Gichigami

The rice

Manoomin is wild rice. It grows in one to three feet of standing water, which rules out Lake Superior and rules in the shallow lakes and slow rivers behind it. The 1854 Treaty Authority keeps an inventory of rice waters in the ceded territory that runs to 532 entries, every one of them a lake, part of a lake, or a stretch of river. Crews have surveyed 415 of them since 1996.

The Authority calls manoomin a sacred gift given to the Bands, and part of the Ojibwe migration story. Harvest opens August 15, but only where the rice is actually ripe, which varies water to water and year to year. Ricing is done from a canoe with two cedar sticks, one to bend the stalks over the boat and one to knock the grain loose.

The shore

Move the pointer across the water.

In Anishinaabemowin, gichigami means a sea, or a large lake, and it means this one. Longer forms carry the people's name inside them. Anishinaabewi-gichigami, Anishinaabe's Sea. Ojibwewi-gichigami. Charles Lippert collected both for the Decolonial Atlas map of the Great Lakes. Dialects differ all the way around the shore, so the lake answers to more than one name and always has.

Longfellow spelled it Gitche Gumee in 1855 and that spelling is the one that got loose. Lake Superior Magazine traces it back through Henry Schoolcraft, and notes that Frederic Baraga's 1878 dictionary has Otchipwe-kitchi-gami. The final vowel is closer to the sound in "it" than to a long e, which is not how anyone says it in a poetry class.

The rock along the North Shore is cooled lava. A billion years ago the continent started to pull apart along a seam that ran down through what is now Minnesota, and iron-rich flows came up through it and spread out and hardened. Those flows are the cliffs and ledges people picnic on. Gas bubbles caught in the cooling rock later filled with quartz and iron, laid down in rings, and when the softer basalt eroded away the filled bubbles came out whole. Those are Lake Superior agates, per the Minnesota DNR: banded, reddened by iron, anywhere from the size of a pea to over twenty pounds. Glaciers hauled them south. People still find them in gravel pits two hundred miles from the water.

Three agates, drawn rather than photographed. Reload for a new set; the seed rides in the link, so a shared page keeps the same stones.

Six of the names, with English and Anishinaabemowin on a switch. Onigamiinsing and Gichi-onigamiing are entries in the Ojibwe People's Dictionary, which has a speaker saying each. Binesii-wiikwedong, Gakiiwe-onigamiing, and the Ojibwe name for the St. Louis River come from InfoSuperior at Lakehead University; Baawitigong and Mooningwanekaaning are as an Ojibwe writer gives them in Belt Magazine. Most describe a carry or a bay. North up. Isle Royale sits off the north shore, the Apostles cluster in the southwest, Michipicoten is the small one in the east. 350 miles end to end. Claude Allouez and Claude Dablon spent 1667 to 1669 traveling the shoreline and published a map in 1672 that the National Park Service still calls remarkably accurate; the Wisconsin Historical Society has a copy. Outline from Natural Earth.

The gales

Twenty-five feet is roughly how tall the waves were on the evening of November 10, 1975. A reanalysis by NOAA scientists in 2006, using models that did not exist at the time, found sustained winds near 50 knots over most of southeast Lake Superior that evening, gusts above hurricane force in places, and waves over 7.5 meters running west to east, nearly at right angles to the course the Edmund Fitzgerald was steering. The University of Michigan summarizes the findings: the ship was lost around 7:15 that evening, in both the time and the place where conditions were worst.

The Fitzgerald reported 10-foot seas at one in the morning and was taking 16-foot seas by afternoon, per the National Transportation Safety Board record. Steep, short-period waves over 16 feet are the dangerous kind for a boat that long. Her hull stood 39 feet above the water.

Storms like that one arrive most years. Wave height on the lake is a product of wind speed and fetch, the open distance the wind gets to work across, and Lake Superior offers 350 miles of it in the direction the November lows travel. Gale warnings go up for sustained winds of 39 to 54 miles per hour. Above 55 it becomes a storm warning, which is what was flying by the morning of the tenth.

Copper

Native copper branches through basalt in veins, some of them running hundreds of feet.

Copper is not a depth. It is the reason boats came here in the first place, and the reason for one of the treaties further down. The word is miskwaabik, built from miskw-, red, and -aabikw, something mineral. The metal here comes out of the ground already pure, which is rare, and it can be worked cold with a hammer stone.

