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III. THE ILLINI TRIBE
The Illini were a loose association or confederation of several tribes all speaking the Algonquin language. Those tribes included, among others, the Kaskaskia, Cahokia, Peoria, Tamaroa, and Metchigamea. At the time of European contact, this group lived and hunted in an area approximately from the Illinois-Wisconsin border on the north, east to the Wabash River basin, westward across the Mississippi into eastern Iowa, with the Ohio River to the south.
The Illini did not live in tipis; their dwellings were long houses consisting of bark or mats stretched over wooden frames. They combined hunting, fishing, gathering and farming on a yearly cycle with corn as their most important crop. After their first contact with Europeans in the 1670s, their ranks were depleted primarily by intertribal warfare (including battles with the Dakota Sioux) and disease. The primary enemy was the Iroquois, who attacked them first in 1682 as the Iroquois sought new areas for hunting and trapping. Attacks from the Iroquois and conflicts with other tribes caused the Illini to move down the Illinois River Valley. By the middle of the eighteenth century, their population was a fraction of what it had been a century before. The Illini alliances with the French and, after the American Revolution, with the Americans contributed to their demise. Their French allies ceded their territories to the British in 1763, and in the first decades of the nineteenth century the Americans failed to support them when attacked by groups supported by the British.
By the 1830s when the U. S. Government adopted the policy of removal, which forcibly relocated most Native Americans from states east of the Mississippi River, there were few Illini survivors left in Illinois. By treaty, most of the land occupied by the Illini was ceded to the government, and the last of the Kaskaskia and Peorias crossed the Mississippi and headed briefly to Missouri and then to Kansas where they remained until the white settlers wanted their land. They then were relocated to Oklahoma where they yet remain, united as a single tribe, the Peoria. A few Tamaroas and Metchigameas remained in Illinois, where some of their descendants remain to this day.
According to the 1990 U. S. census, in the State of Illinois, 20,970 people identified themselves as American Indian, with no designation as to tribal ancestry. That figure represents 0.2% of the total population of 10,830,612 in the state. Coincidentally, that percentage is identical to the Indian enrollment at UIUC which the University reports. American Indians have questioned whether actually there are 76 of their ethnic group enrolled out of the 36,738 total student population as reported by the University.
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