Art & The Land

Marianne Combs:

Welcome to Filling the Well. A podcast created to nourish, provoke, and inspire artists and arts leaders. I’m independent journalist Marianne Combs.

Leah Lemm:

And I’m Leah Lemm, citizen of the Mille Lacs Band of Ojibwe and community story sharer. On Filling the Well, we are talking to creatives, living and working in rural areas as well as indigenous culture bearers. Today, we’re going to hear from two Ojibwe artists who are working in close relationship with the natural environment. Birchbark and quill artist Pat Kruse and water walker Sharon Day.

Sharon Day:

[Introduction in Ojibwe] So what I said was, greetings, my relatives, my name is Singing Wolf. I’m from the Martin Clan, I’m an Ojibwe woman. Second degree M’dewin and … is headwater woman.

Marianne Combs:

That’s Sharon Day. I recently sat down to talk to her in her office at the Indigenous People’s Task Force in the Phillips neighborhood of Minneapolis.

Leah Lemm:

Yes, Sharon is amazing. Met her quite a few times and the Indigenous People’s Task Force does really important work in the community.

Marianne Combs:

Right. When I was there, downstairs staff were preparing a free lunch for clients, which smelled amazing. And the nonprofit hosts everything from HIV testing to youth theater programs. And in addition to serving as the task force’s executive director, Sharon is an artist and a water walker. She explained to me that contemporary water walking got its start in the late 1990s.

Sharon Day:

The chief of our lodge said to us at that time, what will you do for the water? And so one of our elders, Josephine Mandamin, and she thought about that and one day she decided that she was going to move the water because water has to move to be healthy and carry it with other women around Lake Superior. And so that was the beginning of the water walks. I, on the other hand, when we were called to help at Camp Coldwater was involved with that for about two and a half years at Camp Coldwater. And then from there walked with Josephine at the beginning of her walk around Lake Superior and then met her on the east side by Wawa Iand walked several days there. And that was the first time that I had done that, and to my knowledge in these contemporary times, Josephine was the first water walker.

Marianne Combs:

And you say it’s to keep the water moving, to keep it healthy, but it seems to serve another role too in terms of awareness and other things.

Sharon Day:

Well, this is what Josephine said. She said, “I want the water to know that there are still human beings who love and care for the water.” And we believe that water is a living entity, that it has its own spirit. And so when we’re walking and we gather the water at the headwaters, and we carry it, we’re actually speaking to the spirit of the water. And if awareness gets raised at the same time, well that’s good, but that’s not the intention. I’m smarter than that. If I wanted to raise awareness, I would do some kind of campaign where I’d raise a lot of money and hire some people to do a campaign. But no, we are actually speaking to the water. And like Josephine said, we want the water to know that there’s still human beings who love and care for the water. And no matter what anybody thinks, it’s not the banks, or the mining companies, or the oil companies who are more powerful. Nothing on the earth is more powerful than the water.

Marianne Combs:

I love that. You are an artist. Do you consider the water walking a part of your artistic practice?

Sharon Day:

I consider it a practice. And if some art comes out of that, a song emerges, something that’s well and good and songs have come out of it. We had an exhibit at Minneapolis Institute of Art a couple years ago, the Tree of Peace. It was a collaborative effort with many. We found this tree that came out of Lake Superior floating and we hauled it home and we made a tree. I invited people to send a leaf, to create a leaf, and a message to future generations. And so people, water walkers from all over the country did send that leaf and the tree was like 14 feet tall and I can’t remember, well over a hundred leaves I think that were on the tree. So sometimes you get inspired by something and you create something, but that’s not the goal. The goal is to really just to speak to the water.

Marianne Combs:

So it sounds like you have two different practices that sometimes overlap or inspire one another. Are there times when the art inspires the water walking in some way?

Sharon Day:

I wouldn’t say that, but I would say that as an artist, whenever you’re creating something, whether it’s a piece of poetry, or a song, or a tree of peace, the idea is to communicate with some other human beings. To have something that will resonate with other people, either in the act of making it or lifting their voice. I mean that really is the intention is to communicate.

Marianne Combs:

That’s beautiful. And I guess the commonality between the two is sort of the resonating that you’re creating work that’s resonating with an audience or you are resonating with the water in some way when you’re doing the water walking and communicating with it. I would say just even based on that last story, you have a particularly strong relationship with the land and with the water. You spend a lot of time in it, you’re keenly aware of it. What have you noticed change over the years that you have been water walking?

Sharon Day:

I think anytime you have a practice, meditation, ceremony, the more you practice, the easier it is to get to that place. And so I’ve been meditating since I was like 24, 25 years old and been participating in ceremony for almost that long as well. When you first start meditating, it takes a little while to get to that place, but the more you do it, the easier, the faster it is to get there. I led a water walk up in Otter Tail county just a few months ago, and I had led a walk up there last year too. Do you know that Otter Tail county has more water per square foot than any other place on the earth?

