For centuries before the arrival of explorers and traders from Europe and the Far East around 1615, Indigenous peoples of many different tribes lived in the Great Lakes region. They were economically self-sustaining in their woodland and water environment. The earliest interactions with explorers and traders were dominated by fur-trading, and for over a century these interactions were mostly transactional. It was around the American Revolution that relations began to deteriorate as white settlers encroached on Indigenous lands. The power of disease and weaponry that white settlers brought killed and disempowered Indigenous peoples and eventually rendered most of the region under white authority.

It would be a disrespectful effort for me to try and acknowledge broadly the Indigenous peoples of the entire Great Lakes region; it would lump together an enormous swath of diverse peoples and histories. For more information on specifically acknowledging the Indigenous peoples of Northeast Ohio where I live, I turned to one of the most outstanding institutions in this region: the Cleveland Museum of Art.

I think that their Indigenous Peoples and Land Acknowledgement page along with the Q and A they include is thoughtful, respectful and directly states the obvious: land acknowledgements are often rightfully criticized for being too little, too late. However, for me, given a choice between saying “It is important to acknowledge those who lived on this land before me, many of whom lost their lives with European arrival and subsequent conquest of the land,” or saying “A land acknowledgement is an insincere, meaningless woke gesture”, I will choose the former.  I will choose it because it is the right thing to do.

The legacy of the people who lived on the land here for centuries prior to European arrival is omnipresent and yet often unrecognized. The name Ohio comes from an Onondowa’ga’ (Seneca) term meaning “beautiful river”. The Miami River and Miami University in Ohio are a direct reference to the Myaamia (Miami) peoples who lived in the region before forcibly signing away the right to their land.  

Here is my land acknowledgement, with credit to the Cleveland Museum of Art for the final two paragraphs: 

While today it is me standing on the shores of Lake Erie and looking out at the water and dark horizon line, for centuries prior there were others who stood and looked out at the same inland sea. Many of the Indigenous peoples who lived on this land were eventually dispossessed of it. Their existence has often been diminished to a short chapter in the arc of North American history, as it has been told by those with the power to craft the story. With my whole heart and mind, I acknowledge their own stories.   

These are the nations that signed Ohio treaties in the 1700s and 1800s: the Odawa, Ojibwe, and Potawatomi of the Anishinaabeg; Delaware; Seneca and Cayuga of the Haudenosaunee (Iroquois); Myaamia (Miami); Kaskasjia, Piankeshaw, and Wea, today of the Peoria; Shawnee; and Wyandotte – along with the Erie and ancient Whittlesey peoples.

These are the Indigenous peoples who continue to occupy land and urban spaces in Northeast Ohio today: the Choctaw, Dine (Navajo), Haudenosaunee (Iroquois), Lakota (Sioux), Odawa, and Ojibwe nations as well as others.

When I started this blog, my Uncle Mike wrote to me and said: I don’t know a lot about the Great Lakes but I have read about the famous wolf and moose study on Isle Royale.  

I had never heard about this study and frankly was only peripherally aware of Isle Royale National Park. Lo and behold, about six weeks later, I’m at the library with my girls, and on the shelf in the young adult nonfiction section is a book titled The Wolves and Moose of Isle Royale: Restoring an Island Ecosystem with text by Nancy Castaldo and photographs by Morgan Heim.  

I’m sharing the book cover text because it’s a great layperson overview and I couldn’t do a better job summarizing – all credit to Nancy Castaldo and Clarion Books:

“On Isle Royale, a remote island national park surrounded by Lake Superior, a thrilling drama is unfolding between wolves and moose, the island’s ultimate predator and prey. For over sixty years, in what has been known as the longest study of a predator-prey relationship in the world, scientists have observed the importance of wolves to Isle Royale’s unique ecology. But due to illness and underlying factors, the population of wolves on the island has dropped while the number of moose has increased, putting the Isle Royale ecosystem in jeopardy. 

In order to restore the island’s ecological balance, scientists are stepping in… If scientists are successful in growing the island’s wolf population, they can potentially restore the island’s balance and explore ways to repair other damaged ecosystems.”

