Traveling the Seven Fires--Mille Lacs

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 location will be a land where the food grows on water and there will be an island just like there was an island at the beginning. Minnesota is full of wild rice fields...check. Minneosta is the land with 10,000 lakes and almost as many islands..check. We must assume that a cowry shell identified the final lcoations, but strangely, there are no bold claims or flag planting moments to triumphantly announce the end of the migration.

The "Spirit Island" crowd believe the migration moved along the northern shore of Lake Superior, settled on Spirit Island (#6) and THEN moved onto Madeline Island. Perhaps they are right.

There is another group of Anishinaabe that continued looking for another stopping place, and given how many, it seems that even though Minnesota fit many qualities of the migration, the big moment never happened. These folks kept looking and ended up migrating out onto the prairie. Most settled in a very unique place now called Turtle Mountain, a reference to the island they were sent to find. In this case, the island is an island on the prairie. It is a unique geographical depression out on the prairie filled with lakes anf fertile forests. For these folks, THIS is the right stopping place. Perhaps they are right.

My Alchemist Chronicles series took me out to Sinclair Pass in British Columbia for a variety of reasons, but one of the interesting discoveries was a sizeable Anishinaabe population who kept migrating right out of North Dakota and into the rockies STILL looking for the right signs about the Seventh Stopping Place. Perhaps they are right.

Ultimately, I gravitated to the idea of the Stopping Place being in central Minnesota (even though I incorporated the other theories). Fictionally, I had Lake Manitou be the secret stopping place known only to the fictional Wijigan Clan. Historically, Joseph Nicollet's guide Chagobay took him through a bed of lily pads where a sleeping water serpent lurked. How cool is that? Combined with the name Manitou (Spirit), you've got the makings of a "Haunted" lake. So that's what I went with in my fictional account.

However, in real life, Lake Mille Lacs also fit very well. The Dakota people once possessed the territory with the spiritual center being Mille Lacs. To them, the lake was dubbed "Spirit" or "Mystic," which is where the term M'dewakanton comes from "Dwellers of Spirit Lake." The lore behind the name is that the lake was the birthplace of creation, with the stony island being a holy site. Due to the nature of Mille Lac's size and volume, optical illusions made it appear as if the lake moved during the day, fueling even more lore.

Ultimately, the Anishinaabe pressed into Minnesota from Lake Superior and around1750, a great battle occurred. According to the oral tradition, a group of Anishinaabe sought vegneance for a crime and armed with French weapons layed seige to the community entrenched along the shores of the Rum River (Spirit River). This devastating loss resulted in the Mdewakanton leaving their ancestral homelands. While there was an attempt to reclaim the terriroty in 1768, the Anishinaabe again defeated the Dakota.

Was Mille Lacs the fulfillment of prophecy?

Was another lake secretly discovered?

Or was the quest fulfilled far off on the open prairie or Rocky Mountains?

The mystery of the Seven Fires quest remains as enigmatic as the Book of Revelation, but like St. John's prophecy, it ultimately predicts a choice for mankind that can lead to an "Eighth" fire or restoration or a doom that will destroy mankind. With so much. ofthe prophecy seemingly fulfilled, now it is just a matter of time to see who was right and who was wrong and what will happen in the days to come.