Anahkwet (Guy Reiter), a member of the Menominee nation and a longtime community organizer, remembers the counsel of his elders about what to do when times get thorny, tangled, and twisted. “If I’m struggling with something in my life, if I’m having a hard time, I was taught to go outside and walk,” Anahkwet told Truthout. “The earth will show me something that I haven’t seen before, or a way of reframing the way I’m looking at something, and I trust it. I trust that that’s the connection I have to our beautiful Mother and her reaching out to me, saying, ‘There now, it doesn’t have to be so hard.’”

The difficulties northern tribes are facing on their shared ancestral lands in the Porcupine Mountains of Michigan’s Western Upper Peninsula have recently become acutely thorny, as they stare down an industrial buildout in the last uncut old-growth forest in the region. Charlotte Loonsfoot, a tribal member of the Keweenaw Bay Indian Community (KBIC), told Truthout she had the same impulse: to go into the wilderness, build a sacred fire in community, and make offerings to the spirits.

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