On Being Local
Dear Saint Mary’s Friends,
Today, students are back on campus after Fall break, and everything from the crisp morning air to the changing sunlight to the crunch of leaves underfoot reminds me how far autumn has advanced. I often travel during semester breaks, but this year, a relatively uncharted week at home here in The Bend offered the chance to slow down and enjoy the place where I live.
While I worked a bit every day, I also walked, read, tried a few local restaurants, and made plans for a Friday drive into Michigan. On Thursday evening, my husband and I visited the South Bend Museum of Art to hear two artists—Jason Wesaw and the College’s own Professor Julie Tourtillotte ’82—in conversation with Frances Jacobus-Parker, Curator of Exhibitions and the Collection.
Born and raised in South Bend, Julie has observed this region’s urban and natural landscapes since childhood. Her relationship to place extends to the materials she uses: she grows plants, harvests them, and extracts natural dyes for her textiles. Together with Saint Mary’s students, she has created a dye garden at the College’s sustainable farm, where growing and making become part of the same education.
Listening to Julie, I began to understand that our local environment has its own palette, shaped by soil, weather, and season. The plants I pass on my daily walks hold possibilities for color that I would never know how to coax from them. Julie and her students have learned to look for those possibilities—and to undertake the patient work of bringing them into view.
Jason, a member of the Potawatomi Nation who lives and works in southern Michigan, also gathers materials from the land. Clay from riverbeds, local wood, and indigenous plants connect his work to his ancestral homelands. One installation especially held my attention: a framed 1873 map of “Weesaw,” embellished with silver leaf, hanging behind a pedestal bearing a stunning deep-blue glazed ceramic vessel adorned with dyed deer tail. Its title was “The Land Remembers What the People Forget.”
The next day, my husband and I drove around the southeastern end of Lake Michigan. Fields of brittle cornstalks stood straw-colored in the pale autumn sun. Beyond them were bright green winter wheat, golden vineyards, and stretches of bare blueberry bushes turned fiery crimson. With Julie’s observations in mind, I found myself paying closer attention to the colors and wondering about the conditions that had produced them.
We stopped for lunch, looked in some shops, and began our way home. After an accidental wrong turn, I asked the GPS to redirect us. There, in the middle of the map, was the word “Wesaw”—the surname of the artist we had heard the night before.
I wanted to see what was there. But when we reached the spot, there was no sign announcing it, only stretches of fields and a farmhouse or two in the distance. Because of the previous evening, however, I found myself looking at those fields with new questions. What histories did that name carry? What relationships to this land remained unfamiliar to me? What did the land remember? Jason’s art had made me curious about a place I might otherwise have passed through without a second thought.
With our students’ return, I’m reminded that this capacity—to notice, to interpret, and to ask better questions—is something we seek to cultivate in a Saint Mary’s College education. It is also something our faculty practice beyond the classroom, enriching the life of our region and inviting the rest of us to keep learning. I was grateful to spend an evening as Julie’s student, and to learn from Jason’s work alongside hers. Julie and Jason share a deep, quiet accountability to the place where they stand. Through their art, I observed layers of ecological beauty and ancestral memory in my own adopted locale that I might otherwise have completely missed.
I have lived here for more than six years, and there is still so much I have yet to see or understand. A little uncharted time, and one unexpected turn, helped me recognize that with fresh immediacy. I returned to familiar surroundings with new questions and with a deeper appreciation for the people who helped me find them.
As the semester resumes, I hope to carry some of that attention into my more crowded days—and to remember how much there is to discover close to home.
Warm regards,
Katie Conboy, Ph.D.
President
October 26, 2026