Marianne Combs:

No.

Sharon Day:

Yeah, it’s so beautiful. And so I’ve walked with some of the same women up there for the last couple years now, and this last walk was just so smooth. Just everybody got into the pattern right away and it was just really, really beautiful. So the more you do something, the easier you are to get to that place of being sort of in tune with what’s happening around you.

Marianne Combs:

You talk about getting into the rhythm and the chaos at first. So what exactly happens on a water walk? What do they have to adjust to?

Sharon Day:

Well, for some people it’s silence. When people are carrying the water or the staff, I ask them to be silent. And most people, today, don’t have any time of silence. Every minute, from the time they wake up, until they go to sleep, and perhaps even while they’re sleeping, they’re being bombarded by sound via earbuds. I mean, you see people jogging along the Mississippi River Boulevard and they have earbuds on and it’s like your body is getting some exercise, but your spirit not so much. And so getting adjusted to silence, getting people in order. Sometimes on some of the shorter walks there will be people, might be 30 people, this is how it goes because it’s not just the walkers, but it’s the cars because there are multiple vehicles you have to hop scotch as well and it’s a lot. We have lunch. Sometimes dealing with media on the longer walks. Where are we camping tonight, where we staying tonight, all of the others. It’s a lot.

Marianne Combs:

It is a lot. And I’m trying to imagine you having time in the water walk to actually take some time for yourself and think and be present. Is that something that you do?

Sharon Day:

Yeah, I mean I have my 15 minutes too. Every time I carry the water I’m silent. And those are the moments that you live for. Was it line three? I think we’re walking line three and we’re on this little road and we’ve been sort of harassed along the way, but we’re on this little road and I was carrying the water and there were these little black and white butterflies that were just going in front of me and I was sort of mesmerized by them. And then I heard a sound and I looked to my left and there was this beautiful white horse at this fence calling to me. And so when I handed the water off, the people who were following me said, “That was so beautiful. That horse was in this far pasture, saw you, and came all the way up to meet you when you passed at that point on the road.” I didn’t see any of that. I just saw him when he called to me. So it’s like those moments that you feel connected.

Marianne Combs:

When you think about connection to the land, and you also mentioned earlier the people who are going for runs with earbuds in their ears. I mean, what are the things that you wrestle with or think about a lot in terms of our land and our future?

Sharon Day:

The thing that I worry about the most is that we don’t have a connection to the land. So we take care of the land and the land takes care of us. We’re given so many gifts from the land and so it’s having that reciprocal relationship with the land. I think that is so important. And I fear that most people don’t have any connection to land. I think that is what I fear is that we protect that which we love. And if we don’t see the land, and the water, and the trees as being living entities, but just something that we use, then we continue to abuse all of those things. I think the best thing that people can do is when you get up in the morning, make a little offering, have some moments of silence and go for a walk in the snow, in the rain, just to be in touch with. We’re just a small little spec in the universe, and yet we think we’re everything. We are not. I wish I could be more hopeful and I am hopeful, but change is not happening fast enough.

Marianne Combs:

Change is not happening fast enough. I certainly feel that sentiment, Leah. What are you thinking as you hear Sharon talk about our relationship with the land?

Leah Lemm:

Yeah, I think this is a really, really big topic of conversation that I don’t want to say separates, but I am saying it, but that indigenous versus colonizer attitude towards the land. And of course, you know, you don’t have to be indigenous to have an indigenous value on the land and vice versa. So I’m not separating out the people, but kind of that perspective. So a lot of times with the introduction of colonization, settlers, and assimilation, there is this and continues to be, to this day, this view that water, that trees, that animals, have a price tag on them. Have this quantified utility to justify their existence from our own perspective as humans. As humans, we can place a value on something and that’s what it’s worth.

Marianne Combs:

You’re just saying that water, its value is in relationship to how I use. It’s value, is in relationship to how I use it as opposed to having an inherent value of its own?

Leah Lemm:

Right. So a lot of times that colonizer perspective has people at the top of this pyramid where everything else is subservient to the person, whereas more of an indigenous point of view is being a part of a circle, being a part of the environment, being in relationship with all of our relatives out there, all of our plant relatives, animal relatives, water spirit, all of that. So when we place a value on something, it’s discounting our plant, animal, water spirit relatives. It’s discounting their inherent value and value that they place on one another too.

Marianne Combs:

So for instance, I look at a tree as a commodity, not my cousin.

Leah Lemm:

So you can see how you can cut it down, make it into firewood, make it into a chair, make it into a board for your wood floor, and that’s its value. Whereas it’s an ecosystem for squirrels, for fungus, and it’s sharing a root system with other trees and communicating with one another in that respect. It’s a source of maple syrup. It’s all these things that goes far beyond what I, Leah Lemm, or you, Marianne Combs, can get out of it by ourselves.

