Excerpt from Seventh Generation Earth Ethics

Excerpt from Seventh Generation Earth Ethics: Native Voices of Wisconsin by Patty Loew.

Reprinted with permission by the Wisconsin Historical Society Press © 2014. All rights reserved.

“Elder, Environmentalist, Scholar: Joe Rose, Bad River Ojibwe”

If you asked me to name the people I admire most in life, Joe Rose, a cultural treasure of the Bad River Ojibwe community, would be among them. My favorite memory of Joe is from the “One Sky, Two Views” Star Conference at the Lac du Flambeau Reservation in 2007. Joe and a NASA scientist, David Kratz from the Langley Research Center, were paired in an evening storytelling session. Joe told the Ojibwe version of creation, while Dr. Kratz explained the Big Bang theory—descriptions that were remarkably similar. The three-day conference culminated in a stargazing event for more than a hundred middle school children and their families. The NASA scientists had brought along powerful telescopes, but the cloudy skies were not cooperating. Just after Joe’s storytelling session, however, the clouds parted and we were able to see not only the stars but also Saturn with five rings visible. “Close encounters” with Joe always seem to expand my cultural universe.

When Carl Rose [Joe’s father] left for Adak in the Aleutians, the Rose family—Joe, his younger brother Carl Jr., and Joe’s mother [Dolly]—left the state of Washington and returned to the Bad River Reservation on the south­ern shores of Lake Superior. They moved in with Dolly’s parents, who lived in Old Odanah near the present-day powwow grounds. “It was a time of kerosene lamps, outhouses and wood heat,” Joe remembered, “and we hauled our water from the town pumps, so it was a much different lifestyle than what we have today.” They also lived in a flood area. The Bad River didn’t overflow its banks every year, but it hap­pened often enough to be a problem. “I remember getting up in the middle of the night and leaving by boat and then coming home after the floodwaters receded,” Rose recollected. Everyone in the family grabbed a shovel and scraped mud from the floors, then scrubbed everything down with disinfectant. “It really wasn’t a problem because you didn’t have all this insulation in the walls at that time,” Rose added, “so you didn’t have all that mildew and everything.”

Rose was not daunted by the challenges of substandard Bad River housing because he spent nearly every waking moment outside, either on the water or in the woods. He credits his grandfather, old Dan Jackson, a full-blood Ojibwe,with instilling in him his appreciation for the natural world. Even before Rose started school, his grandfather would take him rabbit hunting. “The snow was deep and pretty soon my little short legs would tire on the trail and Grandpa would look back and I’d be straggling way back there. He’d wait until I caught up and then he’d put me on his back and pack me until I was rested up,” Rose recalled.

“In the meantime we’d be setting snares and if we didn’t get any wild game, we always came home with some kind of plant medicines,” Rose remembered. His grandfather, who lived traditionally, always carried a pack strap for dragging deer and a little bag with a strap that hung from his shoulder for gathering plants. Other essentials in the bag included a compass and a waterproof match case for making a fire. “I learned a lot about the natural world from my grandfather,” Rose said. He learned Ojibwe cultural customs from his grandfather’s relatives and other Native elders, who explained how to use asema (ceremonial tobacco) and offer prayers before harvesting an animal or plant. Jackson often spoke the Ojibwe language to his grandson. Although Rose does not consider himself a fluent speaker, he ac­knowledged, “I understand enough so that if I sat down at a table with fluent speakers, I would not go hungry.”

As a boy, his life revolved around seasonal activities in the Bad River and Kakagon Sloughs. There was netting fish in the spring; swimming and wild ricing in late summer; duck hunting in the fall; and ice skat­ing, winter games, and bonfires in the winter. “We used to play outside when it was below zero,” he remembered. “Our parents and grandparents would have to come out after dark and get us to come home.” He developed a healthy respect for the “big water” of Lake Superior early on and remembered a few times when the weather kicked up. “If you didn’t know what you were doing, you wouldn’t have made it back safely,” he recalled. “You have to know how to handle a boat in high winds and rough water when you get out there.”

From his grandmother, a mixed-blood Chickasaw/Choctaw Indian from Texas who loved the outdoors, Rose learned about gardening. The Jacksons had two acres in Odanah on the Bad River Reservation with apple trees, chickens, a barn with a cow, and a big garden. “She’d get up at daylight and go out and work in the garden all day until sundown,” he remembered. “She really enjoyed being outside.” In many ways, Rose’s childhood was idyllic. Unlike families in urban areas who struggled with wartime food shortages and rations, the Rose fam­ily faced no such privation. Dan Jackson, regarded by many as the best tracker on the reservation, kept them well stocked with deer and wild game, as well as fish and foraged plants. There were fresh and home-canned fruits and vegetables from his grandmother’s garden and sea­sonally gathered items from the wild. The family made its own maple syrup and sugar in the spring, picked berries in the summer, and har­vested wild rice in the fall, hand processing it “the old-fashioned way.” Rose’s environmental activism as an adult to preserve the treaty-reserved rights of Native people to hunt, fish, and gather can be traced to the healthy lifestyle he learned as a child from his grandparents and the many elders on the Bad River Reservation.

Seventh Generation Earth Ethics is available for purchase from the Wisconsin Historical Society online store at https://shop.wisconsinhistory.org/seventh-generation-earth-ethics-native-voices-of-wisconsin. It can also be found at many booksellers and libraries.