Our Changing Relationship to Lake Superior, 1975-2025

A new collection of works by Duluthians speaks to their changing relationship to Lake Superior. I am including the intro, which I wrote, below. For more, visit openrivers.lib.umn.edu.

Our Changing Relationship to Lake Superior, 1975-2025
By David Beard, Catherine O’Reilly, Joseph M. Lane, Jennifer E. Moore, Timothy Broman, Chance Lasher, Robert Dewitt Adams, Luke Moravec, Moira Villiard, Anastasia Bamford, Nan Montgomery, Sheila Packa, Krista Sue-Lo Twu, and Jennifer Brady

This Open Rivers feature is occasioned by the fiftieth anniversary of the sinking of the SS Edmund Fitzgerald.

The Fitzgerald was a ship moving taconite (iron ore) across the Great Lakes between Silver Bay, Minnesota, and steel mills near Detroit and Toledo. On November 9, 1975, the Fitzgerald was scheduled to transport taconite from Superior, Wisconsin, to Zug Island near Detroit. The ship never made it; the Edmund Fitzgerald was lost in a storm with no survivors—her entire crew of 29 men. She sank in Lake Superior on November 10, 1975, 17 miles north-northwest of Whitefish Point, Michigan. The story is interpreted today at the Great Lakes Shipwreck Museum, near Whitefish Point.

There is still international interest in the tragedy. Gordon Lightfoot inspired popular curiosity with his 1976 ballad, “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald.” The song made the tragedy visible to many. But more poignantly, today, towns around Lake Superior get together on the anniversary of the shipwreck. Duluth hosts an annual “Gales of November” conference that commemorates the Fitzgerald and uses the history of the shipwreck to fuel interest in the Great Lakes. The Minnesota Historical Society operates Split Rock Lighthouse, which rings its bell in honor of the lost every November. We carry the Fitzgerald in our imagination and in our relationship with the lake.

The anniversary of the shipwreck is an opportunity to think more broadly about our relationship with Lake Superior. Of course, the lake has long filled our regional imagination. The Great Lakes Shipwreck Museum is across the Upper Peninsula from the Museum of Ojibwe Culture in St. Ignace, Michigan. The Museum of Ojibwe Culture celebrates the long history of the Ojibwe people on the lake; it is also the final resting place of Pere Jacques Marquette, one of the Jesuit explorers who traveled through the Great Lakes region. In the Twin Ports—Duluth, Minnesota, and Superior, Wisconsin—community members honor Ojibwe traditions at sites such as the Chief Buffalo murals along the Duluth Lakewalk, and the region’s Jesuit influences at Montreal Pier, Quebec Pier, and Allouez Bay. We recall the influence of French Jesuits and fur traders across the region—as well as the deep connections between Indigenous communities and Lake Superior’s shores.

By the early twentieth century, Montreal Pier and Quebec Pier were sites of commerce. The city of Superior was in competition with Minneapolis as the center of wheat and grain production, and several major companies built grain elevators and mills on the piers (Lake Superior Mills, Anchor, Listman, Cargill, and Belt Line). On the Duluth side, in addition to grain elevators, companies expanded infrastructure to support local iron mines. Today, the ports also transport the gargantuan blades of wind turbines for use in the Great Plains. In the period before federal environmental regulations, heavy industrial commerce caused environmental degradation in and around Lake Superior. Minnesotans imagined the lake to be a giant waste diluter at least until the 1950s, when the U.S. Army and the multinational corporation Honeywell dumped 1400 barrels of munitions waste into the lake. Honestly, in a way, many Minnesotans still viewed Lake Superior this way in the 1970s, if you consider how the lakefront in Duluth was used as a scrapyard. In the 1980s, the city repurposed the scrapyard for tourism in an area called Canal Park.

A lot has changed since the 1970s.

This collection of poetry, essays, and art documents changes in our relationship with Lake Superior in the fifty years since the sinking of the Edmund Fitzgerald. The collection is divided into two parts.

In the first section, each contributor examines their changing relationship with Lake Superior. Catherine O’Reilly, Joe Lane, and Jennifer Moore approach the concept of change from their requisite disciplinary frames: ecology, geography, and media history. Memoirs by community members Tim Broman and Chance Lasher chronicle their youth, foregrounding memories of their fathers who lived and worked on Lake Superior. Broman’s father, for example, was the captain of a boat operated by the same company that operated the Fitzgerald. Lasher’s father was an independent diesel mechanic who serviced many boats in the region. These personal histories, together with the section’s scholarly perspectives illuminate how our connection to Lake Superior has shifted in the last fifty years.

In the second section, we look at art shaped by Lake Superior. Artist Rob Adams recounts how his art installations representing shipwrecks on the Great Lakes helped him reconnect with his father. Media personality and author Luke Moravec reflects on his personal history of diving in the lake and how these frigid plunges helped him build resiliency. Anastasia Bamford and Nan Montgomery together present art and poetry in dialogue, where the lake forms a horizon to human relationships. And, finally, we share an excerpt from a longer poem by former Duluth poet laureate Sheila Packa. “Surface Displacements,” extracted from the book by the same name, oscillates between a geologic perspective of Minnesota and an individual poet’s personal experiences of Lake Superior. The excerpt concludes where Packa begins to describe the rivers that run through our region. We include a link to the rest of the poem as part of a multimedia artwork created by Kathy McTavish, using digital sound and animation to bring Packa’s poem to life. Packa’s work is a reminder that the brief time of our consciousness and the vast time of geology, especially of the lake and its watershed, are intertwined.

This section of Open Rivers concludes with words from Jennifer Brady about the ways that the Edmund Fitzgerald continues to resonate today. Throughout the section, art by Krista Sue-Lo Twu, as well as art and photography from contributing poets and authors, brings our conversations to life.

In the spirit of Open Rivers, we appreciate the ways members of our diverse community have contributed to this work. Together, we have assembled a picture of our relationship with Lake Superior. Open Rivers brings together voices and perspectives of academics, community members, artists, and advocates who are united by a shared concern for our water futures. In this collection, an ecologist, a geographer, a broadcaster, a journalism professor, and several artists, poets, and memoirists—each shaped by the lake—come together to create the fullest articulation of our relationship to this body of water. If this is to be the last issue of Open Rivers, we hope we have lived up to the potential the journal set for us all in shaping the future of our relationship to our waters.

— David Beard