A couple takeaways from the book:

Isle Royale is the real deal when talking about a remote island wilderness ripe for a living ecologic laboratory. 278 miles from Ontario, 61 miles from Houghton, Michigan and 40 miles from Grand Portage, Minnesota, it is the least visited of all the United States’ 63 national parks. There is little human presence on the island (one lodge, one food establishment, no cell service and close to no Wi-Fi) and it closes for over six months in the wintertime due to inaccessability. 

As always, the facts of the story illustrate the interconnectedness of the natural world, of which we are a part. On the island, the wolves eat the moose.  If there are not enough wolves, the moose overpopulate. The overpopulated moose overeat the trees and bushes on the island, eventually causing the moose to start suffering from starvation and destroying food and habitat for other animals. The ecosystem becomes imbalanced and unhealthy. 

The predictable debate that occurred on whether to reintroduce wolves to the island is really part of bigger questions around environmental ethics. What is wilderness? What are the reasons that humans should intervene in ecological management of wilderness?

In the end, the argument that resulted in the wolf reintroduction project that started in 2018 and that continues at this time rested on the words of the famous naturalist Aldo Leopold: “A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when it tends otherwise.”

The book itself feels very accessible in its design – a photojournalistic structure with gorgeous pictures supporting text that is broken up well with headings and boxes. The book left me hopeful that our young generations might still see benefits of a physical book versus just online content. It was such a joy to find the book sitting on the library shelf that day. It felt a bit like it was there waiting for me. 

This post is dedicated to my Uncle Mike and his enduring love of the natural world.

I love when you find a non-fiction book that weaves multiple engaging storylines together in a readable, cohesive, and impactful way. I found all of these things when I picked journalist Dan Egan’s 2017 book The Death and Life of the Great Lakes off the shelves of my favorite independent bookstore in Cleveland, Loganberry Books.

A twist on Jane Jacobs’ The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the book is a testament to both the positive and negative impact humans have had on the ecology of the Great Lakes (mostly negative, to be real). Egan opens the book recounting the incredible ambition and optimism of the late 1950s that propelled one of the most expansive infrastructure projects in history: the digging of the St. Lawrence Seaway. The idea was to dig a nautical expressway through the St. Lawrence river that would open up a shipping channel from the Atlantic Ocean and coast and would drive Great Lakes cities to become dynamic domestic and international commercial ports. Project leaders, politicians and media figures boldly talked about this “Fourth Seacoast” for North America. 

But the ships and great port cities never really materialized. And the reason is a real kicker. In a brilliant short vignette, Egan tells the story of a gas station attendant turned truck driver named Malcolm Purcell McLean who one day in 1956 put into action an idea he had dreamed up while sitting in his truck watching stevedores haphazardly and inefficiently load ships at a port. He took an old oil tanker, installed a raised platform on it, and built a structure that could hold 58 trailer trucks whose tires had been removed. The structure could hold 58 containers. It was still a number of years before this invention completely took hold of the shipping industry. But it was also still a number of years before the Seaway was completed. And by the time it was fully operational, the channel and locks built were too narrow for the container ships that came to dominate the shipping industry in the 1960s. Whomp whomp.

Tragically what did materialize from the opening of the St. Lawrence Seaway in 1959 was ecologic disaster. The cargo that was delivered by international ships came via the millions of gallons of ballast waters that kept ships’ weight steady and balanced while sailing and were then released near and in ports when they picked-up cargo. In those millions of gallons of water were millions of living organisms from around the globe – some of which found new life in the freshwaters of the Great Lakes.    

Many of the storylines that follow in the book are so good that they are worthy of their own blog posts – a scientist who singlehandedly found a way to rid the Great Lakes of sea lamprey (do not look this creature up unless you want to give yourself quite a fright), the incredible effort to keep Asian carp out of the Great Lakes, and the complex root causes of Lake Erie’s toxic algae problem that endanger drinking water. You can wait for my synopses of these storylines, or you can head to your local library or independent bookstore for this very worthwhile book.