Marianne Combs:

Right. That’s such a powerful point. And I feel like Sharon lives this an exemplifies this in a really powerful way. She’s constantly thinking about her relationship to the land, our relationship to the land, and not just the land, but also the sky as you hear her talk about this next project.

Sharon Day:

This summer, I had this idea of creating a mound in the shape of the Big Dipper. We believe that everything above is a reflection of what’s below and what’s below is a reflection of what’s above. And so there’s so many stories about the Big Dipper and I was involved in a kind of over Zoom residency called Dreaming the Land. And so we moved six tons of dirt, hundreds of downed trees we used for the berm underneath, and then five tons of fill soil and I think it’s 60 feet long, and then another ton of topsoil on that. And we planted plants on it and it’s an exact correlation to where the Big Dipper is in August. And then we found boulders on the land. And so there’s a boulder where each star would be and then a high-powered solar light next to the rock.

And so at night it lights up and we slept out there during the full moon in August, about five of us. And so I’m kind of thinking maybe this year we might add a crescent moon, but it really made me think about our ancestors when they built these mounds that were so much higher. How the heck did they do that? We had wheelbarrows, I had a truck, I mean shovels. How did they do those? The serpent mound. We walked by that when we walked the Ohio River. We went there and had a tobacco ceremony, a pipe ceremony. How did they do that? I mean that’s so incredible. And we passed so many mounds there. One was a hundred feet tall and, of course, CahokiaT, so impressive. But a lot of my art these days is really more collaborative. You know, having an idea and then convincing people that they should help me do it.

Marianne Combs:

I love that you have writing, you have theater, you have poetry, you have music, you have land installations. I mean the tree, creating the tree with the leaves, sculptural. I mean you’re doing all the different art forms as an artist. I’m also thinking about your work here and how you are serving people in need and dealing with the effects of both colonization and cultural loss. And then you’re doing this work that’s environmentalism, it’s the relationship to the water, the water walking, and then you have the art and how all of these things are intersectional in some way, how they relate to each other. Do you think a little bit ever about how each of these avenues connects with one another?

Sharon Day:

No, no, not really. You just do, right? To do it is its sort of like a theater ensemble. Everybody has a part and some people are actors, and some people are writers, and some people are stage managers, but it takes everybody and I don’t know, just really fortunate, really fortunate. And I think one of the things I know is sometimes working with women of color on different things over the years, I don’t know a person of color who doesn’t want to leave a legacy. Who doesn’t want to make things a little bit better for their people in the short time that we have on this earth. And I think a lot of it also springs from like my faith. Being in the day when we have seven core values that we try to follow and to be loving, to be kind, to be honest, to be humble, to be courageous, and to seek wisdom. I often say it’s easy to be midday when you’re in the lodge and everybody’s talking about love and it’s more difficult to do that out in the world, but that’s where we need to do it the most.

Marianne Combs:

What do you wish people were paying more attention to beyond just having a stronger connection to the land?

Sharon Day:

Well, I think some of that’s being involved in community, whatever community that is. I think the other thing that my dad always said to me was like, you have to stand up for what you believe in because nobody will do that for you. So everybody, whatever you believe, get educated about the topic and then do something, do whatever it is you can do.

Marianne Combs:

A technical question. If you walk Lake Superior, you will pick up a pail of water and you’ll carry it around Lake Superior and then you’ll put it back in. It’s the moving of the water by human hands and showing it that love and attention, that’s what’s so powerful and for its health?

Sharon Day:

Yes. We walked the Mississippi River and we gathered the water at the headwaters and we carried it. We gathered enough to make sure we had enough of the headwaters water because we could have replenished the pail all along the way, but the idea was to bring that water that was still clean enough for us to drink back in 2013 all the way… I don’t know what it’s like today, but to carry it all the way to the mouth of the river and to give the river a taste of herself. This is how you began. This is how we wish for you to be again. That’s the message. Now in Lake Superior, it’s the same water all the way around, so we’re not going to have to take enough to last for 30 days because we can replenish it from the water all along the way.

But on a river it’s different. It’s different because, generally, at the headwaters where it’s coming out of the earth or it’s being filtered, its cleaner, and then when you get to the mouth, the mouth of the river used to be a place where all life went to for nourishment, you know, at the confluences of many of these rivers or the mouth. It’s not that way today.

Leah Lemm:

You’re listening to Filling the Well. I’m Leah Lemm.

Marianne Combs:

And I’m Marianne Combs. I should mention Sharon plans to reenact Josephine Mandamin’s first water walk around Lake Superior this year. And these walks are entirely supported through donations and volunteer time.

