Artist’s walking tours tell a different story about Chicago

CHICAGO — “What we are going to do is go for a walk.”

JeeYeun Lee, artist, activist, creator of social-justice-minded walking tours along Lake Michigan, stood in front of the Museum of Contemporary Art holding a microphone. Its cord curled over the concrete and ended at a small portable speaker at her feet. She waved a pamphlet. “Everyone should have one of these,” she said. “If you look at the map on the cover, that’s from 1902.” It showed where the shoreline of Lake Michigan used to be. It used to be where Lee stood now.

She pointed east.

“Everything between here to the lake is actually landfill,” she said. Several of the three dozen or so people seated on the MCA stairs nodded. Yes, they’d heard this was all landfill. That’s part of the narrative Chicago likes to tell about itself: After the Great Fire of 1871, there was so much debris clogging the streets, the city, in a fit of cleverness, used its rubble to expand its lakefront.

Over time, she went on, white settlers found that extended land to be the most valuable part of the city. Streeterville, Soldier Field, Grant Park, the Field Museum — it was all built atop landfill.

More nods.

“So ever since,” she said, “there’ve been fights over who gets to control the lakefront.”

Smirks now — everyone knows Chicago politics …

That’s when Lee threw a curveball: But did they know that part of what made its growth and wealth possible was that Chicago ignored treaty claims of Native Americans who lived on its shoreline? Did they know the Pokagon Band of the Potawatomi argued any treaties it signed referred to the original Lake Michigan shoreline as the boundary of ceded land, and, as many Potawatomi still contend, Chicago had no right to land it added beyond that initial shoreline?

There were no nods now.

Indeed, in 1914, the Potawatomi sued the city over that extended shoreline, a case that made it as far as the U.S. Supreme Court, which decided the tribe had no right to land it had abandoned. A strange decision, considering the Potawatomi, like other Native tribes, were forced into treaties.

OK, Lee said brightly, to the suddenly still audience, the walk they were about to do is a work in progress. It lasts about an hour. By the end of this month, when Lee leads her final walk of the summer, the hike will take at least three hours and cover six miles, moving south out of Jackson Park to Steelworkers Park, near 87th Street. But at the MCA, she intended a brief, mournful jaunt: “We’re going to walk around the corner, down Chicago Avenue, there will be stairs to under the overpass at Lake Shore Drive, we come out beside the water, then return.”

She nodded at her phone: “The main part is the audio track.”

The crowd pushed in earbuds and strapped on headphones and began to walk. The audio was an alternate story of Chicago. Not of underground speakeasies and aldermanic hubris set to the usual gallop of “Sweet Home Chicago,” but a story of broken treaties with Indigenous people and snippets of Indigenous songs, interviews with elders, nature sounds, readings of legislation, everything flowing in and out, overlapping peacefully, occasionally interrupted by the drifting thump-thump of music blasting from powerboats anchored in the “Playpen” off DuSable Lake Shore Drive.

When Lee looks at this lakefront, she explained to me later, she sees so much as a kind of byproduct of the city’s original sin — taking the lakefront for itself and paying no heed to those lived there before. When we emerged from the tunnel beneath Lake Shore and stepped across bike lanes, riders slowed and screamed: “What the hell?” and “What the (expletive)!” and “Bike lane, you idiots!”

There was no question of who dominates the lakefront there. A couple of years ago, when Lee led a three-hour walk along Michigan Avenue that left a long, thin line of red sand behind her as she walked — 2,000 pounds of red sand, spilling out of a wheelbarrow. It was a way of delineating ceded territory (everything east of Michigan Avenue) from legitimate Chicago (everything west of Michigan Avenue). “The bureaucracy to do that, leave a line of sand!” she recalled. “It kind of reflected everything I know about who claims to control the land and what you can do with land.”

Her projects, which are part history, part performance art, part activism, are intended to raise unsettling questions about who is entitled to the lakefront and what is meant by “public land.”

And, why do these questions rarely come up?

