An artistic, land acknowledgment project dedicated to honoring Chief Buffalo, as well as the past and contemporary history of our region's Indigenous people.
Leader
Moira Villiard
Location
N 2nd Ave E & East Michigan Street Duluth, MN 55802
The murals will exist in a large maze of walls near the lakewalk that connect the newly renamed Gitchi Ode Akiing Park and Downtown Duluth with the lower Canal Park tourism peninsula through a series of ramps and staircases. The murals focus on the journey of Chief Buffalo, a history inaccessible through both art and public space in Duluth. The murals will also feature contemporary imagery of Native people and our existence and connection to the land today.
Villiard, in partnership with the Duluth Indigenous Commission, the Buffalo family, and Zeitgeist Center for the Arts, launched a pilot project in the Summer of 2019 to paint 3 of the 12+ walls in a single day-long event, which was preceded by a ceremony that brought over a hundred native people to the space to bless the project. As the lead artist, Villiard is recruiting other emerging Indigenous artists to assist her in designing the various walls and then we will host public events where everyone is welcome to help us fill in the designs.
"The treaty was not a grant of rights to the Indians, but a grant of rights from them -- a reservation of those not granted." US v. Winans (1905)
For more information on treaties and the story of Chief Buffalo, check out the following links:
January - April 2021:
Meeting with the Buffalo Family and community members to coordinate plan for the walls
Research plaques and historic marker options
Draft designs
Confirm assistant artists and photo references
Meet with remaining appropriate city parties
May - June 2021:
Awareness events in the park in collaboration with Duluth Indigenous Commission
Research creative ways to reintroduce sweetgrass and Indigenous plant-life into the space and to include other historic markers
September 2021:
Mural painting sessions in conjunction with park activities.
October 2021:
Installation of plaques and any other place markers.
Duluth, as an “artsy” city, has thus far failed to implement public art depicting Native people in any capacity outside of a few early non-Native artists creating inaccurate depictions of what they thought pre-1900 Ojibwe would look like. The transformation of this public space is going to change this forever.
We are currently working with the oldest descendents of Chief Buffalo (Henry Jr. and Bob, the hereditary chief) to piece together information on the Treaty of 1854, which is the reason anyone was allowed to immigrate to our region of Minnesota - it is also, in a bittersweet way, the reason that the Anishinaabe people were not pushed further West after the Ojibwe Trail of Tears (Sandy Lake Tragedy). The mural maze not only beautifies this underused public space, but will finally make visible and honest community-designed depiction of the Indigenous history in the region. It will also call attention to the potential of creative placemaking as a whole, which is a movement that is amazing but sometimes veers too much into the mentality that places need to be “made” and don’t already hold stories and cultures that have “made” them already.