Where the Water Decides
A Subcontinental Divide Corridor and Public Memory Initiative for Menomonee Falls, Wisconsin
A TransLocalism Proposal John F. Sendelbach, Sculptor, Landscape Designer, and Public Artist Shelburne Falls, Massachusetts May 2026
The Idea in Plain Terms
A glacial ridge runs through the eastern third of Menomonee Falls, Wisconsin. It is not dramatic. You cannot see it from a car window or feel it under your feet. It is a subtle elevation in the landscape, created when the last continental ice sheet retreated roughly ten thousand years ago, and it does something extraordinary that almost no one who lives in the village knows about. A raindrop falling on the west side of that ridge flows eventually into the Fox River, joins the Mississippi, and reaches the Gulf of Mexico. A raindrop falling on the east side flows into the Menomonee River, moves through the Great Lakes, exits through the St. Lawrence Seaway, and reaches the Atlantic Ocean. One ridge. Two oceans. Running through a quiet Wisconsin suburb between the parking lots and residential streets and park trails of a village of thirty-nine thousand people who drive across it every day without a thought.
This proposal is about making that ridge visible, walkable, rideable, and meaningful. Not just as a geographic curiosity, but as a thread connecting the deepest Indigenous history of the place, the most painful chapters of American racial history, the most powerful freedom mythology in American consumer culture, and the living ecological systems that all of it flows through and depends on. The subcontinental divide of Menomonee Falls is the organizing spine of a public art and landscape corridor that could run from the village's northern edge to its southern boundary, linking parks, streets, schools, and community spaces along a route that traces one of the most significant hidden features in the entire Midwest.
The name of this corridor is Where the Water Decides. Because the water knows. The water has always known. Long before European settlement surveyed the land into sections and counties and property lines, the water was already following this ridge, already deciding which ocean it was headed for, already organizing the landscape according to a logic that had nothing to do with human ambition or political boundaries. That logic is still operating underneath everything that has been built on top of it. This proposal is an invitation to pay attention to what the water has always been saying.
Background: The Land and Its People
The Menominee people have lived in this watershed for at least ten thousand years, and by their own oral tradition, they have always been here. They call themselves Mamaceqtaw — the people. They call themselves the Kiash Matchitiwuk — the Ancient Ones. They are the only present-day tribe in Wisconsin whose origin story does not involve migration. This is not a claim of recent arrival dressed up in spiritual language. It is a statement of deep time, of a civilization so old and so rooted in this specific landscape that the landscape itself carries their name.
The word Menominee comes from manomin — the Algonquian word for wild rice. The Chippewa gave this name to the Menominee people because of their profound relationship with wild rice, which grew abundantly in the wetlands of the river valley. The river was named for the rice. The village was named for the river. Every time someone says the word Menomonee Falls, they are speaking, without knowing it, an Indigenous word for a sacred food plant that once defined this entire ecosystem. That plant is largely gone from the river now. That fact is not incidental.
The Menominee are, by some accounts, descended from the Old Copper Culture people — a civilization of sophisticated metallurgists who worked native copper from the shores of Lake Superior and the Upper Peninsula of Michigan for perhaps seven thousand years before European contact. They cold-hammered copper into tools, weapons, ornaments, and ceremonial objects of extraordinary refinement, and they traded those objects across a continental network reaching from the Gulf Coast to the Canadian Shield. This was not primitive technology. This was a continental economy organized around a sacred material that came from a specific piece of the earth. Copper was the material of this region long before steel mills or motorcycle engines. It came from the ground. It was shaped by hand. It carried spiritual weight alongside its practical value. The people who worked it understood it as a gift from the earth that required reciprocity, not extraction.
By the 1700s, the Potawatomi had become the primary residents of the greater Milwaukee region. But the Menomonee River Valley was a shared gathering place — Chippewa, Ojibwe, Fox, Ottawa, Sauk, Ho-Chunk, Menominee, and others came to trade, to fish, to harvest wild rice, and to maintain the kind of fluid, multi-tribal diplomacy that characterized Great Lakes Indigenous life. They did not draw property lines. They did not divide the watershed into parcels. They moved through it seasonally, following water, following game, following rice, following relationships. The subcontinental divide was not an abstraction to them. It was lived geography, embedded in the knowledge of where rivers went and what they carried.
