ARTS ENCORE
Dancing for My Tribe
Regalia photos capture modern Potawatomi stories by
LISA MACKINDER
W
The 64-year-old Hoogstraten, a 1972 Otsego High School graduate and professional photographer who now lives in Chicago, is a tribal member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation and says she finds it amazing that in light of the moves — some of 32 | ENCORE APRIL 2019
Brian Powers
hen Sharon Hoogstraten went on her second Trail of Death Commemorative Caravan in 2018 — a six-day pilgrimage following the trail of the forced removal of 859 Potawatomi Indians from north-central Indiana to eastern Kansas in 1838 — and stood on the western banks of the Mississippi River, she grasped the heartache that her ancestors must have experienced standing in that same spot nearly 180 years earlier. “To cross the Mississippi, they were ferried across in multiple steamboats — a new and startling experience in and of itself,” says Hoogstraten. “Once across the mighty river, they were left to contemplate their irreversible separation from their homelands. There was no way back.”