Keeping the Fire Alive in Ann Arbor

It's a rainy end to October. The leaves are almost completely down...a carpet of yellow sits on the ground. There's pumpkin carving and school work to attend, but I'm predictably procrastinating. It's a balancing act obscuring the focus on aches and should haves; I'm determined not to waste time shoulding on myself.

Words can take you only so far...my universe may be different from yours--although like a Ven diagram--they intersect. Inner and outer worlds form the similar shapes. The micro and the macro. What's up with that? Are we all just floating in some linty pocket in the Creator's rumpled old corduroys? or in an ever-expanding inter-dimensional womb? The alternative is to do or dream.

Each time I move to Ann Arbor, it's a changed somehow. The Union is still there with its maize and blue flag but it looks a little different. The Student Publications Building has the same pencil-carved work desks but now is called something else and filled with computer terminals. There is a new business building on Hill and State Streets named for a banker out East, and where giant elms once cascaded over vast green space by the Diag, masses of new buildings push ever upward. The students seem younger now.

The Art Museum still has the portrait of Lincoln as a young boy reading by the fireside; it also prominently displays a painting of "pioneers" and the noble "savages" shooting it out in a wagon train. Newer medical offices near North Campus at Domino's Farms have a mythic quality to them. The wall art I saw there is of 19th century caucasian women--only--gazing wistfully over the prairie as if the land had erupted with white linen Gibson-girls from time immemorial.

I'm no expert, but I have a feeling that not many people know the history of the University of Michigan. It's first site in Detroit was on land given to the school by the Native people of this region, including the Potawatomi--the Fire Keepers of the confederacy of three tribes which also include the Ojibwa and Oddawa. In their generosity they asked only that Native Americans be allowed to study there.

In the mid-1800s many Potawatomi and others were pushed West on another trail of tears during President Jackson's tenure.* Many died along the way to Council Bluffs in Iowa and the adjoining area. Others who had already intermarried with the new settlers remained. Some even passed for "white." Still others made families with African Americans. The First People of this land were not given the right to vote until the 1920s.

And that brings me back to this state run public university. I feel something is lacking. In some ways it resembles an exclusive citadel. Donors' names adorn new buildings; exclusive luxury boxes lurk over Michigan Stadium, yet where is acknowledgment to the people who gave so much? The determination that they and theirs will not be forgotten?

The decades-old diorama exhibit at the UM's Museum of Natural History (a personal favorite) has garnered controversy. It carefully depicts Native American life as it may have been long ago, but without any modern context, in a building with the remains of mastodons and meteorites. It will be moved soon to a warehouse where it will still be accessible to study; however, it begs the question...why not have a separate museum or cultural center that tells the story of the people who donated the land upon which the school sits?

"Up North" in Mount Pleasant the Ziibiwing Center of the Ojibwa/Chippewa tribe is a vibrant place to visit and learn. It is welcoming to the public. It also sits on reservation land.

Here in Southern Michigan there are no reservations; how apt, then, to build our own place of gratitude and learning...one that fully acknowledges the contributions of the original people of this land and their continued connection to the university. The dioramas could remain in public view, but as a smaller part of a much larger story. A gathering place for those who want to study and appreciate the significance of these foremothers and fathers would be a welcome addition to the Ann Arbor campus.

An institution of such purported acclaim should have a place to celebrate its roots as a whole.

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*McCabe, Michael A. The Removal of the Potawtomi Indians: 1820 to the Trail of Death, A.M. thesis, Indiana State University, 1960.
Links to come.