Kayla Wikaryasz-News Staff Writer

The legend lives on from the Chippewa on down

Of the big lake they called Gitche Gumee

In the fourth grade my class learned about thousands of years of Michigan history from the glaciers that carved out the Great Lakes to the Anishinaabe natives navigating the unprecedented introduction to international trade, disease, and war.

I enjoyed the course though it did not teach the lessons my mother taught me about the Anishinaabe, my maternal grandfather’s ancestors.

“Natives can’t handle liquor,” she’d say.

My mom told me that as French traders descended upon the New World, they gave our ancestors “fire water” to compromise negotiations and turn our ancestors against each other.

“We killed each other,” my mother said.

My mother taught me that since that first fateful introduction, alcoholism has plagued our people. Her experiences only prove the “drunken native” stereotype that others try to dispel.

My grandfather — the native — worked for a Michigan-based shipping company from ’63 to ’68. He sailed on the freighters that hauled raw material from LaFarge to Duluth, Minnesota — through the gales of Lake Superior, a fresh-water sea that my ancestors called gichi-gami, though later colloquially referred to as Gitche Gumee in popular culture.

My grandfather sailed on Gitche Gumee until alcoholism crept into his life — a seductress with piercing phantom cries of a siren.

Those few years working on the ships must have imprinted upon my grandfather, as he was infatuated with the Edmund Fitzgerald for the rest of his life.

The Edmund Fitzgerald sank on Gitche Gumee back in ’75 – 50 years ago on Nov. 10 — and serves as an underwater graveyard for 29 people. It has also been immortalized in song by an Irish-Canadian, Gordon Lightfoot.

My mother said my grandfather often listened to Gordon Lightfoot’s “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald” and cry. Perhaps he saw himself as one of those lost sailors? Perhaps he was looking for his own lighthouse through his own storm?

My mother’s lessons of our ancestry were rooted in distant Anishinaabe traditions that were translated into teachings of environmental stewardship, reverence for elders, and a healthy fear for unseen, powerful spirits. In her teachings, she also always warned against the mightiness of Gitche Gumee, which she must have learned from her father.

My grandfather believed Gitche Gumee was a capricious spirit with unyielding emotions. I wonder what it was like for him to sail over a lake so big — so deep and so cold — that at night the dark sky melds with the water, like an ever-expanding puddle of spilled ink.

Many cultures believe water holds energy, memories, and is a conductor for spirits. Though my grandfather is long-gone, I feel his presence every time I hear the crashing of waves from a Great Lake. Just from a single drop of water from Lake Huron, I can feel the heartbeat of my grandfather’s ancestral home — Gitche Gumee.

For some reason, Gitche Gumee spared my grandfather but took many others to watery graves. Perhaps Gitche Gumee gave my grandfather a lesson he did not heed.

My mother always says certain quirks and physical characteristics of mine are from my native-ness — flat feet and droopy eyes echo the characteristics of the ancestry to which my maternal side traces our lineage.

When I walk barefoot — so as to feel the Earth’s diaphragm contract against my tender flesh — I find myself almost satiated, inching closer to pacifying my insatiable desire to meld with the wilderness. To finally have tangible evidence that a fraction of my identity is of Anishinaabe lineage — of my grandfather’s blood.

Though my native patriarch has been dead since before I was born, he did show himself to me once in a dream, though I think his spirit did so by accident. He was wearing his burial suit in my backyard. He stood short and nonthreatening — he looked very sad and lost. As I approached, my grandfather started pulling yellowing skin off of his skull, leaving only bloody shreds behind.

If I close my eyes, I can enter that feverish dream again, and a voice behind me whispers, “He was sick in life and now in death.”

I wonder what his life would have been like if he had kept sailing. Did his choices anger Gitche Gumee to where she poisoned other aspects of his life? Did he disrespect the ancestors who held accountability and personal responsibility so high?

I believe Gitche Gumee demands respect and teaches us to endure the harshest storms. Especially as the winter months near and she becomes restless, just as we do, Gitche Gumee demands we be cautious and gracious through the November gales.

My grandfather — the unsettled, restless soul that he was — did not heed her warnings.

“Steady yourself against the gales,” Gitche Gumee says. “Steady yourself and sail straight and true. Find your lighthouse.”