This paper was presented at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts as part of Boston University’s Graduate Student Symposium on the History of Art & Architecture.

This paper addresses a central problem in contemporary environmental art history: how visual culture engages Indigenous epistemologies of ecological relations under conditions of climate crisis. I argue that Tom Uttech's Great Lakes landscapes are reflective of broader settler approaches to material ecologies, particularly those that aestheticize Indigenous language and worldviews while evacuating Indigenous presence, sovereignty and land relations from their frames. Through a comparative analysis of Tom Uttech’s "Nin Mamakadendam" (2010) and its Chazen Museum of Art gallery neighbor Rabbett before Horses Strickland’s "Iskwaaj Nibi (The Last Waterhole: Creating a New World" (2018), I demonstrate how these artists articulate their respective ontologies of ecological care in a rapidly changing environment while mobilizing Ojibwemowin, the language of the Anishinaabe Ojibwe. Uttech assembles Ojibwemowin titles to frame landscapes of enchanting, abundant nonhuman life, visuals that advocate a human-absent wilderness ideal worthy of protection. Uttech’s fictionalized Boundary Waters wildernesses in "Nin Mamakadendam" and across his body of work perpetuate a settler-colonial logic by abstracting land from the Indigenous frameworks that make it known, and make it place, while employing Indigenous language. Red Cliff Band of Ojibwe painter Rabbett before Horses Strickland's "Iskwaaj Nibi" notably contrasts in its cohesion between an Ojibwemowin title, with English translation, and the visual content of Anishinaabe cosmological/ecological storytelling. Strickland's canvases and titles collaborate to educate the American public about Ojibwe environmental understanding by centering stories of Nanaboozhoo, through which generations of Anishinaabe have maintained reciprocal stewardship of sacred land and waters of the Great Lakes.

Contemporary climate discourse increasingly turns to Indigenous knowledge systems for ecological solutions. By clarifying how material ecologies are visually constructed—and by whom—this paper insists that meaningful coalition for just environmental futures requires moving away from appropriative discourse of Indigeneity as abstracted epistemology, and towards a land-rooted ethic of Indigenous sovereignty that drives environmental stewardship.

This paper was presented at the Vernacular Architecture Forum 2026 Annual Conference in Walla Walla Washington.

The paper offers a speculative methodology for reconstructing and studying vernacular buildings that are no longer physically accessible to scholars, using a combination of memory, oral and written testimony, and photographic evidence. The case study that led to such an exploratory methodology is my family’s homestead cabin in Trade Lake, Burnett County, Wisconsin, established in 1869. While the original log structure remains intact, it is now enclosed within later structural additions and inaccessible due to private ownership–the original building’s exterior is not visible even from the street. This situation raises a broader question for scholars of vernacular architecture: How do we study, visualize, and interpret structures we can no longer enter–or even observe externally–directly?

Drawing on my own embodied memory of the home, oral histories from relatives and neighbors, and a photographic archive spanning the late nineteenth century through the 2020s, I have reconstructed the cabin’s evolving floor plan over time, from well before my living memory of the structure through present. This process revealed the productive tension between individual and collective memory’s distortions and photography’s selectivity. Embodied memory’s inherent bias is at play in such a methodological approach, which might call upon borrowing from and rethinking of experimental archaeology and its speculative benefits to the study of inaccessible vernacular structures.

This literature review explores how mounds as individual works and their broader mound systems risk disorientation and miscontext if treated separately.

Leigh Bloch’s Animate Earth, Settler Ruins (2020) helps articulate the vitality and relationality of mound landscapes. Bloch stresses that Indigenous earthworks are simultaneously animate, relational, and decolonial, emphasizing that settler erasure—through plowing, development, and legal regimes—has removed both physical mounds and Indigenous epistemologies from cultural imagination. Ross Barrett’s discussion of nineteenth-century land and labor visual regimes in Wisconsin contextualizes Euro-American picturing practices that contributed to settler understandings of land as productive, flattening relational and aesthetic complexity in the process. Moreton-Robinson’s The White Possessive (2015) and Binder Johnson’s Gridding a National Landscape (1990) foreground property, measurement, and the material reshuffling through violent displacement by settler grids, illustrating how legal and agricultural systems physically and epistemically de-sculpted the earth. Gunlög Fur’s “Indians and Immigrants-Entangled Histories” (2014) demands more of historians in confronting how European immigrants directly imposed colonial regimes in the quotidian acts of settlement, producing newly layered landscapes that are simultaneously ecological, social, and political.

Analyses of mounds conducted solely from within the imperial American academy will not produce the decolonization of these sites, their broader earthwork systems, or the discipline of art history itself. I nevertheless pursue these questions because I am concerned with the epistemic gaps left unaddressed by disciplinary divides—gaps that may obscure missed opportunities for orientation and relation between human and mound, and for more meaningful forms of preservation of these sacred sites. I further insist that sustained attention be paid to the history of mound destruction, not only within archaeological discourse but across the settler practices of surveying, gridding, farming, and homesteading that rework the land, historically and ongoingly, through the undoing of mounds

This paper analyzes Historical Sketches: Fifty‑Five Years in Western Wisconsin—Louis J. Ahlstrom’s 19th–20th century immigrant memoir as translated and edited by Carolyn Wedin (the author’s Farmor, Swedish ofor father’s mother)—as a site where Swedish exceptionalism, settler memory, and Ojibwe land politics become mutually constitutive. Through a critical heritage studies framework, the paper argues that Wedin’s translation is not a neutral linguistic act but a contemporary performance of heritage-making: a process through which the past is selectively curated to meet the needs, desires, and blind spots of the present. Reading the translated text alongside historical research on the St. Croix Ojibwe, treaty-era land dispossession, and the region’s settler-colonial geographies, the paper demonstrates how Ahlstrom’s narrative authority—reinforced through Wedin’s editorial decisions—produces a frontier nostalgia that foregrounds Swedish immigrant industriousness while minimizing or reframing Ojibwe displacement.

