Midwest Migrations, Fall 2005 A first step into marginalized midwestern time/space

Dan S. Wang designed and printed a series of five postcards that we sent out from the road. Click on the postcards to see a larger image and photos from the portion of the trip associated with the card. >>>	postcard #1 Sunday, August 28, a bit after 9am (we were late) Bonnie Fortune and Mike Wolf left from the intersection of Hoyne and Augusta, near the Moorish Science Temple, in Chicago.	postcard #2 We headed South out of the city to Hopkins Park. From Hopkins Park we turned South West and arrived in Mahomet on September 6th, much sooner than we anticipated. This last leg we followed a portion of the yearly migration of little known, tri-racial, nomadic, tribe that lived for over 100 years beginning in the late 1700's, in what is now Illinois and Indiana, the Tribe of Ishmael.	postcard #3 This trip is a collage of historical and cultural migrations, part road trip, part pilgrimage, an attempt to answer questions like, what is it like to travel long distances by foot today? What kind of social connections can we make with people living "down state"?	postcard #4	postcard #5 We made two reports on the trip that aired onSomething Else (on 88.7fm WLUW Chicago). The first report was via phone, from a motel in Rantoul, that aired September, 4, a little after 11 pm. For the second report we recorded a conversation with Brian Taylor shortly after we returned from the walk. An edited version of this conversation aired on Sunday, September 11th. Click to downlaod mp3 of the reports. Road Report One (6.3MB mp3) Road Report Two (8.9MB mp3, caution, canned bird sounds)
Botany of Desire: A Plant's Eye View of the World, by Michael Pollan has a good, complex, but accessible biographical account of Johnny Appleseed, a figure who helped to settle and domesticate the Midwest around the same time that The Tribe of Ishmael existed. It should be easy to find this book at the local public library.		Gone To Croatan: Origins of North American Drop Out Culture, the source of the only substantial historical account of the Tribe of Ishmael, was published by AK Press and Autonomedia. It has been invaluable in formulating this walk. We left one copy with the Williams family in Hopkins Park, with the promise that they would deliver it to the local library, and donated a second copy to the library in Mahomet.			Midwest Migrations was part of the Urban, Rural, Wild exhibition at Ispace.