Chris Peterson is showing me the machine that hauls up the fishing nets on his 50 foot commercial fishing boat, the Three Suns.
“This will hang out over the side so you're not pulling the nets up right next to the boat,” he said, pointing to a metal arm with a track for the net to pass through.
“And then this grabs it, grabs it and pulls the net in.”
He flips a switch, and a large, rotating wheel clacks to life.
The machinery looks old, but capable. Peterson bought the boat from his father, years ago.
The first time I ever ran this boat, it was 100% different than being a deckhand,” he said. “And I eventually grew to like it.”
It’s early March, snow is on the ground, and ice chunks float in the little harbor, near the town of Gay, Michigan, on the western shore of the Keweenaw Peninsula.
Peterson allows me and my colleague Jodi Westrick to tag along for the day, to see how one of the few remaining large commercial fishing boats operates on Lake Superior. We board the boat before dawn, stepping carefully from the icy dock onto the enclosed deck of the Three Suns.
Peterson’s family moved to the Keweenaw Peninsula from Wisconsin. He’s a member of the Red Cliff band of Lake Superior Chippewa. Fishing is a tradition and a right guaranteed to Great Lakes tribes in treaties signed with the federal government.
Those treaty rights haven’t always been respected, but tribal fishermen fought to reassert them. Peterson's own family has filed lawsuits to protect their right to fish, not just in Wisconsin, but throughout Lake Superior.
Hunting fish
But Peterson didn’t always want to be a fisherman.
“No, no no no no,” he said, standing at the wheel of the boat, chugging out to the first net of the day. “I was going to college, and, you know, I was going to do something else. But when I was in college, I went to junior college in Escanaba, Michigan at Bay College. And I would be looking out the window during classes, wondering how the weather was or how the fishing was going. And so I kind of came back to it.”
It’s not what he thought he wanted. But it turned out to be a calling.
“I mean, I'm good at it now,” he said. “Made a lot of money doing it. So, you know, put my two daughters through school. So, you know, I'm good at it. You got to get it in your blood. You gotta fall in love with doing it. Hunting fish.”
When Peterson spots the buoy marking his next net, he steps down from the captain’s bench and stands at the side of the boat where there's a second wheel and an open panel next to the rotating wheel that pulls the net through.
The deck of the boat is enclosed; heaters are blasting to keep it warm inside. It smells of fish guts, marine grease and Peterson’s Marlboros.
Peterson reaches out for his buoy and gets the net started into the machine. The net spills out onto a white table, where four men stand, one guiding the net at one end, one stuffing it into a bin at the other end, and two in the middle, pulling the fish free from the net and chucking them into a plastic box on the floor.
It’s slow at first, only a few fish appear at a time. It’s a mixture of trout and whitefish.
After the net is cleared, Peterson returns to the wheel to head to the next buoy.
“I mean, we had something, but not what I'm looking for,” he said of the first net. “I need bigger numbers than that. I mean, at least, a box of whitefish would be nice.”
Peterson said his lines were out a little shallower than they usually would be. This was his first trip back after taking a month off. February is not a great time to try to run a boat on Lake Superior, so he took the time to get some repairs done. For his first time back on the water in a while, he wasn’t sure how many fish he’d get.
He’s one of the few large-boat commercial fishermen on the lake. So he sees it more. As a tribal fisherman, he sees what comes up in the nets, and what doesn’t.
A couple decades ago, his uncle and his dad fished these waters a little closer to shore, in shallower water where there’s an underwater pile of rocks known as Buffalo Reef. It had always been a good fishing spot for them, until it seemed it wasn’t.
'Something's up with Buffalo Reef.'Chris Peterson, recalling his uncle's message to the Great Lakes Indian Fish & Wildlife Commission
Peterson said his uncle mentioned it to some people at the Great Lakes Indian Fish & Wildlife Commission, GLIFWC.
“He had told whoever — GLIFWC — that they weren’t catching no fish,” Peterson said. “I don’t know if he said because of stamp sands or not, but he said ‘something’s up with Buffalo Reef.’”
Scientists began studying the reef, and what they found underwater on the rocks traced back to the shore.
The reason the fish weren’t on the reef was because of the leftovers from two copper mines that operated a century ago near the shore here. The mines operated by pulling chunks of rock out of the ground and smashing them into bits. The copper bits were separated out. But there was lots of coarse leftover so-called stamp sands, or tailings, that had trace amounts of copper. The mine operators just dumped it all on the beach: 23 million metric tons of it. Over time, the copper infused sands drifted onto the reef. The Environmental Protection Agency says copper can be toxic to fish in higher concentrations. And the scientists who studied Buffalo Reef found fish had started to avoid spawning there.
The copper history is evident everywhere you go in the Keweenaw Peninsula.
It’s a unique part of Lake Superior’s history, a history that stretches back more than one billion years.
Ancient origins
Lake Superior is the largest of the Great Lakes, one of the largest lakes in the world. And its history stretches back to a stunning geological event in the earth’s history.
The story begins 1.1 billion years ago, with an event of unimaginable violence. The earth cracked open.
