40 Fun Facts About Illinois Confederation (Illiniwek)

Which fruit from Africa, brought to North America by Spanish colonists, did Illinois women grow beside corn and beans?

Watermelons were an important Illinois crop, and archaeologists found their remains at the great Kaskaskia village on the Illinois River.

At a 1673 feast in a Peoria village, two French explorers refused which meat that the Illinois prized as a delicacy?

Dog was the third of four courses, and the hosts simply carried it away and brought bison when their guests would not eat it.

Which field sport did the Illinois play on open prairie with walnut rackets laced with sinew and a wooden ball?

Lacrosse teams drew players of both sexes from different villages, and the Illinois played toward a single goal set in the middle of the field.

The Peoria Tribe, home to descendants of the Illinois Confederation, is based in a town called Miami in which state?

Oklahoma became home in 1867, when the Peoria left an earlier reservation for Indian Territory, and the town of Miami there is named for the related Miami Tribe.

Which Great Lakes city takes its name from a Miami-Illinois word for a wild relative of onion and garlic?

Chicago was first written down as Checagou by the explorer La Salle around 1679, and a later French traveller noted how thickly the wild garlic grew there.

The French missionary who visited the Illinois in 1673 wrote that their name meant which phrase in their language?

The men was his translation, but linguists trace the name to an Illinois verb meaning that someone speaks in the ordinary way.

Which Ottawa war leader, famous for a 1763 uprising against the British, was killed by a Peoria warrior in 1769?

Pontiac was clubbed and stabbed near Cahokia by a warrior apparently avenging his uncle, a Peoria chief Pontiac had wounded three years earlier.

What are the dome-shaped winter lodges called that Illinois women covered with reed mats and carried between villages?

Wigwams sheltered one or two families through winter, while summer villages held longhouses big enough for as many as ten.

Kaskaskia chief Jean Baptiste Ducoigne smoked a peace pipe with which Founding Father, then governor of Virginia?

Thomas Jefferson kept writing to the chief afterwards, and Ducoigne's son and successor was called Louis Jefferson Ducoigne.

In 1725 an Illinois chief of the Michigamea and five other leaders sailed to which European capital to meet the king?

Paris was the goal of the voyage: the chiefs met the young Louis XV, and their dances at a theatre moved the composer Rameau to write a harpsichord piece.

On which sandstone butte above the Illinois River did the explorer La Salle have Fort St. Louis built?

Starved Rock takes its name from a later legend in which a band of Illinois, besieged on the summit, ran out of food and water.

Illinois villagers greeted French explorers in 1673 by offering which feathered tobacco pipe as a token of peace?

Calumet in hand, a traveller could pass safely through strange nations, and the Illinois danced with one to seal alliances or end disputes.

Illinois women and children wore paint of which colour on their cheeks, first made from the mineral ochre?

Red paint later came from vermilion bought from French traders, and it was also used to fill in the tattoos on arms and torsos.

From the trunks of which tall tree did the Illinois hollow out dugout canoes up to fifty feet long?

Cottonwood dugouts were so heavy that the Illinois pushed them along with poles instead of paddles, and a household might own three.

Which rivals, armed with guns from Dutch traders, destroyed the great Kaskaskia village on the Illinois River in 1680?

The Iroquois had gone to war for the fur trade once their own hunting grounds were emptied, and their guns routed most tribes they fought.

Which Jesuit priest explored the Mississippi in 1673 and founded the first Catholic mission in the Illinois Country?

Jacques Marquette had studied the Illinois language beforehand in the hope of such a mission, and he died soon after opening it in 1675.

Illinois drummers stretched buckskin over which vessel, half filled with water, to make a drum?

A clay pot drum beat time for dances and signalled war parties setting out, while healers shook a gourd rattle filled with glass beads.

In autumn, Illinois hunters trapped bison herds inside a C-shaped ring of what, then shot the animals as they fled?

Fire worked because dry prairie grass burns fast, and hunters waited at the open end of the ring for the bison to bolt.

Illinois healers treated the bite of which prairie reptile with a root said to cure the swelling by the next day?

Rattlesnake bites happened every year yet troubled the Illinois little, a French trader wrote, and the cure may have been the plant called rattlesnake master.

Two prized wooden bowls from the Illinois people, one with brass tacks for eyes, are carved to look like which animal?

Beaver bowls stand on four legs with flat tails, and they are among the few Illinois wood carvings to survive in museum collections.