Leah Lemm:

That’s awesome. I can imagine the training that goes into this.

Marianne Combs:

Yeah. She talked about it’s like organizing so many people and resources. It’s so funny, Sharon, as you heard, she does so much. She says she doesn’t really think about the connections between her water walks, her community care, and her art, but she’s right at the center of all of that and it’s all connected through her.

Leah Lemm:

And that’s where, again, we have this desire, and I say we as kind of this United States society wanting to place everything neatly into boxes or silos.

Marianne Combs:

Labels.

Leah Lemm:

Yeah. To label everything like this is art because X, Y, Z. When art and culture go together hand in hand, it’s just a part of living. It’s not something we necessarily always have to seek out to create and to define as art. So Sharon has this beautiful flow between art and culture, ceremony and prayer and isn’t performing these things, she’s living these things. Her life is this art that we can see, and appreciate, and support as well.

Marianne Combs:

Beautiful. Yeah, it’s really humbling to see the work that she does and how she does it with her own humility, which is kind of mind-boggling based on what she all that she’s doing. Working at the Indigenous People’s Task Force, creating her own art, and major theater or sculptural projects, or poetry, or music, and then also engaging in these huge water walks that are very profound sort of water healing ceremonies. And I love the distinction of this practice as ceremony and prayer but not performance.

Leah Lemm:

Yeah. Because Sharon performs as well and there’s a distinct difference between a play and this embodiment of art.

Marianne Combs:

Even as she said that putting on a water walk is kind of staging a show. It’s like you got your cast, you got your props, you got to get everything together so it’s like theater but it’s not theater.

Leah Lemm:

Right. So I love hearing how water walker Sharon Day is living and embracing this relationship with the natural environment. And the person I talked to for today, birchbark and quill artist Pat Kruse is very similar. His artwork revolves around the environment, it depends on the environment, it gives back to the environment. So here’s Pat Kruse.

Pat Kruse:

My name is Pat Kruse. My Ojibwe family name is [inaudible 00:25:40] from Red Cliff to Mille Lacs. I do birchbark art.

Leah Lemm:

Pat Kruse was born in Oakland, California and now lives on the Mille Lacs Band of Ojibwe’s Reservation and he’s a member of the Red Cliff Band of Ojibwe in Wisconsin and is a descendant of the Mille Lacs Band of Ojibwe here in central Minnesota. And he’s been working with birchbark for over 30 years. Pat is known for remaking these beautiful old style Ojibwe birchbark and quill basketry and he creates just… I want you to look at the pictures that I took of his art.

Marianne Combs:

It’s amazing.

Leah Lemm:

And you can see him online on his website, but he creates these just beautiful wall hangings, 3D art from birchbark and he also teaches birchbark basket workshops with students ranging from grade school to elders.

Pat Kruse:

My work is a lot of the old and the new at the same time mixed. So I tried to originally make things one of a kind and stuff like that. I started when I was really young, but, of course, I didn’t have wheels and stuff like that. I went to culture classes and I did all them kind of things and I made my first canoes when I was probably five years old. But then when we get teenagers and start messing around, I figure since I was 20, 19, 20, so I’m 52 now, so it’s been 30 plus years mostly off and on. I do construction also. These years, we recognize that the climate is changing because of I’m a wild ricer and the more they clear cut, we notice the worse it gets for the rice, the more bad years we’re having. Normally, like 20 years ago we were getting two, three, 4,000 pounds a year and now we’re getting a thousand or so or less.

And that’s not very good because I’m a pretty good wild ricer. But with the trees, it’s also the same. When they do take an area and they clear cut it, they don’t plant back what was there. They plant other trees like poplar and things that aren’t very usable, you know what I mean? For us as natives, it don’t matter whether you’re native, even all kinds of colors use birchbark and they just ain’t being seen because they put that 1990 rule about not being able to sell art that’s not native made and you’re not native to native stores and all that. So that was part of it, but then in the DNR and all them places, they don’t consider the birch tree a valued tree when it’s hardwood. The cradle that I made, it’s all birchbark porcupine quills. Guess what the cradle’s made of? Birchbark hardwood because I made sure that we used birchbark for it.

So it’s 98% birchbark and then quills 1% and then stitching the other 1%. So it’s all birch tree, the whole thing. Birchbark is besides all the other trees, of course, birchbark is one of the main things that are culturally significant to the tribes because they use it as a boat. Especially Ojibwe is the boat, the house, the cup, the bowl, everything. Plus, there’s more to the birch tree than everybody understood. They don’t understand that there’s chaga medicine. The roots are medicine. The leaves and branches are tea medicine. So the skin of the tree is medicine. So it’s very important that you remember that birch trees is not just an art piece or a canoe or anything, it’s also medicine. So it’s very, very, very important to remember that.

