The name Black Hawk permeates the built environment in the upper midwestern United States. It has been appropriated for everything from fitness clubs to used car dealerships. Makataimeshekiakiak, the Sauk Indian war leader whose name loosely translates to “Black Hawk,” surrendered in 1832 after hundreds of his fellow tribal members were slaughtered at the Bad Axe Massacre.
Re-Collecting Black Hawk examines the phenomena of this appropriation in the physical landscape, and the deeply rooted sentiments it evokes among Native Americans and descendants of European settlers. Nearly 170 original photographs are presented and juxtaposed with texts that reveal and complicate the significance of the imagery. Contributors include  tribal officials, scholars, activists, and others including George Thurman, the principal chief of the Sac and Fox Nation and a direct descendant of Black Hawk. These image-text encounters offer visions of both the past and present and the shaping of memory through landscapes that reach beyond their material presence into spaces of cultural and political power. As we witness, the evocation of Black Hawk serves as a painful reminder, a forced deference, and a veiled attempt to wipe away the guilt of past atrocities. Re-Collecting Black Hawk also points toward the future. By simultaneously unsettling and reconstructing the midwestern landscape, it envisions new modes of peaceful and just coexistence and suggests alternative ways of inhabiting the landscape.

In Reflecting a Prairie Town Drake Hokanson takes a prolonged look at a common place in an uncommon fashion. He presents Peterson, Iowa, through a singular combination of words and images, a remarkable synthesis of history, geography, direct observation, climatology, botany, oral history, archaeology, agricultural science, literature, geology, photography, and even a bit of astronomy. This vernacular landscape study is lavishly illustrated with photographs taken by the author, including stunning panoramic views.

The fundamental truth of experience on this continent has always lain in the challenges and opportunities of space. Place mattered because we were so few before the immensity of the land. But place at the same time rooted us in that immensity. Even now our appreciation for place is not quite dead; locked in our urban environments we continue to crave a “view,” be it of mountains, forests, or prairies. These “views” crop up unexpectedly as photographic murals in office buildings or posters in dentists' offices. It is to this stifled sense of the importance of place that Hokanson speaks; he invites us to remember and to be revitalized.

The magic of Reflecting a Prairie Town is the revelation that Peterson, Iowa, is a small town that is also uncannily large. In capturing the essence of this one place Hokanson helps us to understand our own worlds better—he asks the simple questions many of us would like to ask were we given the opportunity. To enter this book is to come back to a place we have never really seen before.

A photographic diary of a small Midwestern farm and the family who’ve made it their home

In Roshara Journal, father-and-son team Jerry and Steve Apps share the monthly happenings at their family’s farm in central Wisconsin. Featuring Steve’s stunning photos and fifty years of Jerry’s journal entries, Roshara Journal captures the changes—both from month to month and over the decades—on the landscape and farmstead.

The Apps family has owned Roshara since 1966. There they nurture a prairie restoration and pine plantation, maintain a large garden that feeds three generations, observe wildlife species by the dozens, and support a population of endangered butterflies. In documenting life on this piece of land, Jerry and Steve remind us how, despite the pace and challenges of modern life, the seasons continue to influence our lives in ways large and small. Jerry explains that his journal entries become much more than mere observations: "It seems that when I write about something—a bur oak tree, for example—that old tree becomes a part of me. . . . Writing takes me to a place that goes beyond observation and understanding, a place filled with feeling and meaning."

In the tradition of Bernd Heinrich in Maine, Barry Lopez in the Canadian Arctic, and Aldo Leopold just an hour down the road in Baraboo, Jerry and Steve Apps combine observation, experience, and reflection to tell a profound story about one place in the world.