A Home Near the Sweetwater Seas
Coming to Ground #14
Dearest Fellow Earthlings,
We all have stories of home: our home place which includes the features of the land, waters and all the more than human lives there; the people we come from, make our life with, and the home we make as we grow; the home within us, the home we wish for, the home we yearn to return to.
I have lived in southeast Michigan for nearly my entire life, and it took me a long while to love it and actually claim it as my home. I was born in Pennsylvania where my parents had been born and raised, so our “Home” was different than the place we lived. Throughout my childhood, we didn’t travel to places in Michigan outside of suburban Detroit. Any time my dad had a vacation from work, we traveled “home” to Pennsylvania. When I was growing up in the industrial area of Greater Detroit, I had no idea what a beautiful place Michigan is or how amazing the Great Lakes are. My discovery of and sense of belonging in this place, has grown along with me.
A glimpse of Lake Michigan:
Michigan is at the heart of the largest freshwater ecoregion in the world. This region, with its pine and hardwood forests, rocky coastlines, sandy beaches and dunes, wetlands, numerous inland lakes, rivers and streams, and the enormous freshwater seas within it, is truly a sweet spot on planet Earth. It is my hope that as I share about some of the beauty and complexity of my home place, you might also feel a tug to contemplate and to share the particular beauties and challenges, however large or small, of your own home place, where ever that is.
As you read on, you’ll find a collection of short pieces that include bits of history and culture, maps and photos, my personal reflections and poetry, and because I will focus on land and water that is a part of Turtle Island, often known as North America,
I will begin with . . .
A Land and Language Acknowledgement
I live in Michigan, the ancestral and current home of the Anishinaabeg People of the Three Fires—the Ojibwe, Odawa and Potawatomi—who are sovereign Peoples dwelling here for many hundreds of years before French and British prospectors and colonial settlers arrived, but whose population and culture were decimated by those settlers through centuries of land theft, murder and the forced removal of children from their families and language that ended in the US in 1978.
Despite these policies and practices of genocide, the Anishinaabe are still here, living throughout the Great Lakes region both on and off of parcels of reserved and sovereign Tribal land. Because a People’s Indigenous language and their place are entwined and should not be separated or forgotten within a history that conspired to destroy it, this piece will include Anishinaabewim Ojibwe names for each of the freshwater seas.
Note: I used the online Decolonial Atlas, and the Ojibwe Peoples Dictionary as references for place name, language and pronunciation. I highly recommend that you check out these resources!
Orienting to Place:
Nayaano-nibiimaang Gichigamiin
“The Five Freshwater Seas”
I love the way the same place can be looked at from a totally different perspective. The familiar becomes new, as if you’re seeing it again, for the first time. The following two maps show the same region with different cultural orientations. As you compare them them, what do you notice? Read their place names and look at the shape of the land and waters.
We’re conditioned by a dominant culture to accept that the way things are presented to us is the correct way. The idea that north is always at the top on a map is a European construct. People in the northern hemisphere learned to navigate using the North Star, and as European explorers began to forge their way over the oceans to distant lands, looking for riches and more territory, printed maps were visualized as Eurocentric, with north at the top.
In reality, the Earth is a sphere, there is no real up or down. It’s all relative. However, humans orient themselves with familiarity and meaning, and it is helpful to have a culturally unified sense of direction. It is also important to know that there are a number of orientations that are equally correct.1
The Anishinaabeg peoples orient toward east, because that is the direction out of which the sun rises each day. East is literally and symbolically the beginning of things and therefore at the top of the view. In the absence of mechanical clocks and alarms, when we rise in the morning, we might look east toward the growing light more than any other direction at the start of our day.
(You might notice other interesting differences about these two maps . . . I’d love for you to share your observations and what you think about them in the comments section at the bottom!)
Looking at these two maps reminds me that there is a plurality of knowing in this world, and our perceptions expand when we encounter the vision of another who sees or experiences things differently. This challenges what we are accustomed to. A different perspective may still be seeing true and telling true, with orientations and sensibilities that are different from yours, and worth attending to.
And, just now, I want to hold these words:
truth and plurality
before us, like a lamp.
The five gigantic, sweetwater seas that are known by most as The Great Lakes, are themselves a plurality. A plurality of waters that fill gigantic stone bowls, or basins, carved by uneven erosion in ancient rock strata and sediments after billions of years of our Earth becoming, and then many thousands of years of periodic glaciation. All of this formed what we call the Great Lakes Basin, the largest freshwater watershed on Earth. Though we separate regions on maps, the waters in that gigantic geological basin area, like all waters, are one. They are all seamlessly connected in their continuous movement to the ocean, but they’re known by the plurality of their names, locations, shapes, and the lives that have lived and continue to live near them.
