Indian Summer remembrance ED
Milwaukee’s Indian Summer Festival Ends Its 32 Year Run:
An Appreciation
by Rick Whaley
When I was a young man, I followed the Irish bioregional vision to be a “dweller in the land.” It led me to Indian Summer Festival (ISF) and the struggle of Chippewa spearfishing rights in the late 1980s/early 1990s.
Walt Bresette, shield of the north, would be at ISF with his Buffalo Bay Trading booth, “selling trinkets,” he’d say. But really he was calling all allies to witness in northern Wisconsin for Chippewa cultural and sovereignty rights. On his break, we’d go down and watch the powwow dancers and he’d explain the timing of the sneak-up move and the other things judges watched for in the contest dancing. Once he said to me, “You really got to go hear this guy—John Trudell.”
For many years, the ISF’s Environmental Tent was its own gathering place of clean water, peace, and sovereignty activists, and of artists and storytellers. Witness for Non-Violence sold a counter-Columbus Quincentenary sweatshirt to festival-goers for $14.91. Milwaukee Area Greens had a table there, right between the stuffed teddy bears of the animal rights group, on one side, and on the other side, the taxidermal forest critters of Wisconsin Women Hunters. Nearby were the craft tents. My favorite was birch-bark biting designs, which reminded me of when I was a child and first took the time to look at birches: the tiny black lines suddenly move and the spider runs off.
From the beginning, Nick Hocking’s WaSwaGoning village welcomed visitors to the ISF gatherings at the entrance plaza of the Summerfest grounds. Nick and Art Shegonee (Menominee/Potawatomi) would tell stories—environmental instructions—and lead dances for interested adults and rapt children. During the death threats of the worst years of racial protests against Chippewa spearfishing, I thought every story Nick told, every appearance he made around the state, was another nail out of his coffin. The spearfishers escaped hate lynchings. Cancer eventually took Nick in 2012 and those of us who spoke at his remembrance at ISF recalled the kind of man and influence he was.
In recent years, and nearing my older age (70s now), I would hike around the Indian fest grounds and remember more people who have walked-on than people who are still here to talk to. Then I would run into bright young activists (Penokee Hills and Back Forty support; Water Walkers; Standing Rock) or go listen to the Strawberry Moon Women Singers, and then I knew: they keep the flame going. For 32 special years Indian Summer Festival has, like Susan Seddon Boulet’s paintings, framed my political activism and vision.
For the time being, Indian Summer Festival (1987-2018) is shape-shifting from its traditional home at the lakefront and its September festival weekend into a series of ongoing programs, reinvented and to be presented throughout the Milwaukee area.
Encore! Encore!
Rick Whaley (Milwaukee) is co-author with the late Walt Bresette of Walleye Warriors: The Chippewa Treaty Rights Story (NSP, 1994; Beech River Books, 2015). Rick is also author of the booklet of storytelling and critical Green Party essays, How Green is the Green Party? (Stories from the Margins) (Beech River Books, 2007). Both books are still in print via beechriverbooks.com
Indian Summer Festival future updates, online via www.indiansummer.org
ISF mailing address is 2931 S. 108 St., Box 184, West Allis, WI 53227.
This article was sent to News from Indian Country and The Spanish Journal (Milwaukee)