Category Archives: indigenous environmentalism

Remapping the Indigenous Chicago: Past, Present, Future

I have a memory.
It swims deep in blood,
a delta in the skin. It swims out of Oklahoma,
deep the Mississippi River . . .

Joy Harjo

By Sara Černe

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.

The Midwest and Mississippi: Keyword, RECREATION / RE-CREATION

By Andrew Freiman

Recreation: “the action or process of creating something again”

1.

The Living Webster Encyclopedic Dictionary of the English Language says that recreation is “[a]musement or diversion which gives enjoyment; refreshment of the strength of spirits, as after toil; anything providing entertainment or relaxation” (801). The Oxford Dictionary is more to the point, saying simply “[a]ctivity done for enjoyment when one is not working”, while quickly adding the second definition “the action or process of creating something again” as well as  “a re-enactment or simulation of something”.

Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division Washington, D.C. 20540 USA

The term had a steady if shallow trend during the 19th century only to explode at the turn of the 20th as a reaction to growing trends in employment, labor, a slowly rising class consciousness, and the notion of leisure time–that free stuff, outside the confines of work, that allow some folks to further define who they are. Not just a tailor, but one who plays handball. Not just an investor, but one that enjoys motoring on the weekends and holidays. There were of course other uses of the word that sought to help individuals internally, to heal their bodies or bring peace to their minds. A midcentury anthology puts it this way: “Recreation is frequently used to help attain other ends such as healing the sick, rehabilitating the injured, and helping the delinquent” (Brightbill 51). Brightbill continues to stress his case by noting that “[a]s far as individual need is concerned, recreation is often the only outlet for self-realization and self-discovery. It gives to human beings the chance to create, to express, to serve, and to gain, and results in personality growth and development” (52). So, recreation is a reaction to labor, a utilization of free time, a way to define the self, even heal the self, maybe even foundational to the self in general. We cannot forget the second definition offered by the Oxford Dictionary “the action or process of creating something again” and “a re-enactment or simulation of something” these two ideas, related as they are, will become useful later on.

We should stress what may already be obvious, recreation at the turn of the 20th century was something reserved for a specific group of Americans. White, some degree above the economic nomination of “lower class,” often male citizens enjoyed this form of self-realization. Others worked more often at more difficult jobs, or were banned from or physically and culturally removed from the places in which recreation could happen. Pools and parks were segregated. Racist practices on public roadways made motoring while a person of color difficult if not dangerous. Thanks to the Dawes Act of 1887 National Forests were cut out from already existing, legally documented tribal reservations. By the 1930’s “the amount of land owned by Indians had fallen to 46 million acres, a reduction of ⅔. Some tribes lost 95% of their reservation lands because of the Dawes Act” (McAvoy 82). These lands became mythologized in a national American identity attained through the recreational outlets of hiking, camping, and canoeing, among others. Non-white communities found it difficult not only to find the time for the processes of recreation, but also found it difficult if not impossible to find the space for such things to occur.

For many in Native American communities the idea of leisure time or recreation in general might not directly square with the larger understanding of the terms. This is because there is often little difference between work and leisure activities (McAvoy 81). Furthermore, there doesn’t seem to be much fragmentation of the human experience into distinct categories such as work, leisure, family, and spiritual. Instead, many of the activities, especially those that may be called leisure activities like hunting, fishing, and berry picking, seem to be wrapped up in a close association with sustenance, gathering activities, leisure, family, culture and tradition. Many of the activities American Indians participate in are closely related to traditional activities Indian people have done for centuries (81).

Ojibwe family, circa 1913 (labeled “Typical Indians” by the non-Native photographer). Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division LOT 12880 [P&P;]

When removed from their historical lands, when their government appointed lands are further reduced, when their foodways are disrupted by logging, white settlers, the draining of swamps or the rerouting of rivers, what then happens to the the re-creative tasks Native American populations depend on?

