Ann Durkin Keating

So Blackhawk throughout his early decades as a warrior is a part of these, and they're large villages.

I mean, the sock villages could be upwards of a thousand people moving and living these summer villages.

So the women would be farming corn, beans, and squash, or

all through the summer in the farm fields east of the Mississippi River, right into 1830.

And then what happens in the late 1820s, early 1830s, is you've got settlers, American settlers, moving into these farm fields that the SOC had held.

And they start farming those same farm fields so that when...

Black Hawk comes in 1831 and then in 1832 with, again, and why the women?

Because it's the women who are farming.

They're the ones that are coming across that are farming here on the western edge of Illinois.

And they find other people in their farm fields.

They find these American settlers in what they saw as their farm fields, but that was on land that had been ceded away decades before the

That was a part of the settler colonial enterprise.

So Blackhawk, it's at that moment that we're going to see Blackhawk want to fight against this.

So Blackhawk goes across northern Illinois, southern Wisconsin, looking for allies.

He's Sock.

He's looking for allies amongst the Anishinaabe people, and that would include the Potawatomi.

And the Potawatomi split.

Some of the younger warriors would like to join with Black Hawk, but most of the older Potawatomi leaders have seen what happened in 1812, have seen the way that Tecumseh's movement unfolded.

had not led to holding this territory against the U.S.

government.