“Smeared by Dark Ironies”

Published as part of the exhibition Harriet Monroe & the Open Door

Listen to this article:

The Red Man’s Greeting

Harriet Monroe’s Columbian Ode celebrated Christopher Columbus’s “discovery” of the Americas, but the question of Columbus’s historical significance remained debatable for many Americans in 1893. Indigenous writers critiqued the laudatory narratives of westward expansion found in poems such as Monroe’s. One such challenge arrived at the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition, or Chicago World’s Fair, on thin, durable pages of birchbark. The Neshnabé (Potawatomi) leader Simon Pokagon’s (Po-KAY-Gun) book The Red Man’s Greeting (also printed with the title The Red Man’s Rebuke) invoked the Fair on the front cover with an engraving depicting Columbus and Indigenous peoples adapted from the 1836 painting Landing of Columbus by John Vanderlyn. “In behalf of my people, the American Indians,” Pokagon wrote, “I hereby declare to you, the pale-faced race that has usurped our lands and homes, that we have no spirit to celebrate with you the Great Columbian Fair now being held in this Chicago city, the wonder of the world.”

Pokagon was a writer, an intellectual, and a citizen of the Pokagon Band of Potawatomi Indians. He was invited to speak at the Fair in October 1893, where he used his platform to draw public attention to the Potawatomi history and presence in the Chicago area. His tribal nation was named after his father, Leopold Pokagon, a wgëma (chief) who negotiated with U.S. American settlers and the federal government to allow his people to avoid deportation west of the Mississippi River following the passage of the Indian Removal Act in 1830. Despite popular belief at the time, the Potawatomi had never left their homelands and had withstood attempts to alienate them from their land since the 18th century.

There is no evidence suggesting that Pokagon and Monroe met in 1893, but there are fascinating parallels between the two writers. Both wrote in response to the Fair’s celebration of Columbus, each taking very different perspectives on 1492 and its consequences. Both saw the importance of copyright as a means of securing authorial control in a publishing world dominated by white men. Pokagon held the copyright for the Greeting, a move publicly signaling that the birchbark books were his intellectual property. At a time when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that Indigenous peoples could only occupy, not own, their homelands, securing copyright was one way Pokagon claimed authority over his own words and representation. For Indigenous authors, whose works were often excerpted and repackaged without permission by settler writers, copyright was a significant, if imperfect, form of what Osage scholar Robert Warrior calls “intellectual sovereignty.”

Although Monroe did not show an interest in Indigenous writing until some years after the Fair, the confluences between her and Pokagon—their mutual interest in Columbus and their determination to secure copyright for their works—are one way to frame the shift in perspective that Monroe and Poetry magazine slowly came to embrace. Pokagon’s “rebuke” of the Fair shows that Indigenous writers were already insisting that settler writers take Indigenous writing traditions and relations to place seriously—traditions that Monroe eventually turned toward in her editorship of Poetry.

Mapping Chicagoland

Indigenous peoples have long called Chicago “home,” maintaining sovereign and spiritual ties to these lands long before the signing of the 1833 Treaty of Chicago, which was the last land cession treaty before Chicago was incorporated as a city in 1837. One name for this homeland derives from the Bodwéwadmimwen (Potawatomi) word zhegagoynak, meaning “the place of the wild onions.” 

Simon Pokagon encouraged his audiences to see Native peoples as part of a land and its history from which they had been nearly erased. In the introductory pages of the Greeting, Pokagon offers a bird’s-eye view of Chicago that looks dramatically different from the one audiences experienced in 1893 and now in 2023. In “Chicago in My Grandfather’s Days,” Pokagon recalls a moment before the land cessions and removals began, when Chicago was covered with homes and canoes made from birch bark, the same material on which he composed his Greeting. This was a land where Pokagon’s grandfather Topinabee and his people likely met with nations such as the Myaamia (Miami), Kaskaskia, Sauk and Fox, and others to engage in trade, diplomacy, warfare, and celebrations of their own. This Chicago was nothing like the“white city” of neoclassical architecture built on a foundation of westward expansion that was on display at the World’s Fair.