A few news clippings from the late 19th century may give us an answer, and later may lead us to new possibilities in the present moment. Here we will focus on canoeing as it was something very quickly and successfully appropriated from Indigenous communities by whites, who utilized it for recreational activities ignoring the concerns of sustenance, family, culture, and tradition. On June 19th, 1880 the New York Times ran an article titled “The Canoe ‘Boom’” that explained the new recreational craze of the moment. The author quickly informs us that “Canoeing had been for some years a very popular sport in England before it was introduced into the United States,” ignoring the Indigenous communities of North America which created the craft and taught whites how to pilot them. Later the writer doubles down on this erasure by stating that it was only 8 years before, in 1872, that canoeing “became naturalized [in New England] by the founding of the New-York Canoe Club,” as if it too, like all of white America, was a recent immigrant from the Old World. The author makes a stark distinction between Indigenous birch bark canoes and those used by the white canoers of New England, otherwise known as “the canoe of civilization”; in reality it isn’t that the canoe didn’t exist before 1872, but that the canoe, being so “primitive,” didn’t matter at all, was entirely inconsequential.

Frank Yielfs & Geo. Newhouse of U[…] Canoe Club at Regatta, [8/23/24]. Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division, LC-F8- 31916 [P&P]

Of this brand new world of American Canoeing we are happily informed that “within the last two years [1888-1890] the number of American canoeists has grown to very respectable dimensions. There are now five flourishing canoe clubs, and a half dozen builders who find their time fully occupied in building canoes”. In Canoe and Canvas: Life at the Encampments of the American Canoe Association, Jessica Dunkin makes it very plain how the early canoe clubs were indebted to Indigenous realities:

Members of the ACA appropriated Indigenous technologies and practices as they camped and canoed at the annual meets. Occasionally, they acknowledged their debt to Indigenous designers, but mostly they claimed their boats and styles of camping bore little resemblance to the ‘crank’ craft and rudimentary living arrangements of ‘Indians,’ both having been improved, in their eyes, by modern materials and methods. The canoeists did not just benefit from the ingenuity of Indigenous peoples, they were also beneficiaries of the colonial system that sought to contain, assimilate, and eradicate the continent’s original inhabitants. In particular, colonial policies and structures worked to ensure that white folks had places to play that were free of Indigenous peoples (9).

“Tenting on Historic Ground” (New York Times, July 15th, 1894) retells this story in ways that accentuate the violence of this cultural appropriation and cultural erasure. In describing the area where the American Canoe Club is held, the article describes the first encounter between Native populations and Hendrik Hudson and his crew of explorers  in 1609. Anchored off Verplanck’s Point on the  Hudson River,

Hudson was visited by some of the Indians, who were struck with wonder at the superiority of his craft to their own canoes and marveled at the peculiar weapons of the strangers. One of the Indians lingered in a canoe beside the vessel with evidently thievish intent, and, although warned away, watched his opportunity, and, climbing up the rudder into the cabin window, stole a pillow of a few articles of wearing apparel. He was discovered by the mate with his plunder and shot. The other Indians fled in alarm, some of the them in their terror leaping into the river. The ship’s boat was sent out to recover the stolen articles, when one of the Indians in the water seized hold of the boat with the intention, as was believed, of overturning it. A stroke from the sword of the cook cut off his hands, and he was drowned. This was the first Indian blood shed during the voyage.

This “Indian blood” serves to consecrate the ground on which “the American Canoe Association has pitched its tents.” An act of violence has rendered this location “historic ground, and a place which for the purposes desired [canoeing] cannot be surpassed anywhere.”

So, what happens to Native American populations when their recreational ability is erased from history, and they themselves are erased from the space where recreation happens? A possible answer could simply be that whites put themselves in the fabricated absence. Where agency is taken away by Native American hands, all that remains are the hands of the whites that stole the agency in the first place.

Still, we cannot forget that our keyword is of two parts, two definitions. The second definition of recreation should offer us hope: “the action or process of creating something again,” “a re-enactment or simulation of something”.

2.

