“Our ancestors always thought about us with every decision they made.”
In the fall of 1901 till the spring of 1902, our ancestors had to deal with the Smallpox epidemic. The entire population of the Settlement was placed on mandatory quarantine that lasted for five months.
We lost over 40 people.
At the end of the quarantine, it was decided that all of our wikiups along with our possessions would be burned to the ground in order to insure the health of the people.
The Meskwaki people survived.
Prior to the burning, it is said that sacred bundles were buried in order to survive.
Meskwaki “Na Na Wa Che” (b.1862) beside wickiup at Meskwaki Settlement. Tama County, Iowa. ca August 1905. Duren H. Ward Meskwaki Collection. State Historical Society of Iowa, Iowa City
Our ancestors always thought about us with every decision they made.
I believe we are going to be alright.
For further information, please click this link to view historian Eric Zimmer’s talk on this difficult period in Meskwaki history:
Three cultures
Choctaw-Biloxi, Louisiana Creole, and Creek
woven into my Grandfather –
his mother, my Great Grands.
Three is a sacred number for us:
three sisters, three worlds.
Three.
The number of strands it takes to weave.
Three.
The waters of Louisiana:
seawater
fresh water
brackish water.
I come to our Humanities Without Walls project as a Pākehā (non-Indigenous) person originally from New Zealand. My main context for the Mississippi as a child was learning how to spell it in an international elementary school in Indonesia, where the children were from many different countries but the curriculum was all American. We learned nothing about the Mississippi’s Native histories. When my partner and I moved to Illinois for graduate school we drove from California. I knew that when we crossed the Mississippi we would be in Illinois. For me, then, the Mississippi River signaled the beginning of my graduate student life and the joining of that life with my ongoing research interests in waterways as sites of comparative Indigenous histories and relations. My primary research focuses on contemporary Indigenous literatures of the Pacific, which may, at first, seem distant from the Mississippi. However, all oceans are ultimately connected and the shipping routes of corn and grains downstream that are then exported to major markets like China, the transport of oil and other petroleum products upstream, the increasing ambiguity of where the river ends and the ocean begins in Louisiana, and the growing dead zones in the Gulf of Mexico caused, in part, by nitrates from fertilizer runoff that travels to the ocean via the Mississippi, suggests that the histories and futures of these large bodies of water are very much entangled with each other. The following keyword pairs are words that kept coming up for me through the project’s emphasis on these kinds of intermingling.
Confluence/ Collaboration
As a methodological term, collaboration asks that the members of our Humanities Without Walls team think about how we engage with Indigenous peoples invested in the river, and with each other as researchers, as artists, as teachers, and as members of university communities and communities beyond our institutions. It is also a term that necessitates thinking about how we engage with the river itself. The term “confluence” has been helpful for me when thinking about collaboration in the context of the river and its histories. Confluence refers to the merging of elements, or where rivers or tributaries meet. Collaboration, in its ideal form, does not mean a flattening of all the different things we bring to the table. We all come to the river project from different contexts and we also all bring different questions. As the river’s confluences tell numerous overlapping, converging, and accumulating stories that are connected but are also still very much about specific places and localities, so too does collaboration encompass the emphasis on multiplicity as well as specificity that I see emerging from the project.
Headwaters of the Mississippi.
The project has made clear that collaboration does not mean homogenization or wholesale access to Indigenous knowledge and practices. Though the grant that funds this project is called Humanities Without Walls, it has also taught me some of the values of walls. For example, when we talk about public lands or a public stretch of water, such as that found in a national park, collaborating effectively with Indigenous communities in those areas who have been disenfranchised from their lands and waters necessitates thinking about who the “public” is and how something is made public. An image I keep returning to is a webcam set up by the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources at the Mississippi headwaters, designed to provide visual access to the headwaters at all times. However, when we visited the headwaters the webcam added a layer of government surveillance to the space that made multiple members of the group uncomfortable. Its presence reinforces narratives of common accessibility perpetuated by settlers that erase histories of those lands and the violent ways in which the U.S. government often acquired them. Similarly, if we view collaboration as simply “working together” or ignore the fact that Indigenous expertise has so long been erased or violently taken by non-Indigenous researchers and institutions, then we risk doing further harm. Collaborating in a methodological context thus requires attending to how settlers construct narratives that divide land into public or private property, and how concepts of “wilderness” as devoid of humans erase Indigenous presences. It also requires analyzing how such narratives disrupt already existing relationships that people have with their lands and waters. It means continually thinking critically about how a term like collaboration has been and can be wielded in ways that actually do not serve Indigenous peoples.
Effective collaboration in the context of this project is something that I think we need to continually negotiate and must center primarily on relationships—accounting for our own positions within those relationships and with our research, and asking questions about how best to enact those relationships. Relationships are not created overnight and are necessarily very dependent on context. Depending on what we working on, this could mean relationships with local community members, it could mean interdisciplinary relationships within our own institution and across institutions, and so on. Collaboration can also disrupt the idea of humanities scholars working in isolation and foreground the value of de-centering ourselves as experts or authorities in our research. Collaboration allows for this de-centering in ways that might hopefully lead to more equitable and ethical research systems.