Leah Lemm:

So much like our earlier discussion with Sharon Day, there’s this propensity, this tendency to commodify nature and Pat Kruse here is pointing out how significant our trees are as an example of that. You can’t possibly just say how much a tree is worth in dollars when it is life giving.

Marianne Combs:

Yeah, when you hear Pat talk about it, it’s so much more than like, oh, I need to appreciate the trees more. It’s vital and so powerfully important, the role they play within the ecosystem. Whether or not I esteem them and view them as important to me they have amazing value independent of that. It’s more than just individuals taking a moment to say, “Oh yeah, trees are cool. I love trees.”

Leah Lemm:

Well, all these beings in our creation story came before we did. We’re like the newborns and they’re taking care of us, and we have a responsibility to take care of them in return so it is wrapped into culture, this reciprocal relationship.

Marianne Combs:

And humility, which is very uncommon in mainstream society. This idea of being humble before trees, and animals, and plants, and the water, and the land.

Leah Lemm:

Well let’s go back in time a little bit and hear how Pat Kruse got his start in birchbark art.

Pat Kruse:

A lot of my family from Leech Lake so I got Leech Lake Turtle Mountain, Red Cliff and Mille Lacs are all my main tribes. That’s where I’m from. I’m not just from one, right? Just because I have a band card that says Red Cliff, uh-uh. I’m from Leech Lake, I’m from Red Cliff, I’m from Mille Lacs and Turtle Mountain.

Leah Lemm:

Yeah.

Pat Kruse:

So where does that put me? You know what I mean? As an Ojibwe we’re a free roaming people, we have always been that way. So I don’t claim one as my own, but I live and love Mille Lacs. This is where I’m from. But I am a Red Cliff Band member so it’s like I don’t want to claim one as I love the most, but Mille Lacs is where I made my better life for myself. This is where I learned all these baskets. But I also learned how to make the beginning of birchbark in Leech Lake.

So I made the simple things. I wasn’t very good in the beginning. You know what I mean? It was hard to learn. There was a lot of better people that were doing way better work than me. It took a long time to evolve until this. I had teachings from my mother. She actually sent me to go learn birchbark. When I did, I brought it back. And when I was doing chasing, wait a minute, you need to stitch it a little bit more than that. If you want to be seen more as an Ojibwe, you need to do it more like the old Ojibwe is make old stuff, put floral and stuff on there and everything like that. So that’s where you see all these floral designs, the Thunderbird pieces, all the things I did all became from my mom. She’s the one that advanced me and taught me to do it like that because I’m very light skinned, my family’s dark. A lot of them are dark, but I’m the light skinned of them and it does bother me that I’m not dark like them.

I want to be like them. Dark like that. But I am me. I’m like a birch tree. I’m light skinned. You know what I’m saying?

Leah Lemm:

Yeah.

Pat Kruse:

That’s why I called myself the birchbark kid. My ma, every since she’s been a very visionary person. She said that you’re not not special like the rest of us that are darker or not so light. She said, “You’re like a birds tree. You’re very special and it’s like sacred.” So all of us who are half-breeds are light-skinned are like that. We all probably feel the same way, but we don’t mention that to people because we don’t want to be more looking like a white guy. You know what I mean? We want to be Native American a hundred percent. I was raised on the res. My ties are reservations not the streets in Minneapolis or California where I was born.

And so I was born in California, brought to Minnesota when I was a little kid and raised on the res. A long time ago when my mom said, “We’re going to be living here someday, boys,” as she pulled up into the shores of Mille Lacs, and as you know, the old 169 used to be right next to the lake. So there was a pullover spot right down south here where there’s a bridge. So we went swimming there and she said, “We’re going to be living here someday, boys.” And we were like, “Yeah, right.” So years later we ended up living in Mille Lacs and we were stunned because my ma told us that when we were little boys. But the special thing about Mille Lacs is from where I grew up, Leech Lake, it gets warmer here months earlier than Leech Lake so we have access to all the things, forest, earlier than all the people up north, like Grand Portage, Nett Lake, all them places like that. Red Lake, all them are still got lots of snow on the ground and we’re actually getting access.

So Mille Lacs is perfect for a guy like me because there’s a lot of rice when there was a lot of rice, there’s a lot of rice and not a lot of ricers anymore. So I have a benefit because of that, because I have a lot of opportunity today. There’s too many birch workers. There’s a few, but there’s not predominantly. I do birch work like 24/7 so it’s like my life. It’s not a job. I never felt like it was a burden or anything to do it. Even the biggest giantest things. I actually love doing what I do. It’s not like a job, it’s a lifestyle. [inaudible 00:35:26] birchbark. It’s life for me.

