Meadow People

Until last year, I lived 200 feet from the Mackinaw River, in McLean County, Illinois, a river with two faces, flood or water famine, worsened by the gigantic monstrous bio industry known as American Agribusiness which depends on an utter lack of stewardship of the land. This is in complete contrast to the people who lived here so long that they are referred to as “indigenous,” those people who actually tended the garden.

From my perch at the back of my house, 4.25 acres of meadow habitat stretches out before my eyes. Everyday, it feels as if I have free box seats to the best show on earth. But I became aware, every single day, that I was a squatter.

This is how the story of the Meadow People actually begins. One early spring, lots of rain led to the Mackinaw escaping its banks. Each time this happens, after the water subsides, the bushes are festooned with leaves, grass, twigs and, of course, corn leaves and stalks. I was sitting on the back porch with my old friend Edgar Kiper, a Kentucky native, drinking coffee. He said to me, “Look at all those people in the meadow.” I didn’t understand him, was confused, and he became embarrassed and said, “oh, I’m probably just being silly.” I said “no,” tell me what you mean.” And he did, and then suddenly the “scales fell from my eyes” and I could see, sort of.

Later, I went out with my camera to get a closer look and see if I could photograph some of those people. In the trapped debris, I saw figures that looked sort of human, but I didn’t know what or who I was recording and didn’t realize the import until I downloaded the files. The first image I truly saw was the “Water Witch,” a figure that for all the world looked like a woman driven mad, screaming and running through the grass. And thus I began to realize I was not alone out here, in spite of the fact that the actual townspeople made me feel more alone than I ever have in my life.

I was shocked as the images continued to scroll before my eyes, images of a mass exodus, a forced march, one of the many trails of tears that ended the lives of Native Americans. I photographed them after a big rain, in the weak sunlight of earliest spring when they appeared to be walking through water, through what was once the “wet prairie” before German farmers began to dig trenches by hand and lay clay tiles to turn the prairie into tillable land. I saw people in states of utter exhaustion, despair, defeat, but also people still standing tall, refusing to give in. I saw the figures of Native American mythology, such as Bineshii, the thunderbird god. In the winter, their figural outlines, sharpened by a mantle of snow, were surrounded by Monet’s deep blue winter twilight; I saw mothers and children walking through freezing water and snow, and figures kneeling in the snow, having finally given in to despair. And I knew exactly who they were - the same people that had once lived within eyesight and earshot, along the banks of the Mackinac River, the Turtle, under the pre-settlement huge oak tree.

Since the day Edgar pointed them out, I have taken hundreds of pictures of what I’ve come to call The Meadow People. I’ve been called to give witness to a Native American diaspora. The site of the Kickapoo Grand Village is just down the road south of me, but nothing remains but a plaque and a small herd of buffalo. But I’ve learned that if we listen, watch, and pay attention, the dead can rise and walk again. It isn’t a zombie apocalypse, but instead an unbidden and unexpected resurrection. “He who has ears to hear, let him hear” Matthew 11:15.