Launching Anung at the Center of the Ojibwa Universe

Thank you all.

Thank you Shirley, the Director of the Museum of Ojibwa Culture, for inviting me to tell my stories during History Week, and thank you for being such a gracious hostess, and thank you for your enthusiasm for Anung’s Journey. And thank you for introducing me to so many wonderful people.

Thank you Tony Grodin, an elder in the Ojibwa community, for teaching me how to make a drum, and thank you for the wonderful story about how the Dakota who first envisioned the drum, Tailfeather Woman, shared it with the Ojibwa people.

Thank you Joanne Carey, an elder in the Odawa community, for the wonderful vest you gave me, and thank you for your presence as we made our drums together.

Thank you Matt Wyers, a young man of the Ojibwa community, and thank you Francie Wyers, Matt’s mother, for telling us about your dancing, and for showing us your regalia.

Thank you Robin Kissinger, from the Dakota community, for your hospitality and for taking pictures.

Thank you Keith Knecht and your family, Brant, Ann, and Margret, for your demonstration of building birch bark vessels, making maple candy, and the delicious roast duck.

Thanks to you and so many others who had a hand in the launching of Anung’s Journey at the Center of the Ojibwa universe.

Anung will be available for purchase on October 27th. Pre-order it on Amazon today, and follow Carl @carlnordgren to discuss Anung and his other titles with him!

The IRA and the Nazis

In the Fall of 2001 secret service files were published by the British Public Record Office that revealed a plot by the IRA to collaborate with the Nazis to invade Northern Ireland during the Second World War.

A key story line in The 53rd Parallel is built around this little known historical fact.

The files included MI5 records about a German spy parachuting into Ireland in 1940 to assess the feasibility of the plan after being approached by the IRA.

The plan was foiled after the spy, Dr Hermann Goertz, aka “K”, was arrested a year later by the Irish government.

The MI5 report, written in 1943, read:
“On the 5th May 1940 Goertz landed by parachute at Ballivor, Co Meath, Eire. Earlier that year the IRA had been in touch with the German SS through the intermediary of Stephen Carroll Held. Held had visited Berlin with a proposal from the IRA for an attack on Northern Ireland by the Germans to be supported by 5,000 IRA recruited in Eire and Northern Ireland. Goertz’s mission was to examine this proposal and to obtain the military information on which the joint attack by the Germans and the IRA on Northern Ireland could be based.”

The 53rd Parallel takes you to that meeting.

Tales from an Ojibway Chief: Truth to Power

I had just finished the post below about Steve Fobister when I found out about his recent hunger strike. Read about it first here.

There are hereditary Chiefs in the Ojibway clan system who tend to come from the Crane and Loon clans. There are elected
Chiefs as well, and Steve Fobister was the youngest man to be elected Chief of Grassy Narrows First Nation Reserve on the English River in the 1970’s.

Steve was elected because he boldly spoke truth to power when it was discovered that the Dryden Pulp and Paper Company had been dumping mercury into the English River, that the methyl-mercury had been biomagnified as it always will be, and that the walleye the Ojibway relied on as a major part of their diet were toxic and were poisoning them.

He spoke up in dramatic fashion in the early days when even after the Canadian government and Dryden Pulp acknowledged the mercury had been dumped in the English River they continued to vigorously deny that the serious health problems the residents of Grassy Narrows and neighboring White Dog reserve were suffering–White Dog is also on the English River–were in any way related to the mercury in the fish.

Doctors who attended the residents of the reserves in those early days adopted a common line–nationalized health meant they were employed by the government. They stated “Perhaps these health problems are what occurs when an aboriginal population suddenly take on a modern diet.” Steve’s response was “Sure, that’s right, this is what happens when our modern diet is laced with mercury.”

Since the Ojibway had signed away their rights to sue the Canadian government when they signed their peace treaties in the 1880’s and because that legal protection extended to Crown Corporations and Dryden was the subsidiary of one, no one was accepting they had any legal responsibility to help these folks and absent a legal responsibility no one stepped up to take on a basic humanitarian obligation. After all Grassy Narrows was in the wilderness, far away from the media, easy to ignore.

Then one day Steve learned a reporter was visiting Grassy Narrows to follow up on another story; Steve tracked him down and told him that if he wanted a really big story, a block bluster of a story, he should come back with a camera crew and Steve would tell them of the proof he had that white men were raping Ojibway women on the Reserve in a systematic fashion.

When a few days later the media returned in large numbers Steve was ready. He introduced them to four women who were suffering the early stages of what has come to be known as Minamata Disease, after the first major mercury poisoning event in Japan, in Minamata Bay. He showed reporters the research he had done linking methyl-mercury and the symptoms found in these women and in more and more residents all the time. It was the event that broke open the story.

Later, when Steve was negotiating with American factory owners who were being challenged in courts by the Canadian government for the pollution damage caused in Canada by the factories close to the border, Steve was intercepted by the Royal Canadian Mounted police and taken to then Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau who asked Steve if he knew what the punishment was for treason. Steve replied, “No, but I have wondered many times what the punishment for genocide is.”

Steve has given so much to this fight. It was my great blessing to work with him for four summers when we were boys learning to become men. My writing is motivated by a need to honor him.