I think that humans can fairly be classified by observing how they cross a bridge. For some of us, crossing a bridge is a common and unremarkable experience warranting little more than a glance out the window as the scenery flies by. For others, crossing a bridge initiates a compulsion to peer over the side to see and know the water below. It’s a familiar pull, like a benign addiction but trust me, if I am driving, it’s simply a force of will that keeps me and my passengers safe. I am of the water tribe.
I am a child of the Great Lakes. The Great Lakes region is a wet place. It’s laced with creeks and gentle rivers, it’s blessed with abundant rain and snow, and it’s positively bejeweled with wetlands, swamps, marshes, bogs, fens, and thousands of inland lakes with water so clear and deep and cool that it would break your heart for the beauty of it all. And if this embarrassment of watery riches weren’t enough, the magnificent five Great Lakes themselves embrace and define the region – vast inland seas of deep sweet water stretching beyond the horizon. When I cross a bridge I want nothing so much as to stop the car run down the embankment and encounter the water. I want to muddy my boots. I want to kneel and feel the water with my hands as moisture soaks through the knees of my jeans. I want smell the dampness and encounter the creatures there. I want to drink it all in.
I’ve been around the world and have lived in several states from Connecticut to Montana but my personal geography pivots on a stretch of beach on the eastern shore of Lake Michigan. I’ve played in those waters since I was a toddler and I return to them whenever I can. Following a painful break-up, I ran there instinctively when I felt I had nowhere else to turn to ease my teen-aged pain and loneliness. Soon after, I swam there in the night with a certain dark-haired beauty who later consented to marry me on a sand dune facing the sunset. When she was pregnant, I left her on the shore shivering (briefly) in a November wind while I waded in barefoot to collect a few bottles-worth from beyond the forming ice. Our children were baptized with that water.
I’ve known Lake Michigan in all of her moods, from the feral violent fury of her storms when wind-driven sand stung my cheeks to her hot still fugue states where only a barely perceptible lapping hinted that she was alive at all. I’ve seen her sheathed in ice with an eerie alien topography built of pressure ridges and blowing snow and I’ve listen to her whisper to me out of the peacefulness of a summer night as I slept on the sand. Most of the terrestrial places that are special to me are drained by creeks and rivers that collect in the Great Lakes and when I stand in the waters of Lake Michigan I feel a physical reconnection upstream to the nameless farmland creek I played in as a child, the logging towns where I’ve lived and worked, the rivers I’ve paddled and fished, and the wetlands I’ve explored. She’s the dear old friend I’ve grown up with. She’s always greets me with a welcome embrace, a familiar touch, and the wisdom to know what I need from her before even I do.
If Lake Michigan is my old friend, Lake Superior is my new crush. I grew to know her as an adult. She’s longingly, even achingly beautiful but also distant and dangerous and wild and I love her for it. I’ve paddled miles and miles of her austere coastline and have been humbled by the massive craggy rock formations and the stark remote majesty of her commanding shores where rock and sky and forest all meet in celebrations of wave and spray. I am further seduced with every encounter. Her forests are dark and damp and ancient and they draw upon one’s imagination with a primordial reminder that humans are kings of the beasts only insofar as we rig the competition in our favor with technology. The rivers that drain those forests convey darkness into Lake Superior in the form of water stained the color of old whisky by the tannins leached out of the peaty forest soils. She haunts me and I steal off to her embrace whenever I can.
I diary this stuff because I’ve been in a funk since Governor Walker signed the infamous mining bill a few weeks ago. I have been moved by the plight of the Bad River band of Lake Superior Ojibwa. This band of Ojibwa people take their name from the Bad River that flows through the center of their reservation into Lake Superior. The mouth of the Bad River is mostly sunken owing to the vagaries of glacial rebound in the Great Lakes basin. This particular topography means that the mouth of the Bad River and its companion waterways feed the largest fresh water estuary in North America and it’s a wetland complex of international ecological significance. But the significance of the Bad River cannot be captured in factoids suitable for tourist-shop postcards.
Years ago, I was part of a group that was given a tour of the estuary by a tribal biologist. I will personally attest to the fact that the Bad River estuary is an ecological treasure. The rivers separate into braided channels and, stretching nearly as far as I could see in every direction when I stood my nearly-six-foot frame tip-toed on the seat of a jonboat, was native wild rice. The estuary and the shallow Chequamegon bay to the west are protected from Lake Superior’s storms by a narrow barrier island to the north and the nursery that the estuary provides for forage fish and gamefish fry is undoubtedly the reason that Chequamegon bay is a treasured fishing destination.