I have lived on land surrounded by these bodies of water all my life, but never learned or heard their original Anishinaabewim names until I sought them out.
The Nayaano-nibiimaang Gichigamiin, or “The Five Freshwater Seas,” are located on the continent known by the Anishinaabe as Mikinaak Minising or Turtle Island (North America). Here are the Anishinaabe names of each of these sweetwater seas, spoken humbly now by the tongue of a non-native speaker, followed by the English translation:
Anishinaabewi-gichigami “Anishinanbee’s Sea” . . . (Lake Superior)
Mishigami “Great Lake” . . . (Lake Michigan)
Gichi-aazhoogami-gichigami “Great Crosswaters Sea” . . . (Lake Huron)
Aanikegamaa-gichigami (Chain of Lakes Sea) . . . (Lake Erie)
Gichi-zaaga’igan (Big Lake) . . . (Lake Ontario)
Many of the State names here in the US are derived from Indigenous place names, and my state of Michigan is one of them. It is a French derivative of Mishigami, or “Great Lake” and we call this place “The Great Lake State.”
As I continue on here, I will use the name Turtle Island for what is most often called North America, and I will name the Lakes in English, both for brevity and because it is my own language. However, the Anishinaabe names for the Lakes are with me, and hopefully they are within your awareness as we move on.
A Short Story of Home
If you look at the satellite image below of Turtle Island, you can find the five sweetwater seas nestled there in the area just off to the right side of center on the picture. I say “sweetwater” because these seas aren’t salty, they’re sweet. They’re enormous lakes of freshwater.
My home is on the mittened hand, placed over that watery heart. We live near the base of the thumb, a little bit above the inland port city of Detroit.
I came with my parents to live here when I was a baby, just beginning to walk on my own two feet. We moved from our home of many generations in the rolling foothills of the Appalachians in southwestern Pennsylvania, so my father could find a job. When I was a child, any time my dad had vacation time from work, we went home, and home meant the farm in Pennsylvania. I still feel deep connection and familial ties to that rolling green land, with black locust trees, mocking birds, black raspberry brambles, and sheep dotting the green hill sides.
I’m the first person from both sides of my family to actually call the state of Michigan my home and that is largely because of my husband, Mike, who is a true Michigander, born and raised here by parents who were also born here. Mike took me camping around the state and shared his love for the Lakes, which I had rarely seen in my first twenty years of life. I fell in love with him and I fell in love with Michigan.
I was formed in two places and they both feel like a home place, but Michigan is where I grew up, and our own two children were born and raised.
What is “Lake”?
When people imagine a “lake,” the image that most often comes to mind is a fairly calm, inland body of freshwater that might be small, but also could be quite large and long. If you’re at the water’s edge, you can likely estimate how long it will take to reach the other side in a small boat because the opposite shore is often visible to you from where you stand. Lakes like this are usually crossable with human power in a canoe, kayak or rowboat, over the course of, at most for a large lake, a few hours. You might feel tired, but you could do it.
The bodies of water that you can clearly see from space in the earlier satellite image here, are significantly larger than the biggest of those lakes. In Michigan we consider those smaller lakes as “inland” and the Great Lakes are the vast water that surrounds the land of our two peninsulas: the UP (Upper Peninsula) and the “Mitten” (Lower Peninsula), separated by the wide Strait of Mackinac between Lakes Michigan and Huron, five miles spanned by the Mackinac Bridge, the longest suspension bridge in the world until 1998.2
The rationale for calling the Great Lakes “lakes” is that they’re landlocked from an ocean perspective and filled with fresh water, but they are truly in a class of their own. If you take a boat out to the middle of any one of them you will find yourself in open water. If you look in any direction, the shore will not be visible for a significant length of time, particularly in the middle of the largest three that surround the state of Michigan’s two peninsulas, Lakes Michigan, Superior and Huron.
Seventy-one percent of our Earth is covered with water and over 97% of it is salty. The remaining 3% is fresh water, two thirds of which exists in soil moisture, deep in groundwater or in glaciers and polar ice caps.
Approximately, 1% of the water on Earth is surface freshwater, this includes all rivers, streams, wetlands, ponds and lakes, and together the five Great Lakes contain 20% of ALL of the surface freshwater on the Earth. Collectively these giant lakes lap the shores of over 11,000 miles of coastline along the US States of Michigan, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Ohio, Illinois, Indiana, Pennsylvania, New York and the Canadian Province of Ontario. Michigan has the most freshwater shoreline in the world with a total of 4,344 miles (6991 km) when islands are taken into account (3,288 miles/5292 km, without islands).
