I’m a nature person. My spiritual life is connected to nature and I live surrounded by it now. It wasn’t always that way however. I lived in Colorado for many years and it was a lovely place to grow up. I still have family and friends there and I visit when I can. But it stopped being “home” a few years before Covid hit. It wasn’t feeding me anymore energetically. Slowly, that land withdrew from me and I knew that the time was coming for me to move once again, and this time it would be to the place I called the home of my heart, Upper Michigan, and specifically to my home reservation along Keweenaw Bay.

I had never lived up here before but vacations were here and my mom’s side of the family are here too. We are the Indigenous people here, the Anishinaabe/Ojibwe. Our reservation here is an open one, meaning that anyone can live on it. You can buy a house here and live, but we retain the “ownership” of the land. Ownership, of course, is a non-indigenous way of thinking. We know the earth belongs to itself and Spirit.

We share this place, the U.P., with many other cultures: Finnish, Irish, English and many more. Up north is Michigan Technological University where over 100 countries are represented in the student body and professors. Back in the old days, mining for copper was a main industry, along with timber/lumberjacks, ship building and fishing. For the most part we all get along. When tragedy strikes, we pull together in a way that you don’t see in the cities anymore. It’s a beautiful thing to watch and know that if it happens to me, they will be there.

We live around a bay of Lake Superior. The largest fresh water lake in the world, it’s an inland sea. It controls so much of the weather here. It can be so beautiful that you are awestruck. And it can be so strong that it becomes a destructive force that will terrify you. There’s over 200 shipwrecks lying on the bottom, including the Edmond Fitzgerald. My grandfather taught me a rhyme for the water to keep me safe: when its gray, stay away. It’s big, powerful and intimidating to some. When you live around it, you learn to respect it.

We might be different in a wide variety of ways, but we have one thing in common: we go to the water. People take their lunches there. Naps. Walks. Parking and staring at the water. Whatever brings you there, you go. We talk to it. Cry before it. Pray and lay tobacco and sage on the shore. We go to the water.

What makes it different, at least to me, is that it feels unique here. I’ve been to other places with water and saw people doing the same thing but it feels different here. No one makes fun of or laughs at this behavior. It’s normal here. It’s respected. You don’t bother someone who’s at the water, unless you know they are expecting you. We might see your car there, and you sitting inside, but we know what you’re doing. We won’t interrupt.

It’s nice to know that I can go there alone and no one bothers me because they understand it. We who live here are surrounded by trees, creatures and water. We love this wilderness. And we all go to the water.