Reconciliation Project
1992
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Sioux Falls, South Dakota
+ Project Details
Abstract
A temporary installation of charred tipi frames and historical markers on the Augustana campus for the 1992 Nobel Peace Prize Forum. The markers carried voices of massacre, reconciliation, and remembrance in English and Lakota.
Narrative
500 years after Columbus and 101 years after Wounded Knee, tipi skeletons of burnt lodgepole pines stood silent and ghost-like in the trampled snow, echoing memories of massacre and deceit alongside voices of reconciliation and remembrance recorded in English and Lakota on the historical markers scattered throughout the site.
This was the original installation. Later that same year, a second and larger version was erected in Denver’s Civic Center Park as the Quincentenary Project, placed along the Columbus Day Parade route, where it contributed to the cancellation of the parade.
The Reconciliation Project was discussed by Lucy Lippard in The Lure of the Local (New Press, 1997).