Relationality/ Trans-Indigenous
The poem “Grandma’s Zydeco Stomp Dance: A Patchwork Poem” by Rain Prudhomme-Cranford (Louisiana Creole/ Choctaw-Biloxi/ Mvskogean) and Carolyn Dunn (Tunica/ Choctaw/ Biloxi), expresses, for me, some useful ways of thinking about collaboration in terms of trans-Indigenous relationality as well, in the context of the river and its entangled histories. The poem is accompanied by an image of a quilt art piece called “Intertribal” made with multiple overlapping elements and colors by artist Tony Tiger (Sac & Fox / Muscogee). The form of the poem itself is a “patchwork” poem, or one assembled by different authors coming together to make one unified work. A note at the end of the poem describes how it embodies collaboration, as it is a “found poem” created by “piec[ing] together writing by Dunn and Prud’homme-Cranford to form a new poetic conversation in call and response.” The structure of call and response is explicitly relational, as each part of the conversation emerges in relation to another. Additionally, the poem is not simply a collection of their different writings but forms something new out of their previous writing.
The authors state that the “traveling tributaries” of the river include “long varied stories” of “colonization and conquest.” But these tributaries also include the Native and Black cultural histories that they see “woven” into the “Mississippi red, / blood arteries” and therefore also woven into their own genealogies: these are moving histories, dynamic, and explicitly storied. In their poem, “the waters of Louisiana” are woven “strands” of “seawater/ fresh water/ brackish water” which do not allow them to forget the histories of slavery, Native expulsion, and genocide. But their description of the river’s waters also foreground trans-Indigenous and Black histories of persistence. The waters “carry our Grandma’s stories” and the “rhythms” of her dance, which are portrayed as living and active, despite genocide and enslavement. The form of a patchwork poem, with its ability to incorporate different elements or “strands” into a whole, is able to hold all these histories and presents at once, in the same way that Dunn and Prudhomme-Cranford portray the river holding all these histories simultaneously with multiple forms of potential for vibrant futures.
In a workshop on mapping held during our latest Humanities Without Walls meeting, Citizen Band Potawatomi geographer and Northwestern Center for Native American and Indigenous Research artist in residence Margaret Pearce stated that all maps are about relationality. Nothing is independent on a map, and a map is essentially thousands of tiny decisions replicated across a page—it is an accumulation of meanings. Dunn and Prudhomme-Cranford’s poem suggests that relationality in the context of the Mississippi River Valley requires paying attention to the many different trans-Indigenous relationships it facilitates, which are not necessarily made visible on maps created by non-Indigenous cartographers. Chadwick Allen (Chickasaw) defines the term trans-Indigenous as a way to read connections among different Indigenous peoples in a way that is “together (yet) distinct” (xiii). In other words, the term offers ways to talk about the long-held and ongoing relationships Indigenous peoples have had and continue to have with each other without homogenizing them and without reading their relational acts within colonially-centered frameworks.
“together (yet) distinct”
The river and its tributaries allow for conversations about nodes and confluences of trans-Indigenous activism that it connects and facilitates. For example, in Chicago we heard from Indigenous futurist artist Santiago X (Coushatta and Chamoru) and his latest project to build two earthworks (mounds) at the bookends of the Northwest Portage Walking Museum for the Chicago Architecture Biennial in collaboration with the American Indian Center of Chicago.
Santiago X’s mound project, Chicago.
This project involves collaborations between several Native organizations, artists, and community members based on shared interests in highlighting historical as well as ongoing Native American presences in Chicagoland, but it is also a project that arises specifically from Santiago X’s Coushatta heritage that includes mound builders. The project is additionally guided by the properties of the sites Santiago X chose for his mounds along the river, and the wider Mississippi Valley’s history as a place of numerous earthworks created by multiple Native Nations since time immemorial. Santiago X’s mounds and “Grandma Zydeco’s Stomp Dance” act then as representations as well as continuations of the trans-Indigenous relations that the Mississippi River Valley facilitates.
My ideas are a practice of honoring Indigenous identity on the water and Indigenous resilience while not attempting to fill in the erasures with one family history. Rather I name my own stakes in an acknowledgment of Indigenous resilience, diplomacy, and sovereignties. I am grateful to be in conversation with my diverse and dynamic group and am looking forward to what is ahead!
Please click on the link below to enter my project:
Born and raised in Ljubljana, Slovenia, I came to Chicago five years ago to pursue a PhD in English at Northwestern University. While I remained confined to books and the far north side during the first two years of my graduate program, I grew to know and love the city and its many different neighborhoods over the past three. As I wrote in a previous post, I joined the Humanities Without Walls grant on Indigenous Art and Activism in Changing Climates: The Mississippi River Valley, Colonialism, and Environmental Change with a dissertation project on the Mississippi River in post-Twain literature underway, but had very little background in American Indian Studies. Learning from site visits and Indigenous artists, activists, and scholars working in the field, I began to feel more grounded and started having a greater sense of all the absences and omissions in my knowledge of American history and culture. I was still taken by surprise, however, when our team met in Chicago, the city I’ve come to consider home, in the spring of 2019, and I learned about the vibrant Native American community in the greater Chicago area—about 65,000 people from over a hundred tribal nations, according to the American Indian Center of Chicago—and the art and activism that come out of it. How could I have missed this? The keywords and map below reflect how the HWW project has shifted my understanding of Chicago and the Midwest, showing them as the Indigenous hubs that they are.