Illinois women tilled their fields with hoes made by lashing which part of a bison to a long wooden handle?

Shoulder blade hoes did more than weed gardens, since they also dug holes, and one found at the great Kaskaskia village is over a foot long.

Which river animals supplied the shells that Illinois cooks used as spoons and to scrape corn kernels from the cob?

Mussels were gathered from rivers and creeks near the villages, and the biggest shells were turned into hoes.

Illinois women played a betting game by tossing painted stones of which fruit and catching them in a small bowl?

Plums gave the Illinois their dice, since each stone was painted on one side only and a throw was scored by the faces that landed upward.

What did the Illinois call the personal guardian spirit that a teenager sought by fasting alone in the wilderness?

A manitou could come to girls as well as boys, and anyone whose spirit taught them healing medicines became a shaman.

The village of Kaskaskia, named for an Illinois tribe, has been reachable by road only through which state since 1881?

Missouri holds the only road in because the Mississippi jumped to a new channel east of the village, which had been the first Illinois state capital.

Which lieutenant of La Salle, nicknamed Iron Hand for his metal prosthesis, built Fort St. Louis among the Illinois?

Henri de Tonti lost the hand to a grenade and wore a gloved hook, which led some tribes to believe he had special powers.

The Miami-Illinois language belongs to which large family that also includes Cree, Blackfoot and Cheyenne?

Algonquian speech tied the Illinois so closely to the Miami that the two peoples could easily understand each other, differing mostly in accent.

The Kaskaskia, one of the main Illinois tribes, take their name from an old Miami-Illinois word for which insect?

Katydid was kaaskaaskia in the old language, and a missionary's word list from about 1700 already gives the word as both an insect and the tribe.

Which sports body named Chief Illiniwek in 2005 among college mascots that it judged hostile or abusive?

The NCAA limited postseason play for schools that kept such mascots, and the University of Illinois retired the Chief in February 2007.

Which decoration for moccasins, not found in their own territory, did the Illinois get by trading with northern tribes?

Porcupine quills were dyed and stitched onto moccasins and headbands until glass beads from French traders took their place.

What did the Kaskaskia, an Illinois tribe, first use horses to power when the animals arrived around 1711?

Grist mills for grinding corn came first, and only as the herds grew did horses become a way for the Kaskaskia to travel.

A 1735 drawing by Alexandre de Batz shows tattooed Illinois visitors to which French colonial city?

New Orleans is where de Batz sketched six Illinois, leaving one of the earliest known pictures of their clothing, hairstyles and weapons.

Which spirit being, honored by the Illinois for its powers, seems to be shown on a painted hide kept in France?

Thunderbird imagery fits Illinois belief, which honored thunder and the sun as signs of the master of life who made all things.

Because Miami-Illinois survives in old written records, tribal members prefer which word to extinct for the language?

Sleeping is the preferred word because the language was never lost for good, and one teacher who learned it from old documents raised his children speaking it.

Jacques Gravier's manuscript of nearly 600 pages, which preserves the Kaskaskia language, is what kind of book?

A dictionary of some 20,000 entries, it is held by a Connecticut college, and the missionary who wrote it was later shot with an arrow by a Peoria warrior.

Which Great Lakes nation, also called the Meskwaki, fought two wars against the French and their Illinois allies?

The Fox attacked the Peoria in 1722 over the killing of a chief's nephew, and they were crushed in 1730 when the French and their allies besieged a fortified Fox village.

Which nation, spreading from Detroit and the St. Joseph River, took northern Illinois from the weakened Illiniwek?

Potawatomi villages stood where the Kankakee joins the Illinois River by the early 1770s, and Spanish officials already judged them and their allies to control the river.

In 1735 the Cahokia, an Illinois tribe, built a village on which giant ancient earthwork beside a French mission?

Monks Mound was already centuries old: the Cahokia people lent their name to the famous mound site but arrived long after its builders had left.

The Peoria trickster hero Wisakatchekwa, credited with creating land and people, was identified with which animal?

The Great Hare, as Wisakatchekwa was known, also kept blundering into trouble in tales a Peoria storyteller told for the record in 1916.

In the 1660s Illinois traders travelled far north to a French post on which Great Lake for guns, kettles and hatchets?

Superior was where, at a small mission on Chequamegon Bay in 1666, a Jesuit priest became the first European known to meet the Illinois face to face.