She was born in 1914. And while the rest of the world was careening into the great war, the shores of northern Lake Michigan continued in the indifferent cycle of nature. Waves roiled sand and stone. Cattails and snake grass swayed in coastal breezes. Color and pattern traversed the sky. Shadow and highlight knit patchworks across the rolling landscape's forest canopy. All dampened the silent hum of creation within.
Atop the bluff that overlooked that great lake, nested behind a handful of plain wooden storefronts, sat the simple log cabin and subsistence farm of her childhood. There she learned her native language first. Men from the community would gather at her father's barber chair located in their home. She listened as the elders recounted stories of the Odawa people and mulled over their meanings. Next, she learned Polish from immigrant children of the local mill workers. Only by attending school at the Catholic parish did she learn English.
Life was work. Regular employment and professional careers had yet to enter the native ethos. With her family, she worked their rows of vegetables. Green beans, indispensable for winter, were stored in large woven baskets. She gathered wild berries and herbs in the forest under the instruction of her grandmother. On hot summer days, they would cool their wrists and neck before drinking spring water. Her father and brothers fished the shores, and during winter the ice, for whitefish and perch. If a deer was killed it would be shared within the small community. Alongside other native women, she wove baskets to sell to vacationing whites from the distant cities of Detroit and Chicago. The sparse earnings purchased basic wares and supplies.
Atop the bluff that overlooked that great lake, nested behind a handful of plain wooden storefronts, sat the simple log cabin and subsistence farm of her childhood. There she learned her native language first. Men from the community would gather at her father's barber chair located in their home. She listened as the elders recounted stories of the Odawa people and mulled over their meanings. Next, she learned Polish from immigrant children of the local mill workers. Only by attending school at the Catholic parish did she learn English.
Life was work. Regular employment and professional careers had yet to enter the native ethos. With her family, she worked their rows of vegetables. Green beans, indispensable for winter, were stored in large woven baskets. She gathered wild berries and herbs in the forest under the instruction of her grandmother. On hot summer days, they would cool their wrists and neck before drinking spring water. Her father and brothers fished the shores, and during winter the ice, for whitefish and perch. If a deer was killed it would be shared within the small community. Alongside other native women, she wove baskets to sell to vacationing whites from the distant cities of Detroit and Chicago. The sparse earnings purchased basic wares and supplies.
These ways of life were on course to fade, change, and clash with the momentum of mainstream America. It was this transition that irreversibly influenced her broadening perspective of life and people.
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