Posted: 11/3/05 Section: News

Media Credit: Josh Birnbaum Peoria Chief John Froman stands in the schoolhouse where tribe members were educated for almost a century. The tribe recently purchased the building and is planning to restore it in order to open it for use by school groups.

MIAMI, Okla. - It's 86 degrees of dry heat on an October Sunday. A thin film of harvest dust hangs in the air, carried through town on a warm breeze. Rows of cars fill the Wal-Mart parking lot, but the old downtown is nearly lifeless; fast food joints like Taco Bell and KFC serve a slow stream of customers while diners down the road stand empty, closed for a day of rest.

Miami, Okla., is 490 miles from Champaign, but it might as well be a quick trip down Interstate-57 for the parallels you'll find. Miami has the same strip of new development you'll see driving down Prospect, only scaled to fit a town one-thirteenth the size. Ottawa County, of which Miami is the seat, has virtually identical poverty and employment rates as Champaign County.

Just one clear difference divides Miami from Champaign. It doesn't become apparent when ambling through town or driving down Main Street. It isn't announced on billboards as you drive into town; there are no indicators of what makes Miami unique. Its only overt image is a cluster of office buildings on a street running parallel to Interstate-44.

Miami is headquarters for nine American Indian tribes, each forcibly relocated to Oklahoma more than a century ago. There are no Indian reservations here. No boundaries declare where Ottawa land ends and Modoc begins. In Ottawa County, 22.8 percent of residents claim American Indian heritage. Governments of Miami's nine sovereign nations intermingle and work in conjunction with local, state and national leadership. Their aim is to provide services to their tribe members and, in doing so, to improve the overall quality of life for Miami's 13,700 residents.

In Champaign, the University of Illinois is deep in a 15-year debate about its Chief Illiniwek symbol and Fighting Illini nickname. Whether the University will retain or retire the Chief is a common topic of conversation on campus - but in Miami, members of the Peoria Indian Tribe of Oklahoma, the descendents of the "Illiniwek" tribes that once inhabited Illinois, focus more on local economics and tribal government than on the controversy at a college two states away.

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