Watch: My Wisconsin, by Ariel Beaujot

Transcript: (Ariel Beaujot) "This is my Wisconsin." I was part of a video project where I had to say that over and over again—"this is my Wisconsin"—and I had to look into the camera and say that and it felt so odd, partly because I'm not from Wisconsin and because I was creating such a sanitized version of what Wisconsin is, La Crosse, Wisconsin in particular. I was saying that on the banks of the Mississippi, which is such a disturbing place and has been such a disturbing place for me as I've learned more and more about what has happened to the Ho-Chunk there and what happens currently to young men that go to the school where I teach. So "this is my Wisconsin" is what I'd like to talk about now. What's my Wisconsin? My Wisconsin is to think about the meaning of the space in which I find myself.

(David Krump) There are new ghosts in the Mississippi and all day they play unimaginable, underwatery games with each other. Come night the moon releases them, old and new, from the grip of the river. Then old drowned Sioux and new suicides chase weightless spirits of black and brown bison through our bedrooms. Perhaps those who died in what we understand as accident do not realize their conclusions.

(Ariel Beaujot) I think as settler colonialists we're often thinking a lot about the facts of the situation and we don't often have feelings about a situation—we have feelings but they're suppressed and a lot of the facts are also suppressed. But what we do know in terms of facts is that in 1830 the federal US government enacted the Indian Removal Act. This moved all indigenous peoples from the area that was east of the Mississippi to the Indian Territory that was west of the Mississippi. So this is all lands that divide white settlers from indigenous peoples, and it was the Mississippi that marked that divide. And I think this is the beginning of a lot of other things that are going on, like redlining that divides people of color from white people in America. One hundred and thirty years later settlers put up a statue. This statue was an erasure of the fact that in 1830 the US government moved people to the other side of the Mississippi River. Because the statue that they put up was of Hiawatha, an Iroquoian chief that has nothing to do with the area of La Crosse.

(William Stobb) Into the shadow of our large Hiawatha statue, a Zimmerhakl, Anthony, 1962. History describes it as a tumultuous era—the 60s—when justice and peace might have broken free of slogans and become a kind of reality, but I think Bugs Bunny was the greater influence on Zimmerhakl, whose huge pastel chief seems most poised to step back into a TV that might be loaded on an Acme truck and driven off a cliff. Our Hiawatha, arms crossed with the peace-pipe, high above the paddle wheeler and friendship garden, makes history fun as Jack would have wanted for everyone. Lifelong fitness and satisfaction in a land beyond skirmish or treaty, fuel or distribution, a stretch of bronze in setting sun.

(Ariel Beaujot) Another fact that we know is that in 2000 city authorities erected a fence around the statue of Hiawatha because chunks of concrete were falling off of it and it became dangerous. It was only then that settlers decided to ask indigenous people if they actually thought that the statue was good. This was at a moment when they were questioning whether or not they should pay to repair the statue or whether or not the statue should be taken down. So this is when some indigenous critique emerged.

(Kera Cho Mani ga/Dan Green) I just turned my back symbolically on what the UWL Native American students used to refer to as "The Colossus of Kitsch" or as Riverside Park calls "The Big Indian." First my name is Kera Cho Mani ga, that means "the person who paints the sky blue." You know me as Dan Green, what Malcolm X might have called my "slave name." At the time—the late 90s—the Chamber of Commerce in La Crosse proposed $50,000 into a paint job on the Colossus, something that reinforces stereotypes about Native Americans. As a sociology student I had for years looked into the influence of imagery, statuary, and I was a part of the National anti-Native American sport mascot movement. I traveled to University of Illinois, University of North Dakota, and Cleveland, Ohio on a regular basis to demonstrate and to teach about the harms, the largely psychological harms, of this kind of imagery of the Big Indian standing behind me. So that was my interest, that here it is, in my hometown where I'm raising children that look like me— they're brown skinned, they're dark-haired, we don't get mistaken for anything but Native American—and here's something in our hometown reinforcing harmful thinking about us. So I was compelled to do something.

(Ariel Beuajot) The vote to remove the statue lost by one. Another fact is that in 2017 Americans started to debate the validity of Civil War monuments. Statues became a hot topic and people in La Crosse decided that they needed to revisit the question of the Big Statue.

(Benjamin Morris) I was working with a group of people thinking about climbing the Big Statue at Riverside Park and hanging a "No DAPL" banner from it, and I called up my friend who is very thoughtful person, an enrolled member of the Cherokee Nation in Oklahoma and he wisely said "if you do that, you know natives are gonna get blamed for it when it'll be a bunch of white guys like you doing it." Climbing the statue and trying to draw attention to the Standing Rock movement there that would have been done in dark and in secret and would not have used my privilege, but by going to Standing Rock I was able to leverage my existence in this society as a white, straight, cis man and for a lot of the society it still matters, that I'm ordained clergy.

(Ariel Beaujot) The final fact that we know is that in 2018 it was agreed that the statue must come down. It will be moved on to private land. Fact: cost will be fifty thousand dollars. But none of these facts of course exists in a feeling of what the meaning of the statue is. What is the meaning of the statue in terms of the larger things that are going on in La Crosse? I'm really interested in the image of the Mississippi because the Mississippi is the dividing land between settler space and Indian Territory. I'm interested in the idea that as people were moved and removed from the land, as Ho-Chunk people were removed from the land, people died in that river. The river holds not only the deaths of those Ho-Chunk people but it also holds the deaths of drunk university students who fell into the river. How did they fall into the river? Why did they fall into the river? It seems like a strange thing— there's barriers—and yet there they are along with these other people that were treated so violently. Is there something about the river? Is there something about the erasure of the people and their history that has embedded and has not flowed down into the Gulf of Mexico? Has it stayed and been trapped in the river and in the area around Riverside Park so that it's no longer possible for us to ignore the shared human reality and the shared existence of violence on the shores of La Crosse?

(David Krump) When the ghosts float sobbing on by lonely as water in the beginning. In the beginning there was a vast and formal formlessness then waters, rivers ground the formlessness down, separated the dead from the living