Returned to lender The Met accepts temporary loans of art both for short-term exhibitions and for long-term display in its galleries.
Ma-ka’tal-na’-zin (One Who Stands on the Earth)
Edgar Heap of Birds, Hock E Aye VI Native American
Not on view
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.
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