I’ve listened to a tribal elder speak of the oral history and religious beliefs of the Ojibwa and I’ve been impressed that religion and culture enmesh more seamlessly for them than they do for us Lutherans. The Ojibwa peoples’ ancestral home was on the east coast. When they were compelled to leave by war with other tribes, they carried with them a prophesy that their new home would be the place where food grew on the water. Upon reaching the Great Lakes region, the Ojibwa discovered the region’s abundant wild rice (Ojibwa: Manoomin) and their prophesy was fulfilled. The Bad River estuary is managed communally among the Bad River people using a system of family-based rice gathering areas to distribute the resource equitably.
If I claim to be a child of the Great Lakes, I must admit that I am late to the party. I am only a fourth-generation resident of the Great Lake region and if any of the previous three generations of my family ever professed as profound a connection to these lakes as I have, I am not aware of it. Contrast my sheepish claim on the Great Lakes with that of the Bad River people. Their religion, their history, their culture, indeed their very name (and that of their reservation) connect them to Lake Superior and her waters in ways that I can only begin to appreciate if I take my own love of the Great Lakes and imagine it multiplied. Hence my funk. I am profoundly angry and sad at the utter callousness and shortsightedness of this mining legislation. Mines and mine tailings leach chemicals that can poison both surface and groundwater and even the best-engineered containment systems are not fool-proof (alas, we have no shortage of fools). The mining legislation was written by mining interests to grease the skids for a massive new mine with as little real oversight as the miners and their republican enablers thought they could get away with. Apart from gouging a jagged 4-mile scar across the Penokee range (among the most pristine areas of Wisconsin), having a mine of the scale proposed and the tailings it will generate perched in the upstream reaches of the Bad River drainage is a sword of Damocles suspended over the heart of the Bad River Ojibwa. Civilized and honorable people do not do such things to one another.
Bad River estuary (Google Earth)
My Pastor once told a story about being so moved by the beauty of a mountain stream that she felt compelled to kneel, wet her hand, and make the sign of the cross as a gesture of gratitude to the creator. She later gave me a book about connecting worship and ecology. The book asserts that early Christians instinctively worshiped near water and that this impulse predated Christianity itself. Moreover, one of the earliest known guides for the practice of Christian worship (the
Didache) instructed that baptism should be performed with immersion in a pool of “living” (i.e. flowing) water, and if not flowing then cold, and if not flowing or cold or enough for an immersion, then whatever you’ve got. The implication being that the ideal for the sacrament (i.e. sacred act) of baptism was bodily commitment to flowing and wild surface water rather than a sprinkling from a sterile and tepid bowl encased in a font under a roof somewhere. I get this. I like infusing this particular ritual means of grace with a real connection to the watershed where one lives and the gracious and blessed presence of flowing water. I suspect my Lutheran pastor would understand this. And despite different religious traditions, I am all but certain that my Ojibwa brothers and sisters would.
We rail against big political malfeasances here at the Daily Kos and we often scale our concern to the magnitude of the issue. At a certain level, the proposed mine and the small Ojibwa community in northern Wisconsin are small potatoes when evaluated against big-ticket issues like gun safety and climate change. But we degrade our humanity by degrees when we fail to stand against local injustices where we find them. The mining legislation is rightly criticized as an affront to Wisconsin’s tradition of good government and progressive environmental regulation. This should not diminish the fact that it’s also an affront to the human rights of the Bad River Ojibwa people in the way that it puts the river and the estuary at the center of their culture in jeopardy. The Ojibwa are not citizens of Wisconsin in the sense that I am. By treaty, they are a sovereign people and they contend that the government of Wisconsin has not consulted them in the government to government fashion that is their right. These same treaties specifically give the Ojibwa the right to gather the wild rice.
I recall the emotional punch that the Bad River singers delivered when they brought their drum circle to the capitol during the Wisconsin protests – it was a bookend on par with the emotional punch delivered by the firefighters marching with their bagpipes. These heroic people stood with us despite a history of ill treatment by various incarnations of our government. The Ojibwa people strike me as patient. Their backs are against the wall on this but they remain resolute. I am told that we are now entering a new phase in the battle against a mine in the Bad River watershed and that this new phase will be fought in court rooms and in the realm of public opinion. Eventually this battle may be fought elsewhere. I don’t know how this ends. I do know this. I will take my muddy boots and stand with the Bad River Ojibwa.
More on the Bad River Ojibwa from their website: http://www.badriver-nsn.gov/
More on the mining legislation from the Wisconsin League of Conservation Voters: http://conservationvoters.org/...