“And it’s erupting just oceans of magma onto the surface of the earth,” said Erika Vye, a professor at Michigan Technological University, in Houghton.
Vye is a geologist, more specifically she studies something called geoheritage, the connection between geology and human societies.
She met me and Jodi Westrick at the A.E. Seaman Mineral Museum on Michigan Tech’s campus in Houghton. Around her, in glass cases, are examples of the Keweenaw’s unique geological history.
Vye said 1.1 billion years ago, as the oceans of magma flowed to the surface, the earth split apart, essentially trying to create a new ocean in the middle of the continent. This is the same way the Atlantic Ocean was born, Vye said. But for some reason, this split stopped before it broke the continent in half.
Then, over the course of thousands of years, the magma cooled, and as it did so, it sagged under its own weight.
“So that’s essentially the birth of Lake Superior,” Vye said, “having that basin shape.”
Over the billion years, it could have filled in with sediment, but instead there was this massive sheet of ice you’ve probably heard about — nearly two miles high, according to Vye. About 10,000 years ago, it started to melt.
“And as that’s melting, retreating, it’s filling in that basin that was created 1.1 billion years ago,” Vye said.
Not the ocean it could have been, but instead one of the largest freshwater lakes on the planet.
The lake and the copper, they share a history. Even today.
And, here on the Keweenaw Peninsula, it left something else behind too.
“Enter the story of the copper,” Vye said.
Back when all that magma was flowing, it took a long time to cool, Vye told us. Like, thousands of years. And as it did, gases poured out from deeper in the earth, creating bubbles and cracks. Copper came up from deep in the earth along with it.
“These hydrothermal fluids that are being brought up from the deep earth carrying this gift of copper,” Vye explained. “And they're going to find any crack and crevice they can find to hide. And so those flow tops where you've got those little air bubbles that are frozen in time, are a great place for copper to fill in.”
The lake and the copper, they share a history. Even today.
Because once humans came along, the copper didn’t stay in the ground. For thousands of years, people have collected it and mined it in the Keweenaw Peninsula. And starting 150 years ago or so, they started taking a lot more of it.
The impact of this copper mining boom is evident everywhere you go in the Keweenaw Peninsula.
This area has the largest deposit of what’s known as native copper anywhere in the world. The copper taken from here is the same copper used in the wires that brought electricity to every home in America a century ago.
And people up here are still dealing with the leftovers.
“The sand was out a mile and eighth out in the lake when they closed the mill in 1932,” said Bob Kauppi, who owns the dock where Chris Peterson tied up the Three Suns during the fishing trip in early March.
“It was a big deal,” Kauppi said of the leftover stamp sands from the mill that sat a few hundred yards up the beach from his dock.
Over the course of the past century, storms have blown the coarse, dark sand down along the shore, and over Buffalo Reef.
“They call that the dead zone because when a fry is born on the reef, they head to the shallow water, but there's no food for them there,” Kauppi said. “They have to go to past the Traverse [River] to get food. So that's why that's a big deal. That spawning grounds.”
The work
Nearly a decade ago, the Environmental Protection Agency created a new Buffalo Reef task force to study how to stop the spread of stamp sands on the reef. Since then, there’s been annual dredging, and there’s a plan for how to remove much of the sand to stop its spread.
The problem is, that plan could cost $2 billion.
So for now, the state and tribes are just doing maintenance, digging up sands from one end of the beach, trucking them to the other, away from the reef — just slowing it down enough to keep things relatively in check.
A big part of the work, right now, and in the future, is coming from the Keweenaw Bay Indian Community.
“Some of the things that have to be looked at take years,” said Evelyn Ravindran, director of the KBIC’s natural resources department. “The process of Buffalo Reef, if you look at the timeline of it… coming to know what was happening there and getting a group together and working on it, we're talking decades.”
Ravindran is also on the Buffalo Reef task force.
“But as has been expressed in those meetings and with the community around here, we're not going anywhere,” she said. “And whether it takes a hundred years, we're still here. We're still working on it. It's still an obligation.”
I met Ravindran while standing on the ice on Keweenaw Bay, during the tribe’s annual free ice fishing event. The moment she’d arrived at the event, she went out on the ice, to connect with the lake and the people she knew.
Staying connected to this lake is important to her, she told me. Her other name, she told me, is “Laughing Water Woman.”
“That was the name that was gifted to me many years ago,” Ravindran said, standing on the ice. “I'm with Bear Clan, and … my name really reflects my ties to Lake Superior and to the waters of this area — that there's a joy, and this is home to me. And I need this as a touchstone every day of my life. You know that it's very important to me what happens. And I stay connected to these waters.”
That connection runs deep, and it’s important, Ravindran said, to keep it going every day.
“It's a balance, connectedness to the water and to the beings that are here that share the same landscape as us,” she said. “It's important for me to know what's happening and that I'm interacting in a good way, and that I'm sharing this with my community, and I’m hearing what they say too.”
And it also comes back to a word she used earlier. Obligation.
It’s a big word for the tribes’ work and connection to this lake.
There are the obligations that come from the tribe's treaties with the U.S. government.
