"The 2010 Census puts about 101,000 American Indians and Alaska Natives in Illinois, and about 27,000 in the city of Chicago. In total, the greater Chicago area has the third-largest off-reservation population of Native Americans in the country. Many of them, or their predecessors, came back starting in the 1950s, when the federal government began its Urban Indian Relocation Program. Most of those who claim ancestral roots here are probably from lines that went away for a while and then returned in recent decades"
(WBEZ, "Do Descendants of Chicago's Native American Tribes Live In The City Today?").
26 states in the United States are named after words from various Indigenous peoples' native languages. Here is a list of all the states' names and their meanings.
Illinois comes from the Miami-Illinois verb irenwe·wa—"he speaks the regular way". This was taken into the Ojibwe language, perhaps in the Ottawa dialect, and modified into ilinwe· (pluralized as ilinwe·k). The French borrowed these forms, changing the /we/ ending to spell it as -ois, a transliteration for its pronunciation in French of that time. The current spelling form, Illinois, began to appear in the early 1670s, when French colonists had settled in the western area (Wikipedia).
Chicago is derived from a French rendering of the indigenous Miami-Illinois word shikaakwa for a wild relative of the onion; it is known to botanists as Allium tricoccum and known more commonly as "ramps". The first known reference to the site of the current city of Chicago as "Checagou" was by Robert de LaSalle around 1679 in a memoir (Wikipedia).
(Maritza Garcia, of the Choctaw Mississippi tribe, performed a traditional Ojibwe dance as part of a ceremony outside the Field Museum on Oct. 26 2018. (Antonio Perez / Chicago Tribune)
Researching Illinois/Chicago Indigenous Peoples:
"The most prominent Indian tribes in Illinois were the Illinois, Miami, Ho-Chunk (Winnebago), Sac (Sauk) and Fox, Kickapoo, and Potawatomi tribes. Most of these tribes were eliminated from Illinois by about the mid-nineteenth century either through warfare or resettlement to other territories by the federal government" (Family Search).
(Native Americans stand in solidarity with the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe in North Dakota during the NoDAPL rally in Chicago. Sept. 9, 2016.
Pat Nabong/MEDIL)