My immigrant ancestors first came to the Superior wilderness long about 1880, at least some of them via the stagecoach.
It was a hard place.
Image courtesy of the Philip J. Kucera collection
The family settled in some twenty-five miles east of the still fairly new Bad River reservation, a sovereign territory established by legal treaty in 1854.
Though of course it'd been indigenous land since the first human got there.
In any event, once my tribe arrived, all along the Gogebic Iron Range the landscape was radically transformed in basically no time at all.
Image courtesy of the Philip J. Kucera collection
While on and around Bad River land it never was, much. All the way
to today.
1955, foreign oil giant Enbridge lays 645 miles of pipeline across sovereign U.S. territory, primarily to transfer a steady wealth of Canadian oil and gas from
one part of Canada to another.
2013, the legal easement for that leaky line to cross
roughly 12 miles of Bad River land ended. The tribe told the company
to pack up its poorly maintained pipeline and go home.
Thanks to the Wisconsin Citizen's Media Cooperative
Foreign oil giant Enbridge simply said ‘No.’
2019, the Bad River Band sued Enbridge, claiming not only that the Company
was trespassing but that the aged line was just one major flood event away from presenting an existential threat to their indigenous
way of life.
2023, the U.S. District Court agreed on both counts, yet gave the company until June 2026 to close down and get the hell off tribal land.
The way things are going these days, I’ll not bet the rent.
Meanwhile, on another side of the world…
Terra Vista – a Brazil se Fato documentary
My dear friend Avital’s daughter Noa Cykman is brilliant. Soon to be a Ph.D. The fruit didn’t fall far from that tree, for sure.
Noa’s 2024 documentary Terra Vista allows a long abused native people to speak for themselves and on their own behalf, as they work toward reestablishing stewardship over both their culture and the ancestral environment it sprang from.
The native landscape long ravaged by commercial exploitation was returned to the locals only after their land was deemed spent. Cykman’s fine film tells what’s essentially a positive story, even given the historically grim context.
Today these folk are reclaiming what’s always been theirs, way of life included. It’s hard work, as you’ll imagine. And the landscape will never again be what it once was. Neither, I suppose, will they.
But they’ll make do.
Because indigenous resilience in the face of everything is the natural way of the world.
*
The past is irretrievable.
At best, it’s our teacher. At
worst a lie people cling to, as if magical thinking might somehow someday actually save us from ourselves.
The future but a dream.
Anyone tells you otherwise is
lying or stupid. All too often, both.
Only now is everything that counts.
As knowledge applied (or not) today steadily shoves our future forward, all together.
