Abstract: The land and culture of the people
Marquette called the "Ilinois Nation" ("La Nation des Ilinois,"
as illustrated above by the image of the text from
the 1676 publication). Modern scholars refer to this culture
and language, which was originally spelled Eriniouaj,
one of a wide
variety of spellings for the name "Illinois", as the Miami-Illinois.
The spelling of "Ilinois" used here is not just an affectation. It will
be used whenever appropriate (without creating too many problems for human
memory and Internet domain catalogs and search engines) as a reminder that
the land and people under consideration should not be associated with the
boundaries of the modern state of Illinois. "Ilinois" as it is used here
refers to the entire state of Illinois, plus bordering areas of neighboring
states, in particular the Wabash River Valley in northern Indiana. This
area of Indiana is the home of the Miami.
This Ilinois prairie is largely what ecologists and geographers call
the tall grass prairie peninsula because it is a extension of tall grass
prairie projecting into the eastern hardwood forest. The Ilinois prairie
would quickly become forest if the people had not burnt it off every year
or every few years to maintain and reinvigorate the prairie. And in the
process they created some of the most fertile, deepest soil on the planet.
Page images of rare historical
records of New France, the early French explorers' name for the upper midwest..
Suggestions for an International
Boulevard garden of plants that are popular as garden flowers Europe
and elsewhere in the world, but may beconsidered "just wildflowers" --
if not weeds -- here.
Central
gardens, or stewardship gardens, and community gardens dedicated
to raising food for those in need and/or restoring a healthy ecology.
Instructions, notes, and a plant list for an archaeobotanical
"living time line" exhibit of 12,000 years of prairie plants-- a
12K list.
The Poster Project.
Free, downloadable color 11 by 15 posters in PDF format.
PAGE IMAGES OF RARE PRIMARY DOCUMENTS In some ways, the Internet is a disaster for sound scholarship. It
is so easy to Google an expression or term, cut and paste a 'way cool'
phrase or two about it, and call that scholarship.
And more and more scholars seem to be finding it much more gratifying
to expend their time and effort promoting some outlandish and entertaining
notion on the web than it is to publish sound, straightforward research
in scholarly journals. The dubious, but entertaining stuff has a greater
chance of reverberating throughout the web, getting picked up by the media
and perhaps even get its creator a spot on Opra Winfrey.
Fortunately, the Internet is also an extraordinary resource for the
serious researcher. It offers page images of an increasing number of rare
primary documents that would only a few years ago required 1) locating
an archive that owned the document, 2) making an appointment to view it,
3) travelling to the archive, 4) agreeing to the policies about using the
material, 5) carefully perusing the volume, probably under the watchful
eye of a staff person.
Now a net surfer can merely go to a website and view and often download
page images of the entire document. These original page images are often
substantially different from the modern versions of these materials, even
versions that purport to be reprints of the original.
A master archive is located at the Internet
Archive site. This archive offers materials in a variety of formats
such as "Moving Images," "Texts," "Software," and "Music." Of course the
only media that is pertinent to the early history of Illinois is "Texts."
There are a couple of other particularly good sources of these page
images. Perhaps the best is Library and Archives of Canada's Early Canada
Online. It includes the early missionary records, many of which were later
collected under the name Jesuit Relations, as well as other early
publications. The search page for this collection is at: <http://www.canadiana.org/ECO/>.
Another good source is Google's collection of page images of books,
although many of these resources offer only small snippets of page images
or perhaps no images at all. Many of these files offer full page images
and downloadable files. The search page for this collection is at: <http://books.google.com/advanced_book_search>.
Let's give a couple of these resources a try. We will first check out
a statement about the Jesuit Relations and other early missionary
records. And then we will browse some topics in a extraordinary encyclopedia
of Native American knowledge, Hodge's Handbook of Indians North of Mexico.
Jesuit Relaitons and other early French missionary
records. One of the notions currently getting a lot of notariety
on the web is that "Illinois" was never a name used by a Native people,
that the name is merely one created by the State of Illinois and promoted
by the University of Illinois Athletic Department. The champion of this
idea says that the expression inoka "is by far the most common name
for the Illinois Indians in the missionary sources" although he has only
found it in one "post-missionary source." He says he has no idea about
the pronunciation, other than that "the k could be preaspirated."
Let's check that out. Go to the premier collection of early French
missionary sources, Canada Online
search page. Enter "Inoka" in the search box. Click on [Search].
You will probably not get a single hit that has anything to do with
early French missionary records..
Now search for "Illinois" and/or "Ilinois" (an early spelling of that
name) in some time range before the establishment of the State or University
of Illinois, such as, for example, 1600 to 1800. If you searched for both
spellings you will get hundreds of hits in dozens of publications.
Hodge's Handbook of Indians North of Mexico.
In
1910 the Smithsonian Institution's Bureau of American Ethnology published
a milestone two thousand page, two-volume Handbook of American Indians
North of Mexico, edited by Frederick Webb Hodge (Smithsonian Institution,
Bureau of American Ethnology Bulletin 30. GPO: 1910) . The encyclopedic
work went through numerous re-printing, many of which did not list any
publication date on the title page. The work has become virtually
the bible for historical information about Indian culture. Let us browse
some of the entries:
For the meaning of "Sioux" and "Iroquois" see Dakota.
There is currently a campaign to define "squaw"
as an English word based on a Mohawk obscenity. (Here's a commentary
by the webmaster on that effort.)
THE POSTER PROJECT These posters are designed for large format color inkjet or laser printers,
but they are also effective on regular letter size paper and in black and
white. Also, copy shops will often print an 11 by 15 color poster for about
$1.50. The PDF software can be downloaded free of charge. Some posters
include supporting documents.
DOCUMENT INFORMATION This document: http://www.illinoisprairie.info/index.htm
It is a home page document.
Author: Jim Fay, Ph.D.
Comments to:JimFay@prairieInet.net Last Update: 6/15/09
The Ilinois Prairie Info website and exhibits are by Meredith and Jim
Fay, who are solely responsible for the content. No other affiliation
is expressed or implied.