Leah Lemm:

You can really tell that Pat Kruse loves what he does. Pat is a very humble person and his home, when I visited, it is full of art. It is full of his baskets. In fact, I showed up and he made me this birchbark canoe right on the spot. He put it together right then and there.

Marianne Combs:

He’s prolific.

Leah Lemm:

Oh, totally. And so he lives in this beautiful place right on the shores of Lake Mille Lacs. And at the same time, Pat Kruse was also caring for his mother, who was a fantastic person. And I got the chance to meet her while visiting with Pat. And she has since passed so my heart goes out to Pat and his family. And through Pat’s humility, you wouldn’t realize how many awards and accolades he’s earned and where his art is displayed. Pat was selected for the native artist in residence at the Minnesota Historical Society in 2015. Big honor.

And another really big honor was that he was selected for the Native Arts and Cultures Foundation Fellowship in 2016. And that’s also a huge deal. He’s out there helping others learn how to create birchbark art. He’s creating it for himself and we can also check it out too, because he does have his art in museum collections in St. Paul at the Minnesota Historical Society and at the National Museum of the American Indian, the Smithsonian Museum there in DC.

Marianne Combs:

Wow, that’s impressive.

Leah Lemm:

Totally impressive. And where does he get this birchbark for all of this birchbark art that he’s creating? Well, birch trees, but often those birch trees are on private property and there’s this continued conflict, this friction between our rights as native people to access resources on treaty lands versus state property so it’s kind of tricky so I’ll let Pat explain more.

Pat Kruse:

I’m very fortunate because a lot of times I do art shows and I meet different people, people of different color, like white people, and they offer me, they’re friendly to natives and stuff. They offer me the opportunity to go get bark off their land. So most times I get my bark from these people. They give it to me. I try to give them art and they are so modest they say, “No, we don’t want that. We want you to just to make the art, keep making this because it’s a storytelling thing.” You tell a story with the barks that I’m making, you can tell the harvesting, how to gather, how to hunt, all that. So then there’s all the treaty right areas that I get from there too, which we face problems in them places because they say we’re free to go to these treaty rights and we’re free to go there and gather but then there’s gates on every road. So is that free? No, they’re our masters.

We have to ask our masters to open the gate so we could go back there and the birchbark ain’t right by that gate. It’s five miles back in the woods. That’s the number one reason why I don’t get a lot of birchbark from the state is because I don’t like the fact that I have to answer to somebody like a DNR to go get what’s family been written into a treaty for way back in the 1850s and 1837. We’re supposed to be able to go do this without being accosted, without being searched, without being looked at, without being run our name. You know what I mean? And looked through our car. And it hasn’t happened to me so much, but other people more because maybe it’s because I am lighter skinned, they just think I’m just a white guy. Right?

But I’ve been very fortunate where I haven’t had a lot of trouble. But that does bother me that I have to call a DNR and open this gate. So you pretty much subject yourself to a search and seizure if in fact you want to go harvest. So if they see, like I know people like other Ojibwes like me, we go, I don’t just do birchbark, but I harvest like medicines, like swamp tea, and rot root, and wintergreen, all these other different kind of chagas and stuff like that. And to have a gate in your way, you have to walk five miles back just to get to the medicines too also. Can you imagine that? Have to call someone to get into access to a land that’s already ours in a treaty right that says we should be able to go there. Do you know how disturbing that is? So we are not free.

We actually have to answer to someone else so that’s what I feel about that. And it’s not just me. I feel for other people who don’t understand why that gate’s there. It should never be there. So imagine going picking all these medicines that your ancestors go there for hundreds of years and then all of a sudden they take a bigger machine and go in there and clear cut the heck out of it because they seen natives gathering swamp tea in there. I mean they literally wait till the winter comes, it freezes solid, and they go in there and clear cut the whole thing. It is the most aggressive thing to a native person to see that.

Now people will say, oh, it’s selfish. You’re thinking only about you and your people and the harvesting. Them forests don’t belong to us. They’re full of bear, deer, wolf, they’re not ours, they’re theirs and them are the only last places where these animals are. Wonder why there’s bear problems in our neighborhood? Wonder why there’s chronic wasting disease and all the other things like that? Because they’re baiting these deer and they’re doing all that. They’re creating these things. So we are like nature, protecting nature. They think we’re tree huggers and we’re water protectors and they can put these labels on us. Uh-uh, we’re protecting nature.

Marianne Combs:

God, I love that.

Leah Lemm:

Oo, Pat. Pat is speaking truth here. And I don’t mind words like tree huggers and water protectors because those sound good too. I go hug a tree, I’m fine. But that’s this question of why is it a radical thing, a radical action to protect your relatives? So I would die for my child.

Marianne Combs:

Yeah.

Leah Lemm:

This is analogous to how we relate to the environment, how we relate to our forests, our water. They are family members.