The Chicago Canoe Club was created under the auspices of the Chicago American Indian Center in 1964 (AIC), eighty-four years after the American Canoe Association. Instead of being exclusionary, the Chicago Canoe Club was not only inter-tribal, but also welcomed and worked with white Americans; Ralph Frese a local canoe builder (and co-founder of the club) worked closely with group members to create a fleet of fiberglass birch bark canoes. The birch bark canoe, the same feared as primitive by the white hobbyist of the late 1800s, was the traditional canoe of the Potawatomi Indians in and around the area of present day Chicago. For the Potawatomi it wasn’t a tool for recreation but instead was an integral part of survival. John Low (Pokagon band of Potawatomi Indians) details the cultural importance of the canoe when he writes that “[t]he birch bark surrounded its occupants and carried them safely from village to village and facilitated friendships, social interaction and inter-tribal circulation. In a region of numerous, streams, lakes, and rivers, the canoe served the native vehicle on indigenous highways” (Vessels 7). The importance of birch bark canoes are not only immediately material but are also vital parts of the oral histories of the Odawa, Ojibwe, and Potawatomi people (6). The canoes even have a profound historical importance: “Some oral histories recount that they were the mode of transport for their great migration west at the behest of prophets five hundred years ago or more from the Atlantic Seaboard to the land where food grows on water (wild rice).”

Dr. John Low (Potawatomi) and William Derrah introduce the group to the Ralph Frese fiberglass reproduction canoe.

A birch bark/fiberglass canoe may give some pause, but in terms of re-creation there is a certain poetry to the material. According to Low,

[Leroy] Wesaw [a founding member, Pokagon Band Potawatomi]  and the Canoe Club favored the craft designed by Ralph Frese to represent the Algonquin canoe because of its style of their vessels; it was a celebration of Indian technology and Indian heritage. Frese’s fiberglass canoes, complete with simulated pitch, the texture of birch bark, and decorative etchings, were purposefully designed to represent the past. However, the material was contemporary and practical. Fiberglass enabled the production of enough canoes for the club members. Wesaw and the rest of the Canoe Club membership made good use of the opportunity afforded by Frese’s canoes. 

Whether or not it was fiberglass made to look like birch bark or actually birch bark that kept canoe club members afloat, the effect was the same–pride, happiness, connection. According to club member Louis (Bird) Traverzo (Lac Courte Oreilles Band, Ojibwe), the Chicago Canoe Club “promoted strong families within the Chicago Indian community by fostering a sense of community and camaraderie. ‘It reinforced a pride in family and being Native’” (Imprints). The Chicago Canoe Club’s main concern wasn’t a technical authenticity, but Indian pride and dignity. Leroy Wesaw, the club’s lifeblood, described the purpose of the club simply “Canoeing serves not only as good exercise and fun for the participants […] Like almost everything an Indian family does, it is aimed at preserving our Indian heritage.” Existing from 1964 to 1972 “the Chicago Canoe Club was not only the most popular sport and recreational activity sponsored by the AIC, but it also became the public face of Indians thriving in Chicago.”

Leroy Wesaw
“Canoeing serves not only as good exercise and fun for the participants […] Like almost everything an Indian family does, it is aimed at preserving our Indian heritage.”

The re-creation of Indigenous water-based recreation does not end here. Vicente Diaz (Filipino-Pohnpeian) is doing important trans-indigenous work in and out of the classroom in Minnesota. Diaz is presently working on a project that “involves a long-term program of cultural revitalization of canoe voyaging and knowledge of land, water, and skyways in the Caroline islands and in Dakota homelands in Rural western Minnesota (Diaz 11). Diaz is connecting indigenous people through water and the use of their specific craft and star maps, while also bringing the canoe and those that would be re-created through it into virtual reality (Tynjala). On the Pacific coast there is the Healing of the Canoe project, a “collaboration among the Suquamish Tribe, the Port Gamble S’Klallam Tribe, and the University of Washington Alcohol and Drug Abuse Institute (ADAI)”. The Healing of the Canoe project is “based on the traditional Coastal Salish canoe journey, [which] was identified as the backbone of the intervention” which involves a curriculum centered on Indigenous knowledge and traditions seeking to prevent drug dependency in indigenous youth  (Healing). And, of course, there are still other examples not covered here.

