Yesterday I awoke with this very same idea being as my wife and I live
here 'in the middle of nowhere' away from all the rest of our immediate
family; the threat of contacting and spreading Covid, a further
isolating experience, making things terribly worse especially during
holiday periods and birthdays.
The wife stays in contact with our
children, and grandchildren via Facebook/FaceTime, etc; occasional
texts, and emails but, the way I see it, most of it is small talk
with little substantive exchange of information, something I lament
because their aging mother's/grandmother's, once-illustrative life is
little known among them. I foresee regret on their parts for not asking
her about herself NOW; born in 1944, what was her childhood like?; who
were her her parents? Her siblings? What did she think of as a young
girl. Where did she go to school? What was it like to raise four
children all under the age of five? Learn the story of her life as only
she can tell it before its too late.
We get caught up in the
immediate in the headlong rush of our lives, and don't think to ask the
elders about theirs, thinking or not thinking that they'll always be
there until they're not; then later by chance or design, learn something
about them that was unknown, then painfully realize their woeful
failure to ask them when they had the opportunity.
This is the first channel wide moving water I've seen since the spring of 2023 --and it's in February! On maps, the creek (or ‘crick' depending on your dialect) is spelled ‘Mickinock’ for the Anishinaabe man who lived at the Indian camp at Ross, but had seasonal camps around Wannaska and other places. The Euro-American immigrants who homesteaded here in Roseau County called him ‘Chief,’ but he may have been just a spokesperson who knew enough English to get things done peacefully and simultaneously meet the needs of his people; the word, ‘chief' was often used in derision of any Indigenous male adult. I spell Mikinaak the Ojibwe way, in a gesture of respect; what the Dakota, who were here before the Anishinaabeg/Chippewa, called this place, this body of moving water I don’t know; just as I don’t know who came before them exactly. I was told that one of Mikinaak's camps were here on our place in Palmville Township. Its locat...
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