Marianne Combs:

And the fact that coming from my white colonizer upbringing perspective, I mean I absolutely see the value in protecting water, and in protecting trees, and keeping the earth clean. But I see it very differently when I try and adopt the practice of being a relative of the tree, of thinking of the water as my relative. Thinking of the birds and the plants as my relatives who don’t necessarily have a voice at the legislature or who don’t have a voice to fight back against an industrial sector. It becomes a much more, I don’t want to say primal, but gut level feeling of urgency, and care taking and empathy that wouldn’t exist otherwise.

Leah Lemm:

Absolutely. All right, let’s hear more from Pat.

Pat Kruse:

When they clear cut in Wisconsin, they do this more. They say, well, we’re clear cutting in this area. So all the natives that want to harvest the goods out here, whether it’s birch, cedar, the roots from the spruce roots and all them, they don’t say hey and advertise that to each native community and say here’s the chance for you to come get this bark before we clear cut it. They don’t do that here. So not only do the animals suffer, but the natives who use that material suffer because they go back and they don’t realize that. They’re going, “Oh, we’re going to go get this stuff.” And they get out there and the whole forest is gone and it takes a hundred years, 75 years for it to grow back. It ain’t enough time for us, as a nation, to wait 75 years to go back to a place where possibly the medicine will grow. Besides that, we’re not so much about us, it’s about the animals too. So there’s no place for birds to perch, no place to, you know what I mean? It’s not the same. It’s just not the same.

Leah Lemm:

And this includes the porcupine, which Pat Kruse cherishes in his artwork as well.

Pat Kruse:

They love birch, they love all these. They love all, especially birch. They love the buds and stuff on it, especially in spring. But I pick quills off the dead ones, but I also know how to get them off the live ones. Of course, you don’t get that much off the live ones, but I’ve used… Matter of fact, I got whole bin of them right there. There’s a whole porcupine in that bin right there.

Leah Lemm:

Cool.

Pat Kruse:

So I make sure to use that. I waited till I became more red road type. I don’t drink, I don’t mess around with none of that hard drugs or anything like that. So I waited till later to actually do that because I didn’t want to mess with any of that sacred stuff unless I was absolutely close to being sober and straight for years. And that’s why I do quill work now. We’ve lost many to them same things because matter of fact, most people probably went to them things because there was nothing for them to do naturally because there was no woods to harvest. There’s no things like that. We don’t know why people fall into them things and drugs and drinking are two of the main things, but also loss of nature, loss of cultural identity. All them are hand in hand with each other and you don’t think so much about that.

Leah Lemm:

This is such a significant point that Pat Kruse is making here. He’s pointing out the relationship between the disconnection between ourselves and the environment. This loss, this mourning, this trauma, and how that relates to substance abuse in our communities. How it’s a way to try to numb ourselves to trauma. So I just wanted to make sure that we took a moment to acknowledge what Pat says there. So let’s let him continue.

Pat Kruse:

I’m not a person of money and wealth. I’m a person of nature and living good as possible while we have life to live. I ain’t trying to be higher than anybody. I want to be equal. You know what I mean? We don’t claim to be some kind of big shot or anything. We’re trying to keep it humble at the same time. I’m just a regular birchbarker doing a little bit different than everybody else. And I don’t want to be anything more than just a birchbarker. I have no king or anything of these things. You know what I mean? I’m very fortunate because I call it desperate res kid stuff because we were very desperate and it was easy to fall on them traps with the drinking and the drugs and all that. So I was very desperate to find something other than them things to teach my kid a future. Teach my people a future for our longevity instead of destruction.

Birchbark is the most truthful thing a person can do, is to work on your culture, to learn your language, to learn the baskets, to make the moccasins, to do the bead work, following your ancestor’s footsteps a little bit. You know, you don’t have to be good at all them things, you just have to find something that fits you as a person. Because long time ago we all had trades. One person was a great hunter, one was a good fire starter, and one could do bead work really well. So that’s what I do.

Leah Lemm:

And what Pat Kruse is saying here is so true. We each have skills, and abilities, and gifts, to bring to the table when we’re living in a collaborative community. It’s this notion of sharing what we have, giving freely of what we have for all of our benefits. We don’t need to hoard, we don’t need to sock things away, but instead live that good life in a reciprocal, collaborative sharing way.

Marianne Combs:

And yet he’s an artist who needs to make a living too.

Leah Lemm:

Yep. So he’s a part of this community where he brings his art to us, and in return, either we buy it, appreciate it, or I brought him some coffee. We all kind of have this way to give and take from one another.

Marianne Combs:

And to honor each other in a way that’s more meaningful than just money necessarily.

Leah Lemm:

And Pat Kruse applies this reciprocal relationship with nature to his art by making sure he does this work in a sustainable way.

