561 - Missouri River Heritage Mural

I'm Greta McLean, and the mural is titled the Missouri River Heritage Mural. So I was, like, super privileged to get to work with the Heritage foundation, who has this bank of history and knowledge and say, hey, can you guys help inform what this means and what this space means? We had conversations starting years ago, and we were saying, how can we use some of the infrastructure of the landing of the Heritage site to tell people the story of the connection to the river? We're gonna invite a bunch of people to talk about their connection to the space, and then we're gonna have them paint together, and we're gonna put it up as a permanent piece of public art on the actual bridge on the river. So when you're looking at this mural, there are some key points that I can point out to you or that I can kind of highlight here that make it really special. So, like, the. The bigger kind of umbrella structure that's holding the whole thing is the Fibonacci spiral, like the golden ratio. But in the middle of the mural, you see a youth, and it's George. He is a native youth. He's from Bismarck, and he's shown with his braid, and he's touching the water. His hand is in the water. And his hand is also surrounded by all these different words that mean river in all kinds of languages that are spoken here. And then next to him, you have a contemporary farmer, woman, farmer. You can see that the crops are like the traditional three sisters. And there's also echinacea. There are cone flowers, and there's monarchs. And those monarchs represent those sustainable systems again, how we're connecting to this environment here. And then behind her, that farmer there is featured. So that's on the left side, you have buffalo, bird, woman. When we think about heirloom seeds and all of that knowledge, we can, like, run the story back to her and a lot of the knowledge that she was able to save and preserve and pass on. And then on the other side, we have farmers that represent immigrant communities that were arriving, and there were so many different cultures coming together, and we were figuring out, again, how to be in a community and what it meant to be from this place. But in that crunchiness, the place was holding for everybody. And the place could sustain and feed and lift all of those people coming together. So I would like it if that's what that represents, but reality. You see some farmers back there, and so those are, like, those poetic moments that we wanted to include here. And some of that, like, people will see and find and hear and be like, oh, I can see thy cottonwood. I know that. But some of it's just embedded in this process. The poetry of that, that piece of, I love it here. This is what makes it special for me. This is what makes it home. We hope, I hope, it is embedded in the very feel of this mural.