Linda LeGarde Grover - Gichigami Hearts: Stories and Histories from Misaabekong

Also by Linda Le Garde Grover

Published by the University of Minnesota Press

The Road Back to Sweetgrass

In the Night of Memory

Onigamiising: Seasons of an Ojibwe Year

Linda LeGarde Grover

University of Minnesota Press

Minneapolis

London

Epigraph reprinted with permission from The Dance Boots: Stories by Linda LeGarde Grover (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2010).

The Stone Tomahawk was previously published in a different form in The State Were In, edited by Annette Atkins and Deborah L. Miller(St. Paul: Minnesota Historical Society Press, 2010).

Photographs are courtesy of the author, unless credited otherwise.

Copyright 2021 by Linda LeGarde Grover

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced,stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means,electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise,without the prior written permission of the publisher.

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isbn 978-1-4529-6625-0

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And so Elias joined his true love, Victoria,

and they joined the others who watch us

from far beyond where the sun sets,

the past that birthed the present

that even now births the future.

They pray as we pass into life,

they pray us through our lives,

they pray us as we pass out of life;

when we die, they pray our steps across the walk west.

Thus blessed, we live and die

in an air hung with their prayers,

the breath of their words on our faces and bodies,

their spirits among us,

trying to see and hear and understand.

Wegonen, what is it, we think.

Amanj i dash, and I wonder.

We ponder this all of our lives,

not realizing what we already know.

Artense Gallette

Angelique LaVierge and her husband, George Danielson,with daughters and grandchildren at their home on Park Point in Duluth, circa 1905

P ART OF A MASSIVE RIDGE of gabbro rock that extends southwest of Duluth and follows the north shore of Lake Superior into Canada, the Point of Rocks divides the city of Duluth in half.

The area around Duluth has been known by Ojibwe words that describe this terrain. One of these is Onigamiising, the place of the small portage, which refers to the five-mile-long sandbar not far from the Point of Rocks. Another is Misaabekong, the place of the giants. Standing on top of those walls of gabbro, or looking up at the mass of rock and trees from the valleys and lakeshore, we are standing among the giants.

In 1838, newlyweds Josepha Susan Neganigijigok and Gabriel Egomo LaVierge traveled from LaPointe, Wisconsin, on Madeline Island to Fond du Lac, the Ojibwe settlement next to the American Fur Post on the St. Louis River in Minnesota. Their first child, Angelique, was born in 1839 at the Fond du Lac settlement, in sight of the gabbro ridge before there was a Duluth, or a State of Minnesota, before the lands of the Minnesota Arrowhead were lost under the terms of the 1854 Treaty.

That baby girl lived to be an old woman. Angeliques children and grandchildren scattered under federal removals and relocations and became part of the Bois Forte, Fond du Lac, and Grand Portage bands. She died in the West End neighborhood, in sight of the western side of the Point of Rocks, and is buried in the Park Hill cemetery, next to her husband, a Civil War veteran. During her lifetime, Angelique had moved from one end of Duluth to the other, never far from the gabbro ridge and the Point of Rocks.

We, the descendants, are of this land and story, and this land and story are of us. We are honored to live in this place of the giants.

H ERE IN O NIGAMIISING Duluth, Minnesota, the small city on the western tip of Lake Superiora massive outcropping of gabbro rock, the Point of Rocks, divides the city in half. Never far from that uneven and rocky hill that affords views of Lake Superior to the east, and to the west, of Park Point peninsula and Lake Superior Harbor, to St. Louis Bay and then the St. Louis River, we Onigamiisingowininiwag, Native and non-Native, live surrounded by beauty created by the Great Spirit, the Creator, through the ages. This is both our history and our existence today.

Onigamiising is known by a few names besides that of Daniel Greysolon, Sieur du Lhut, the French explorer who arrived at this end of Lake Superior in 1679. Like other Europeans who made their way into the interior, he was looking for somethingmany were looking for areas rich in natural resources that could be harvested, especially furs, but I believe that a desire for peace and quiet, beauty, and setting foot on a land that other Europeans had never seen was also part of the quest. It is doubtful that he was surprised to find that there were already people living here: the Ojibwe who had themselves journeyed from the northeast coastal regions, from what is now northern New England, into Canada and Newfoundland. During the Great Migration of the Ojibwe, there were a number of places where people stopped and stayed, all spiritual and sacred because of their creation by the Great Spirit, the Creator, who sent the visions and dreams directing the journey. When Sieur du Lhut reached what is now the Fond du Lac neighborhood of far western Duluth, that place was already home to an established Ojibwe community. My ancestors, my fathers grandparents and the generations preceding them, had traveled from the east on a route that followed the Great Lakes to Sault Ste. Marie, on the far eastern end of Lake Superior where it joins Lake Huron. Some family groups continued westward to LaPointe, the Ojibwe community on Madeline Island in Wisconsin, and some went further to Fond du Lac, at the western end of Lake Superior. Others traveled northward from Sault Ste. Marie to Fort Frances, Ontario, and then south to Grand Portage, which is 150 miles northeast of present-day Duluth, and to the Bois Forte on Lake Vermilion, in northern Minnesota. At Fond du Lac, the LaVierges and LeGardes established lives and extended families that experienced upheavals, removals, returns, the breaking up of families, and the reconnection of families, as when my great-grandmother Lucy Ann married Muh-Quay-Mud and began their dynasty at Bois Forte, and when my grandmother Victoria and grandfather Elias, both students at the Vermilion Lake Indian School near Tower, Minnesota, met and joined families that had known and lived with one another for a very long time before European contact.