Pat Kruse:

There’s been times where I’ve had 200 sheets of birchbark because they’re clear cutting it, they’re going to use it for firewood and they don’t want the bark and that’s fine. So I grabbed whatever I could. Most of it was rough. Some of it was not usable, but there was a whole bunch of it that was, and I’ve actually shared that birchbark with multiple places, multiple people that asked for some. So besides using it all, I’ve always shared because I knew it was important. I didn’t want to be like I’m like hoarding it like a squirrel, right? I shared it. So that’s why I teach the classes is I was able to share some with them and I was able to, like at the museum, I make baskets or there’s other people that make Christmas trinket or do quill work or anything like that, I share with them too.

It’s important to learn from somebody that actually has skills with working with the tree and how to peel it. You actually check the depth of each tree because each tree has different thicknesses of skin. So some older ones, you think that the skin would be really thick, but it’s actually paper thin. So you can’t just go and cut the line in it right away and then start peeling it because you have to actually check the depth of a tree. And you would be surprised, a big old tree, you’d think the bark would be really thick, but sometimes it’s paper thin. So each tree you peel, you have to check that depth and you got to pinch the blade and make it that depth because you don’t want to hit that cambium layer in the middle between the hardwood and the skin.

You try not to cut too deep into that. It’s very important. Another thing I didn’t get to mention is about the birch tree is not only does it give you all these things, but like maple, you can tap that tree, but you got to be careful because you could kill it and you got to do it in the right way. You got to put the tobacco on and pray for that. And you got to learn from people that know how to do that. I don’t mess with that kind of stuff too much with tapping a birds tree, but you can also make like maple syrup out of it. Just a little different taste but it’s really good. I mean, the tree will give you clean water and even in the areas where there’s rainy seasons are coming so it’s kind of amazing like that. The birch tree has so much more to offer that people don’t know.

All the trees I peeled, I actually prayed that the trees forgive me for taking these things to survive, to live off of because that’s the last thing we want is to insult nature because nature’s stronger than any human. It’s here, it’s going to be here long after all of us are gone. Trees will be here longer as long as they don’t clear cut them all and desolate this planet.

But each and everything that’s here on this earth has a spirit, including animals, trees, fish, all. And that’s what main society is missing is that the these things, water, trees, birds, animals, all things, grass, all have spirit and to take them things, there’s repercussions with that if you don’t honor them. We really wish people would see what we’ve seen and wonder why we fought so hard for this land to the last Ojibwe at dang near to make sure our culture is alive and make sure that we’re trying to do these things because the trees and us are hand in hand. We need them, they need us and there is no getting away from that ever. We are here to do that. We are here to speak of them things. We are here to teach them things.

Leah Lemm:

Absolutely. And I just want to add to what Pat is saying here, that we as indigenous people, keeping our connection to our land, to our culture means that we are surviving and thriving. We are here forever. In the face of it all, in the face of colonization and assimilation, shoot, we are here and we’re going to continue to be here.

Pat Kruse:

I got bad news for the colonizers. There’s a bunch of us that are sober and we’re living that good life. Everyone that’s like that, all my artist friends, I appreciate every one of them because they’re doing the same as me. We don’t get to meet all the time. We don’t get to hang out, but they’re doing the same as me. They’re working every day to make sure that they stay to that road. Right? It’s important. It’s a good thing. So that’s why I said we don’t get to meet good people a lot of times because we’re so immersed in what we’re trying to do for our own families that we can’t literally meet like this. So I appreciate that you came to my house.

Leah Lemm:

And I appreciate being able to go to Pat Kruse’s house. Beautiful spot there on the shores of Lake Mille Lacs. God, it’s so wonderful to just look outside, to see trees and water. What an inspiring spot. And Pat’s humility, his care for his community, and the thoughtful way that he approaches art. I’m a huge fan. He has a new fan and that fan is me.

Marianne Combs:

That’s excellent. Well, I’m equally in awe of Sharon Day, who just made me realize just the awesome power of one individual mindfully going about their way in the world and focusing, with care, on relationships and taking care of needs where she sees them meeting those needs. And whether it’s caring for the people in her community, whether it’s caring for the water, whether it’s caring for her own self and the art that she makes, and tending to her relationship with the land around her really left me inspired to be more mindful and more present in the way I go about my work every day.

You’ve been listening to Filling the Well. I’m Marianne Combs.

Leah Lemm:

And I’m Leah Lemm. Tune in next time when we talk about the Indian Arts and Crafts Act with two native experts.

Marianne Combs:

This podcast was produced and edited by Emily Goldberg and mixed by Eric and Amanda Romani with original music by Damien Strange.

Leah Lemm:

Filling the Well is a podcast of Arts Midwest amplifying the power of Midwestern creativity. Find out more at artsmidwest.org.