A Lost Generation: How One Artist Reconnects to Her Indigenous Heritage

Art can be a way to remember, to resist, and to reclaim what was once taken. For Chicago-area artist Nora Moore Lloyd, of the Lac Courte Oreilles Band of Lake Superior Ojibwe, it’s a way to reconnect with an ancestry interrupted and nearly stolen from her. Through her paintings, photographs, and mixed-media art, Moore weaves together family history, Ojibwe traditions, and personal resilience, inviting viewers to consider their own connections to heritage and place. Nora: My grandmother, Anna, was born at the Lac Courte Oreilles reservation in 1880. Back then, Native kids were sent to government schools and mission schools. She had been orphaned. So she was being raised by Chief Blue Sky, or Ozhaawashkogiizhig, and his wife, Zaagigwanebi, and this big extended family. When she was seven, the Presbyterian missionaries at the school kidnapped her and took her from the beautiful Northwoods Wisconsin, all lakes and forests, to Indiana, where they raised her but made her not proud of her heritage. So I didn't learn until I was 35. I still have cousins up there. So it was important for me to acknowledge my ancestors whom I didn't know. Residential schools like the one that took Anna were widespread. More than 500 operated in the U.S. during the 19th and 20th centuries, forcibly removing tens of thousands of Indigenous children from their families and cultures. Some schools remained open as late as 1969. Nora: My family was gone from the reservation for a hundred years. This nearly made Nora a member of a lost generation, cut off from language, culture, and community, like so many others. She honors her ancestors by creating art that restores their stories to visibility and celebrates the culture they fought to preserve. Nora: I have done photography for decades now, but mostly I've documented other people's stories. Nora: For this show, I got to tell my story. One of her pieces uses birch bark collected over decades at her cabin in Wisconsin, near where her tribe established a village in 1745. Birch bark holds physical and spiritual value in many Native American cultures: it can be made into canoes, cooking vessels, and shelters, and it also has religious meaning. Nora: The chances are remote that my family didn't walk on—woo, it always gives me bumps when I say that—the land where I live up there. Nora: Painting, on this old bark, the names of my old ancestors just felt right. Nora: I have generations one, two, three. Gwekigaabawikwe, who was my grandmother's mother, and that translates to either “woman standing and turning” or “woman looking back,” and I don't know which because it was her daughter that was taken. So the next generation is my grandmother Mizhakwad, which means “clear sky.” And then there isn't one for my father because he didn't know. So the last is me. Gaag is my name, and it means “porcupine.” Nora: After my grandmother, Anna was taken, her uncle sent her letters from 1892 till 1900. And they're sad, but it was important for him to let her know, even though she was three states away, she wasn’t forgotten. Nora: These are the letters Frank Blue Sky sent to his niece, my grandmother Anna. He didn't speak English, so it was a huge effort for him to keep in touch with Anna. He either had to go 10 miles into town, the town of Hayward, and to a translator. And then he would have to say the words, the translator wrote it down, and he'd copy it, which is why these are handwritten. Nora: This is June 1894. My dear niece. I take the pen and ink to write to you with sad news. Poor Louis, my younger brother. He is dead. Half past seven yesterday evening. Most my tears burst every minute, and I could not write very well my eyes so leak. And he say before he died, I got pure white wings, I think. God bless me. From your uncle Frank Blue Sky. Those are his teardrops.