Bringing the International Year of Indigenous Languages closer to home

2019 has been proclaimed the Year of Indigenous Languages by the United Nations. The St. Croix River watershed, where we live, is home to both Chippewa (Ojibwe) and Dakota peoples. Wikipedia has a page discussing the St. Croix Chippewa Indians. The Science Museum of Minnesota has a Field Notes web page covering much of the history of settlement of the river valley.

"The St. Croix watershed has been occupied by indigenous people for perhaps 12,000 years, including the Dakota and Ojibwe to this day. Native people manipulated the landscape by setting fires, farming small plots, living in villages or seasonal camps, and just passing through."

St. Croix River from Wild River State Park

Photo by J. Harrington

The oldest settled community on the Upper St. Croix started as an Ojibwe village known as Amik. Several years ago we started, and never finished, a writing project focused on the St. Croix watershed. This year, in honor of the Year of Indigenous Languages, we're going to return to that project and research what we can find of Native American place names. The Northern Forest Center has a brief publication, focused on Maine, on the significance of Native American place names. That will continue to serve as an inspiration and general template for what we hope to accomplish. Wish us luck. We're going to start by reviewing an overview history commissioned by the National Park Service. From time to time we'll post here where we've gone from there, sort of like Hansel and Gretel's trail of crumbs.

I Was Sleeping Where the Black Oaks Move

By Louise Erdrich

We watched from the house

as the river grew, helpless

and terrible in its unfamiliar body.   

Wrestling everything into it,

the water wrapped around trees

until their life-hold was broken.

They went down, one by one,

and the river dragged off their covering.

Nests of the herons, roots washed to bones,   

snags of soaked bark on the shoreline:   

a whole forest pulled through the teeth   

of the spillway. Trees surfacing

singly, where the river poured off

into arteries for fields below the reservation.

When at last it was over, the long removal,   

they had all become the same dry wood.   

We walked among them, the branches   

whitening in the raw sun.

Above us drifted herons,

alone, hoarse-voiced, broken,

settling their beaks among the hollows.

Grandpa said, These are the ghosts of the tree people   

moving among us, unable to take their rest. 

Sometimes now, we dream our way back to the heron dance.   

Their long wings are bending the air   

into circles through which they fall.   

They rise again in shifting wheels.   

How long must we live in the broken figures   

their necks make, narrowing the sky.

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