At 65, Chicago’s American Indian Center is the oldest urban indigenous center in the US. Its current retrospective highlights its importance to the city and is intended to serve as “evidence of the Native experience, existence, and survival.” But there is an easier way to see the enduring indigenous influence on Chicago – simply walk a few blocks east to Clark Street.

Named for George Rogers Clark, whose brother William was one half of the Lewis and Clark expedition, Clark Street was formed during the tail end of the ice age and has been a key trail for thousands of years. Its irregularity is an unnoticed but integral reminder of the many tribes that once called the area home, and a fitting example of the erasure of the Native influence on the city’s development.

Native people gave European settlers the ways and means of transportation. We haven’t gotten much in exchange John Low

Natural roots, indigenous routes

Over the course of four distinct periods of glacial melting, stretching as far back as 14,500 years ago, Chicago’s terrain was shaped by the ebbs and flows of melting ice. Through the process of littoral drift, where small bits of sand and organic matter drifted from place to place on the tide, small but distinct ridges were etched into the land. Those natural high grounds, rising no more than 10 or 15 feet above the rest of the terrain, became some of the pathways used by Native peoples as they began to inhabit the area about 11,000 years ago.

These high points held obvious value: most of the land was swampy, and very little stayed dry year-round. Indigenous tribes passed down their understanding of the land’s natural features through oral traditions. Incoming European settlers, including French trappers traveling to the area during the 17th and 18th centuries, depended on this knowledge for survival. They also quickly came to understand the significance of the trails, adapting them for commercial and military purposes.

Map of American Indian trails and villages of Chicago, and of Cook, DuPage and Will counties in 1804. Map by Albert F. Scharf, 1900-1901. Villages highlighted in green; principle trails in red and waterways in blue. Photograph: Chicago History Museum/Getty Images

However, that knowledge was rarely codified in printed form, and it was not until the early 20th century that the remaining Native camps and trails were comprehensively mapped by the surveyor Albert Scharf. His rendition remains the definitive representation of Native impact on the area, as any remaining sites were quickly wiped out in the development-heavy years that followed.

The indigenous footpaths, for centuries not much wider than five or six feet across, were some of the first roads in Chicago to be widened and normalized.

While the Northwest Ordinance of 1787 incorporated today’s midwestern states as a new territory and established the principle of dividing the land into regular, square areas, Chicago’s modern grid system remained a fantasy for decades. Though a vision of regular six-mile square plots was enshrined in the Land Ordinance of 1785, the city’s first plat map wasn’t made until 1830, and only covered what is now downtown Chicago.

The whole idea of imposing a grid on this land is from one point of view kind of laughable Henry Binford

“The whole idea of imposing a grid on this land is from one point of view kind of laughable,” said Henry Binford, a professor of urban history at Northwestern University. “The indigenous trail network made a lot more sense, at least in the beginning.”

But mapping fever had important consequences for the city – in effect, the maps sold east coast investors on a process of land speculation that would, in time, create the city we know today. The grid was designed with this outcome in mind, making it easy for speculators to divide the city into identical, saleable plots that would also serve to speed up commerce by placing major roads every half-mile. Capitalism and Native removal worked hand in hand, and the grid slowly came into focus as settlers began to drain the swampy land for redevelopment.

“The grid was always aspirational,” said Sam Kling, a research associate at the Chicago Council on Global Affairs whose PhD dissertation explored Chicago’s transportation infrastructure. “It was drawn on a map before it was actually built, and it was the blueprint for Chicago’s growth, even before the city reached anywhere near the extent to which the grid was supposed to extend.”

While these plans held a prefigurative vision of a city on the make, they could not have existed without the legwork carried out by generations of Native Americans. The roads were only one small piece of indigenous infrastructure that proved essential to Chicago’s success as a midwestern metropolis in the 19th century: a number of tribes including the Illini, the Fox and the Potawatomi peoples used the Chicago area as a meeting site for generations, thanks to the near-confluence of several rivers in the area.

Chicago’s grid network lit up at night. Photograph: Jim Richardson/Getty Images/National Geographic Creative

Tribes carried boats from the Mississippi River to the Chicago and Des Plaines rivers by traversing the Chicago Portage, located in what is now the South Lawndale neighborhood, which connected Chicago to the western United States.

The indigenous scholar and Potawatomi tribe member John Low, a professor at the Ohio State University – Newark, notes that Native people taught incoming white settlers these transportation routes, as well as giving them snowshoes, canoes and other transportation tools – necessary equipment as white colonizers spread further west.

“Native people gave European settlers the ways and means of transportation,” Low says. “We haven’t gotten much in exchange.”

Continued erasure

Just as Clark Street betrays Chicago’s Native American roots by honoring those who saw to their removal, Rogers Avenue erases one of the few obvious markers of how Native removal was essential to the creation of Chicago. For years it was known as Indian Boundary Line Road, referencing the 1816 Treaty of St Louis that pushed indigenous people further out of Chicago. Only 17 years later, just a month after Chicago was formally incorporated as a town, the 1833 Treaty of Chicago revoked all indigenous claims to the area, allowing for the genocide of Native Americans to continue pushing westward.

A 19th-century illustration showing Chicago in 1831. Photograph: clu/Getty Images

In 1909 Indian Boundary Line Road was renamed after Phillip Rogers, an early white settler who had already given his name to the surrounding neighborhood of Rogers Park. The decision to hide the street’s importance contributes to the ongoing erasure of Native influence on modern Chicago.

The erasure of Indian Boundary Line Road, mitigated somewhat by a remaining nearby park with a similar name, as well as Pottawatomie Park, has historical implications for how Chicagoans today understand the legacy of Native removal. Other local street names such as Wabansia and Menomonee make direct reference to Native Americans who lived in the area centuries ago, but Low believes they don’t help people recognize the eradication of Native life that made Chicago possible.

“We have to remember that the urban landscape often almost completely overwrote indigenous territories in places like Seattle and Chicago,” agrees Coll Thrush, a professor at the University of British Columbia.

“Even when the urban geography has some of its roots in indigenous realities, we have to do the difficult work of reimagining those spaces as indigenous, by paying attention to the historical archive and by listening to descendant indigenous communities.”

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