Mississagi

Happy Canadian Thanksgiving and opening of moose hunting season.
We are at Whitefish, Ontario. It’s a lovely day but rain is expected tonight so Michael is processing ahead. We are parked in the community park near the trailhead to the falls. Salmon are still struggling through the sharp rocks below.
Yesterday we spent in the Boom Camp reserve, down from the town of Blind River, next to the Mississagi River that flows into the North Channel of Lake Huron. We canoed around the delta’s canals and walked the beaches. It was a perfect day. We had started the day out on a beautiful and nameless lake north of Iron Bridge and had great luck with picking up veggie oil in a restaurant in the tiny town.
We really would have liked to know where we were going and how to get there. Our goal today was to get into the Kilarney Provincial Park which looks like it would be accessible from its western border, but, no, not to be. Now we have a dilemma about taking an expensive ferry or taking a long loop round the Georgian Bay.
These are all First Nations lands. When I wrote about Sault Ste. Marie I didn’t mention that aboriginal people had settled and fished the rapids there for thousands of years. I’ve been thinking a lot about “reservation,” the word itself, a North American Bantustan concept that everyone seems to have resigned themselves to accept. Then again about the idea of self governance and community and the positive aspects that are possible, in some times and cases, within the reservations. Still, there’s no getting around the tragic losses First Nations people have suffered. I’m including a map to show the incredible range of the Anishinabe people as they moved freely around the Great Lakes in previous times. This was posted at Mississagi, where a reservation was created that is a postage stamp, upstream from the once rich delta. The people still celebrate their culture each summer where us tourists now beach comb.