Altogether, the freshwater in the sweetwater seas of the Great Lakes amounts to over 6 quadrillion gallons and a geographic area of over 94,000 sq miles—an area larger than the United Kingdom—with depths in Lake Superior plunging to 1,333 ft (406 m).3
The Great Lakes lie in the northern latitudes between 41°N and 48° N, so they’re subject to all kinds of weather, and are known for their wild gales and many tragic shipwrecks of ocean-worthy vessels. They’re also gentle and can become as still as glass on a calm, warm day. Their coastlines range from tree-lined, rocky and mountainous, to miles of sandy beach and giant dunes.
Welcome to the Shore, Human Creature . . .
Water is life and we know it in the very core of our being. There is a kind of primal relief in our human bodies when we encounter an abundance of it. Deep within we know it is capable of sustaining the spark of life in our own tissues.
As you draw near to the immensity of one of the sweetwater seas of the Great Lakes, you hear the sound of their power from a distance and are drawn to it. You want to be near the rhythm and music of the water rolling up and over the shore and back again; susurrant waves over sand, arriving, then returning to the deep . . .
Your body remembers womb-time: a heartbeat, the shoosh . . . shoosh . . . shoosh . . . of blood’s rhythm, your first lullaby. Later, a tender voice that whispers, “Shhhhhhhhhhh, it’s ok . . .”
The sound of waves and the sight of water tend to sooth us, and our bodies respond, calming with the movement, the sound and space: breathing deepens, blood pressure and heart rate decrease, feelings of wellbeing arise.
When you come to the shore of a large body of water, you become quiet and still. Your eyes rest as you gaze upon the distant horizon where water meets sky. You can rest and behold the space before you for a very long time, never tiring of the view.
Tension ebbs slowly from the shore of your body . . .
Being With Water and Land
When I’m at the shore, I love being simultaneously in the water and on the land. If I go in for a swim and I’m in deep water for a while, I begin to yearn for the feeling of grounding. I prefer to love the water with my feet upon earth. This is not fear, it is recognizing my own belonging.
I’m not a swimmer by nature—I can swim, I just prefer the feeling of being at the place of both, land and water. I want to wade in, plunge my whole body into the coolness, and then get out dripping onto the warm rocks and sand, wrap myself in a towel and sit there within the sound of the waves.
I also love to walk along the edge, feeling the water’s wave movement over sand, rocks and my feet, eyes wandering over the threshold for treasures cast up from the lake bottom by its current.
I wrote the following poem after a solitary walk along the shore of Lake Huron on the Ontario side. The water was hushed and warm, the day heavy with unfallen rain; the water so quiet, its gentle movement like breath. The horizon and the water were united in soft strata of gray and blue, so that I could not see clearly their meeting point in my vision, but I knew it was there. The whole scene felt kind.
Later, as I made my way back to the house, it began to rain, lightly.
The Great Crosswaters Sea*, Gentle Gichi-aazhoogami Gichigami Today this lake, often fierce, is an immensely gentle body. Cool, undulating muscle under skin, breaking slowly on shore in rhythmic sighs, the blood pulse of a spacious womb. The distant horizon is translucent, sky: soft beryl-gray, lambent light, the wool of clouds, knitting into water, imbued with greens. In this balmy air, tiny pins awaken my skin, cold points of mist; I walk, weaving steps through weft of water crossing warp of sand, a kind of dance one partner meeting and moving with the other. The placid beach sings quietly: muted tones of sand on sand, lilt of stray gull feathers, dusty green hum of dune grass, dulcet white bones of driftwood, the lithic harmonies of multicolored glacial jewels. The cool water renews bare, sand-scoured feet, tender waves, intimate as breath. In this diffuse light all is grace. My open hands overflow with the abundant gifts of ancient fossils and the pearly angel wings of lake-worn mussel shells. *Ojibwe name for Lake Huron: “Gichi-aazhoogami-gichigami” (Great Crosswaters Sea) ©Michelle Berry Lane
This is My Home
I have come to know my place and to love it; to feel its waters flowing even when I can’t see them; its green forests and wetlands and their creatures, living within me. I am a part of that whole as an inhabitant here.
My deep ancestry doesn’t spring from the place where I live, and it feels complicated to be here, even hundreds of years after the domineering arrival of Europeans to this continent and to this particular part of it. I want to face that history and I know that many people who came to this land, like my ancestors, were people who had their backs pressed against a wall by imperialistic powers in their home places and were simply seeking a better life. They were migrant, eager for freedom and land to support their own wellbeing and that of their children. They came seeking prosperity.
