WannaskaWriter

  "You'll never make it by 4:00 p.m." my son had said, knowing quite well the ever on-going construction along Highway 2 in the Duluth area and east toward Ashland, WI. I had kept a good speed since we had left home, driving faster than normal, taking the road through the Red Lake Nation to cut some time, hitting the lights just right through Grand Rapids, pausing briefly in Floodwood for Grandma's sake as she is so uncomfortable on long car trips.            Cutting any time at all from the seven and a half hour trip is quite a task since there seems a hundred small towns to slow down through between here and Red Cliff--and no interstates, save for the higher speed limits on the east-west Highway 2 which offers stretches of four-lane travel and passing lanes, but we have to travel a hundred miles to reach it and all of that on two-lane blacktops that during the summertime, are full of deer, bear, an occasional moose, a few canines, turtles, frogs and mosquitoes tr

   "Norwegians don't gather on such a regular basis all over the country. You don't see Swedes in their regalia walking past you with a festive air. You don't see friendly Finlanders shaking hands in some familiar fashion, palm-to-palm, thumbs-up, finger-grip, then slide--eyes all a-smile . You don't see those people wearing tattoos with the Four Directions on them, nor eagle feathers adorning dream catchers on their shoulders.    A Minnesota Ojibwe author wrote that many Native Americans are other cultures as well, but in my observations, none of those other cultures 'celebrate' their heritage as commonly as do Native Americans. The scandanavians don't waft smoking sweet grass or smudge before they dance or drum. I've never observed the solemnity of tradition, within my own heritage as that practiced by the Ojibwe embracing  their heritage, one event, one day at a time, but neither have I participated in my own heritage those of the clans of Euro

    For the fourth year in a row, I've spent my 4th of July in Red Cliff, Wisconsin. Red Cliff is a tiny Native American reservation north of Bayfield, WI, about 5 miles, and a stone's throw from the Apostle Island chain on Lake Superior or 'gichigami,' as they say in Ojibwe, and home to our 4-year old grandson.   Grandma, on his paternal side, has Metis as a part of her ancestry, and her son, our grandson's father, has Lakota as well, on his father's side. Our son and his son are very close to their Native heritage whereas, in contrast, I'm culturally anemic. My mother's parents and grandparents were Swede and Norwegian; and my father, by all counts, was Scots-Irish, neither of which was celebrated much when I was growing up except on Christmas or Thanksgiving when my mother would cook up a few pounds of reconstituted lutefisk in melted butter and urge me and my three sisters and their husbands to eat it--or at least taste it. As a child I disliked i