The Chaldean Community of Metro Detroit

Chaldeans are an Aramaic-speaking Catholic people from northern Iraq, and Metro Detroit is home to the largest Chaldean population outside the Middle East. Over several generations that community moved from immigrant storefronts in Detroit to established life in the suburbs of Oakland and Macomb counties, and built churches, foundations, a country club and a museum along the way. Hanna Shina is one of the community leaders who helped build those institutions: he is a founding board member of the Chaldean Cultural Center in West Bloomfield, Michigan.

Who Chaldeans Are

Chaldeans belong to the Chaldean Catholic Church, an Eastern Catholic church in communion with Rome that keeps its own liturgy and its own liturgical language. That language is Aramaic — the modern spoken form is often called Sureth — and it is the same family of speech used in the region for thousands of years. Chaldeans are rooted in the Nineveh Plain of northern Iraq, in towns such as Telkaif near Mosul, and identify by church, village, and family in roughly that order.

Being Christian and Aramaic-speaking in a majority-Muslim, Arabic-speaking country shaped the community long before emigration: it made the church the center of communal life and made village ties unusually durable. Both of those traits travelled to Michigan intact. Telkaif, the ancestral village of most Metro Detroit Chaldeans and the town Hanna Shina was born in, is where a great many of those family lines begin.

Why Detroit

Chaldean migration to Detroit began in the early twentieth century and grew across the decades that followed. Three things pulled people to this particular city. The first was work: the automobile industry, and Ford Motor Company above all, was hiring at wages that were widely reported back home and required no English to begin. The second was that Detroit already had an Arabic-speaking community, which meant a new arrival could find someone to translate a lease, a form, or a doctor’s question. The third was proximity to Canada, which shaped the routes people took and kept families connected across the border.

Beyond those pulls, the mechanism was chain migration in its purest form. One man came, found work, wrote home, and sponsored a brother or a cousin. Because so many of those first arrivals came from the same handful of towns, the community that formed in Detroit was not a general Iraqi community but a village community relocated — people who already knew each other’s families.

From Detroit to Oakland County

The first Chaldean neighborhoods were inside the city, and the family business — the grocery, the party store, the coffee shop — was the standard first foothold. As those businesses succeeded and the second generation went through American schools, households moved outward, following the same suburban path many Detroit communities took in the second half of the twentieth century. Southfield, West Bloomfield, Bloomfield Hills and Farmington Hills in Oakland County, and Sterling Heights in Macomb, became the centers of Chaldean residential life.

The move outward did not dissolve the community, which is the notable part. Parishes relocated or were founded anew in the suburbs, social clubs followed, and the same families who had been neighbors on a Detroit block became neighbors again several miles north. The 7 Mile corridor, where Hanna Shina ran his businesses, was one of the places that arc began.

The Institutions

What distinguishes Metro Detroit’s Chaldean community is how much of it is institutionalized. The parishes came first and remain the backbone. Around them grew foundations and charitable organizations that handle resettlement, scholarships, and aid to families in Iraq. The Chaldean Iraqi American Association of Michigan acquired Shenandoah Country Club in West Bloomfield and renovated it, giving the community a gathering place substantial enough to host its own civic life — and, inside the same building, museum space.

That space became the Chaldean Cultural Center, the first and only Chaldean museum in the world, conceived in 2003 and opened to the public in 2017. Its five galleries carry the story from ancient Mesopotamia through village life and the journey to America to Chaldeans today. Hanna Shina’s role in founding the Chaldean Cultural Center and his long service on the board of Shenandoah Country Club sit at the intersection of those two institutions.

The People Who Built Them

Institutions like these are built by named people doing unglamorous work over decades — committee meetings, fundraising calls, board terms nobody applauds. The Chaldean Cultural Center recognized eight of them by name at its 20th Anniversary Founders Gala on October 20, 2023. Read about the eight founders of the Chaldean Cultural Center and the biography of Hanna Shina, from Telkaif to West Bloomfield.