We should stress that indigenous recreation/re-creation takes on many forms. Every pow-wow, every stickball game, in fact every iteration of Native American life in the present day is a re-creation of white settler colonialism set out to and still seeks to destroy. It is in this way that recreation in Native American communities battles some of the same demons that white recreationists fought against at the turn of the 20th century — alienated labor, industrialization, a growing consciousness of self, a desire to mend the spirit that the predominate culture sought to destroy. The differences are many, for our purposes here, where white recreation erases and reframes a white hegemonic mythos, Native American recreation re-creates and re-affirms lifeways, bringing all different types of communities together.

 

Works Cited

Brightbill, Charles K. & Harold D. Meyer. Recreation: Text and Readings. New York: Prentice

Hall, 1953.

Diaz, Vicente M. “Oceania in the Plains: The Politics and Analytics of Transindigenous

resurgence in Chuukese Voyaging of Dakota Lands, Waters, and Skies in Mini Sota

Makhoche.” Pacific Studies, Vol. 42, No. ½–April / August, 2019.

Healing the Canoe Training Center, https://healingofthecanoe.org/suquamish/, Accessed 20

October 2019.

Low, John N. Imprints: The Pokagon Band of Potawatomi Indians and the City of Chicago.

Kindle Edition, Michigan State U P, 2016.

McAvoy, Leo, Paul Shirilla & Joseph Flood. “American Indian Gathering and Recreation Uses

of National Forests.” Proceedings of the 2004 Northeastern Recreation Research

Symposium, 2004.

“Recreation.” The Living Webster Encyclopedic Dictionary of the English Language, 1974.

“Recreation.” https://www.lexico.com/en/definition/recreation, accessed 17 October 2019.

“Tenting on Historic Ground: American Canoe Association’s Romantic Surroundings at Croton

Point.” New York Times, 15 July 1894.

“The Canoe ‘Boom’.” New York Times, 19 June 1880.

Dunkin, Jessica. Canoe and Canvas: Life at the Encampments of the American Canoe

Association, 1880-1910. U of Toronto P, 2019.

Tynjala, Kate. “Canoes: Indigeneity, Relocation, and Maintaining Tradition,” American Indian

Studies, https://cla.umn.edu/ais/news-events/story/canoes-indigeneity-relocation-and

-maintaining-tradition

The Midwest & the Mississippi: Reflections and Keywords

 

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.

Native American History Month: 2019

Every November since 1990, cultural and educational institutions across the US recognize the Indigenous peoples of this country with programming dedicated to celebrating Native American History Month. For The Repatriation Files, it is a good time to reflect on the past year in Indian Country—this highs and the lows—and to reacquaint readers with news and events from the more than 500 Native Nations recognized by the federal government.

The year 2019 began with a confrontation between high school students wearing MAGA hats and Native activist Nathan Phillips—an event chronicled in a January issue of this blog (“Nathan Phillips: An Elder for All Americans”).

  “as the non-Indian struggles in solitude and despair, he curses the Indian for not coveting the same disaster.”

Vine Deloria, Jr.

August saw the last edition of News from Indian Country, a Native owned and operated news outlet from Hayward, Wisconsin. Longtime editor, Paul DeMain recalled the early days of the publication:

News From Indian Country started publishing in 1987 and all three of these men [Pipe Mustache, Archy Mosay,  and Richard LaCourse], along with Indigenous women like Janet McCloud, Rose Mary Robinson and Wilma Mankiller, and even a young woman named Winona LaDuke could be found in the pages of our earliest newspaper, the one now putting its last hard copy to bed.

We have survived the controversies of the last 40 years, a written testament to opinions of the widest dimensions. Treaty rights, taxing authority, identity, spiritualism, healing, war, trauma, battles between relatives, nations and international personalities (“33 Years of Publishing”).

Out west, the Yurok Nation was successful in its quest to have the Klamath River, the lifeblood of the Yurok homeland, the rights of personhood under the law. Following the example of the White Earth Band of Ojibwe, who used the concept to designate wild rice (manoomin) as deserving the same protections as human beings.

