Summer is mural season, according to Natchez Beaulieu of Ashagi Studio. If you’re a Macalester student, by now you have encountered her most recent work: the pillars between the DeWitt Wallace and Old Main have come alive with color, serving as canvas for a heartfelt tribute to Native American culture.
Beaulieu is a local artist who designs and installs murals, specializing in designs shaped by her heritage as Anishinaabe (people native to the great lakes region of the United States and Canada). She comes from an artistic family, crediting her father as the person who taught her the craft of visual art. She was assisted in the project by her son Gregory, her teenage twin daughters Madison and Jaiden, and her friend Liz.
“We make our own things…so being artistic, it means a form of prayer…we make things to just be in beauty all the time.” She talks about her family. As I spoke to Beaulieu, her family hurriedly cleaned up the project site, clad in paint–soaked ponchos.
The Old Main project, titled “We Are All Creation,” is modeled after the Medicine Wheel, a symbol of the universal cycles that dictate life and death that has been shared among many Native tribes.
Given that the medicine wheel is not exclusively tied to one particular nation of aboriginal people, its interpretations vary greatly; the four corners of the wheel can represent the four directions, the changing seasons, the stages of life, or the sun cycle, among other things.
Because of its unique nature, it works perfectly as a basis for a project that is designed as both an individual expression of native pride and as a broad symbol of native unity.
Each set of three pillars represents a different cardinal direction. The east pillars correspond with spring, the season of birth and the symbolic rising of the sun. The south pillars represent summer, the season of prosperity. West represents fall, the age of maturity and carrying out what was taught in youth. Finally, the north pillars are decorated with imagery from winter, the transition from old age to death in which elderly wisdom is imparted onto younger people. This journey is personified by an Indigenous dancer, who grows from a baby to an old woman as the murals progress.
The broad range of interpretations the medicine wheel template offers is also indicative of the process of the murals’ creation. While they primarily depict beliefs in the culture of the Lakota and Anishinaabe people, indigenous alumni and faculty from many different Native American heritages participated in design sessions for them.
“The question was ‘what do you want to see on this mural? What resonates with you from your culture, from your tribe, from your background,” Beaulieu said.
For instance, the mural includes an Ojibwe floral, which Beaulieu attributes to the culture of the White Earth reservation. The floral is given a Dakota counterpart as well, which was designed by her friend Gracie.
The style of the piece walks a fine line between detailed and minimal. The paintings are visually pleasant, their balanced and uniform color schemes being well-calibrated and complimentary. I got used to walking past them pretty quickly, but still, while working on this article, I have tried to notice a new detail on at least one pillar as I walk by them, and I became particularly transfixed by the skies, whose evocative colors are shaped by a sun that is felt but not seen. Additionally, I thought about the birch tree the dancer is standing next to, which does not change much over the course of her lifetime. I like to think of this tree as a reminder that the earth and its land will be here long after we are gone.
For Macalester, the murals are an extension of the school’s efforts to recognize indigenous people. While students become familiarized with the process of “land acknowledgements” within their first couple days of orientation, the simple acknowledgement of past wrongs committed against native peoples does not begin to honor their unique cultural diversity and the beauty that has persisted within their communities. When a native artist leaves their mark on the land, however, they are taking it back, using what is rightfully theirs as a means of self expression. As Beaulieu puts it:
“It’s reclaiming our spaces, a way of putting ourselves and our culture up for everyone— for ourselves first, and then for everyone else to see; to understand who we are, what we believe in, and what we find beautiful.”
In other words, this is what a land acknowledgement looks like.