The Potawatomi Treaty of Chicago in 1833 ceded this land. Many Potawatomi refused to leave. Those who resisted the forced march west — explicitly compared to the Trail of Death — eventually settled in Forest County, Wisconsin. Then in 1990, more than a hundred and fifty years after the dispossession, the Forest County Potawatomi returned to seven acres in Milwaukee's Menomonee River Valley, land that had been used as a dump. They cleaned it, built what became the Potawatomi Hotel and Casino, and have since been among the most significant forces in the valley's ecological and economic revival. They came back to exactly the place they were removed from. They are still here.
The Menominee occupy their reservation on the upper Wolf and Oconto Rivers, sixty miles from the site of their creation according to their tradition. In 1961, during the federal termination movement, the United States dissolved their reservation, stripped their federal recognition, and converted their land into a county. It took until 1973, after sustained activism, to restore recognition. Their story is one of the most dramatic examples in American history of a people surviving every attempt at erasure. They survived the fur trade, the missionary system, the boarding schools, the reservation, the termination, and the county. They are still here.
These are not distant historical facts. They are living realities in a watershed that shares its name with a people who were removed from it, whose language is encoded in every road sign and school name and business directory in Menomonee Falls, and who have largely been forgotten by the community that inherited their landscape.
The Road and the Paradox
Here is where the proposal becomes complicated and interesting, because Menomonee Falls is also home to one of the most powerful freedom symbols in American culture.
Harley-Davidson Motor Company has a major manufacturing plant in Menomonee Falls. The company was co-founded by Walter Davidson, whose widow Emma owned the historic Miller-Davidson House now preserved at the Old Falls Village Museum. Harley-Davidson is not just a motorcycle company. It is a mythology. Think of Easy Rider. Think of the Hells Angels. Think of every outlaw biker film, every cross-country road trip, every image of the open road as American freedom. The motorcycle is the freedom machine. And freedom is exactly what Harley-Davidson sells — the experience of moving through the landscape unconstrained, answering to no one, following the road wherever it goes.
But the road is also the final erasure.
Before roads, before the highway grid that now covers the continent, Indigenous peoples could still move through the landscape in something approaching the fluid, borderless way that their civilization required. The road changes that permanently. It demands massive earthmoving — literally taking the earth, displacing it, using it, profiting from it. It requires surveyed property lines on either side. It brings the grid. It fragments habitat and migration routes. It makes the continent legible to the colonial project in a way that nothing else does. Every highway in America is, in one reading, a scar across Indigenous territory.
And then Harley-Davidson takes that road and turns it into the supreme symbol of American freedom.
The machine requires the infrastructure of dispossession in order to deliver its promise of liberation. You cannot ride free without the road. The road was built on taken land. The freedom is real — deeply, genuinely real to everyone who has ever ridden across this country and felt the wind — and the foundation of that freedom is a historical crime. Both of those things are true at the same time and neither cancels the other out. That is not an accusation. It is a description of American history, and it is a description that becomes most visible in exactly a place like Menomonee Falls, where the Indigenous name is still on the landscape, where the Old Copper Culture copper is still in the motorcycle engines, where the subcontinental divide still organizes the hydrology underneath the roads that cross it without acknowledgment, and where a Harley-Davidson plant sits in a suburb built by the FHA redlining system that excluded Black families from the prosperity it was creating.
The Black history of this place runs parallel to the Indigenous history and intersects with it at the level of systematic exclusion from the freedom that the dominant culture was simultaneously celebrating. The Great Migration brought Black Americans north to Milwaukee in enormous numbers — the Black population of Wisconsin grew six hundred percent between 1940 and 1960 alone — because they were seeking exactly the freedom that the American mythology promised. What they found instead was one of the most rigidly segregated cities in the United States. They were confined to a shrinking inner city by redlining — the federal policy of denying mortgage loans to Black buyers in designated neighborhoods — while white families moved to suburbs like Menomonee Falls backed by FHA guarantees that Black families could not access. The first FHA-approved subdivision in Wisconsin was built in Menomonee Falls in 1937. It was, by design, white.
Vel Phillips, the first Black woman on the Milwaukee City Council, introduced open housing legislation year after year, watching it fail, before the federal Fair Housing Act passed in 1968. She later became the first Black Wisconsin Secretary of State. She was doing in Milwaukee what the Menominee people were doing in Washington — fighting, through every legal and political means available, for the right to exist in the land they belonged to.
The nested recursion of this history is what makes Menomonee Falls such a rich site for the kind of public memory work this proposal describes. The water runs to two oceans. The copper went from ceremonial object to engine component. The road erased the Indigenous landscape and became the vehicle of American freedom. The suburb was built on exclusion and named freedom. The motorcycle roars down the road that was built on taken land and calls it liberation. None of these paradoxes can be resolved. All of them are true. The ridge that runs through the eastern third of the village — the divide that the glaciers left, that the Menominee and Potawatomi understood as one of the organizing features of the continent — is the place to stand while holding all of it.
