For most people, summer provides an opportunity to head out into the great outdoors. For authors, it’s the CANOPY TENT season. Compared...

For my grandparents. AUTHOR’S NOTE I never knew my grandparents. All four were gone before I was old enough to investigate...

Collecting stones at Mille Lacs Three thousand miles later, I returned home. Spending a week traveling by car, the scope of the migration really began to hit home. By comparison, Moses and the Hebrews only traveled 500ish miles for the Exodus, so a trek across the continent of North America was quite impressive. Yet the location of the Seventh Stopping Place is a bit...controversial. You see, there isn't orthodoxy in its location. According to the text of the prophecy, the lo

We arrived on a stormy day. Glad we had a very big canoe. Madeline Island is a bit controversial for multiple reasons. Located on the southern shore of Lake Superior, it exists in the protection of Chaumegon Bay and actually has way more than just 12 islands. From the shore at Bayfield, it looms on the horizon. Choosing it as a stopping place makes a lot of sense if the southern shores belonged to the Dakota people for there is a deep channel separating the island from the sh

When European explorers arrived at the rapids of Sault Ste Marie, they made first contact with the Anishinaabe People. Whether coincidence or purposeful, the Jesuits had created their own migration path with settlements/missions at Montreal, Niagara Falls, Detroit, and Manitoulin Island, so their interest in the waterway between Lake Superior and Lake Huron should come as no suprise. In 1620, they found a robust population and also a unique geographical anomoly: the rapids. S

The fourth stopping place. To get to the Fourth Stopping Place, you need a BIG canoe. Manitoulin Island is located on the northern shore of Lake Huron, and for the Anishinaabe living near Detroit, it was one of the most challenging locations to find. Montreal, Niagara Falls, and Detroit were found upstream along the same waterway, but finding the next location proved to be a great challenge. In the text of the Seven Fires, it describes how the exodus came to a halt. Where wa

The modern Lake St. Clair The Third Stopping Place turned out to be the most disappointing for me. A few years later, I'd visit Michigan again and find some wonderful resources at a Potowatomi community, but after we crossed the bridge into the United States, everything felt very industrial. Historically, the Third Stopping Place was known as Waawiyaataan, which translates as "Curved Shores." The obvious match to this description is Lake St. Clair. Lake St. Clair is located

After leaving Montreal, we stayed in Canada until we reached the headwaters of the St. Lawrence River at Lake Ontario. Once again, the open roads and scenic countryside made “getting there” half of the fun. What my wife didn’t expect was that BRIDGE! You see, she’s always had a phobia about bridges (we’ll talk about this again with our visit to Mackinac Island) and one of the biggest we came across was crossing into New York. That was a steep angle on a BIG bridge. And it was

Whether you believe in prophecy or not, the location of Montreal turned out to be an ideal place to build a city—first for the Anishinaabe, then the Iroquois, and later the French and English. Located in the channel of the St. Lawrence River, this massive island not only had beauty but also natural defenses. Did the scouts for the Anishinaabe people truly find cowry shells on this island? Did it just happen to look like a cowry shell (and that was close enough)? Or was it a p

Centuries ago, the Anishinaabe People left the shores of Nova Scotia on an exodus to discover a new home described in prophecy. A decade ago, my wife and I hopped on a jet plane and replicated this spiritual journey in a rental car with cheese and crackers in our Wal-Mart cooler. Okay, so our experience lacked any of the “epic” qualities of the original, but in trying to understand what it means to be “Minnesotan,” I needed to understand the journey that helped shape one of t