That natural human impulse has been manipulated by imperialistic, extractive ideologies to serve a plan that began here in the 1600s, well before the United States became an independent country, which dehumanized and harmed many others through codified genocidal policies to exterminate Indigenous peoples. Around the same time, the practice of kidnapping and enslaving African peoples commenced, to supply free labor to build more wealth for empire. The specters of these historic realities are still very much among us here, and the awareness of both are culturally sublimated and denied, even now.
Many people in the US are rootless in their drive to seek a moving target called “prosperity.” They’re mobile in the pursuit of better “jobs” with the hope to accumulate more financial and material wealth for greater security. This desire and the need for paying work is what brought my little family to Michigan in 1963. This is all referred to as the “American Dream,” but it has fed into a corporate nightmare that looks shiny and desirable, and is literally killing the planet.
In our rootlessness and focus on consumption to serve the economy, the land and water, tend to be valued only for the degree to which they are available for use. The economically determined “value” of place lies in its capacity to serve extractive wealth accumulation, or to become a limited pristine sanctuary for the few who have access to it. Pollution, waste and the practices that have brought about Climate Change is a worldwide issue, not just here in the US, but we are present at the core of much of this global damage.
Michigan is one of the States in the Industrial Midwest. We are at the heart of the Great Lakes region, which has been historically integral to the international shipping trade with its inland access to the St Lawrence Seaway and seas that are deep enough and broad enough to hold ocean-going cargo ships. Because of this, Michigan has historically borne a lot of ecological damage. The forests here were clearcut in the lumber boom of the 1800s. As the population grew, second growth forests have increasingly been toppled for development. Habitat loss from development, along with invasive plants and insects that have largely arrived through global shipping, impact both aquatic and terrestrial ecologies, decimating many native populations of plants and animals.
Capitalist interests lust after the abundance of freshwater here. The bottled water industry has extracted billions of gallons of it and sold it at great profit in small individual plastic bottles. Many citizens here have taken up the fight against this wasteful mass extraction by multinational corporations, who continue to suck the water out of Michigan.
These sweetwater seas that hold 1/5 of the Earth’s surface freshwater, have been sullied by industry, power plants, and fossil fuel infrastructure. Oil and gas pipelines course under the water of rivers and lake floors, and leaks are environmentally catastrophic. Right now, a massive new replacement pipeline for the Enbridge Line 5 that spans the floor of the Strait of Mackinac, is planned against well-founded concern and controversy. Anishinaabeg Tribes across the region are leading the resistance to it. There have been 33 spills from Line 5 since 1968 when it was first built there. Despite the sensitivity of the location in the largest freshwater reservoir in the world, Enbridge continues to press forward as if the project will happen even though a legal case against it brought by Michigan Attorney General, Dana Nessel, is still unresolved.
Growing Your Roots
Environmental and justice issues can feel heartbreaking and angering and very overwhelming. However, becoming informed about both historic and current reality is increasingly more important in every place that is called “home” right now. Cultivating your own belonging in a place is one foundational way to begin to pick up the stitches of human relationship that have come undone, and to begin to weave them back in to the greater tapestry.
Humans belong to the Earth, the Earth does not belong to us—we are of it. Loving one’s home place, growing roots and not taking it all for granted, grounds us and opens us to caring in a time of cynicism and ecological unraveling. To consciously knit yourself more fully into your place and community is an integral part of the work of surviving and thriving.
I encourage you to read more about your own place and to spend time getting to really know it. Actively fall in love with your region and let your heart break a little about some of what you find out. Share what you learn with others. Do what you are able to do with the time, resources and talents that you have, to affect change. If you cannot be at the front line, support those who are actively involved and doing direct action. Even if your effort feels small it’s important. All the work isn’t your work to do, but your presence and your heart is needed.
Every home on this Earth is connected to all other homes in some way. There is no such thing as “separate” on a living planet. The waters know this well, always meeting and flowing together somewhere.
More information about resistance to Enbridge Line 5:
See the Decolonial Atlas and this article: Five maps that will change how you see the world for a few other ways of seeing
See the list of the longest suspension bridges in the world here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_longest_suspension_bridge_spans
Source: Michigan Seagrant
Hands down!, Michigan is the best state! A thoughtful and insightfully written piece. Sweetwater seas is a perfect name for our Great Lakes. This makes me want to go out and discover them again!
Beautiful post, Michelle. I have always been fascinated from afar by these enormous bodies of fresh water, and what they mean to the people who live there.... and I LOVE the term 'sweetwater seas' 💙