Rebuking Columbus

As Pokagon and other Indigenous peoples present at the Fair well knew, the land that became the city of Chicago was never an uninhabited “wilderness,” nor was this a story of “manifest destiny” in which Americans had the divine right to expand their territory from coast to coast. As Pokagon observed in the Greeting, this land had been stolen from Indigenous peoples, and any rights that America had to that land were falsehoods meant to justify that theft. “[S]ooner would we hold high joy-day over the graves of our departed fathers,” Pokagon writes, “than to celebrate our own funeral, the discovery of America.” By calling Columbus’s “discovery” a funeral, Pokagon challenged contemporary celebrations of Columbus, from Monroe’s Ode to the monuments and statues of Columbus throughout the fairgrounds. And by printing this challenge on birch bark, he boldly challenged expectations that Indigenous peoples were stuck in the past or that they served as what curators called a “base” for modernity, American progress, discovery, and the future.

Pokagon’s birch bark book brought together two technologies—letterpress printing and birch bark bookmaking—often understood by U.S. Americans as representing contrasting values. Letterpress printing invoked western technologies that enabled rapid reproduction and networked communications while birch bark invoked forests and ongoing Indigenous writing and artistic practices or, for settlers, an idealized nature unblemished by modernity, settlement, and urbanization. Printing on birch bark allowed Pokagon to create an object of interest to White fairgoers because of its seeming exceptionality and capacity to function as a souvenir—an object whose pocket-sized materiality was connected to a place or event that purchasers desired to remember. Pokagon also used the birch bark pages to invoke the environmental destruction that colonialism caused—including the clear-cutting of the forests on which Potawatomi people relied for birch bark—a material they used to build canoes, homes, baskets, and other useful objects. By using both birch bark and print, Pokagon disrupted audience expectations of a souvenir from the Fair as well as preconceived notions about Indigenous books, written engagements with Columbus’s legacy, and the futures Indigenous people could anticipate in the 1890s. Pokagon’s Greeting was a protest that was simultaneously intellectual, ethical, material, and artistic.

The Voices of Rebuke were Many

Pokagon was not alone in criticizing the Fair and its celebration of colonialism. As the story of Swami Vivekananda shows, people of color from across the globe called out Fair organizers for shortcomings in their representations of non-Western peoples. Although evidence that Pokagon and other critics met or corresponded has not been found, the voices of rebuke shared the same message of critiquing colonialism across the globe. The Dakota physician and intellectual Charles Eastman spoke at the International Folk-Lore Congress in July 1893. Black intellectuals and activists Ida B. Wells and Frederick Douglass critiqued the absence of Black speakers and authors in the Fair’s events and exhibitions. And hundreds of Indigenous peoples sought to control which of their ancestors’ belongings were displayed and how. While newspaper reports of the Fair and contemporary scholars often represent Pokagon as an exceptional figure, he was one of many Indigenous peoples at the Fair who had very different experiences and perspectives than white attendees such as Monroe.

Chief Williams vs. City of Chicago

Just as Harriet Monroe’s Ode led to legal arguments regarding property, Simon Pokagon’s Greeting and participation at the World’s Fair also led to a lawsuit. Since the signing of the 1833 Treaty of Chicago, land speculators, corporations, politicians, and laborers along Lake Michigan had used capital secured through treaty negotiations and land cessions to “improve” Indigenous land. One strategy used included “reclaiming” submerged lands from Lake Michigan and artificially extending settlement borders eastward into the water. Today, this includes all land east of the “Magnificent Mile,” or Michigan Avenue, in downtown Chicago, some of the city’s— and the nation’s—most valuable real estate.

