In May 2019, the members of our Humanities Without Walls team for the project “Indigenous Art and Activism in Changing Climates: The Mississippi River Valley, Colonialism, and Environmental Change” met for the second time. We visited sites in Chicagoland, focusing on the tributaries of the Mississippi and their vast reach from the homelands of the Three Fires Confederacy (Ojibwe, Odawa, and Potawatami), as well as from the lands of the Menominee, Miami, and Ho-Chunk nations, which remain home to many Native peoples. We listened to Dr. Ashley Falzetti (Miami) and Dr. John Low (Potawatomi), who discussed Miami and Potawatomi alluvial histories, before viewing a Ralph Frese birchbark canoe and then going on the water at Skokie Lagoons. Dr. Margaret Pearce (Potawatomi) conducted a mapping workshop with us, and we also visited with Indigenous futurist artist Santiago X (Coushatta/ Chamoru) at one of the sites for his two earthwork projects in Chicago that he is creating in partnership with the American Indian Center. Drawing on this meeting as well as the previous one in Minneapolis, the graduate student team members came up with keywords that reflect the processes and methodologies we are engaging with and thinking through as this project continues.
John Low discusses canoe travel in the Great Lakes.
In the next few posts on The Repatriation Files, we will share these keywords and use them to gesture toward how we see the project’s next steps unfolding. Shaped by the input of the artists/activists/scholars we’ve encountered, the keywords represent our take on concepts that have guided our understanding of Indigenous art and activism in the Mississippi River Valley. The accompanying digital maps help visualize the concepts of collaboration, place-based learning, and remapping on the one hand, and give visibility to Indigenous art and activism by highlighting the Native Midwest on the other.