Remapping
How do you map a story? What would happen if representations of Native Americans in art and culture centered the landscapes that emerge out of Native memories, stories, and poetry instead of dwelling on colonial erasures and conventional maps that cover up Indigenous presence? These are some of the questions Citizen Band Potawatomi artist and cartographer Margaret Pearce addresses in her work, which has taken her to New Orleans via Chicago as she examines public opinion about flooding to create an Indigenized map of the Mississippi River. While in residence at Northwestern University in Evanston, IL, just north of Chicago, Pearce shared some of her work with our Humanities Without Walls group and led us through a workshop that redefined mapping.
The workshop with Pearce made me see the poem “New Orleans” (1983) by U.S. Poet Laureate Joy Harjo (Creek) in a new light. “New Orleans” traces Indigenous histories of the city through cartographic language, i.e. the language of mapping used in poetic form, linguistically and creatively remapping sites of erasure as places of Indigenous presence and rhetorically bringing Native people into the present. I borrow the term ‘(re)mapping’ from Gender and American Indian Studies scholar Mishuana Goeman (Tonawanda Band of Seneca). Goeman describes Indigenous (re)mapping as a creative process that first exposes colonial erasures and reveals the ways in which histories and landscapes get overwritten in settler historical memory, and then reclaims those spaces by presenting them in relation to contemporary Native experiences as well as to memories and stories that involve specific geographies and ancestors. In other words, remappings reject the concept of ownership and describe geography in terms of relationships—to the land and to one another, to the past and to the future.
Harjo’s poem serves as one example of such a remapping, linking post-removal Oklahoma to ancestral Creek lands along the Lower Mississippi through representations of memory and the metaphor of the river’s geography: “I have a memory. / It swims deep in blood, / a delta in the skin. It swims out of Oklahoma, / deep the Mississippi River.” These lines present memory as embodied—not only does it act with agency; it is also embedded in blood, the fluid that keeps us alive. At the same time, the image of a “delta in the skin” maps geography onto the body, highlighting Indigenous people’s relations with the land. The speaker compares ancestral memories encoded in the body to the Mississippi River delta south of New Orleans, a striking landform created by sediment deposition that is etched into the land in a vein-like pattern. The image of the body as land shows the two as inextricably linked, but it also connects Creeks’ ancestral lands along the Lower Mississippi River with their post-relocation territory in Oklahoma, expanding the notion of homelands. The speaker’s memory and the poem itself carry forward the voices that the lines describe as buried in the Mississippi mud. By giving visibility to Indigenous presence in New Orleans and claiming lost territory through the act of writing, the speaker is resisting the erasure and dispossession attempted by relocation and asserting the Creeks’ claim to the Southeast (listen to Harjo’s reading of the poem here).
Indigenous Chicago
Margaret Pearce’s mapping workshop and the artists we met also made me see Chicago, the city I have called home for the past five years, as the Indigenous hub that it is. The interactive map I made in response to the experience is best viewed following the link below:
The area of what is now known as Chicago is the traditional homeland of the people of the Council of Three Fires: the Potawatomi, Ojibwa, Odawa, as well as the Miami, Ho-Chunk, Sac, Fox, Menominee, and Mesquakie. The 1833 Treaty of Chicago, a consequence of Andrew Jackson’s Indian Removal Act of 1830, pushed Native tribes west of the Mississippi River to clear the space for European settlement, resulting in mass exile and dispossession. This set the stage for the 1837 incorporation of Chicago, the world’s fastest growing city in the nineteenth century. But some Native people refused to be removed, remaining in Chicago and the region. In the 1950s, the assimilationist federal policies of American Indian Urban Relocation moved many Native people from reservations across the country to big cities like Chicago, Seattle, Los Angeles, Denver, and Cleveland. In this way, Chicago became an important Indigenous center once again, and the city continues to be a place of activism, art, and belonging for Native people throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. According to the American Indian Center of Chicago, American Indians from over one hundred tribal nations live in Chicagoland today, making it one of the larger Native American urban centers in the country. The official population count for Cook County, Illinois currently stands at over 38,000. For more on this history, see Rosalyn LaPier and David Beck’s City Indian: Native American Activism in Chicago, 1893-1934 (2015), John Low’s Imprints: The Pokagon Band of Potawatomi Indians and the City of Chicago (2016) and Laura Furlan’s Indigenous Cities: Urban Indian Fiction and the History of Relocation (2017).
Explore the map to learn about some important sites of Indigenous art and activism in Chicago.