The Pokagon Band of Potawatomi, led first by Simon, later by his son Charles, and, finally, by the nation’s Business Committee, challenged the legitimacy of these claims to land. They argued that because this reclaimed land had never been ceded in a federally recognized treaty, the Pokagon Potawatomi were either entitled to negotiate with settlers for its deed or to receive a share of the profits derived from its development.

For nearly 25 years, the Pokagons pursued their land claim to the Chicago lakefront. Led by John and Michael Williams and Thomas Topash, the Pokagon Band of Potawatomi Business Committee sued the City of Chicago, the Illinois Central Railroad, the South Park Commissioners, the Lincoln Park Commissioners, the Illinois Steel Company, and the Michigan Central Railroad, all of which had interests in the lakefront. Their efforts resulted in the 1917 Supreme Court case Chief Williams v. City of Chicago, wherein the Court ruled in less than four full pages that “the Indians” had only the “right of occupancy” to the land, which had long since been “abandoned” by the Potawatomi during the Indian Removal era. Regardless of the language the courts used, the Potawatomi had never abandoned their land, and they still live there today.

Reading and Publishing Poetry on Potawatomi Land

Contemporary Pokagon Potawatomi leaders such as linguist Kyle Malott and Ojibwe artists such as Andrea Carlson continue the generations-long effort to recognize the Potawatomi presence on Native land. A series of banners written in Bodwéwadmimwen and translated into English by Malott and designed by Carlson hang over the Chicago River. The message, like Simon Pokagon’s in 1893, remains clear: when you are in Chicago, you are on Potawatomi land. As you leave the exhibit, we welcome you to witness this history for yourself. Just a few short blocks south of the Poetry Foundation is Carlson’s and Malott’s monument to Potawatomi lands, visible from the DuSable Bridge.

Reading Simon Pokagon’s work and legacy alongside Harriet Monroe’s honors the influence both literary icons had over our shared histories. Without Monroe, there would be no Poetry magazine, and without the Potawatomi, there would be no Chicago. Though Monroe’s Ode was complicit in the erasure of Indigenous peoples and a rewriting of their history, Poetry is not destined to repeat these injustices nor was Monroe condemned to live in ignorance. She reflected back on her Ode in her 1938 memoir A Poet’s Life from the vantage point of travel and the experience of global conflict during World War I. This was a point from which she no longer felt she could endorse the narrative of Western progress expressed in the Ode. Instead, she noted that the “finale of my poem is smeared by dark ironies.” Pokagon was one of the writers who reflected on these dark ironies during the Fair, and Poetry magazine reflects Monroe’s thoughtful turn on her own earlier work in its attention to the legacy of the magazine as an exclusive space and its commitment not to repeat the ironies in its own history.

But this story needn’t end with this exhibit. It may inspire you to listen to the recent voices celebrated in the pages of Poetry, such as the June 2018 issue, the first in the magazine’s history to be edited by and devoted to poetry by Indigenous writers. As the issue’s editor, Heid E. Erdrich (Turtle Mountain Ojibwe) noted in her introduction, “In editing this identity-based issue, I am encouraging more than a ‘one-and-done’ approach. I hope you will look at this presentation as an invitation to readers, editors, and publishers to learn what Native poets write today, to look for these poets, to invite and expand American poetry with regular reading, reviewing, and inclusion of poets of Native Nations.” 

125 years before Erdrich wrote those words, Simon Pokagon also invited readers to engage with Indigenous nations and their writing, sovereignty, and futures in different ways. What began with a birch bark pamphlet became something much bigger than any one person. Simon Pokagon’s protest compelled audiences to acknowledge their history of stolen land just as it inspired the Pokagons to demand their land back. The Pokagons’ protest lives on. It lives in the stories they tell, the murals they paint, the Bodwéwadmimwen they speak, and … well, the rest is up to all of us to decide.

Title quote, “Smeared by Dark Ironies”: Source, a chapter in Harriet Monroe’s autobiography, A Poet’s Life, in which she reflects on the problematic implications of The Columbian Ode.