People were doing that on the Keweenaw Peninsula as early as 8,000 years ago, and on Isle Royale about 6,500 years ago, according to the National Park Service, which is working from both oral tradition and archaeology. The copper went out along trade networks that reached across much of the continent, shaped into fishhooks, knives, and beads.

In 1842 the Ojibwa ceded the mineral rights at La Pointe and kept the right to fish, hunt, and gather on the same ground. Mining companies arrived. The Park Service says without hedging that those retained rights were violated.

The fishery

Whitefish is adikameg. Lake trout is namegos. Both spellings come off a Wisconsin Sea Grant vocabulary sheet, and the Ojibwe People's Dictionary has a recording of a speaker saying each one.

Two hundred feet is where the whitefish are in summer. They spawn in November and December in shallow rock and sand, then go down as the surface warms, schooling at 100 to 300 feet, per Michigan Sea Grant. Lake trout go deeper still. In 2021 a Michigan DNR crew working off Isle Royale filmed them spawning in June in more than 300 feet of water, the deepest lake trout spawning ever documented in the Great Lakes.

In summer the lake sorts itself into layers, and the fish sort themselves the same way. Warm water floats on top, the temperature falls off hard through a middle band, and everything under that stays near 39°F. Depths are summer averages from 473 profiles taken between 1996 and 2017, in Table 2 of a 2020 paper in Limnology and Oceanography. A swimmer in July never touches anything below the first layer.

Fishing here did not stop and start. Boats go out under treaty agreements, and Michigan Sea Grant counts the tribal commercial fleet as a working part of the regional economy.

The Great Lakes Indian Fish & Wildlife Commission, formed in 1984, serves eleven Ojibwe tribes in Minnesota, Wisconsin, and Michigan that reserved hunting, fishing, and gathering rights in the treaties of 1836, 1837, 1842, and 1854. The 1854 Treaty Authority manages the off-reservation hunting, fishing, and gathering rights of the Bois Forte Band and the Grand Portage Band in the territory ceded under the 1854 treaty. Seasons, bag limits, and enforcement all run through those two offices.

The treaties

Three treaties took the south and west shores in seventeen years. In each one the Ojibwe negotiators insisted on language keeping the right to hunt, fish, and gather on the land being ceded, and that language is why the clauses still matter in court. GLIFWC publishes the texts and the case law together.

1837 Treaty of St. Peters, 7 Stat. 536. Article 5 guarantees the privilege of hunting, fishing, and gathering wild rice on the ceded lands, rivers, and lakes, during the pleasure of the President.
1842 Treaty of La Pointe, 7 Stat. 591. Article II keeps the right of hunting and the usual privileges of occupancy "until required to remove by the President." This is the copper cession.
1854 Treaty of La Pointe, 10 Stat. 1109. Article 11 keeps the right to hunt and fish in the ceded territory for those living there. This treaty established the reservations, in the homeland rather than out west.

GLIFWC keeps the boundary maps.

Then the government tried to move everyone west. In October 1849 the Minnesota Territorial Assembly approved a plan to pay the annuities owed under the 1837 and 1842 treaties inside Minnesota Territory instead of in Wisconsin, which would keep the money in the hands of territorial traders. The following autumn, thousands of Lake Superior Ojibwe walked to Sandy Lake to collect the payment. It was not there. The rations the government had provided were spoiled. About 400 people died of starvation, disease, and exposure, a good many of them on the walk home, and the Minnesota Historical Society keeps the account.

Removal still did not happen. Petitions went to Washington. A delegation followed in 1852. By 1853 a new administration had replaced both the territorial governor and the agent, and the effort collapsed. The treaty signed at La Pointe the next year promised permanent reservations and payments made on site, in the homeland. GLIFWC puts it in one line: President Taylor's removal order had failed.

The rights in those clauses were never a gift. GLIFWC is flat about it. The Ojibwe held rights to hunt, fish, and gather before any treaty existed, reserved them in writing when they ceded the land, and retained them afterward. The United States granted nothing. Courts took a long time to agree, and the 1983 decision in Lac Courte Oreilles v. Voigt is what put the Commission on its present footing.

The wrecks

Five wrecks, at depth. The dashed line marks how far down you have come.

The Edmund Fitzgerald went down on November 10, 1975, about 17 miles north-northwest of Whitefish Point, with all 29 aboard. The Great Lakes Shipwreck Historical Society has been down to her three times and brought the bell up in 1995. NOAA puts her at 530 feet, deeper than any other well-known wreck in the lake.

