In 1833, the United States signed the Treaty of Chicago with the Ojibwe, Odawa, and Potawatomi nations. The treaty ceded Indigenous homeland for reservations on the western side of the Mississippi River, cleaving and dispersing tribal nations through removal. However, many Indigenous peoples continued to return to their homelands for ceremonies to honor their ancestors. Many others remained and never left.

Over the next century, antiquarians and archaeologists researched Indigenous peoples and cultures by digging and robbing in their homeland. In 1916, Charles Brown wrote about the findings of this research in the journal The Wisconsin Archeologist published by the Wisconsin Archeological Society. Charles Brown co-founded the society and served as its secretary and editor for forty years, where he organized various archeological surveys and preserved many Indigenous mounds. He also collected many Indigenous stories and traditions.

This digital mapping project called Unceded Milwaukee visualizes Indigenous Milwaukee in the age of empire. It is supported by Raynor Library at Marquette University in the Near West Side neighborhood of Milwaukee, Wisconsin. For data, it uses Charles Brown’s archaeological descriptions of camps, villages, trading posts, and trails in Milwaukee county. The image that overlays the digital map is from an 1812 map drawn by Thomas Forsyth, an Illinois fur trader who provided intelligence to the United States in the War of 1812. In the image from the map included here, it shows a trading post at Milwaukee and Potawatomi villages at Waukesha and Muskego. By visualizing data from Charles Brown’s archaeological descriptions together with Thomas Forsyth’s 1812 map, this project tries to help us remember this history.

Lauren Reszczynski was born and raised in Kiel, Wisconsin. Her ancestors are from Poland, Germany, and Mexico by way of Wisconsin and Kansas. She is an undergraduate student in history and gender and sexuality studies at Marquette University in Milwaukee.

Maxwell Gray was born and raised in the state of Connecticut. He lives in the Bay View neighborhood of Milwaukee, and divides his time between Milwaukee and Madison, Wisconsin. His ancestors are from Britain and Italy by way of the Great Plains, Midwest and New York. He is a digital scholarship librarian in Raynor Library at Marquette University in Milwaukee.

We are committed to new modes of collaboration, engagement, and partnership with Indigenous peoples for the care and curation of our shared histories, both past and present. This means we welcome dialogue and collaboration with readers. Because the map is digital, the project may be open-ended. By creating this digital map, are we neglecting these sites or their histories (both past and present)? Do you have a perspective or narrative you’d like to see included in the project? If you believe so, then we’d love to hear from you and enter into conversation together.

—Lauren and Maxwell

Lauren Reszczynski and Maxwell Gray, Unceded Milwaukee: Indigenous Milwaukee in the Age of Empire (Raynor Library, Marquette University, 2024): https://uncededmilwaukee.com.