Close comparison between Wedin’s translation and Gunlög Fur’s independent translation of the same passages reveals subtle but consequential shifts in agency, particularly in depictions of Ojibwe removal. These shifts illuminate how translation becomes a tool of settler memory-making, transforming active processes of dispossession into passive, inevitable outcomes of “progress.” At the same time, the memoir’s depictions of Ojibwe women, borderland warfare, and everyday coexistence offer glimpses of the concurrent histories that Fur and Jennifer Attebery call for—histories in which Indigenous presence is neither vanished nor peripheral.

By situating Wedin’s translation within the broader watershed of the St. Croix River and the author’s own autoethnographic return to Trade Lake, the paper argues that immigrant family narratives are themselves powerful settler archives. They shape how descendants understand land, belonging, and responsibility in a region where Ojibwe dispossession and Scandinavian homesteading unfolded simultaneously. Ultimately, the paper proposes that engaging these texts through a critical, relational lens opens pathways for rethinking heritage not as inheritance alone, but as an ethical practice attuned to concurrent Indigenous histories and the ongoing politics of place in Wisconsin’s Northwoods.

This paper argues that Traditional Knowledge (TK) Labels offer a critical, community‑driven framework for reshaping how museums describe, classify, and steward Indigenous art and visual culture. Drawing from the example of TK Labels used in the Aotearoa-based film project E Reo Noku – My Language, the paper examines how these labels—selected and authorized by Indigenous communities—could intervene meaningfully in the gallery practices of the Chazen Museum of Art at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Two artworks currently on view, Tom Uttech’s Nin Mamakadendam and Rabbett Before Horses Strickland’s Iskwaaj Nibi (The Last Waterhole: Creating a New World), serve as case studies demonstrating the consequences of absent or insufficient contextualization. Uttech’s use of Ojibwemowin titles, drawn from a 17th‑century missionary dictionary, risks misleading viewers about cultural authorship and perpetuating settler‑colonial imaginaries of “empty” wilderness. Conversely, Strickland’s painting conveys sacred Ojibwe cosmological knowledge that is traditionally governed by seasonal storytelling protocols—protocols not communicated on the museum’s wall label or digital collection entry.

The paper argues that TK Labels such as TK Non‑Verified, TK Seasonal, TK Culturally Sensitive, and TK Multiple Communities could provide essential guidance for both Native and non‑Native viewers, while strengthening the museum’s ethical responsibilities as an institution situated on Ho‑Chunk land. Beyond individual artworks, the paper identifies structural issues in the Chazen’s digital catalog—particularly the absence of tribal affiliation as a searchable category—and proposes a phased approach to implementing TK Labels across both physical and digital platforms. Central to this proposal is sustained consultation with Ho‑Chunk, Ojibwe, and other Indigenous representatives whose knowledge is held within the museum’s collections. Ultimately, the paper positions TK Labels as a practical, relational, and reparative tool for transforming museum information systems, enhancing public understanding, and supporting Indigenous sovereignty in the stewardship of cultural knowledge.

This review of For the Love of Water, a 2026 group exhibition at Arts + Literature Laboratory, analyzes the show as a site where contemporary artistic practice, environmental advocacy, and settler–Indigenous relationality converge—and collide. Through close observation of artworks ranging from counter‑cartographic quilting to ash basketry, protest banners, and performance, the paper argues that the exhibition stages multiple, sometimes uneasy, modes of engaging water as material, collaborator, ancestor, and political subject. Drawing on the author’s field notes and conversations with attendees, the analysis foregrounds how non‑Indigenous artists and viewers navigate (and at times appropriate) Indigenous epistemologies of land and water, raising questions about Indigenized environmentalism, cultural authority, and the limits of solidarity within settler‑dominated art spaces.

The paper situates the exhibition within broader debates about settler‑colonial land relations, particularly the tension between cartographic abstraction and embodied, relational ways of knowing. Works such as Marilyn Prescott’s Rivering series challenge the distanced, gridded logics of the Public Land Survey, while Susan Simensky Bietila’s Shut Down Line 5 banner foregrounds Bad River Ojibwe clan imagery and the lived materiality of protest. The culminating performance, Sita & Other Sisters by Blue Naga, further complicates the gallery’s boundaries by invoking ritual, collective voice, and the entanglement of violence against women and land.

Ultimately, the paper argues that For the Love of Water offers a generative but fraught terrain for examining how settlers absorb, reinterpret, or retool Indigenous knowledge in contemporary environmental art. The exhibition becomes a lens through which to interrogate the temporal and geographic scales of settler‑colonialism in the Great Lakes region, and to consider how artistic practice might support—or obscure—more just and relational futures.