Boy, it's been awhile since i wrote anything. I've been visiting in
Minnesota, my Mom and her sister and brother have a cottage on a lake
about 70 miles east of the border with North Dakota. My great Grandfather
Reed built the place in 1920 on land that had some years prior been
logged of its great stands of White and Red Pine, and before that had been
home to Anishinabe Ojibwe (Chippewa) and before that the woodland Sioux
whom the Ojibwe displaced starting in the 18th century. The Ojibwe
originated in what is now the northeastern Great Lakes area but moved
westward due to the complex pressures of an expanding European populace,
i.e. they were driven from place to place and in turn drove the Sioux
westward to the plains. But wherever they've been they have always been
woods people. In this area they live on the White Earth Reservation
several miles north of our cottage. Most of the land within the reservation
boundaries was swindled away from the nominal title holders in the!
early years of the 20th century. Now the most famous daughter of the
White Earth band, Winona LaDuke, has a project called the White Earth
Land Recovery Project, to raise money and buy back land within the
boundaries and do other worthy things like language preservation and
diabetes prevention. The WLRP sells wild rice and maple syrup harvested on the
reservation, and various other items. They just got a contract to be
the exclusive provider of wild rice to the main natural food co-op in
Minneapolis.
After the timber barons cut most of the trees they ran off to the
Pacific Northwest, where for some time now folks have been struggling over
the final scraps of what hasn't yet been sent to the mills, even as the
barons (in modern corporate guise) move on to yet greener pastures such
as vast pine plantations in the South.
Trees do of course usually grow back, and today the northern Minnesota
countryside is a bucolic patchwork of mixed deciduous woods
interspersed with pines that escaped the big cut and marginal farms and abandoned
pastures. And of course thousands of lakes of every shape and size,
ranging from totally wild to totally surrounded by homes and cabins.
What mountains and coast are to Oregonians and Washingtonians, lakes
are to Minnesotans. The place to go for the weekend or for one's entire
vacation. And of course all the little towns have summer festivals and
parades. Sunday my Aunt Lisa and I went to see the annual Turkey Days
parade in nearby town of Frazee. Frazee is basically Lake Wobegon with a
giant Turkey statue. Small town parades are fun because practically
everyone participates. And not only was there the Turkey Princess but
Dairy Princesses from several nearby towns (the kind of princess or queen
depends on the local agricultural crop.) It was heartening to see that
the Dairy Princesses were not required to have anorexic beauty queen
figures. In fact they looked positively well fed, as befitting all those
dairy products.