The Corridor: Where the Water Decides
The physical proposal is a public trail and public art corridor that follows the subcontinental divide through Menomonee Falls from its northern entry point at the county line to its southern exit near the border with Butler and Brookfield. Based on the maps you have reviewed, this corridor runs through the eastern third of the village — not along a single road, but cutting through residential neighborhoods, parks, and open spaces along the glacial ridge itself. It intersects Appleton Avenue, Main Street, Good Hope Road, and other major corridors at specific crossing points that become the nodes of the interpretive system.
The corridor is not a road. It is not a bike path in the ordinary sense. It is a marked route — walkable, bikeable, and yes, rideable on a motorcycle — that follows the actual divide line as closely as local topography, property, and right-of-way allow. Where the route crosses a public park, it moves through the park. Where it crosses a road, the crossing is marked with pavement art and a QR-coded interpretive marker. Where it passes through open space like Tamarack Park, it offers a longer immersive experience of the landscape as it actually is — the trees, the wetlands, the elevation change of the glacial ridge, the birds that move between the Mississippi and Great Lakes watersheds, the water deciding which ocean to head for.
The design language of the corridor draws from three material sources, all of them indigenous to the region. The first is copper — honoring the Old Copper Culture that preceded the Menominee and that the Menominee are descended from, and connecting that ancient metalworking tradition to the copper inside every Harley-Davidson engine that has ever ridden across this continent. Copper markers, copper inlays in pavement, copper sculptural elements at the major nodes — the material of the earth of this place, shaped by hand, acknowledging what was here before anything else. The second is limestone — the bedrock that the Menomonee River carved into the falls at Lime Kiln Park, the material that early European settlers quarried for mortar and whitewash, the geological substrate of the village itself. Limestone elements at ground level, rough and legible, grounding the corridor in the deep time of the place. The third is native plantings — wild rice where hydrology allows it, native prairie grasses and forbs along the upland sections of the ridge, riparian species where the corridor approaches the Menomonee River or its tributaries. The landscape of the corridor becomes, gradually, a demonstration of what this watershed looked like before the grid.
The Nodes
At each major road crossing, and at each significant park or open space along the route, there is a node — a place where the corridor pauses and offers the full depth of what this landscape carries. Each node has a copper marker set into the ground at the exact line of the divide. Each marker carries a QR code. The QR code opens onto a layered interpretive experience that is organized not as a museum exhibit but as a set of concurrent stories about the same place.
You can follow the Menominee story — the rice, the copper, the Old Copper Culture ancestors, the treaties, the termination, the restoration of recognition, and where the Menominee Nation is today. You can follow the Potawatomi story — the primary residents of this watershed by the 1700s, the Trail of Death removal, the 1990 return to seven acres in the Menomonee Valley, and the ecological advocacy that the Forest County Potawatomi continue today. You can follow the water story — the subcontinental divide, the glacial formation of the ridge, which raindrops go to which ocean, how the Menomonee River was dammed and channelized and piped, how the Falk Dam removal brought brook trout and brown trout and walleye back to the river, how the salmon still run to the falls at Lime Kiln Park every autumn. You can follow the Black history story — the Great Migration, the redlining maps that show exactly which neighborhoods in this region were denied mortgage access and why, the Hiawatha Heights subdivision, Father Groppi on the bridge, Vel Phillips in the council chamber. You can follow the road story — how the highway grid was laid over Indigenous territory, how it fragmented the seasonal movement of peoples and species, how it made the continent legible to the colonial project, and how it became the substrate of American freedom mythology. You can follow the Harley-Davidson story — the Davidson family, the manufacturing plant in this village, the machine as cultural object, and the paradox of a freedom mythology built on the infrastructure of dispossession. All of these stories happen in the same place. The QR code is where they meet.
The Main Street Crossing
The existing historical marker at Main Street and Westchester Drive — the Waukesha County Subcontinental Divide marker erected in 1959 — is the anchor of the entire corridor. It is already there. It is already telling part of the story. But it is a small metal sign that most people drive past without stopping, and it tells only the geological part of the story — the Fox River watershed, the Menomonee River watershed, the Great Lakes, the Mississippi. This proposal transforms that crossing into the central node of the corridor, the place where the full depth of what the divide means is made legible.
