by Amy Myszko
September 30, 2023
Labor Day weekend was bustling in Petoskey, MI with the annual Water is Life festival on Saturday, as well an art build on Sunday and the Mackinaw Bridge Walk event on Monday that attracted around 20,000 people. Members of the Niibi Center’s staff, as well as a few of our collaborators, joined in on the festivities for the second year by hosting an informal Water Protector healing circle at the festival and supporting the art build and Bridge Walk.
Saturday dawned warm and bright, with a breeze off of lake Michigan creating the perfect conditions for an outdoor festival. Our healing circle in the shade of a large tree encouraged old friends and newly awakened Water Protectors to share their hopes and fears, to chat about life and to network to create projects for a better future. The music, vendors and speakers all focused on protecting the water, the mother earth, and the Indigenous ways that inherently protect these precious gifts.
Sitting in a hundred-year-old barn on Sunday with Joe Lagarde and many other elders and Water Protectors from throughout the Great Lakes region, we were able to converse and tell stories, as well as learn about current issues affecting tribal sovereignty including the current Line 5 pipeline project. Painting murals that were lovingly walked across the four-mile Mackinaw bridge on Monday, we were all given a chance to be in a space of shared vision and shared pain, which is core to the process of healing. The art build event also gave Protectors from Canada and the US a safe space to vision future cross-border collaborations to protect the sacred.
Since Standing Rock it has become clear that Water Protectors and Land Defenders take on an extra burden of trauma when they are engaged in work to protect the earth. For that reason, the Niibi Center continues to engage in healing events that target Water Protectors to encourage the ongoing work of building community and supporting those that have made sacrifices to protect what is sacred, most especially nibi and manoomin. On Monday morning hundreds of Water Protectors gathered before dawn to greet Governor Whitmer’s opening speech with a light display and banners which were then proudly marched across the Mackinaw Bridge, hopefully raising awareness in some and a sense of solidarity in others.
Originally published in the October 2023 edition of the Anishinaabeg Today (vol. 28, no. 10) on pg. 2 https://whiteearth.com/assets/files/newspaper/2023/October%204,%202023%20c.pdf
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