Driving East

Much like my previous post about race, place and tourism, the institutionalization of the image of North American First Nations in leisure activities is laden with aestheticized and displaced narratives. Some friends of the Travel Office have been working on an extended project titled Driving East that looks at this confluence of mobility, leisure, history and stereotypes through practicing their own form of leisurely, yet critical, mobility. Below is from their recent announcement for an exhibition opening July 17th in Milwaukee (The image is from their Flickr set for the project):

The year 2007 marks the 175th anniversary of the Black Hawk "War", a 4-month military campaign by the US Army and Illinois Militia to prevent a band of Sauk and Meskwaki (Fox) Indians from returning to their village near the confluence of the Rock and Mississippi Rivers. While details of the conflict — including the slaughter of hundreds of starving Indians after they had attempted to surrender - may be little remembered, the mythology of Black Hawk permeates the upper Midwest and, indeed American culture at large. In Wisconsin and Illinois there are hundreds of Black Hawk place names, including state parks, churches, schools, roads, hotels, and dental offices, and several heroic sculptures. Meanwhile, Americans across the country — including the four million people who identify as Native American — may follow the fortunes of Chicago's NHL Hockey team, thrill to the action‒packed war film or Playstation game Black Hawk Down, or find themselves piloting an armored helicopter through war-torn airspace.

Seemingly about the 19th century Sauk leader Black Hawk, this project is, in fact, mostly not about Black Hawk. Rather, we are interested in the disconnect between Black Hawk as a symbol and Black Hawk as a historical person, and, more importantly, the disconnect between the Black Hawk War as a historical narrative inscribed in the landscape and the present day struggles of American Indian peoples and Nations in the midwestern United States. As white people, we believe commemorative processes and historical narratives continue to shape the physical, social, and political spaces we inhabit today with real and substantial consequences for how we view ourselves and others as fellow inhabitants of and travelers within the contemporary United States.

Driving East Through Indian Country
Driving East is a multi-year project exploring how myths of American mobility developed during Manifest Destiny continue to operate today. We use the familiar and lighthearted form of the road trip to rethink how the present-day landscape was forged by the very serious, linked processes of white westward migration on the one hand and Indian removal and resistance on the other. By engaging with the material culture of westward expansion and its commemoration, we uncover, recover, expose, and re-present traces of these histories still resonant in the landscapes and and present-day politics of a place.
Driving East Through Indian Country: Black Hawk Chapter is a project‒ based exhibition by Sarah Kanouse and Nicholas Brown of photos, videos, and texts gathered during the Cultural Crisis Residency Program in Milwaukee