I don't live there. I don't worry if the catch of autumn fish will last me through the winter. I don't hunt the land, drink the water. I don't soak in the fireside symphony of spring frogs, or feel the whirr of batwings as they swoop to deliver me from night bugs.

How do I do justice to the power of the drum, the PowWow in winter when we met Paul DeMain, Editor of Indian Country TV, who now - along with an Ojibwe man named Melvin - educates visitors at Lac Courte Oreilles' Harvest Camp, where you can go and stay for a while, kayak the Brule, check out the north woods, wade the waters of Lake Superior, and understand what it means to lose this to the future gash of the proposed world's largest low-grade iron mine. The mine will leave a basin of acid-leach rock, the trickle down of hundreds of years of extractive industry, water upon rock forever and forever, a murmuring apotheosis of our three hundred year crawl shivering from uncertain shores to the certainty of unrestricted plunder of rich white men. That acid drip drip drips through the years, leaving us suspecting that We the People are the mythic creation of someone else's story.



a few short miles from the Harvest Camp. They stand behind black masks, soldiers on patrol with automatic rifles, guarding the mud roads to the drill holes. They stand at attention with automatic rifles, facing the approach of people, of citizens, of ordinary folks who live there and care about the woods and water and animals and birds and fish and tadpoles and water striders and kingfishers and summer warblers. They stand with hands on their automatic rifles, waiting for something, maybe for the kids who went all civil disobedience on the drill site a month ago, adorned with their own black masks, stopping a bulldozer for a few hours, seizing a cell phone and throwing it into the bush. The medium is the message, and the message was lost. They were predictably excoriated as eco-terrorists in the press, foreshadowing, perhaps, a new level of State in the eternity of our State of Emergency.

So it comes down to this. A Harvest Camp to educate downlanders on the beauty of the north woods, the culture of gatherers, the way of life of still living cultures that did not arrive shivering on shores or offloading in airports. A short walk through the woods and mercenaries stand alert, hands on guns, ready and waiting for something.

So how do I do justice to these images and stories swirling in my head right now? The silent plunge of the kingfisher slipping without drip or splash into water and coming up with a silver minnow. The men in Madison passing laws that only serve their tenuous hold on power, yet never affect their own backyards. The stars above the beech and maple and birch brighter at night than any you have ever before seen, and the eternal drip drip flow of water trickling through future tailings. How do we look at the Purple Loosestrife and worry any more about its slow invasion of the native landscape. It is very pretty. How do we look at Buckthorn and worry anymore about its negative effect on native birds, as they shit the emetic berries too delicious to resist.

And how do we look at this mercenary soldier, locked, seemingly, and loaded: ready for some kind of action, and how do we not whisper the question:

"So… Who in the fuck are you hoping to kill?"