Most of the rest are close enough to the surface to swim to. The Sevona broke apart on Sand Island Shoal and lies in 20 feet of water; the Pretoria sits in 54 off Outer Island. Both are in the Apostles, both surveyed by Wisconsin Shipwrecks. At Isle Royale the America runs from 2 feet down to 80, shallow enough at the bow that you can see her from a boat, and the Emperor lies broken with her bow at 25 to 60 feet and her stern at 100 to 170, per the Michigan Underwater Preserve Council. Nine of the ten major wrecks around that island were groundings, the National Park Service notes, which says something about the rock there.

The cold

Down here the water is 39°F, or 4°C, and it is 39°F in August. Fresh water is densest at that temperature, so the coldest, heaviest water settles to the bottom and stays, whatever the season is doing overhead. The figure comes from the Large Lakes Observatory at the University of Minnesota Duluth, by way of Lake Superior Magazine.

The lake also barely flushes. Michigan Sea Grant gives a retention time of 191 years, meaning the average drop spends nearly two centuries in the basin before it finds the St. Marys River and goes. Rain falling on the lake this year leaves around 2217.

Year: 2026

One drop, from the western end to the outlet at the southeast corner. The dotted line is for the eye and not a real current; water in the lake moves in a slow counterclockwise circulation.

There are 3 quadrillion gallons of it. Spread that over North and South America and it would stand a foot deep on both continents.

The surface is another matter

All of that holds at depth. Up top the lake has been changing fast. Summer surface temperatures rose about 4.5°F between 1979 and 2006, quicker than the air above them and quicker than any other Great Lake, which Jay Austin and Steven Colman at the Large Lakes Observatory traced to a feedback running through the ice. Less ice in winter means the lake starts stratifying earlier in spring. An earlier start means a longer summer for the surface layer to absorb sun. Warmer water then makes less ice the following winter. The Great Lakes Integrated Sciences and Assessments group at Michigan keeps the record.

Ice has thinned to match. Climate Central, working from NOAA's ice database, counts 49 fewer frozen days on Superior now than in the early 1970s, the steepest drop of the five lakes, and the shoreline is where it has fallen off fastest. Individual winters still swing hard. 2014 and 2019 both iced over heavily. In February 2024 the whole Great Lakes system sat at 2.7 percent ice cover, against a normal peak near 53.

The deep

There are fish down here. Three of them make their living below the light: the siscowet, a fat-bodied lake trout found nowhere else on earth; the kiyi, a small silver cousin of the whitefish; and the deepwater sculpin, which lives on the bottom and gets eaten by the other two.

They move up and down every day. A 2015 study out of the University of Minnesota Duluth gives the ranges. Siscowet run from the surface at night to 407 meters by day, which is very nearly the bottom of the lake. Kiyi go from 25 meters at night to 325 by day. Deepwater sculpin stay low, from 15 meters down to 407, with most of the population below 70. In 2005 a trawl survey pulled 39 siscowet from near the deepest point in the lake, the greatest depth fish have ever been collected in the Great Lakes.

Depth ranges from the same study. Bars show the water each species occupies, by day and by night. The siscowet makes the whole trip, bottom to surface and back, every day.

All three see in the dark, and they see the same color. Their eyes peak at 525 nanometers, which is the wavelength that survives longest in this water. The study calculated that enough daylight filters down in summer for a siscowet or a kiyi to see at 325 meters, and for a sculpin at 355. Under a full moon they can still see at 30 to 45 meters. Nobody had assumed vision mattered this far down in a freshwater lake.

The bottom

Every foot of this shoreline is treaty territory. The Minnesota side falls under the 1854 Treaty of La Pointe, where the Grand Portage, Bois Forte, and Fond du Lac Bands retain the right to hunt, fish, and gather. The Keweenaw is within the 1842 cession, per the National Park Service, and GLIFWC's maps show which cession covers the rest of the Wisconsin and Michigan shore. Eleven tribes reserved rights in the treaties of 1836, 1837, 1842, and 1854, and those eleven make up the Commission.

The north shore, from Batchawana Bay west to the Pigeon River and inland to the height of land, is Robinson-Superior country. That treaty was signed at Sault Ste. Marie on September 7, 1850, two days before its Lake Huron counterpart. The Government of Canada's summary records that hunting and fishing rights were retained until the land was taken up for settlement, and that reserves were set aside for each group; the Anishinabek Nation hosts the text. The First Nations of that shore are not yet named here.

