Listen to the second episode of the North Shore's 'It Happens Here' podcast

INTERVIEWER: Last week on the show, we heard the first episode of a podcast by our friends at WTIP North Shore Community Radio. It's called, It Happens Here, The Roots of Racial Inequity on the North Shore, and it recently won first place for the Best Radio Series from the Midwest Broadcast Journalists Association. In the second episode, producers Staci Drouillard and Leah Lemm take us to Isle Royale on Lake Superior.

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LEAH LEMM: Boozhoo, hello. I'm Leah Lemm, a citizen of the Mille Lacs Band of Ojibwe and independent producer of the Native Lights podcast.

STACI DROUILLARD: And I'm Staci Drouillard, a Grand Portage Ojibwe descendant and WTIP producer. This episode focuses on the experiences of Ojibwe people along the North Shore, who share a cultural connection to the islands on Lake Superior. On August 17, 2021, WTIP travel to Isle Royale National Park for a special flag ceremony. Here is Rhonda Silence reporting from that day.

RHONDA SILENCE: All right, I'm speaking with Tribal Councilmember John Morrin. A lot of us know this as Isle Royale, but what actually is the name of the land on which we're speaking?

JOHN MORRIN: Minong.

RHONDA SILENCE: Minong, Minong. All right. And we're here for a special ceremony. The National Park Service is recognizing the-- that Grand Portage Band of Lake Superior Chippewa, this is their land. And that was-- happened a while ago. There was a ceremony. The park recognized that.

JOHN MORRIN: Yes, about a year and a half ago, I think. It was designated a significant cultural area.

RHONDA SILENCE: Yes.

JOHN MORRIN: So yeah, and that's reinforcing what it was in our history. It's always been a cultural area. We'd come out and do ceremonies, hunting and fishing. So it was an important place to our people for sustenance and a spiritual place.

RHONDA SILENCE: Forever, that's been?

JOHN MORRIN: Yes, yes.

STACI DROUILLARD: And so today we're asking the question, what does the word forever mean when it's used to describe why Minong is a culturally significant place for the Grand Portage Ojibwe? Here's how John Morrin quantifies it.

JOHN MORRIN: A place where our people, for thousands of years, came to do ceremonies. It's a real important acknowledgment of the Grand Portage people and our place here on this part of Turtle Island.

LEAH LEMM: The Grand Portage flag that now flies at Isle Royale was created by Gordon Lagarde, a Grand Portage Band member. The flag's seal has four images on it-- an arrow, a caribou, a pipe, and a turtle. According to the band's documentation about the symbolism of the flag, the turtle represents, quote, "Turtle Island, which is the center of the universe for the Anishinaabe," end quote.

Turtle Island refers to a much bigger place sometimes called Anishinaabe Aki, the traditional ancestral homelands of the Ojibwe people. This idea of traditional homelands is going to be important as we begin to delve into the history of land acquisition on the North Shore and how that history relates to racial and social inequities over time.

STACI DROUILLARD: Anton Treuer is a professor of Ojibwemowin at Bemidji State University. He's also a historian, author, and cultural competency trainer. He has shared more about the ancient Ojibwe and how the people first arrived at Turtle Island.

ANTON TRUER: The ancestors of the Ojibwe are pretty ancient-- many thousands of years ago, still living here in North America. In fact, when the last major Ice Age retreated 11,000 years ago, there were humans living throughout the Great Lakes. And at the same time that our DNA is ancient, there's a group often called Algonquian, some people refer to as Algic, as kind of the mother group. There are 29 different tribes from the Algonquian language family, and Ojibwe is one of those tribes.

LEAH LEMM: There are seven Ojibwe reservations in Minnesota-- Bois Forte or Nett Lake, Fond Du Lac, Red Lake, Leech Lake, Mille Lacs, White Earth, and Grand Portage-- but there is a lot of history that happened before those reservation borders were assigned. Here's more from Professor Treuer.

ANTON TRUER: Some couple thousand years ago, we were all living along the Atlantic Coast. And the food resources there are pretty abundant. And so there was a population boom. And then when there would be cyclical stresses on that like a big drought, then people would compete over resources and start moving away. But all of North America was already inhabited.

So for those practical reasons and then also because we had prophets who appeared among the people saying-- foretelling of dangerous and hard times and to move to the land where food grows on water, a reference to the wild rice, there was a slow process of movement in migration from the East to the West long before Europeans ever arrived. It wasn't like everyone packed up their bags and marched from Maine to Grand Portage.

It's more like over a period of hundreds of years, people would slowly move upriver, often in peaceful arrangements with other groups, sometimes times in conflict. And as that happened, the Ojibwe emerged as a people different from the Ottawa, the Potawatomi, the Cree, and other tribes who are our linguistic and cultural cousins. So the emergence of the Ojibwe as a distinct group probably happened a couple thousand years ago.

STACI DROUILLARD: The Ojibwe creation story tells how the islands on the Great Lakes were first created by a being called Sky Woman with help from a great turtle and a little muskrat, who dove deep down below the surface of the water and brought up a piece of Earth which formed Mackinac Island, Isle Royale, and eventually Anishinaabe Aki.

LEAH LEMM: In his book, Minong, author Tim Cochrane writes that in the creation story, the mud from the bottom of the lake, brought to the surface by the muskrat, comes from near Isle Royale. It is one of the many reasons that the island is considered to be a place of great significance to the Grand Portage Anishinaabe. As Tim Cochrane explains, the name Minong means the good place, something that was shared with him by a number of Grand Portage elders, like his friend and consultant, Ellen Olson.

TIM COCHRANE: She could just tell you the reason that many Portagers came here is because they believed there was a purity to the fish that there wasn't on the shore, and there was a purity to the resources here, and also that there is a marine influence here, because there's so much humidity, that the plants are stronger. They're more potent. And you start hearing things like that. And they make sense.

STACI DROUILLARD: In 2019, when Isle Royale received status as the traditional cultural property of the Grand Portage Band, this kind of cultural knowledge that had developed over 2,000 years was formally recognized by the National Park Service for the very first time.

LEAH LEMM: We'll learn more about Minong in the next episode, specifically how the history of the Anishinaabe people on the island was systematically erased and how the Grand Portage Band along with a number of allies were able to bring that history to the surface. For WTIP, I'm Leah Lemm.

STACI DROUILLARD: And I'm Stacey Drouillard. It Happens Here is a production of WTIP North Shore Community Radio and is funded by the Minnesota Arts and Cultural Heritage Fund.

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INTERVIEWER: That was Episode 2 of the award-winning series, It Happens Here, The Roots of Racial Inequity on the North Shore. You can tune in next Wednesday to hear more from that series, and you can find all the episodes at WTIP.org.