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Across Chicago’s Southeast Side, neighbors have been showing up to town halls, asking hard questions, and insisting on having a voice in decisions about the resources and land beneath their own feet that will house the planned development of the Illinois Quantum and Microelectronics Park (IQMP).
The community’s demands are in pursuit of partnership and wellbeing, and Prairie Band Potawatomi Nation, the only federally recognized tribal nation in Illinois, whose history is woven into the city’s lakefront, is ready to add our voice to theirs.
In addition to the fact that we’ve seen firsthand the displacement that can happen when outside interests overtake peoples’ homelands under the guise of safety and prosperity, Lake Michigan is Potawatomi water. That was the case long before its shoreline boasted steel mills, and certainly before it was named the future site of quantum technology that will partly benefit defense contractors and the military.
In fact, some of our Anishinaabe kin never left the water’s edge, and have reservations and trust lands adjacent to the Great Lakes. Our connection to these waters is not simply geographic. For generations, Anishinaabe people have fished, gathered, traveled, prayed and cared for the Great Lakes. Multiple treaties recognize continuing Tribal rights in these waters, and with those rights comes an enduring responsibility to protect the waters for generations yet to come.
Prairie Band Potawatomi Nation is a present-day successor to the Potawatomi, Odawa, and Ojibwe Nations who, in an 1816 treaty, ceded lands along the Illinois and Milwaukee rivers and the southwestern shore of Lake Michigan.
For the Prairie Band Potawatomi Nation, the treaties that forced our people west did not erase our relationship with and treaty rights to the Great Lakes.
Those treaties raise real questions about what our ancestors ceded — and what they did not — and reinforce our continuing legal and cultural connection to the waters that sustained them.
Therefore, any conversation about the future of Lake Michigan’s water, including the future site of a water-dependent quantum campus, is incomplete without the Nations to whom it belongs.
We know from our own history that decisions and promises can be made without conversations about who bears the cost. Facilities like the one planned for the Southeast Side draw enormous amounts of water and power. They can be built to serve the public good or they can be built to enrich distant investors while the communities nearest to them are afterthoughts and face displacement.
Federal law has long recognized that water is essential to survival, and decisions about it should never be made without the people whose lives depend on it. The law protects Indigenous claims to these waters today, and it’s the kind of principle that Illinois has already shown it can honor.
In 2024, the U.S. Department of the Interior placed a portion of our ancestral Shab-eh-nay Reservation land in DeKalb County into trust for our Nation 175 years after the federal government violated the law and illegally sold it out from under us. That makes us the only federally recognized tribal nation in Illinois. The following year, the state passed legislation, signed into law by Gov. JB Pritzker, returning our reservation land in what is now DeKalb County to us. That showed us Illinois is capable of righting old wrongs when it has the courage to.
We are asking the city and the state to build on that same principle, and that same respect for federal Indian law, as they plan the use of Lake Michigan’s waters.
Illinois’ future depends entirely on who is in the room when decisions get made.
Tribal nations deserve a seat at the table, alongside the Southeast Side neighbors who’ve been seeking out what’s right, so that Indigenous water knowledge that’s been built over centuries of living in relationship with Lake Michigan can shape how Illinois grows into its role as an aspiring technology leader.
Our Nation was forcibly moved off our shoreline once. We are asking to help write what comes next, together with our Anishinaabe kin and the Chicago community, so that Illinois’ next great chapter is built the way water itself teaches the world to live: healed and connected.
