Artist JeeYuen Lee’s walking tours tell a very different story
Part history, part performance art, part activism, her projects are intended to raise unsettling questions about who is entitled to the lakefront
“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