Chief Buffalo mural to be unveiled in downtown Duluth park

DULUTH - In a zigzag staircase at a downtown park, artists are in the final stages of creating a vibrant mural to memorialize an Ojibwe leader who is key to Duluth's origin story.

The first brushstrokes for the Chief Buffalo Memorial Mural started three years ago with a recreation of a pictograph the Madeline Island-based leader carried on his seminal trip to Washington, D.C., more than 160 years ago. It was intended to be a one-wall tribute. It's now grown to include nearly a dozen.

"What would stop us from painting all of this?" lead artist Moira Villiard said she wondered at the time.

Nothing, really. Though it would require a lot of behind-the-scenes effort — paperwork, phone calls, fundraising. In addition to base money from Zeitgeist Arts, a local community-based nonprofit, Villiard estimates that she has raised upwards of $100,000.

The walls are adorned with maps, historical scenes, aquatic life and beadwork patterns along a staircase that links Gichi-Ode' Akiing Park and the Lakewalk adjacent to Lake Superior. It will be unveiled Sept. 14.

"It catches your eye," said Lisa Ronnquist, who passes the mural on her way to Lake Superior, where she prays daily. During a recent visit she pointed out a loon.

"That's my clan," she said.

Duluth's Indigenous Commission in 2018 renamed Lake Place Park as Gichi-Ode' Akiing, Ojibwe for "A Grand Heart Place." Zeitgeist Arts approached the commission about doing more at the park to acknowledge local Anishinaabe history, and Villiard was hired to lead the project. She chose Chief Buffalo as the subject.

Villiard brought on other artists, favoring style over mural-making experience. Michelle Defoe added floral patterns influenced by beadwork designs, and Awanigiizhik Bruce and Sylvia Houle of the Turtle Mountain Band in North Dakota lean toward spirituality and folklore.

Villiard has added candid portraits of Duluth people, such as artists Jonathan Thunder and Tashia Hartand physician Arne Vainio.

"It's important to have memorial artwork, but we also need art that celebrates people when they're alive — plain and simple," Villiard said. "I feel like, especially with Native representation, it's always pre-1900 whenever we're depicted."

Villiard estimates that up to 500 people have participated in the mural, at least dabbing paint on the walls. A crew of kids from the Red Lake Reservation added colorful fish.

One young man defaced the project with graffiti, but luckily tagged his work. Villiard found him, offered him $500 and a wall of his own. Now his orange landscape is among the more visible scenes that pedestrians see as they approach.

The events represented in the mural date back to the Sandy Lake Tragedy of 1850. To relocate Lake Superior Ojibwe to west of the Mississippi River, the federal government moved distribution of the annual treaty payment from Madeline Island to Sandy Lake, west of what is now Duluth. When the Ojibwe arrived, the payments weren't available and resources were scarce. More than 400 of them subsequently died of starvation, disease and exposure.

To halt the relocation plan, Chief Buffalo and his followers traveled to Washington, D.C., and convinced President Millard Fillmore to cancel the removal order. That led to a treaty in 1854 that ceded Indian land to the United States and created reservations in Minnesota and Wisconsin. Chief Buffalo was granted land in an area close to what is now Gichi-Ode' Akiing.

Villiard, Defoe and others have become guides offering history lessons to people who stop at the mural. For some, Villiard said, it has become a place of prayer.

That's the vision of Robert Buffalo, a descendant of Chief Buffalo and the hereditary chief of the Red Lake Band of Lake Superior Ojibwe, who has lent help to the project.

"This is a great start to bring recognition and give the urban Indigenous population a place they can feel their culture and have little ceremonies," Buffalo said.