At this crossing, the pavement art is most significant. A copper inlay — wide enough to see from a car window — traces the divide line across Main Street itself. It is not decorative. It is a datum. A fact embedded in the road surface. On one side of the line, the water goes to the Gulf. On the other side, the water goes to the Atlantic. The marker that stands here is supplemented by a larger sculptural element in copper and limestone that can be read from the sidewalk, from a bicycle, from a motorcycle stopped at the light. The QR code at this node opens onto the fullest version of the interpretive experience — all the concurrent stories, all the historical layers, all the living connections to the watershed and its peoples.
A rider coming through Menomonee Falls on a Harley-Davidson who stops at this crossing and reads this marker encounters, perhaps for the first time, the full paradox of what their ride represents. That is not an accusation. It is an invitation. It is the most interesting thing that has ever happened to them on that corner.
Tamarack Park and the Open Space Corridor
The maps show a significant green space in the central-southern portion of the village — Tamarack Park and surrounding open areas — that the divide corridor passes through or near. This is where the corridor has the most room to breathe, where the landscape design can do the most work, and where the wild rice question becomes most alive. If any portion of the park's hydrology flows toward the wetland edge of the Menomonee River watershed, native plant restoration including wild rice reintroduction in appropriate areas becomes possible. Wild rice growing alongside the corridor in the park is the single most powerful interpretive element available. It is living, seasonal, edible, beautiful, ecologically functional, and deeply connected to the Indigenous history that the corridor is honoring. Children from the local schools can harvest it in fall. Interpretive programming can connect it to the Menominee story. It grows and dies and grows again, which is more honest about what restoration actually means than any permanent bronze plaque.
The Motorcycle Route
The corridor as described is primarily a walking and biking route. But the Harley-Davidson connection and the road paradox at the heart of the proposal suggest a parallel experience designed specifically for riders. A marked motorcycle route through Menomonee Falls — not a closed road or a dedicated path, but a designated touring loop through the village that follows the divide line where roads allow and connects the major nodes — gives riders a way to engage with the corridor on their own terms, at their own pace, on their own machines. At each road-crossing node, the pavement art is designed to be visible at riding speed — wide copper inlays, clear directional markers, the node number in the sequence. The QR code experience is designed for the roadside, not the sidewalk. A rider can pull over at any node, take out their phone, and spend five minutes or fifty minutes with the interpretive content, depending on how much they want.
This is not an ironic joke at the expense of motorcycle culture. It is a genuine invitation. The people who ride Harley-Davidsons through this village love this landscape. They love the wind through the open country northwest of Milwaukee. They love the river and the parks and the small-town main street quality of Menomonee Falls. This corridor gives them a reason to love it more deeply and more honestly — to know what they are riding through, what it cost, what it was before, and what it could still become.
Harley-Davidson as Partner
The case for Harley-Davidson corporate partnership in this project is strong, but it has to be made carefully and framed precisely. The pitch is not that Harley-Davidson is responsible for the history of Indigenous dispossession or the redlining of the suburbs. The pitch is that Harley-Davidson understands freedom better than almost any other brand in the world, which is exactly why this project needs them. A brand built on the mythology of the open road has a particular stake in the honest history of what the open road was built on — not to be diminished by that history, but to be deepened by it. The most resonant version of the Harley-Davidson story is not the sanitized myth of pure American liberty. It is the full paradox — the copper from Indigenous earth, the road over Indigenous land, the freedom that everyone in this watershed deserved and not everyone was permitted to have, and the machine that carries it all forward into the wind.
Harley-Davidson has a corporate foundation and a substantial community investment program in the Milwaukee area. They have funded environmental initiatives, educational programs, and cultural projects throughout southeastern Wisconsin. The Where the Water Decides corridor, anchored in their home village, connected to the Indigenous history encoded in the Menomonee name, designed around the material of copper that links the Old Copper Culture ancestors to the engine in every Harley-Davidson motorcycle, and organized around a motorcycle touring route that runs through their backyard — this is exactly the kind of project that a company with genuine civic ambition could make their own. Not as a marketing exercise. As a genuine act of reckoning and civic commitment.
The Potawatomi Hotel and Casino, which sits in the Menomonee River Valley in Milwaukee and which represents the Forest County Potawatomi's return to their ancestral homeland, is another natural partner. They have been among the most significant investors in valley redevelopment and ecological restoration. Their involvement in a corridor project honoring the Menominee and Potawatomi history of the watershed would carry authenticity that no other partner could provide.
The Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources, the Menomonee River Watershed Association, the Forest County Potawatomi Community, the Menominee Indian Tribe of Wisconsin, the Milwaukee Metropolitan Sewerage District, and the Village of Menomonee Falls itself are all potential partners and stakeholders. The University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee has faculty working on urban ecology, Indigenous history, and Great Lakes watershed systems who could contribute research and educational programming to the corridor's interpretive content.
The Schools
Menomonee Falls High School is a natural anchor for the southern end of the corridor or for a major node along its route. The school's students live in this watershed. They drink its water. They drive across the subcontinental divide on their way to school. Most of them have never heard the word Menominee used to refer to anything other than the river and the town. The corridor's interpretive content, designed for QR code delivery, is inherently compatible with school curricula — history, ecology, geology, social studies, art. A school partnership could involve student research contributions to the QR code content, student art integrated into the copper and limestone markers, and annual corridor programming tied to the wild rice harvest and the salmon run at Lime Kiln Park.
The Old Falls Village Historical Museum, with its focus on the mid-1800s to early 1900s period and its connection to the Davidson family, is where the Harley-Davidson thread of the corridor's story is most directly housed. A partnership with the museum could extend the corridor's interpretive reach into the European settlement period and into the industrial history of the village, giving the full timeline from Old Copper Culture through present day a physical home.
Phasing and Funding
The corridor does not need to be built all at once. Phase one is the Main Street crossing — the anchor node at the existing subcontinental divide marker, the pavement art, the sculptural element, and the full QR code interpretive system. This is the proof of concept. It costs relatively little compared to infrastructure projects, it is visually immediate, and it makes the argument for everything that follows. A modest grant from the Wisconsin Arts Board, the National Endowment for the Arts, or a Harley-Davidson Foundation contribution could fund phase one entirely.
Phase two extends the corridor north and south from the Main Street anchor, establishing the next two or three nodes at park and road crossings, with the copper markers, QR codes, and initial native planting. Phase three completes the corridor from the county line to the southern boundary of the village, installs the motorcycle touring route markers, and begins the wild rice restoration work in Tamarack Park. Phase four is the school partnership programming and the full community engagement layer — the annual events, the harvest ceremonies conducted in partnership with Menominee and Potawatomi cultural organizations, the ongoing maintenance and expansion of the QR code content as new research and stories emerge.
Funding sources available for different phases of this work include the National Endowment for the Arts public art programs, the Wisconsin Arts Board, the National Endowment for the Humanities community humanities programs, the Great Lakes Restoration Initiative, the Environmental Protection Agency's environmental justice programs, the Wisconsin DNR's outdoor recreation and habitat restoration grants, the Harley-Davidson Foundation, the Forest County Potawatomi Foundation, the Menomonee River Watershed Association, and the Village of Menomonee Falls community development programs. The interpretive and educational dimensions make the project competitive for National Park Service partnership funding through the Rivers, Trails, and Conservation Assistance Program. The Indigenous cultural dimensions make it eligible for Administration for Native Americans grants in language and cultural preservation.
The Salmon at Lime Kiln Park
One final thread that belongs in any proposal about this watershed. Every autumn, salmon run up the Menomonee River to the falls at Lime Kiln Park. They come from Lake Michigan, following the river upstream to the limestone falls where the village gets its name, completing a migration that the dam removal and water quality improvements of recent decades have made possible again. Children stand on the rocks and watch them. It is one of the most astonishing things that happens in Menomonee Falls, and most residents of the village have never seen it.
The salmon are not native to this watershed. They were introduced. But their return — enabled by the removal of barriers, the improvement of water quality, the gradual healing of a river that was nearly destroyed by industrial use — is a living demonstration of what ecological repair looks like when it actually works. The fish do not know about the subcontinental divide. They know about cold water and clear gravel and the river's flow. They follow the water to where it has always told them to go.
That is what this corridor is about. Not guilt. Not accusation. Not a monument to failure. A commitment to paying attention to what the water has always been saying, to what the copper and the limestone and the glacial ridge and the wild rice and the salmon and the Menominee language encoded in every road sign in the village have always been saying. The water decides. It has always decided. This corridor is an invitation to stand at the divide and listen.
Where the Water Decides. Menomonee Falls, Wisconsin. A TransLocalism corridor for the watershed, the village, the road, the machine, the rice, the copper, and the freedom that all of them are still negotiating.
Proposal prepared by John F. Sendelbach, sculptor, landscape designer, and public artist. Shelburne Falls, Massachusetts. May 2026. All rights reserved.