On May 22 the state legislature named September 1 American Indian Day. In the past, similar proclamations have honored Native Americans with special days or months, but this one is different–it declares a state holiday that will be listed on Illinois’ official calendar from this year forward. The new holiday will be initiated without much fanfare: the river won’t be dyed red, city services will continue uninterrupted, and the mail will be delivered (as much as usual).
Hard times hit in 1946, when Murdaugh’s father died, leaving a widow and eight children. Murdaugh’s mother found work at a pie factory near the family’s Bridgeport apartment. She earned 55 cents an hour, and Cleatus, her second oldest child, dropped out of eighth grade to watch his brothers and sisters. Two years later he started working outside the home, first for a fence company, then as a car hiker, dockworker, plasterer, cabdriver, and receiving clerk. “I worked at different jobs, trying to find something that I wanted to spend the rest of my life doing.”
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Last March 5 he gave both the signatures and his resolution to Burke. He wrote about the Trail of Tears and noted that 17 states do not recognize Columbus Day. “Columbus did not discover America,” Murdaugh asserted. “He discovered the Indian.”
The American Indian Center has made do without funding before. Though its building houses a small museum and several community programs, the center has been run, at times, almost entirely on proceeds from bingo. Podlasek recently learned it will be one of nine American Indian communities (and the only urban Indian community) spotlighted in the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian, which is scheduled to open in Washington, D.C., in 2004. He notes the 2000 census, which included the category of Native American for the first time, showed 30,000 Indians in Chicago and 73,000 statewide.
