The Native American Mural

One of the largest murals in Algoma, prominently placed near the waterfront, this wall honors the people who were here first. Long before Wolf River, before Ahnapee, before Algoma, this shore and river mouth were Native homeland, and the town’s very names remember it: both “Ahnapee” and “Algoma” come down from Native words.

The wall with the deepest subject

Most of the Walldog Wave’s murals honor businesses from the town’s first century. This one reaches back further than any of them, and it carries a responsibility the others don’t: representing a living people, not a closed chapter. This register wants to document this wall better than any other, and to get it right. What we want for this page: the story of how the image was chosen in 2007, what and whom it depicts, and, most of all, perspectives from the tribal nations whose homeland this is. If you can help with any of that, tell us.

Who painted it

The project leading artist was David Petri of Green Bay, the local Walldog who coordinated the entire Walldog Wave and led more walls than anyone: this one, the Reinhart Brothers Shoe Store, and Big Jim.

A note on the record: this mural does not appear in the lettered A-through-K key of the Main Street Program’s walking-tour brochure, though the 2018 Door County Pulse feature documents it as part of the mural program with Petri as project leading artist. The brochure counts ten murals painted in 2007 against eleven lettered walls; where this mural and Big Jim sit in the official ten is one of the register’s open questions.

The Walldog Wave

Over three days, June 21 to 23, 2007, more than one hundred Walldogs, the international guild of mural and sign painters who keep the old hand-lettering craft alive, painted ten murals on historic downtown Algoma buildings, under Petri’s direction and with the Algoma Main Street Program organizing. This register documents every wall in the set.

If you painted here in 2007, or have photographs from that week, we would genuinely like to hear from you.

Sources

• Door County Pulse: A Community’s Vision, the Murals of Algoma (2018)
• The Walldogs, past events: Walldog Wave, Algoma 2007 (via Internet Archive)