The story of how the past century of fire phobia has really mucked up our forests isn’t new, but this new 16-min video with gorgeous photography tells it in a personal way. Featuring Vern Northrup of Fond du Lac, Damon Panek of Red Cliff, and Lane Johnson of the Cloquet Forestry Center.
One hundred years ago today the Duluth Herald reported on military honors given to John Defoe, who the paper credits as “the first American Indian who fell in the World war to be returned to his native land for burial.”
Fond du Lac Reservation elder Sharon Shuck makes masks to donate to the doctors and nurses of Fond du Lac Health and Human Services Division.
In its series The Slice, WDSE-TV presents short “slices of life” that capture the events and experiences that bring people together and speak to what it means to live up north.
The Superior Telegram reports the city of Superior and Wisconsin Historical Society are working to place a portion of Wisconsin Point on the National Register of Historic Places.
The story notes “the boundaries for the site would extend from the access road to the bird sanctuary on the bay side of Wisconsin Point and extend south to about Lot 15.” The site was a campsite and burial place for Ojibwe people until the 20th century.
The “old” cemetery off Reservation Road northwest of Cloquet.
This book sparked a search into a Cloquet mystery from 87 years ago.
I’m not sure how I acquired the book, but there it sat, on the passenger seat of my car as I drove up Reservation Road northwest of Cloquet. There are some things you wish you could unsee — because a history buff like me wants all the facts. Alas, those facts can be elusive, especially so many years from an event. This was the case with a strange little entry in Six Feet Under: A Graveyard Guide to Minnesota.
I’m not into the morbid route to history that this little guide offers. That was my mother. She had dozens of books along the lines of “Wisconsin Death Trip,” “Hollywood Book of the Dead” or “Myths and Mysteries: Strange Stories of the Dead” on her shelves. Morbidly, she died earlier this year and perhaps that is how this book floated into my stacks. She redeemed herself in recent years by ditching the stories of others and digging into her own family history, a genealogy I greatly appreciate today.
A recently launched website is offering an indigenous perspective on the history of Duluth and the surrounding area. Onigamiinsing Dibaajimowinan — Duluth’s Stories Website was created with the mission “to share the deep history and continuing presence of Native people within Duluth.” The site was created by the Fond du Lac Band of Lake Superior Chippewa and grew out of an ethnographic study completed in 2012 for the Duluth Indigenous Commission. The study involved archaeology and history studied through documents and oral interviews. The study is available online in PDF form.
Frank Sander spends his first night in a tipi.
I was on my way into work this morning and I saw some young people from the Take Back Our Rez Facebook group walking along Big Lake Road on Fond du Lac Reservation. That’s like the equivalent of rush hour as it is the main artery to and from Highway 33 and I-35, lots of cars headed up and down the road on the way to work or school.
I’m not sure if that headline is sufficiently dramatic, or maybe overly dramatic, but I am just having trouble wrapping my head around this chart from the September 2012 (PDF link) Fond du Lac Tribal Newspaper (Nahgahchiwanong Dibahjimowinnan).
It shows the Fond du Lac people falling into a demographic abyss. Disappearing as a people by 2080.
Ever wonder what happened to all the remains from the old Indian cemetery on Wisconsin Point? According to this YouTube video, over 100 burials were “dumped” along the banks of the Nemadji River at the St. Francis Cemetery in Superior. Their bones and artifacts crop up to this day as the banks continue to erode.
