A Sacred Trust
The Superior Lake Walkers
by Mark Dunn HighGrader Magazine Sept./Oct. 2000

"Natural laws determine the balance of life here on earth. The Great Lakes watershed is not exempt from these laws; people are not exempt from these laws. If there is to be a meaningful future for the Great Lakes, a sustainable future, then people must understand and abide by these natural laws. To do otherwise is to participate in mass euthanasia - cultural suicide."
-Walter Makoonse Bresette, 1947 - 1999
A Declaration For the Great Lakes: The Seventh Generation Initiative

We knew they were travellers the moment they walked into our café. It was the accent - that unmistakable American drawl - that gave them away. And judging by the speed in which they worked through the menu, they'd been on the road for some time. Maria, my partner, and I rushed to fill the orders, not a moment to talk with our new guests.
It goes that way sometimes. In the summer, as wanderers from every corner of the globe pass through town, there is little time to chat. Ironic, considering that meeting and chatting are the main functions of a café. There were about twelve people in their group. Two toddlers, a woman in a wheelchair, and a tall fellow who walked around like he owned the place.
"Can I leave these here?" the tall guy asked.
He placed a sheaf of pamphlets on the counter and followed his crew out into the day. After the café had closed for the evening, I had a chance to look at what he'd left behind. I could hardly believe what I read.
"Holy shit," I said out loud. "These guys are walking around Lake Superior."

I was amazed that no word of the walkers had preceded them. The highly publicized Trans Canada 2000 Relay - sponsored by industrial giants such as Jeep, Canada Trust, Imperial Oil and media juggernauts like the Globe and Mail and Maclean's - was making its historic way through manicured trails at the same time the Lake Superior walkers, supported only by donations, were dodging cars along ragged northern highways. It seemed a shame.
According to the poster, the action was billed as: "A Walk To Remember: A sacred journey around Lake Superior to bring forth a community vision to protect the air, land and water. . ." The group, known as 'the walkers' left the Bad River Reservation in northern Wisconsin on the 29th of June and arrived in Sault Ste. Marie on the 3rd of August.
The Sault, called Bawating by the Anishinabe, turned out to be the longest stopover on the 1,200 mile journey. And a perfect place for a lengthy stay it is, as the area was the meeting place for Great Lakes native folks long before Étienne Brulé arrived to claim the rapids for God and Country.

Origins of the Walk
The idea of a pilgrimage around the big lake was hatched during a meeting in the Sault hosted last year by the Ontario Metis Aboriginal Association. At the meeting, natives and non-natives gathered to voice concern over the health of the Great Lakes, the world's largest supply of freshwater. The Great Lakes Water Quality Agreement [WQA], signed in 1972 by the United States and Canada, had promised to protect the lakes from industrial discharges. One of the main features of the WQA is the goal of zero toxic emissions.
In 1999, it seemed the two nations were preparing to renegotiate that goal, but bowed to public pressure and reaffirmed their commitment to the Agreement. Either way, both sides had 18 years to make good on the promise. At the meeting, it was decided that work needed to be done to educate communities bordering the watershed about the dangers of toxicity.
According to statistics released by Great Lakes United, an international coalition of environmental groups, hunters, anglers, unions and concerned communities along the lakes, 321 million pounds of toxic emissions from 3,736 industrial facilities entered the Great Lakes in 1996 alone.
The figures were compiled by the U.S General Accounting Office, which is careful to add that the number reflects only the reported volume of waste and could represent as little as 5% of total emissions for that year.
As Reg Gilbert, Communications Officer with Great Lakes United, explained, "On a slightly reassuring note, remember that all these substances are toxic, that is, harmful to life, but that most also break down in the environment relatively quickly. They are harmful mostly to the people and animals that live nearby. That being said, given the enormous quantities involved - and the fact that some chemicals, like the family of 700 chemicals known as dioxins, have very toxic effects at unimaginably low levels and are not even reported - there is still a great deal of very long-lived, very toxic stuff being released."
The walkers credit Walter Bresette, a Lake Superior Chippewa from Wisconsin, as the visionary behind the journey. Bresette, a well-known ecological and native rights activist died in 1999, two months before the meetings were held. Bresette had envisioned an international community of people from every cultural background, joined together by their proximity and concern for the Great Lakes.
As Butch Stone, a walker from Bad River Wisconsin, explained, "It is a collective vision. We - and when I say we I mean all the people involved with the walk, all the people involved with pollution issues in the past - are here to protect the water, air and earth for future generations. This walk is to raise awareness.
"We need the help of all people. Our fear is that we are running out of time. The EPA is not doing enough to protect people. Here in Canada, you have fish (eating) advisories and water contamination. How many Walkertons will it take before the government lives up to its responsibilities? One thousand? One million?
"When we talk about who is polluting, we are talking about multi-national corporations. And the governments of the United States and Canada are subsidizing this irresponsible behavior. When are the people going to wake up and ask where their tax money is going? We have to make a choice between the destructive path we're on and a path toward peace and cleaning up the contaminants our ancestors created. There is a way to turn the clean-up into jobs, to swing away from manufacturing and concentrate on using and reusing what we already have. We have to find that way."

