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In the spring of 2015, Chris Cline and his Gogebic mining company decided that tearing open the Penokee Hills of northern Wisconsin to mine low-grade taconite was just not worth it. Chinese demand had faded, causing the worldwide price to drop. But had Cline’s plan come to fruition, the water and air of the Bad River wetlands would have been poisoned.
Disaster averted, right? Maybe not.
Those of us living on the Bad River Chippewa reservation, along with numerous non-native community members in Iron and Ashland counties, celebrated the end of Gogebic’s threat, but Tribal Chairman Mike Wiggins was never convinced the threat was over.
Wiggins was quick to point out that Cline owned the mining rights to the Penokees. He could decide to start up his machines at any time or sell those rights to another corporation. He had the full backing of Republican Governor Scott Walker and the Republican-controlled legislature.
And so it goes throughout most of Indian Country. Mineral extraction is only one of a number of threats that tribes have had to confront since the days the reservation system displaced—some would say confined—Indian people. Tribal sovereignty, the right to protect American Indian land and people, is precarious at best. Indians know that at any point the President, Congress, and the U.S. Supreme Court could do away with Indian-federal treaties, dismantle reservations, and open up tribal lands to the highest bidder.
In the last few years, the only real hope to stop invasive pipelines and iron and gold mines has been a shift in mainstream American environmental thinking.
In the last few years, the only real hope to stop invasive pipelines and iron and gold mines has been a shift in mainstream American environmental thinking. People all over this country have awakened to the threat resource extraction poses to the planet.
Patty Loew
But for generations, tribal people have understood and practiced safe keeping of the land. Knowing how little of this knowledge is understood by non-Indians, I thought of Patricia Loew’s Seventh Generation Ethics: Native Voices of Wisconsin, published by Wisconsin Historical Society Press. Loew shares a collection of stories and profiles of Indian leaders and earth protectors from each of Wisconsin’s twelve tribes, describing how American Indians view their relationship with the earth and how they have been blessed with the harvests given by it.
Loew, an enrolled member of the Bad River Band of Lake Superior Chippewa, writes with the insights of decades worth of intimate relationships with these earth protectors, and so is able to reveal hidden indigenous transcripts. The book was published in 2014, but it is worth picking up now, given the greater urgency in these times of increasing corporate threats to Indian land.
Jenny and Mary Thunder, profiled in Loew’s book, were two prominent Potawatomi medicine women who carried on the handed-down practice of gathering natural healing plants. Like many Indians of the Upper Great Lakes, they “used plants like goldenseal, whose roots were used to treat inflammation and pneumonia, and seneca snakeroot, the leaves and roots of which were used for colds, sore throats, and toothaches.”
While the federal government was forcibly removing many Potawatomie from their homelands, the Thunders stayed and tended to the land until their passing in the early 1980s.
All of this is critical since promised federal healthcare was either inferior or nonexistent for Indians. And during the boarding school era the untimely deaths of Indian children due to disease was widespread. One has to wonder if more than language and culture were stolen from these children.
This earth knowledge is in danger of extinction. Indigenous practices of gathering and preparing these plants for medicinal purposes will mean nothing if the forests, lakes, rivers, and swamps are drained or polluted by corporate resource extraction.
Hilary “Sparky” Waukau, a Menominee, was known as an “environmental warrior.” A World War II veteran, Sparky helped lead the fight to restore his tribe’s nationhood, ending the federal government’s tribal termination policy. And he recognized the power of locking arms with other tribes, demanding their treaty rights to fish and hunt on ancestral land. At the time, during the mid-1980s, there was white fear that the Ojibwe of Wisconsin would deplete the state’s natural resources. That never happened because generations of these Woodland Indians spear-fished and hunted for sustenance, not sport.
In 1976, Exxon announced the discovery of a large zinc-copper ore deposit in northern Wisconsin and proposed a mine. Its development could have poisoned the waterways and forests of three tribes in Wisconsin. Although the mine was never built, Sparky noted the potential severity of destruction, not just to Indian people, but to all people. “First the animals would go—the fish species, the eagles, ospreys. If they go, then we go next.”
These stories all testify to how vital earth respect is to healthy communities.
Today, the Menominee face a new threat to their waters. Across the Menominee River in Michigan, a Canadian company wants to create an open-pit zinc and gold mine. The “Back Forty,” as it’s known, once again threatens the tribe’s and surrounding communities’ wildlife and waters.
Other environmental warriors profiled by Loew include Walter Bressette, Red Cliff Ojibwe, who among other efforts, helped stop a railroad caravan of acid, iron ore and, and other mining by-products from cutting across the Bad River reservation in northern Wisconsin.
These stories all testify to how vital earth respect is to healthy communities, even those with little power and resources. Thankfully, that same recognition and spirit has found new life outside of Indian Country. The fight against the corporate profiteers who defile our planet can only be strengthened by sharing indigenous knowledge.
Seventh Generation Earth Ethics should not gather dust on some library shelf. It should be read by all who want to learn more about the vital pursuit of earth preservation and stewardship. As famed activist and White Earth Anishinaabe Winona LaDuke notes in the book’s forward, finding respect and balance with the earth begins with understanding not ours, but the land's longing to have a relationship with us: “The land calls us. It calls us home. And it makes us the people our ancestors long for us to be.”
Mark Anthony Rolo is an enrolled member of the Bad River Band of Lake Superior Chippewa and author of the memoir My Mother Is Now Earth.