“From New Zealand to Colombia, the powerful idea that nature has rights is taking root in legal systems.”

David Boyd, U.N. Special Rapporteur on Human Rights and the Environment

 

Following the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, more tribal communities have sought to rethink how they might protect sacred sites and their environment. According to High Country Times, “Legal personhood provides a different framework for dealing with problems like pollution, drought and climate change, though no case has yet been brought to put the Whanganui, Manoomin or Klamath rights to the test in court. The crucial aspect to establishing these legal frameworks, Indigenous lawyers say, involves shifting relationships and codifying Indigenous knowledge — in other words, recognizing non-human entities not as resources, but as rights-holders.

2019 was also the year that the Ponca leader Standing Bear was honored as a civil rights pioneer with a statue in the US Capitol building. As the Washington Post and the Smithsonian Magazine have reported, the statue commemorates the efforts of Standing Bear to overturn US law that in 1879 ruled that “an Indian was neither a person nor a citizen.” Standing Bear, the first Native person to offer testimony in federal court, argued that he and his community had the right to remain in their homeland, rather than be removed to Oklahoma. The presiding judge eventually agreed, ruling that “an Indian is a ‘person’ within the meaning of the laws of the United States” and that “no rightful authority exists for removing by force any of the relators to the Indian Territory.”

“That hand is not the color of yours, but if I pierce it, I shall feel pain. If you pierce your hand you also feel pain. The blood that will flow from mine will be of the same color as yours. I am a man. The same god made us both.”

Standing Bear

Read more: Standing Bear

In the next post, we will explore Native American history month from the perspective of a recent presidential declaration that has overlaid this commemoration with something called “National American History and Founders Month.”

 

Positionality & Poetics of the River

Agléška R. Cohen-Rencountre (PhD student in American Studies, U of Minnesota):

The Bdote, “where the two waters come together,” at the confluence of the Mississippi and Missouri Rivers.

Questions to mull over:

  1. What are the individual stakes or outcomes that each of us are envisioning (this might be in academic terms; in collaborative practices; in terms of our own art and activism; in terms of our institutional and public pedagogies, etc.)

This is a really special project to me because I have the opportunity to engage active healing in terms of my ancestral stories that I have just begun to learn about.

The stakes include insider/outsider positionality as a descendant of Dakota exile and Fort Snelling imprisonment, as well as an Indigenous researcher, and as an Ina (mother) to my Dakota children.

I envision both the academic and collaborative practices being paramount to my growth through this work. I want to further entangle myself within my Indigenous, Dakota and Lakota responsibilities and the opportunities that I can both create and receive through my home institution.

  1. What are the conceptual stakes for each of us in a project that exists at the confluence of academic notions of the humanities and walls, and of Native notions of humanness as it is forged in relation to rivers?

I recall being at the headwaters and later talking within our group, questioning what significance the headwaters held and holds for Dakota and Ojibwe people. That question helped me de-naturalize the western ontological gaze of the cartographers who represent imperialism.

As far as Native notions of humanness and how it is shaped by rivers, this is the heart of what I will become further entangled in. I have heard that there is a place near Fort Snelling (presumably The Bdote—for there may be many such places), where during the winter the river freezes and you can step inside a tunnel of frozen water and listen to the river. If I have remembered correctly and this is something I will experience, it is a source of future humanness that I have yet to experience but already wish to share with others—especially my wife and our children. Growing up as kids we always had access to our local lakes and creeks. It was a given that one would familiarize oneself to them all every chance that there was – and we did thanks to my parents. When we got older, growing up during the winter meant knowing about death near the water, so for me the seasonal changes near the water were really stark. This new and important way to familiarize myself to the Mississippi, from season to season is a confluence of inter-tribal affiliation, intergenerational healing, and multidisciplinary collaboration. I know that sacred sites are not really for me say much about in terms of what the stakes are. Which is also to say that I am deeply invested in them but do not really need or have a way of writing about what this means in terms of humanness.

