With Shore Land, JeeYeun Lee has created a sound walk that contemplates Chicago’s lakefront as a liminal space between land and water, simultaneously a public good, treaty violation, and strategy to suppress insurgence.
This work is one of the shortlisted pieces for the Sound Walk September Awards 2024.
Below, JeeYeun talks about the context of the piece, and the history leading up to its creation.
Growing up in Chicago, the only thing I retained about Chicago history was that the first settler of Chicago was a Haitian immigrant and that there was a big fire. So, after I started doing walking projects in art school and came back to Chicago, there was a lot to learn.
One of the first books I encountered was Imprints: The Pokagon Band of Potawatomi Indians and the City of Chicago, by John Low. It was revelatory in many ways. At the time, I didn’t even know how to pronounce the name of their tribe (“poke – ei – gun”), let alone the history of their connection to Chicago. They were, until recently, the federally recognized tribe with the closest land base to Chicago, located in what is now southwest Michigan. John Low is a member of the tribe who trained as a lawyer and served for a time as the lawyer for his tribe. Later on, he went back to graduate school for a degree in history, and his dissertation became this book.
In the book, Dr. Low writes about a lawsuit filed by leaders of his tribe in 1914 against the City of Chicago for land along the lakefront. They said that the treaties signed by their forebears placed the eastern border of ceded land at the Lake Michigan shoreline. Since then, the city had built a strip of lakefill beyond the shoreline, and the Pokagon Potawatomi leaders argued that Chicago should return this land or pay them for it. Land back, clear and simple.
The case went all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, which handed down its decision in 1917. The judges granted that the Potawatomi did indeed have the right of occupancy, but that they had given up that right by not occupying the land.
It’s hard for me to tell this story without some amount of sputtering at this point. What land could the Potawatomi have occupied? It was literally under the water. And, the terms of the treaties forcibly removed the Potawatomi west of the Mississippi. They could literally not have followed the law and maintained their occupancy of the land.
As an immigrant from a country that was formerly colonized, I don’t like being in a position of occupying other peoples’ lands. When I think about how I would feel if Korea were still colonized by Japan, our names and language erased, our culture appropriated and misidentified, our sovereignty unrecognized, I am overcome with feeling.
My work over the last several years has been motivated by this discomfiting recognition of my position as a settler in another land. I have let it unsettle me, and have aimed to make work that unsettles others. I do not enjoy being used in the genocidal project of settler colonialism, as a middle agent serving the interests of any ruling class. The least I can do is make this situation plain. As James Baldwin said: “Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.”
After learning about the Pokagon land claim, my first thought was to make visible this unceded territory called the Chicago lakefront. Dr. Low was gracious enough to respond to my cold email and talk with me. He became the core of what became an advisory committee of Native artists and community leaders in Chicago, and other Pokagon Band members introduced to me by Dr. Low. We worked on what it would mean to make this beloved lakefront visible as unceded Native land.
This project became Whose Lakefront, a procession of over 100 Native and non-Native people who walked down Michigan Avenue in October 2021, marking the sidewalk with a strip of red sand. Michigan Avenue is a major thoroughfare of tourism, shopping, culture and civic life in downtown Chicago, and also happens to trace the Lake Michigan shoreline before white settlement. East of the road is Grant Park, Museum Campus, and Streeterville high rises, all standing on the rubble of the Great Chicago Fire and other material dumped into the lake to create this “made land.” This is some of the most valuable land in the city. We used 1,600 pounds of non-toxic red sand to create this line on the ground for 1.5 miles, referencing the sand dunes that had previously existed. The line of sand, a miniature earth work as Dr. Low called it, wended past monuments and markers that commemorate colonial violence and genocide. We ended with a water ceremony at the Chicago River, across from a public art piece by Ojibwe artist Andrea Carlson that declared “Bodéwadmikik ėthë yéyék – You are on Potawatomi land”. It was a good day.
