Re-Collecting Black Hawk: Landscape, Memory, and Power in the American Midwest ed. by Nicolas A. Brown, Sarah E. Kanouse (review)

When I receive books in the mail, I tear open the packaging, check the cover, read the back jacket, and flip through the pages. I followed my usual practice upon the arrival of Re-Collecting Black Hawk: Landscapes, Memory, and Power in the American Midwest, a stunning and provocative image-and-text collection edited by Nicolas A. Brown, a professor of geography and American Indian and Native studies, and Sarah E. Kanouse, an artist. Rifling through, I accidentally landed on a black-and-white photograph of a street sign from Freeport, Illinois. Set against a dull gray sky, the sign demarcated the intersection of West Empire Street and South Blackhawk Avenue. I stared at it for a moment before closing the book and setting it on my desk. I did not know it then, but the image proved to be a perfect encapsulation of the volume as a whole: this book is about the intersection of American empire and the appropriated language, imagery, and memories of Chief Blackhawk and Blackhawk’s War—and the myriad ways in which both the man and the war haunt and contour the settler imagination inscribed in the built environment of the American Midwest.

Makataimeshekiakiak, or Black Hawk (1767–1838), was a Sauk war leader. Born in the Illinois Country, he contested the expansion of the United States, fought with the British Empire during the War of 1812, and, in 1828, was forced to move west across the Mississippi River. Four years later, he and 1,500 Sauk men, women, and children crossed back into Illinois before they were attacked by state militias and the U.S. Army. The Sauk suffered nearly six hundred casualties over the course of four months. Imprisoned for a year, U.S. authorities then paraded Makataimeshekiakiak through major cities of the East Coast, where, rather ironically, whites lionized him as protector of his land and people. The mythos of Black Hawk as the noble savage was born.

In Re-Collecting Black Hawk, Brown and Kanouse draw attention to, and complicate, appropriations of Makataimeshekiakiak’s memory through an innovative pairing of photographs and texts, some embodying the Black Hawk fetish and some questioning it. At the core of the book are 170 wonderfully conceived, original, black-and-white photographs of historical markers, sports teams, consumer products, subdivisions, road signs, advertisements, and other white-settler exploits of the name, visage, and history of Black Hawk. Brown and Kanouse pair these images with two sets of post–World War II texts. The first are drawn from governmental reports, white and indigenous histories, recipes, press releases, newspapers, and letters to the editors from local newspapers. The second are writings from and interviews with tribal officials, activists, and scholars. These encounters between text and image speak to “the various and conflicting ways the history of that war [Black Hawk’s] and the memory of that person [Black Hawk] function in the present,” inviting readers to draw new connections between a colonial past, the colonizing present, and new found disjunctures that offer openings for reinterpretation of a familiar landscape (5). Ultimately, the goal of the book, as the authors put it, is to force us to confront “the importance not only of remembering and forgetting—present tense practices—in shaping both history and the landscape but also recognizing the power geometries within which these contemporary mobilizations of the past are situated” (5).

One of the many vital themes of the book is that in enshrining Black Hawk across the landscape, midwesterners—the cultural (if not literal) ancestors of those who dispossessed local indigenous communities—erase the histories they aim to commemorate. As the authors suggest, “the widespread practice of using Black Hawk’s mystique to name parks...