The 1990 census showed the Native American population of Lake County to be 1,198, or about 1 in every 500 people in an area that once, of course, was all Native American.
Among those 1,198 is a Mundelein woman who grew up as an orphan in the 1970s, not knowing her heritage but finally discovering and embracing it and spreading the word through annual powwows she helped establish at the College of Lake County.
In the early 1970s, a young girl with straight black hair and dark liquid eyes spent her days in an orphanage on the South Side of Chicago. On Sunday afternoons, families would come to pick up their children for weekly visits.
This particular girl, known then as Kimberly Joyce Cornstalk, sat watching her housemates leave one by one while she waited and wondered if this would be the day someone would come for her.
Taken from her biological parents when she was just 2 because of neglect, the child known today as Jannan Khuri was passed from orphanages to various foster homes until she was 13. Then a family did come for her, Dr. Raja and Mary Jo Khuri of Evanston.
Now a 36-year-old resident of Mundelein and divorced mother of two, Khuri has found herself and her sense of home.
“When I was growing up, I didn’t grow up on a reservation or in the Native American community, so I really didn’t know what it meant to be an Indian,” Khuri explained. “But I used to have dreams about being Indian. Mostly my dreams occurred the way American Indians were portrayed in the movies. I would dream of warriors in full regalia coming to take me away.
“I actually started exploring being a Native American when I first had contact with my biological family; my brother Eric and my sister Sandy came to my wedding in 1981. Before then, I had met my brothers, who lived in a foster home in (the Homewood-Flossmoor area). But the social workers didn’t want us to have contact, because they said that my brothers were having trouble settling into the foster family and that being associated with me would hurt that process.”
Khuri had met those siblings through St. Augustine’s Center for American Indians Inc., a social services agency in Uptown that helps Native Americans. She has four brothers and two sisters.
“My parents had been (at St. Augustine’s) in the 1960s, and the social workers still had their records,” Khuri said. Her adoptive parents had encouraged her to search for her heritage, including urging her to attend powwows. Through those gatherings, she established relationships with others in the Native American community, including Bernice Bailey of Waukegan, part Assiniboine, part Sioux, who had grown up on a reservation in Montana. Khuri had come know one of Bailey’s sons through a powwow in Zion, then met Bailey. The two became friends and spiritual allies.
“I read a lot during that time too,” Khuri said. “I found out my heritage is Ojibwa, Potawatomi and Ottawa from around the Great Lakes. They lived throughout Wisconsin, Illinois, Indiana and Canada. In the process, I ended up learning about myself and other Native American tribes and traditions as well.”
Part of what Khuri learned had to do with the similarities between her ancestral tribes and those of Bailey. That helped cement friendship.
“Jannan is real generous with her time, her money, if she has it, her well-being. She’s very good with children; my grandchildren love her,” Bailey said. “The youngest ones will dance Indian with her at powwows. I made a dress and shawl for my granddaughter, too, so she could join Jannan in the dancing.”
Bailey, who makes Native American clothing, also helped produce traditional clothing for Khuri to use in ceremonies.
To further her networking, Khuri got involved with the Women’s Leadership Development Group at the Native American Educational Service College in Chicago.
But what eventually led to the Lake County powwows was attending classes at the College of Lake County starting in 1990.
“I began working for (the school paper) two years later,” she said. “That experience gave me a lot of skills for my journalism career and helped me to focus on my career goals. In 1994 I kind of mentioned that the college should have a powwow. The school didn’t know how to do it, who to contact, etc.
“I kept bugging them, connected them with the American Indian Center in Chicago and formed a Native American Awareness Club at the college. It was kind of used as a way of connecting Native Americans in Lake County, somewhat like the American Indian Center in Uptown.”
That first powwow in 1994 drew about 1,200 people.
The next year Khuri was elected president of the Native American Awareness Club, which has fluctuated from 10 to 25 members.
The powwow has become an annual April event, with the next one planned for April 18, and it gets bigger every year, according to Khuri. The 1997 powwow drew more than 2,000 people.
“The most important thing for me, while at CLC and doing the powwow, was changing stereotypes and educating the community about Native Americans and their cultures,” Khuri explained.
“Most children have never met a Native American,” said Hugh Bannon, a board member of the American Indian Center in Chicago. “Taking a child to a powwow provides not only an exciting spectacle but gives a chance to break down stereotypes they see on TV and in movies.”
Herschell Wallace, director of financial aid at the college, said of Khuri, “Jannan was instrumental in creating what happened here, with our first Native American powwow a few years ago. After that first one, she was also key in establishing the Native American Awareness Club on campus. She did a great deal to bring information to the college community about Native Americans and their culture.
“For the future,” Wallace added, “I expect Jannan to be in some key leadership position within our community, in light of what she has already given of herself and her culture to raise awareness in our society.”
In raising that awareness, she has performed dances and songs at schools, senior centers and community centers.
She also is a full-time student at Columbia College in Chicago, majoring in broadcast journalism, and she works part time at Jones Intercable of Lake County as a production assistant.
In addition to working on her career, Khuri has two children, daughter Wahkuna (Beautiful), 16, and son Motega (New Arrow), 14, who has taken an interest in his heritage and performs with his mother, singing and playing traditional drums.
In 1992, at age 9, he told his mother he wanted to learn Native American music.
“We went to the Potawatomi powwow in Zion,” Khuri explained. “I asked one of the drummers how my son could sit at the drum, and he was told to give the head drummer some tobacco and ask to be included. That’s how his singing career began. Now, at 14, he performs with a group called the Chi-Town Singers out of Chicago.”
So now not only has Khuri established who she is, but she is passing that along to her children. But such isn’t always the case with children in any ethnic group.
Although Bailey grew up on a reservation, is a tribal elder and still owns about 1,000 acres of land at the Ft. Belknap Reservation in Montana, there is little interest among her five children in the Native American ways, she said.
“Once I left the reservation to go to school, I never went back,” Bailey said. “But I never let go of our teachings; life is precious, we are a spiritual people. Now I have five children–three sons, two daughters. I tried to bring them up that way, but they got lost along the way.”
Nevertheless, through the steadfastness of people like Bailey, people like Khuri are being found.