  1. How are we as individuals and as collaborators conceiving of “changing climates”?

Changing climates means looking at the health of the ecosystems that each prospective agency of recreation, fishing, dumping, and extraction exact upon the overall health of the water. Changing climates due to reintroduction of native species (wolf), or protection of them (eel), are something that I am aware of but do not yet understand through the specific innumerable lifeways hosted by the Mississippi. Finally, climate change in terms of global warming remind me of a music video that Vince shared with us ‘Rise : From One Island to Another’. The anonymous author writes on the collective’s website an invitation to viewers that reads: “Watch this poetic expedition between two islanders, one from the Marshall Islands, and one from Kalaallit Nunaat (Greenland), connecting their realities of melting glaciers and rising sea levels. Kathy Jetñil-Kijiner and Aka Niviâna use their poetry to showcase the linkages between their homelands in the face of climate change.”

The cinematography and poem have stayed with me. The imagery unhinged my land-based, ‘fly-over state’, mixed rural/urban positionalities. When I think of climate change I do not just see weary scientists defending their research in faraway lecture halls, or climate change deniers taking up where pro- Indian Termination fishing and hunting sportsman leave off. I now feel the call from all around, through the water right at my fingertips of my home, local areas and the ocean. All connected through prayer and activism. Through beautiful poetry that connects rather than disaggregates knowledge.

Three Infographic Reflections

By Bonnie Etherington (PhD Candidate in English, Northwestern)

This is a continuation of the observations made by participants in the Humanities without Walls grant: “Indigenous Art and Activism in Changing Climates: The Mississippi River Valley, Colonialism, and Environmental Change”

“Wakpa Thanka kin”

By Samantha Maijhor (PhD Candidate in English, University of Minnesota)

wakpá ipȟá ed
wakpá tȟáŋka kči napéwéčhiyuze
uŋkičhiksuyapi
wakpá tȟaŋka ahdádha wóčhekiye hóyewaye
aŋpétu waŋ ed wóčhekiyeg hená ahdíyuweǧa kte
óhŋni mní kiŋ hdi
óhŋni mní kiŋ hdi kte

wakáŋ thípi ed
théhaŋ okátȟa kiŋ maúŋnipi
théhaŋ osní kiŋ maúŋnipi
______ kiŋ uŋkakidowaŋpi ičinš uŋči makȟa kiŋ wa akaȟpe
______ čhaze kiŋ uŋkeypai šni kiŋhaŋ wahiŋhe šni
wanaphobyapig uŋpi k’a iǧuǧa oȟdoka kiŋ ihagyapi
óhŋni wičhaȟpi kiŋ mani ohna thaniŋiŋ
waniyetu k’a bdoketu kiŋ nuphiŋ mniowe kiŋ čhaǧa šni
mni wičhóni

bdote ed
wakpá tȟaŋka kiŋ k’a mnisota kči ečhipha čha hetu
watapheta waŋ iŋkpatakiya wabdake
dečed Dakȟóta oyáte kiŋ thuŋpi eyapi
Omaka 1862 heéhaŋ hed Dakȟóta oyáte kiŋ wičhakaksapi
k’a hehaŋ óta wyazaŋpi k’a t’api
uŋkaŋ watapheta waŋ wakpá tȟáŋka ogna awíchaipi
waŋna bdote ed Dakȟóta oyáteg hdipi
mni s’e óhŋni Dakȟod hdipi kte

Táku uŋkákupi kta ke?
Táku mní kiŋ aku kta he?

 

 

1. At the headwaters, I shook hands with the Mississippi, we remember(ed) each other, I sent a prayer along the river, one day the words will return, the water always returns

2. At Wakan Tipi, we walked in the heat for a long time / we walked in the cold for a long time, we sang to ___ because the earth was blanketed with snow / we didn’t say _______’s name when there was no snow, they used explosives and destroyed the cave, the railroad men came here and destroyed the womb, the stars still reflect in the water, in both winter and summer the spring does not freeze, the water lives/water is life

3. At Bdote / It is at that place where the Mississippi and the Minnesota rivers meet / I saw a steamboat go upstream / they say the Dakota people emerged here / Back in 1862 the Dakota people were jailed there / and at that time many were sick and died / and then a steamboat took them away on the Mississippi river / now the Dakota people have returned to Bdote / like water the Dakota people will always return here.

