The One Who Comes with the Light

In 2000, in Pipestone, Minnesota, people gathered for a Sun Dance ceremony.

An Anishinaabe elder, Eddie Benton-Banaise, told of a dream. Because of pollution, he said, water would one day cost as much as gold.

Then he asked those listening: "What are you going to do about it?"

In the crowd was a grandmother from Wiikwemkoong, unceded Anishinaabe territory on Manitoulin Island, Ontario. Her name was Josephine Mandamin.

Her Anishinaabe name, Biidaasige, means "the one who comes with the light."

As a child, from 1948 to 1954, she had been sent to St. Joseph's Residential School for Girls in Spanish, Ontario.

In 2003, she answered the question in her own way. She started walking.

She walked around Lake Superior. The journey took more than a month.

On her walks, she held in her hands a copper pail filled with lake water. It was the women who carried the water. It kept moving, from dawn into the afternoon. Beside them, men carried an eagle staff. They protected them and took care of them.

During breaks, a WXPR radio commentator recalled, she would lie on her stomach, as if embracing the earth.

Then she set off again.

Nearly every spring, she came back to walk. Year after year, she followed the shores of all five Great Lakes. In all, more than 17,000 kilometres.

Her last great walk, in 2017, set out from Duluth, Minnesota. It ended in Matane, Quebec, more than 8,000 kilometres away.

For her, carrying the water was not a protest. It was a responsibility. In 2016, she explained it this way:

Josephine Mandamin died on February 22, 2019, the day after her 77th birthday. She left her husband, eight children, 13 grandchildren and 16 great-grandchildren.

The Grand Chief of the Anishinabek Nation, Glen Hare, said she would be remembered for all she had done to protect the water.

The water of the Great Lakes belongs to no one. It runs through all of us. A grandmother with a pail reminded us, step by step, for fourteen years.