Skokie Lagoons/Kitchi-wap chocu
by Matthew J. Smith
There are not many empty places in and around Chicago.
SARS-CoV-2. On Friday, March 20th, Illinois Governor J.B. Pritzker issued one of the nation’s first stay-at-home orders, just three days after Chicago Public Schools shut down classes, including my 3-year old’s Pre-K classroom. We had already been social distancing for about a week, so Governor Pritzker clarified what so many of us were confused about—we could still go to the grocery store, to health appointments, we could go outdoors if we kept 6 feet apart—but otherwise we had to “stay at home.”
Which of course, made me wonder to myself: But what does Pritzker mean by “home” exactly? We know that “home,” like other social forms, is a constructed notion—not self-evident by any means. But under a global health pandemic, it didn’t quite feel like the right time to queer our notions of kinship and place.
But we could go outdoors. That was key for me. Not merely because I was fresh off a grad school-and-cloudy-weather-induced depression—these winters are long and cold in Chicago—but because I have two energetic kids—1.5 and almost 4. And let me tell you, a “stay at home” order in a 2-bedroom Chicago apartment while trying to finish up my dissertation…you get the picture.
There are not many empty places in and around Chicago. No places to let my kids run around, to briefly let my parenting guard down while they entertain themselves and get their energy out. All of our local playgrounds were off limits. And of one of the main reasons we moved to Rogers Park: the public beaches—all closed. So, after a few weeks of “staying at home,” it was time to find something.
Skokie Lagoons Preserve of Cook County, Illinois
The Skokie Lagoons are about a 30-minute drive outside of Chicago next to the village of Winnetka. Full of lavish lake-front properties, Winnetka is easily one of the wealthiest—and whitest—areas in the country. We had explored the Lagoons once last summer, so I trotted back out there with my kids again in early April. It was sunny but still cold, though early signs of spring were emerging. But it was also a workday, so when we arrived mid-morning it was empty. Perfect. I let the kids go. They started throwing sticks in the lagoon and I breathed a heavy sigh of relief, let my body take in the air it desired under COVID-19. The landscape seemed unending and untouched. Its emptiness felt sacred. Terra nullius.
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Mark David Spence, Dispossessing the Wilderness: Indian Removal and the Making of the National Parks, Revised edition (New York; NY: Oxford University Press, 2000).
Nature preserves are not actually empty or unoccupied—have never actually been empty or unoccupied. For one thing, they are designated “preserves” to do just that, preserve what is very present there: “nature.” The plants, water, non-human animals, insects, and fungi all make up a rather complex ecosystem of non-human actants. Rather, the designation “nature” functions to sacralize the space as specifically set apart from human contact—just the thing we were trying to avoid under COVID-19. And yet, nature preserves are quite strange sacred infrastructures. Like much of the protected land in the US, their emptiness has not merely been preserved but produced, grounding the myth of the US as settled naturally, so to speak, and not as it actually was, through the very deliberate procedures of genocide and racial capitalism [1].
The Skokie Lagoons are no exception. They were, in fact, quite literally constructed. In what was at the time the largest project executed by the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) in 1942, more than a thousand workers engineered about 4 million cubic yards of earth to create lakes, floodplains, connecting channels, flood control dams and perimeter ditches. The area was originally a “great marsh”—the Kitchi-wap chocu, according to the Potawatomi, who used the it for hunting, fishing, and farming wild rice. Before that, the marsh was dug out of the land by the same glaciers that carved the Great Lakes in their recession from Turtle Island, a global warming of epochs past.
And like other conservation projects in the early 20th century, the white, primarily Unitarian and Congregationalist settlers of Winnetka Village were actively trying to fix a problem that they had also created: flooding. Flooding has, in fact, been one of the primary means of US dispossession of Indigenous nations. Under the emerging US war-finance nexus, the settlers of Winnetka invaded Potawatomi lands as a prospective stop on the Chicago-Milwaukee Railroad. They began razing forests and eventually dug the “Skokie Ditch” to expand the land for grazing and farming. Floods, and mosquitos became a constant problem. And Malaria. Empty(ing) land sometimes incites pandemics.
And so the Kitchi-wap chocu turned “Skokie Marsh” finally became the “Skokie Lagoons” mid-20th century. The Skokie Lagoons project executed by the CCC successfully reduced the ecological emergencies caused by invasion with an additional feat of infrastructural engineering. And still, throughout the ‘80s and ‘90s, numerous additional emergency projects have attempted to control peat fires, diverted untreated sewage, dredged out over a million cubic yards of sediment, and removed 40 tons of invasive carp. And of course, new homes built on the former-marsh still do occasionally flood.
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The Skokie Lagoons were emptied to “preserve nature,” but they were not actually empty. I was there for one, with my kids, profaning this empty place devoid of human contact. And it wasn’t too long after we arrived before more people joined us and the picture began to clarify. Nature preserves are less untouched nature, than quite literal infrastructures, built environments for settlers just as much as the roads, railways, and buildings of the city. White recreational places are empty/ied places that are meant to be filled. White recreational spaces are emptied places that while sacralizing “nature,” serve also as infrastructures of conquest, sacralizing the Chicago-lands as home for settler city dwellers seeking to breathe fresh air, with the attendant gendered and racialized affects and desires that “home,” or “recreation” might imply.
My kids and I jumped back in the car and headed back south to our cramped apartment. Even if we had packed for a longer day, under SARS-CoV-2, this empty place was becoming less empty with every encroaching person. I’m not sure, for others who arrived, at what point their recreation would feel uncomfortably profaned by human contact. In any case, it was time for us to go. This empty place was emptied for a particular purpose. There are not many empty places in and around Chicago.
[1] Mark David Spence, Dispossessing the Wilderness: Indian Removal and the Making of the National Parks, Revised edition (New York; NY: Oxford University Press, 2000).
[2] Charles Shabica, “Swamp Secrets: The Natural and Unnatural Evolution of the Skokie Lagoons | Winnetka Historical Society,” Fall/Winter 2012.
[3] Nick Estes, Our History Is the Future: Standing Rock Versus the Dakota Access Pipeline, and the Long Tradition of Indigenous Resistance (London: Verso, 2019).
[4] Originally, the Potawatomi and other Indigenous peoples around southern Lake Michigan were removed after the 1821 and1833 Treaties of Chicago (including the region I grew up in Southwest Michigan), those remaining were forced out of the region as the land became valued in places like Winnetka. Many have returned, however, especially after 1956 Relocation Act, an endeavor that attempted to break up the US reservation and tribal system. Today, the greater Chicago area is presently home to more than 100,000 tribal members, representing over 140 tribal nations. For more, see: https://aicchicago.org/. For more on railroads and the “war-finance nexus”, see Manu Karuka, Empire’s Tracks: Indigenous Nations, Chinese Workers, and the Transcontinental Railroad (Oakland: University of California Press, 2019).
[5] Shabica, “Swamp Secrets.”
Matthew J. Smith is a doctoral candidate in American religions at Northwestern University specializing in the study of religion, race, and ecology in the US empire in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. His dissertation project, "The Age of Plastic(s): Race, Religion and Ecology in the Protestant World Order" explores the biopolitics of conversion in Protestant missions and the human sciences, interrogating the discourse of plasticity as a central grammar of racialized modernity.