“Shore Land,” the title of the walks she has been giving this summer (as part of the “Navigations” series from the Roman Susan Art Foundation near Loyola University), is described by Lee as “an audio walk that contemplates the lakefront as a liminal space between land and water, simultaneously a public good, a treaty violation and strategy to suppress insurgence.” (She likes to note that though Daniel Burnham’s Plan of Chicago is hailed as visionary, the creation of green spaces also was meant to quell growing anger over labor conditions.)

Partly, however, “Shore Land” also raises questions about who gets to tell the story of Native Americans. Lee, 52, was born in South Korea and her family moved here when she was 9.

“A lot of Native folks I reached out to about these projects have been wary,” she said. “They have had experience with non-Native people wanting to extract information and time and their thinking, in a one-sided transactional way. So I’ve tried my best to stick around and be as sincere as I can.” The Potawatomi tribal council itself has asked her to include a note in all the materials associated with a previous project that her work has no official association with the tribe.

But she’s also had support from many Potawatomi.

John Low, a former Chicagoan and an associate professor at Ohio State University who teaches Native American studies, was partly the inspiration. Lee first read about the tribe’s 1914 lawsuit in a book by Low. He said, “She made sure I got lots of credit for ‘Whose Lakefront’ (the 2019 Michigan Avenue walk), though credit is not really the point here, is it?” Low, a citizen of the Pokagon Band of Potawatomi, remembers being upset in a Ph.D. program when he wanted to write his dissertation about Simon Pokagon, an early writer and activist, and learned two other students, neither Native, had already claimed him. “I got upset,” he said. “I am Pokagon, but isn’t the whole point of scholarship to inspire? Frankly, the more people who talk about Indigenous claims to Chicago lakefront — why not? I don’t feel infringed. I want this story alive.”

Madolyn Wesaw, an activist and Potawatomi citizen who lives in Michigan, was just as much a part of that first “Shore Land” walk as Lee, standing and speaking alongside the artist. Wesaw said at the event that Lee is doing “meaningful work that doesn’t center the oppressors” of the story. But erasure was on her mind, “and a lot of time when Indigenous people speak about this to white folks, we hear you can’t blame people for the sins of their grandfathers … People ask me: ‘What am I supposed to do? Do you want to kick all white people out?’ That’s not the goal. But you can go home and learn about us, and when we speak to you about these things, you can believe us. We know what is best for our people and we know our history and it should be Indigenous people telling them — with the assistance of allies.”

Lee told me that her motivation for the walks partly stems from being Korean and being raised in a nation “not formally colonized (by the U.S.) but under the sphere of U.S. military imperialism.” Occupation is on her mind. “So I feel sympathetic about what happened and continues to happen on this continent. I see my role as someone who understands a bit about what it is like to be colonized.”

Her father was a diplomat and when her family moved to Chicago, they settled in Budlong Woods; then later Winnetka, where Lee attended New Trier Township High School. She said she never learned, at New Trier or earlier in Chicago Public Schools, about Potawatomi. She studied linguistics at Stanford University, ethnic studies at the University of California Berkeley and fiber arts at the Cranbrook Academy of Art, near Detroit. While in Michigan, she began a set of 25-mile solo walks, starting in Detroit and moving outward, reflecting on changes in population, ethnicity, opportunity. After she moved back to Chicago, she started a similar project, “100 Miles in Chicagoland,” a series of 20-mile walks tracing the trails once created by native people. She wore traditional Korean dress, pointedly made of denim, an American fabric “with the history of slavery in cotton and indigo.” Mostly, unless asked, you would not know what she was doing.

Few people have ever asked her what she was doing, she said.

“But it’s also not activism in the traditional way, organizing people to have a direct impact. But then, a lot of things contribute to the way we can change a society. A lot of it are the stories we have in our minds about the world and why the world is the way it is and who gets to do what.

“Chicago doesn’t think about the fact we are occupying land of people who lived here. My project isn’t, ‘Give back land.’ I see it as a progression of knowledge. Art and activism — social practice art, whatever you want to call it — contributes to changing all this, even in a small way.”

The final “Shore Land” walking tour is Aug. 27 from 63rd Street Beach; more information at jeeyeunlee.com