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Title of Article: Black Hawk Speaks

By: David Schoenknecht, Asst. Professor of Religious Studies, Rockford College

Date: 6/12/10

The white mole digs deep, but Makataimeshekiakiak flies high and can see far off.

These words spoken by the original Black Hawk (d. 1838) seem prophetically connected to the fortunes
of the Blackhawks hockey franchise. Under Rocky Wirtz the team has flown as high as it can fly, winning
the 2010 Stanley Cup finals. Hopefully owners and management, players and coaches will continue to
“see far off” for the good Blackhawk nation.

Makataimeshekiakiak is the Sauk people’s word for Black Hawk. Today this man is memorialized by
parks; statues; U.S. Army helicopters; and, yes, even a newly beloved Chicago hockey team, for a
leadership style that combined both power and grace. Above all Black Hawk had a heart for his people,
a people that were being pushed out of their homelands by both subtle trickery and the sheer force of
America’s westward expansion.

However, as proof of Black Hawk’s farsightedness, when bitterness would have seemed more
appropriate having suffered the combined onslaught of the American and Sioux Indian forces which
squashed the so-called “Black Hawk Rebellion,” years afterwards, on July 4, 1838, the elder chief would
come to address the residents of Fort Madison mere months before his death:
It has pleased the Great Spirit that I am here today. I have eaten with my white friends. The earth is our
mother – and we are now on it –with the Great Spirit above us –it is good. I hope we are all friends here.
A few summers ago I was fighting against you – I did wrong, perhaps; but it is past – it is buried—let it
be forgotten.

With a clear intent to restore harmony on all levels – spiritual, environmental and political – Black
Hawk’s word are laden with tragic heroism. That little word “perhaps” is one which is worthy of deep
reflection. What exactly did Black Hawk have to apologize for in that moment? His tribal lands were lost
by trickery when in 1804 one Sauk family petitioned the American government to release a family
member from prison and in the process mistakenly signed away all Sauk and Fox lands east of the
Mississippi.

Perhaps, if Black Hawk was in attendance, that treaty would have never been signed.

Perhaps, when Black Hawk and others went to Washington to protest this injustice they could have been
cleverer about using the still fluid political landscape in the Mississippi Valley to their advantage.

Perhaps the need to protect woman and children while the entire tribe was being chased by the
American Army doomed Black Hawk’s attempt to reclaim tribal lands.

Perhaps, if the Sioux befriended their native brothers and sisters rather than massacring them on the
west bank of the Mississippi after a desperate swim across the river to escape the Americans, things
would have been different for all Native Americans.

And yet, Black Hawk’s pragmatic, “perhaps” allows all possible and even preferable outcomes to coexist
with present reality and the ever present longing for peace above all.

Black Hawk’s people called the area framed by the Rock River, the Fox River to the east, the Wisconsin
River to the north, and the Mississippi River to the west -- home. Native Americans had no sense of
property ownership, all that Mother Earth provided -- air, water, sustenance was held in common. But
in the momentous days following his birth in the tribe’s village near Rock Island in 1767 all that would
change.

Those were turbulent times on the American frontier. Even as the Thirteen Colonies battled for
independence in New England, the Spanish held court in St. Louis, the British and French freely patrolled
the Mississippi River valley, Illinois, Wisconsin and Michigan. Chicago’s Fort Dearborn was barely an
outpost. After being recruited by the British army to attack Fort Wayne (Detroit) during the War of
1812, the Americans evacuated Chicago in the face of Black Hawk’s advance -- a far cry from the millions
that poured into the city to celebrate the hockey Blackhawk’s 2010 championship. But then, as now,
Detroit proved to be a worthy opponent. Due to British bungling, Black Hawk quit that campaign to live
to fight another day.

Sadly for the first Black Hawk, that day would come in 1832 when he and his tribe would lose their
beloved Rock River valley to the Americans, ultimately more so to the plow and to the fence than to any
implement of war. But lose it they did. Whatever may have be lost in their territory should never be lost
in our memories, especially in the afterglow of the Blackhawk hockey team’s successful campaigns
against, Detroit, Vancouver, San Jose and Philadelphia.

For in an ironic twist it is Black Hawk, Sac warrior, who gives us the truest vision of brotherly love:

Where ever the Great Spirit places his people they ought to be satisfied to remain, and to be thankful for
what He has given them, and to not drive others from the country He has given them because it happens
to be better than theirs. This is contrary to our way of thinking, and from my intercourse with the
whites, I have learned that one great principle of their religion is “to do unto others as you wish them to
do unto you.

For the complete “Autobiography of Ma-ka-tai-me-she-kia-kiak, or Black Hawk,” as dictated to Antoine

Le Clair, U.S. interpreter for the Sacs and Foxes, go to the Project Gutenberg’s collection of free, online
etexts (http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/7097). This also might be a great summer to go on a Midwest
“stay-cation “ to nearby Black Hawk history sites. A great place to begin your Black Hawk pilgrimage is
the Black Hawk State Historic site in Rock Island, Illinois (http://www.blackhawkpark.org/ ).

[Note: An attendant article featuring a map and suggested Black Hawk pilgrimage destinations in Illinois,
Wisconsin and Iowa might be useful to readers]