The 1842 treaty, which is the one signed by the Keweenaw Bay Indian Community, is often called the mineral treaty, Ravindran told me. The U.S. government had already signed a treaty in 1836 for tribes in the eastern UP. But in 1841, state geologist Douglass Houghton published a survey describing in detail the apparent copper formations in the Keweenaw Peninsula. The next year, the U.S. government entered into a treaty that covered the peninsula.
That treaty gave the U.S. the right to mine the copper. It also gave tribal members the right to continue fishing. Which is what Chris Peterson’s uncle and dad were doing when they discovered that fish were avoiding Buffalo Reef.
For Ravindran, that points to the other obligations — obligations not in the 1842 treaty, or in the 1836 treaty, but in what the tribe considers the first treaty, the treaty with the creator.
Out on Keweenaw Bay, the ice fishing wraps up. Ravindran leads me back to the snowy shore, where kids are eating hot dogs, and adults are sitting around the fire.
Ravindran tells me events like this ice fishing day are important to introduce more kids to fishing, to teach them the traditions and the obligations of that first treaty.
“One of the things with our youth groups, it was beautiful to hear, was that somebody brought up, ‘What about the fish?’ Like, ‘What do they want?’” she said. “And I really feel like they heard that we're sharing this landscape with other beings and they have a right for decisions, too.”
Walking back, we reached the snowy shore, and found Ravindran’s brother, Paul Smith, a commercial fisherman who owns First Catch LLC.
Though Smith grew up fishing, he said he didn’t always think he was going to be a fisherman. But the water kept drawing him back.
“There's moments where I'll watch the sunrise over the horizon and I'm steaming full ahead to my fishing grounds. And as many times I see a sunrise on the lake, it never gets old,” he said. “It never gets old. So it's just kind of like watching that over and over. And I'm like, yeah, I like what I do.”
He makes money at it.
But he doesn’t see it as completely different from the work his sister does in conservation with the natural resources department.
“No, I mean, it's more for me, like stewardship,” he said. “And I think that stewardship played into noticing problems such as what's happening in the Buffalo Reef area or, you know, biologists and scientists will say one thing, but when you're watching it happen with your harvest, you're like, well…”
The tribal fishermen just see the lake differently.
For now, Smith, Ravindran and even Chris Peterson, all agree on one thing: to them, Lake Superior is the healthiest of the Great Lakes.
Lake Superior is different. The people who know it best say you can feel that difference.
Over by the fire, I find Kathleen Smith. She’s an enrolled member of the Keweenaw Bay Indian Community and works with the Great Lakes Indian Fish and Wildlife Commission, where her official title is Manoomin Ganawandang, "she who takes care of the wild rice."
Smith told me she’s also a water walker, which means she’s part of a tradition to honor and protect the waters of the Great Lakes. She takes part in ceremonies where she carries the water over the land, walking it for many miles.
“Women in our culture, anishinaabekweg, we are the caretakers for the water,” she said.
The water from the lake is carried in a vessel made out of copper.
She told me about the water walk movement, a woman she calls Grandmother Josephine — Josephine Mandamin — who said that when she walked with Lake Erie water, it felt heavier because of the pollution affecting that lake.
To Smith, the water of Lake Superior feels lighter.
“When I sing and pray for that water, and as I carry that copper vessel, my feet actually become lighter,” she said, smiling. “And I just want to race to the end.”
“And that feels different with carrying Lake Superior water than other water?” I asked.
“It feels so different,” she responded. “You know, in this community, I'm really partial to Keweenaw Bay, you know, because it's being a part of Lake Superior. But that's the difference, you know, is that it's so much lighter.”
What we do with our teachings is we just remind you, remind you of your connection as well for non-tribal people.Kathleen Smith
I asked Smith, with her connection to this water, what she knows that the rest of us, especially non-tribal people, may not know.
“So, water is very healing, very healing,” she said. “When you sit right next to the water, you know, it just kind of soothes you. So we all have that, no matter what your walk of life, no matter what your belief system is, we all have that connection, you know, to the landscape, to this beautiful Gitche Gumee, to Lake Superior. And what we do with our teachings is we just remind you, remind you of your connection as well for non-tribal people. You know, it just, it takes a tribe to really exercise their treaty rights and to really stand for, you know, what's ours, you know, from since the beginning of time and to really fight for those treaty rights, we're actually also fighting for you too.”
For fisheries, for water quality, for everyone’s connection to this water. “We're here just to remind you of what you already know,” she said.
What you already know, what we already know, is that this lake is ancient, formed in the hot fire of an ocean of magma, created by melting ice, carrying precious resources below its waves and on the shore.
What you already know is that what we do here now affects what comes next, just as what was done before affects us now.
And the people who live here have an obligation to keep that in mind.
Edited by Rebecca Williams, Vincent Duffy, Kate Furby and Jodi Westrick. Special thanks to Randi Kest, Detroit PBS, and Great Lakes Now.
Support for the production of this podcast was made possible by the Charles Stewart Mott Foundation, as part of its Great Lakes News Collaborative.
Beyond the Shore is a production of Michigan Public. You can find all of our podcasts at michiganpublic.org/podcasts.
