On the Trail documents a walk to Washington DC that protested the construction of a highway through wetlands in Lawrence, Kansas. That highway, the South Lawrence Trafficway (SLT) plan 32B, was controversial for almost 30 years. Some thought of the project as unnecessary, expensive, and suburbanizing of a small liberal college town. But most upsetting to a minority in Lawrence, the proposed SLT would occupy 6 miles of the Wakarusa Wetlands located behind Haskell Indian Nations University (HINU). The wetlands, which are integral to Haskell’s history as a Native American boarding school, are also considered sacred.
HINU was founded as the United States Indian Industrial Training School in 1884, just north of the Wakarusa River. Native American children were sent or taken from their families to the boarding school to become assimilated into Christian culture. The school evolved into a four-year tribal university, retaining that history, some buildings, and the wetlands as its backyard. In the nineties, research into the National Archives supported the rumor that many of the boarding school’s earliest students had been buried in the wetlands. Yet lack of physical evidence pointed to a paradox that has burdened other sacred places across the country: the disclosure of Native America graves is prohibited by the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act, but without that proof, what law protects such a site from desecration?
Lawsuits against the Kansas Department of Transportation and the Federal Highway Administration were coming their ends, and the courts were supporting the construction of the SLT for economic reasons when my neighbor, Millie, began to organize a walk to Washington DC, connecting the SLT issue to the larger context of “protecting sacred places.” Millie contacted Suzan Harjo, an American Indian policy advocate, who sent her a piece of draft legislation that would amend the American Indian Religious Freedom Act to include the federal protection of sacred sites, defined as spaces where ceremonies, observance, or worship occur. We named it the Protection of Native American Sacred Places Act and carried it with us to the capitol.
Navajo, Blackfeet, and a former Army cadet, Millie spoke with power. She was a junior at Haskell who led tours through the wetlands. I could envision people following her on this walk, too, so I was eager to help with and join. Millie’s strong personality, however, lost many people’s support. Nevertheless, by May we had wrangled 13 people, and we left Lawrence with the plan to travel 30 miles a day, with teams walking 10 miles each, like a relay. We would also have three cars, creating the first ambiguity about our journey. From the beginning, the Trail of Broken Promises, as Millie named it, constantly battled to form a truthful group identity—after all, we were on the Trail of Death for half of it, the route of the removed Potawatomi from Indiana to Kansas, gaining media attention.
Drama among the group members aside, afraid that our campaign would be ultimately forgotten, I compiled journal entries and news articles from the walk and held interviews in order to reconstruct the Trail, thinking about the disappearance of wetlands, indigenous history, and memory in general. I consider the work a documentary—it describes the SLT controversy and the sequence of towns and trials we encountered—but it is also personal. Through the process of writing it, I relied on my observations and moments I considered meaningful. I used poetry, prose, and documents to weave a narrative broader than that of the Trail of Broken Promises, one related to protest and defeat.
After the walk, none of us could explain what we had argued about, or why the Trail was so difficult to endure. This work, then, is an attempt to find meaning in a two-month trek, during which we retraced—backwards—the 1838 Potawatomi Trail of Death, repeatedly crossed into the history of Tecumseh and the Prophet versus the US army, and created our own path to the end.
