Re-collecting Black Hawk is a book-length, image-text essay exploring the cultural and political landscapes of the Midwest. It brings together roughly one hundred seventy photographs of historical markers and monuments, organizations, sports teams, consumer products, businesses, parks, subdivisions and other places that reference the 19th century Sauk leader Makataimeshekiakiak, more commonly known as Black Hawk. These photographs are arranged geographically and organized into chapters by state (Iowa, Illinois, and Wisconsin). Each image is paired with an appropriated text drawn from sources as wide ranging as press releases and scholarly histories, government reports and advertisements, and poetry and recipes published in tribal newspapers. Upending conventional uses of image and text – in which texts explicate and images illustrate – the juxtaposition of apparently unrelated phenomena asks the reader to actively produce possible meanings. If the “Black Hawks” represented in the photographs are floating signifiers or empty signs, the text reassociate and anchor them in the dynamic and evolving Indigenous political geographies represented by the texts.