Over thirty years ago, I represented U.S. Customs agents working at the Grand Portage, Minnesota border crossing in an arbitration. The hearing was held about 80 miles south in the big city of Duluth. I’ve been up the north shore of Lake Superior many times, but never as far as the border until this month.
I see a borderline
Like a barbed wire fence
Strung tight strung tense
Prickling with pretense
A borderline
Joni Mitchell
Pigeon River, the border into Ontario, Canada
The Pigeon River empties some of the water from Western Canada into Lake Superior. This was a major travelling and trading route for Natives and later for French fur trappers and traders from the Canadian interior to the Great Lakes. As it nears Lake Superior, the river cuts a gorge and has high waterfalls making water navigation impossible. A few miles upstream, Natives created an 8.5 mile Grand Portage from the river to Lake Superior which route the Ojibwe called Gitchi Onigaming. A place of connection; not a border.
Why are you smirking at your friend?
Is this to be the night when
All well-wishing ends?
All credibility revoked?
Thin skin thick jokes!
Can we blame it on the smoke,
This borderline?
Smoky Gichigami (Great Lake) from Grand Portage cliff
The French built a trading post at the Lake to ship tons of furs to Montreal and Europe. After the Seven Years War and the Treaty of Paris, the British North West Trading Company controlled the post. It continued to be a gathering spot. A place where natives and colonizers worked and lived together. Not really a border.
Every bristling shaft of pride
Church or nation
Team or tribe
Every notion we subscribe to
Is just a borderline
High Falls, Grand Portage Minnesota State Park and Pigeon River Provincial Park, Ontario
The Grand Portage continued to be disputed territory between England and the new United States. The border was not resolved until 1842 when an agreement was reached on land between Maine and New Brunswick and Minnesota and Ontario. The border here was agreed to be the Pigeon River, though it also recognized that Canadians had free access to the Grand Portage trail that was now entirely within the United States. The U.S. government and local tribes continued to dispute control of the land, and as was typical, several treaties were made and broken.
Good or bad we think we know
As if thinking makes things so!
All convictions grow along a borderline
Cascades on the Pigeon River
The Pigeon River Provincial Park runs along the north side of the river and Grand Portage State Park envelopes the south side where a trail loops along the river so you can hike to the falls and cascades that prevented water travel to Lake Superior.
Further south where the Gitchi Onigaming reached Gitchigami and the trading post was built, Congress established the 740 acre Grand Portage National Monument in the 1950s. The park included much land donated by the Grand Portage Band of the Lake Superior Chippewa who helped draft the legislation which included rights to native involvement in managing and maintaining the Monument. After more disputes among tribes and the U.S Government over protected lands across the country, the Self-Governance Act was passed in 1994. This Act gave tribes the authority to take over federal programs that serve or benefit the tribes themselves and provides funding for such efforts, and later the Chippewa (Anishinabi) reached an agreement with the National Park Service on staffing and interpreting Grand Portage.
Smug in your jaded expertise
You scathe the wonder world
And you praise barbarity
In this illusionary place
This scared hard-edged rat race
All liberty is laced with
Borderlines
Middle Falls of the Pigeon River
No wall exists along the border. You can waive to hikers on the nation across the water, or simply wade across. The legal crossing site is much further down river near the Lake.
You snipe so steady
You snub so snide
So ripe and ready
To diminish and deride!
Borderline
My favorite Canadian songwriter had a late career powerful song called Borderline in which she lamented the separations we create. I’ve quoted many of the verses. Though written 30 years ago (about the time I arbitrated a dispute at Grand Portage), it certainly applies to times today. The album Turbulent Indigo was Joni Mitchell’s brutal indictment of AIDS, sexual, spousal, environmental abuses, but awarded her a first Grammy in a quarter century.
You're so quick to condescend
My opinionated friend
All you deface all you defend
Is just a borderline
Just a borderline
Another borderline
Just a borderline
from Joni Mitchell, Borderline, copyright 1994
Middle Falls, Pigeon River, Minnesota/Ontario
As you hike along the river separating neighboring countries, no wall exists. The governor of the state on the south side of the river is fighting the one so quick to condescend . . so ripe and ready to diminish and deride. We all need to join that fight, and the one to create rivers to connect, not to separate.
A few years ago, I posted some images and quotes from Joni Mitchell songs. It included a quote from Borderline and an image of a river where there is a wall. I hope you have a chance to listen to Borderline, and if you do, I’d suggest the version she redid in 2002 on her album Travelogue. Just reading the versus, the words sound so harsh. Listening to the orchestration and her older voice, it is such a lament, a crying river.
