Ma-ka’tal-na’-zin (One Who Stands on the Earth)
Returned to lender
This work of art was on loan to the museum and has since been returned to its lender.This sign is one of forty commercially made billboards from Edgar Heap of Birds’s Building Minnesota series, a site-specific public work installed in downtown Minneapolis in 1990. The installation refers to the tragic end of the 1862 Dakota War, a conflict between the Eastern Sioux and the U.S. government. Expansion of white settlements into the Minnesota River Valley resulted in the forced relocation of Dakota people onto reservations in the late 1850s, and they eventually took up arms against the U.S. Army. Following their surrender, 303 Dakota people were sentenced to death by hanging. President Abraham Lincoln commuted the sentence for all but forty of them. The signs insist that the executed men, each named in Dakota and in English, be recast and honored in what can be understood as a type of war memorial.
Artwork Details
- Title: Ma-ka’tal-na’-zin (One Who Stands on the Earth)
- Artist: Edgar Heap of Birds, Hock E Aye VI (Native American, Cheyenne/Arapaho, born Wichita, Kansas, 1954)
- Date: 1990
- Geography: United States, Kansas
- Culture: Cheyenne/Arapaho
- Medium: Enamel on aluminum
- Dimensions: 18 x 36.25 x .0625 inches
- Classification: Metalwork-Sculpture
- Credit Line: Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, Acquired in conjunction with the exhibition "Claim Your Color: Hachivi Edgar Heap of Birds" (1990) (1993.134)
- Curatorial Department: The Michael C. Rockefeller Wing