In conducting research for this project, I became fascinated with the lakefill itself. The shoreline is a fragile system of shifting sand, and the wave action of the lake gradually moves sand southward along the shore. From the first years of white settlement in Chicago, the shoreline has been engineered to prevent this drift, first to create a permanent mouth to the Chicago River, and then to establish stable lakefront land. In addition to Chicago Fire rubble, the material for this land has come from diverse sources including land excavated for highway construction elsewhere in the city, sand from other parts of the lake shore, and slag illegally dumped by U.S. Steel to enlarge its lakefront plant.
The building of this unceded lakefill was enabled by a steady stream of legislation and lawsuits between settler private and public parties. And, as I dug deeper, it turned out that the designation of the lakefront as public access green space was not quite the victory that it seems. Much of the park system in Chicago follows the 1909 Plan of Chicago, where Daniel Burnham asserted, “The Lake front by right belongs to the people.” The plan is often described as visionary and enlightened, a masterpiece of urban planning in the City Beautiful movement. Yet this plan was financed and promoted by the Commercial Club, the business elite of the city, in no small part as a response to the upsurge of working class immigrants and the labor struggles they waged. The 1909 plan was a move to define modernity and impose civilization into the infrastructure of the city in ways that would reduce social conflict and increase economic production. Burnham’s populist language about the public nature of the lakefront hid motivations to provide an outlet for disgruntled workers through recreational spaces.
The idea of public access as an unmitigated good also came into question as I delved into Native thought and writing. My mind was blown when I encountered a recorded lecture by Leanne Betasamosake Simpson (Michi Saagiig Nishnaabeg), where she described how the idea of the commons can be used to dispossess Indigenous peoples of their lands. By stating that Indigenous peoples have the same access as everyone else, this view denies Indigenous peoples’ actual and legal claims to land. It denies sovereignty, their right to determine what happens on the land.
The shoreline is thus a shifting material boundary between lake/water and property/land played out on Native territory. I made Shore Land as a piece that explores this tension between public good / public property and Indigenous land claims. This project takes the form of an audio walk that contrasts these modes of settler engineering (social, legal, material) with Indigenous perspectives on the sovereignty of land and water. The project contemplates the lakefront as a liminal space between land and water, simultaneously a public good, treaty violation, and strategy to suppress insurgence.
The six audio tracks in Shore Land correspond to six points along the lakefront. Each track has a specific theme related to that location, layering interviews, laws, treaties, stories, and songs in English, Potawatomi, and Korean. Language was a key part of the project for me, as I thought about how the settler language of the treaties, legislation, and planning have made material construction possible, and how Indigenous language builds and stewards relationships to land instead of domination.
The audio tracks include excerpts from interviews I conducted with eleven Native people who work on environment, language revitalization, and sovereignty, discussing Native histories of the lakefront and Indigenous connections to water. The stories reveal deeper layers of this made land: an encampment in 1971 by Native activists on a former Nike missile base in Belmont Harbor, as told through the eyes of a 10-year-old; Potawatomi leader Simon Pokagon’s speech protesting the white man’s celebration of civilization at the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition; the 1919 drowning of an African American teenager swimming in Lake Michigan, too afraid to come to shore as white boys pelted rocks, which instigated days of race riots; a childhood spent between the Prairie Band Potawatomi reservation in Kansas and Chicago’s East side in the shadow of U.S. Steel, playing with soil that sparkled from the atmospheric output of the steel plant.
Shore Land is a more personal project for me than the Whose Lakefront procession. The scale is individual and intimate, the audio creating waves of words and song that wash over you from your headphones. I also smuggled some Korean into the project by layering strands of a folk song from Jeju Island where generations of women have dived into the ocean for their livelihood. To me, the song centers women, their work, and their relationship to water and nature, both reciprocal and awesome.
Each audio track ends with the entirety of a song in Anishinaabemowin. I was grateful and honored to receive permission from an Anishnabe elder Mary Maytwayashing (Zoongi Gabawi Ozawa Kinew Ikwe, Strong Standing Golden Eagle Woman) to include her Nibi Water Song, a song thanking the Creator for water. Even as violence continues to structure the built environment around us, as natural as it may appear, water sustains its existence and shares its bounty with us. May we listen to water and remember our connection always.
The winner and honourable mention of the SWS Awards 2024 will be announced around the start of 2025.