The Chi-Nations Youth Council is important to me because it highlights urban Native youth voices. It's the only place where I feel I belong.
One of the priorities of the council is to fight race-based mascots and combat the negative stereotypes they perpetuate. Living in Chicago, we are constantly bombarded with the Blackhawks logo, which represents the city’s professional ice hockey team. There are many multiracial Natives like myself who don't look like a stereotype, and because of this, our Native identities are often questioned or dismissed entirely. This experience erases a whole part of us and mentally breaks us down. At school, my fellow council members and I are usually the only Native kids in class, and it’s hard to find a safe space for Native youth. We decided that as a council, we would teach each other about the land we live on and the medicine and food that are still available to us. This makes us feel like we are not alone, because the land and plants are our relatives, and we are surrounded by them. Living this way creates positive images of Natives as modern people living on our ancestral homelands instead of outdated, stereotypical symbols used by sports teams.
The isolation that can come with being an urban Native makes community spaces critical. There was a time in 2010 that our Chicago Native community center, the American Indian Center (AIC), had ties to the Blackhawks against the collective will of many in the Chicago Native community. The AIC held meetings about their relationship with the Blackhawks and about the mascot, which were attended by people from outside of our Chicago community; they dismissed our concerns. What they don’t understand is how being lonely in school or harassed on the street is directly tied to the mascot — something Native youth in Chicago do understand. (Teen Vogue has reached out to the American Indian Center (AIC) of Chicago for comment, but had not received one by the time of publication.)
In 2015, Chi-Nations vowed to cut ties with anyone who promoted negative Native stereotypes either directly or through an association with organizations like the Blackhawks. This meant making the difficult decision to distance ourselves from the AIC. That year, we staged teach-ins and protests across the city and participated in demonstrations across the country. When the Blackhawks brought the Stanley Cup to the AIC in October 2015, Chi-Nations staged a nonviolent protest.