The bands, as GLIFWC and the Bureau of Indian Affairs name them:

Grand Portage Band of Lake Superior Chippewa, Minnesota
Fond du Lac Band of Lake Superior Chippewa, Minnesota
Bois Forte Band of Chippewa, Minnesota
Mille Lacs Band of Ojibwe, Minnesota
Red Cliff Band of Lake Superior Chippewa Indians, Wisconsin
Bad River Band of the Lake Superior Tribe of Chippewa Indians, Wisconsin
Lac Courte Oreilles Band of Lake Superior Chippewa Indians, Wisconsin
Lac du Flambeau Band of Lake Superior Chippewa Indians, Wisconsin
St. Croix Chippewa Indians of Wisconsin
Sokaogon Chippewa Community, Wisconsin
Keweenaw Bay Indian Community, Michigan
Lac Vieux Desert Band of Lake Superior Chippewa Indians, Michigan
Bay Mills Indian Community, Michigan

Unlinked names still need their government's own address confirmed. Bois Forte, Bad River, and Lac Courte Oreilles link to the addresses in the Ojibwe People's Dictionary key to regions.

Nothing here has been reviewed by the communities it describes. If something is wrong, or should not be here at all, write to corrections@gichigami.org.

Sources, by depth

The shore: Minnesota DNR, Lake Superior Agate, Minnesota's State Gem and Nature Snapshots. Natural Earth, 10m lakes. National Park Service, People and Places: A Human History of the Apostle Islands. Wisconsin Historical Society, Jesuit map of Lake Superior, 1672. Ojibwe People's Dictionary, gichigami, Onigamiinsing, Gichi-onigamiing. InfoSuperior, Lakehead University, Lake Superior in Ojibwe. Belt Magazine, Why Indigenous Place Names Matter. Decolonial Atlas, The Great Lakes: An Ojibwe Perspective. Lake Superior Magazine, Why Is Lake Superior Called Gitche Gumee.
The fishery: Wisconsin Sea Grant, Fish-O-Pedia Ojibwemowin vocabulary. Michigan Sea Grant, Lake Whitefish. Wildlife Management Institute, Deepest lake trout spawning in the Great Lakes. Limnology and Oceanography 65 (2020), Table 2, summer physical variables for the Great Lakes. Michigan Sea Grant, Lake Superior fast facts. GLIFWC, About. 1854 Treaty Authority, home.
The rice: 1854 Treaty Authority, Wild rice survey and news.
Copper: Ojibwe People's Dictionary, miskwaabik. National Park Service, Indigenous Mining and Keweenaw Industrial Landscapes.
The treaties: GLIFWC, Fulfilling Ojibwe Treaty Promises, legal paper and compendium; About; The Commission; Treaties of 1836, 1837, 1842, 1854, and 1855. Colin Mustful, Sandy Lake Tragedy, MNopedia, Minnesota Historical Society.
The gales: University of Michigan, on Schwab, Hultquist and Dutter's 2006 reanalysis of the November 1975 storm, published in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society. Michigan Sea Grant, The Storm that Sunk the Edmund Fitzgerald, drawing on the NTSB marine accident report.
The wrecks: Great Lakes Shipwreck Historical Society, Edmund Fitzgerald. NOAA Office of National Marine Sanctuaries, RULET assessment, Edmund Fitzgerald. Wisconsin Shipwrecks, Sevona and Pretoria. Michigan Underwater Preserve Council, Isle Royale. National Park Service, Research in the Parks: Isle Royale.
The cold: Lake Superior Magazine, Water Temps Arising and How Big is Lake Superior. Michigan Sea Grant, Lake Superior fast facts. GLISA, University of Michigan, Lake Superior Retrospective, citing Austin and Coleman 2007. Climate Central, Great Lakes Ice, from the NOAA GLERL ice database.
The deep: Jubar, Sitar and others, Visual Sensitivity of Deepwater Fishes in Lake Superior, PLOS ONE, 2015: depth ranges, 525 nm peak sensitivity, visual depth limits. Sitar and others, Survey of Siscowet Lake Trout at Their Maximum Depth in Lake Superior, Journal of Great Lakes Research: 39 siscowet taken near 405 m.
The bottom: US EPA, Geophysical Lake Superior: maximum depth 1,332 feet at low water, average 483. Some sources round to 1,333. Bureau of Indian Affairs, Tribes served by the Midwest Region. Crown-Indigenous Relations and Northern Affairs Canada, Robinson Treaties and Douglas Treaties. Anishinabek Nation, Robinson-Superior Treaty text. Ojibwe People's Dictionary, Key to regions.