Sacred River Spirits,

Before painting, the river received an offering of tobacco from one of my mothers. I set up the easel for a plein air painting under the bridge in Cloquet, MN. I painted a thin smoothly gradated layer of grey and an iridescent white acrylic paint evenly across the surface of the canvas. After some time, I spayed the canvass with a mist of river water. It ran down the surface giving detail to the figures slowly walking toward me, across the canvass.

Those that you see on the canvass are 'of the water.' Lake Superior Ojibwe.  They showed themselves, and they still travel the river. These are the sick, the old, the young, walking and wrapped in blankets, being driven from their homes and starving, or already dead. They came because I sought to know, and learn the way life was on the river in that particular area.

A few days later, I was presented with the story, in the clouds spanning over the sky, from my cabin that faces the south, I saw the imagery from the spirits. They came together to show their story over the St. Louis River that leads to and from Lake Superior. I saw the large fallen tree, (logging,) the forked tongues (lies,) the fire upon the fallen tree (of 1918,) and the three dams built on the St.Louis River (seen as three strait cigar shapes laying parallel to each other.) As I drove toward the sky leaving for Minneapolis, the largest raindrops I've ever seen quietly fell upon the car windshield until I had passed beneath the sky over the reservation. They magically stopped at the boarder of the reservation (tears.)