4. What will we bring when we come back here?
5. What will the water bring back?

Humanities Without Walls: The Upper Mississippi

By Sara Černe, Agléška R. Cohen-Rencountre, Bonnie Etherington, Andrew Freiman, and Samantha Majhor.

In September 2018, the authors of this post traveled to various locations along the Upper Mississippi in Minnesota as graduate participants with a 2018-2020 multi-institutional, interdisciplinary Humanities Without Walls project. Entitled “Indigenous Art and Activism in Changing Climates: The Mississippi River Valley, Colonialism, and Environmental Change,” the project is funded by the Andrew Mellon Foundation. We were joined by faculty: Kelly Wisecup (Project Leader & PI, Northwestern), Vicente Diaz (Co-PI, U of Minnesota), Christopher Pexa (Project Coordinator, U of Minnesota), Jacki Thompson Rand (U of Iowa), Phillip Round (U of Iowa), and Caroline Wigginton (U of Mississippi). Other faculty participants are Doug Kiel (Northwestern), Robert Michael Morrissey (U of Illinois Urbana-Champaign), and Project Advisors Margaret Pearce (U of Maine) and Robbie Ethridge (U of Mississippi). Over the next two years we will all also travel to Chicago and to Mississippi as we develop our collaborative research. After the trip to the upper reaches of the river valley, we graduate student participants compiled our reflections. We combine the critical with the creative, and include visual responses with poetic, essay, and other textual reflections.

Jim Rock (Dakota) explains the significance of caves along the Mississippi in the Twin Cities. Jim is Planetarium Projects Director at the University of Minnesota, Duluth.

 

In the next few issues of The Repatriation Files, we share our responses to our initial encounters with the Mississippi.

 

In September 2018, the authors of this post traveled to various locations along the Upper Mississippi in Minnesota as graduate participants with a 2018-2020 multi-institutional, interdisciplinary Humanities Without Walls project. Entitled “Indigenous Art and Activism in Changing Climates: The Mississippi River Valley, Colonialism, and Environmental Change,” the project is funded by the Andrew Mellon Foundation. We were joined by faculty: Kelly Wisecup (Project Leader & PI, Northwestern), Vicente Diaz (Co-PI, U of Minnesota), Christopher Pexa (Project Coordinator, U of Minnesota), Jacki Thompson Rand (U of Iowa), Phillip Round (U of Iowa), and Caroline Wigginton (U of Mississippi). Other faculty participants are Doug Kiel (Northwestern), Robert Michael Morrissey (U of Illinois Urbana-Champaign), and Project Advisors Margaret Pearce (U of Maine) and Robbie Ethridge (U of Mississippi). Over the next two years we will all also travel to Chicago and to Mississippi as we develop our collaborative research. After the trip to the upper reaches of the river valley, we graduate student participants compiled our reflections. We combine the critical with the creative, and include visual responses with poetic, essay, and other textual reflections.

Indigenous Environmental News, November, 2017

Recent Articles in the New York Times have focused on Native environmental news as part of the paper’s recognition of Native American Heritage Month. In this post, I offer readers a set of three pieces that caught my eye last week.

Derrick Pottle, a lifelong resident of Labrador, on sea ice near Rigolet. Livia Albeck-Ripka/The New York Times

Livia Albeck-Ripka, “Why Lost Ice Means Lost Hope for an Inuit Village.” November, 25, 2017.

Victor Jay Blue, “The Horses at Standing Rock Get a Checkup” (Nov. 23, 2017)

Kallen Harrison with his mare, Oreo. Behind them are volunteers from the Rural Veterinary Experience Teaching and Service program, which provides free and low-cost care to horses in areas with few veterinarians. Credit Victor J. Blue for The New York Times

Brendan Jones, “A Gold Rush in Salmon Country.”

Sockeye salmon in a river near Bristol Bay in southwestern Alaska, where a company wants to mine gold beneath spawning grounds. Credit Trout Unlimited

‘