Same place, different times

on the shores of Muskeg Bay

Kakaygeesick holds the Treaty #3 pipe in this vintage postcard. The photograph was taken in the 1950s with a pipe forged in the 1870s and when I look at this souvenir now it evokes memories of the late 1960s and early 1970s.

Whenever I return to Warroad, time collapses. The lake seems the same now as it did when I was a kid. Same as when my mom grew up. Same as when my immigrant great-grandparents arrived here. Same as when the Great Spirit led the Ojibway people to this place where food grows on water (wild rice), and the same as when the ancient glacial Lake Agassiz — larger than all the Great Lakes combined — melted into the Hudson Bay about 12,000 years ago and left us fresh water in Lake of the Woods.

Standing on the beach ten days ago, I recall summer vacations with my mom’s side of the family on Lake of the Woods in northern Minnesota. Digging in the sand to find fossils and shells. Picking wild blueberries in the forest and meeting a bear. Eating walleye. Riding horse. Purchasing postcards at the Trading Post in Warroad and saving the one with Kakaygeesick’s photograph for a half-century.

I never met Kakaygeesick’s great-grandson Don when I was a kid visiting Warroad. He’d been scooped up in second grade from school and placed into foster care with a White family on a farm forty miles away. Even though we are roughly the same age — I was born in July of 1958 and he was born in June of 1959 — our paths run parallel in time but our family histories and experiences differ.