The Bad River Reservation, where the journey around the lake began, has a well-earned reputation for backing belief with affirmative action. It was there, in 1996, that native rights activists stared down INMET, whose Copper Range Corporation had planned to use sulfuric acid in its White Pine Mine in Michigan's Upper Peninsula (for more on INMET see Bad Blood - HighGrader Magazine Jan. 1996 -ed). Train loads of the substance were set to travel along derelict rails through Bad River country.
The plan inspired a month long blockade of the tracks. Copper Range pulled out shortly after, calling the project "economically unfeasible".
The walkers were camped out at the Healing Lodge in Garden River First Nations Reservation just east of Sault Ste. Marie when I caught up with them again. The Healing Lodge is a one-of-a-kind structure: a circular sweat lodge built of wood, large enough to accommodate three hundred, possibly more.
It was the life project of the late Dan Pine, a direct descendant of the great Chief Shingwauk, who, among other accomplishments, founded the concept of Native Studies. Pine worked years to build the Healing Lodge (which has four entrances, one for each direction, one for each race) and he passed on shortly after its completion.
Under a hot August sun I set out to gather the facts of the journey. But it wasn't long before note pad and pen were put aside and the picnic table on which I'd set up a temporary office abandoned for a seat on the dry grass to listen to stories from walker Mel Rasmussen, the tall guy from the café.
Children appeared seemingly out of nowhere, gathering around for a tale or two. Someone told me long ago that to truly listen, one must open the ear of the heart. I had discounted this advice as poetic mumbo-jumbo until that moment, when I found the ears on my head to be inadequate listening tools. With a few short sentences, Rasmussen explained the Anishinabe cosmology and their concept of the universe.
I will not dishonour these beliefs with an attempt to relate them, only to say that nothing in thirteen years of Catholic schooling had ever touched me so deeply.
"When you walk a great length for a month or two, you are given a whole new understanding of time and distance," said Rasmussen of the walkers', journey. "Along the way, we see road signs saying 'Restaurant Five Minutes Ahead'. Time has a way of stretching when you're on foot. That five minutes can go on for an hour."
Rasmussen and his fellow travellers were disturbed to encounter advisories on fish consumption and water boil warnings in many of the communities they passed through.
"Something bad is happening to the water," he said. "A natural order that has existed for thousands of years has been compromised in a few short centuries. This walk is only the first part, the beginning of a movement. The First Nations of Canada and the U.S. are pulling together. We are becoming one nation, a nation of Lake Superior Anishinabe."

The Sleeping Giant
There is a widely known legend of the Sleeping Giant, Nanabozho, the hero-god of many Ojibway tales, who, according to one version, lay down at the Lakehead to protect the silver beneath the ground. The Sleeping Giant has become a symbol of native potential and destiny.
"When that giant wakes up," said Mel Rasmussen, "there's going to be a serious ass whooping." According to Fond du Lac tribal elder Esther Nagahnub, Nanabozho is not the only one asleep. "The people of the lake need to wake up," she said. "We have become complacent, too busy with day-to-day activities, and have not noticed the condition of the lakes. One of the earliest signs of trouble began when bottled water became fashionable. Everybody was buying the stuff and in the meantime the waters in our lakes and rivers became undrinkable. It happened so gradually, right before our eyes, that no one even noticed."
On that day at the healing lodge, Esther sat in a wheelchair with one bandaged ankle propped up. She'd broken it in Wawa the previous week. The cast, she said, was too tight, so she hacked it off with a butcher knife.
A central symbol to their journey is a wooden staff adorned with eagle feathers and ribbons of every imaginable colour. The Protect the Earth Eagle Staff has been around for 15 years and has been present at every ceremony during that time. The staff is carried at the front of the procession. The walkers may rest, riding in one of the support vehicles that trail behind, but the staff moves only by foot.
"We are propelled by the staff," said Al Hunter, the keeper of the icon and chief organizer of the walk. "The staff gives us direction. It is our momentum."
"The staff is a solidifying point, a focal point around which we focus the strength of our knowledge and teachings," explained Mel Rasmussen. "It has its own power, its own magic, if you want to call it that."
Explaining the faith that fueled the grueling journey, Butch Stone said, "We are guided and directed through our ceremonies. We are doing only the physical tasks of walking and speaking with the people we meet, but we are serving a higher power. Through our ceremonies, we learn of our responsibilities to Our Mother, the Earth. The plants, the fish, the medicinal herbs, the trees cannot speak for themselves. It is our duty to be their voices. They have always been there for us, these things have sustained us for millennia. Now, it is our turn to help them."
On August 9, 2000, the United Nations, Day of Aboriginal People, the walkers, their supporters and well-wishers gathered beside the St. Mary's River in Sault Ste. Marie. The crowd was led through a water ceremony which culminated in offerings of tobacco and coins to the river.
The coins were tossed into the water as a gesture to "give back the precious metals that have been torn from the earth."
Songs were sung to the rhythm of a ceremonial drum.
"We pray that you accept our gift of tobacco. We pray that you guide us. We are not in charge. We are not in charge," offered Al Hunter to the spirits of Bawating. The walkers, led by the eagle staff, followed the St. Mary River to the International Bridge, where they crossed into Michigan. A small group of supporters standing on the Canadian side broke into enthusiastic applause as the walkers climbed the bridge, everyone of us wishing we could make the journey ourselves.

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