Arrival at Grand Portage.

Nomadkins dispatch 5/12/23.

For readers/subscribers catching up, I’ll be spending the summer at Grand Portage National Monument in Minnesota, working as a volunteer interpreter. Every now and then, I’ll post an update on Substack, if you’d like to subscribe (for FREE) and follow along…

Nate and Ethan (left to right above) are members of the Grand Portage Band of the Minnesota Chippewa (aka, “Ojibwe” or “Anishinaabe”) Tribe.

The goofy old fart in the middle? He feels deeply honored for the opportunity to hang with Nate and Ethan and their people on the northwestern shore of Lake Superior this summer.

(Right after I snapped the selfie, Nate said, “If we laugh and cut up around you, that means we like you. If we don’t do any of that, then…well, you know.” Luckily, as the three of us started dismantling one of last year’s birchbark wigwams at the historic depot, there was plenty of jocularity.)

Last Sunday, after a relatively breezy two-day journey north from Tennessee, my vintage Toyota Highlander pierced a gloomy black curtain of fog just south of Duluth. Plus rain and howling wind, par for the course this time of year. After white-knuckling up and along the coast for 135 more miles—pulling my camper through it all, almost to the Canadian border—I finally arrived at my Grand Portage camp site. Then I devoured several handfuls of cashews, gulped down some icy-cold cranberry juice and conked out in my camper bed.

But not much rest for the travel weary: every day this past week—training! During which time I met some wonderful folks. The property staff members, plus others who will also be serving as interpreters, a mix of volunteers like me and a few seasonal park rangers from across the country.

The Grand Portage nutshell is this: Towards the early part of the 18th century, this spot became sort of a gigantic Walmart distribution center for the North American fur trade. Every spring, Europeans at Hudson Bay filled up their gigantic 40-foot-long birchbark cargo canoes with textiles, knives, guns and other trinkets, paddled across Lake Superior to Grand Portage, then traded all that stuff for furs harvested by the local natives. After a few days of R&R at the Grand Portage depot, they (“Voyageurs”) loaded up each canoe with nine tons of fur pallets and returned to Hudson Bay where the pallets were then transferred to ships bound for Europe to satisfy that continent’s insatiable appetite for fashionably durable hats, ones mainly created from the felt of beaver skin.

At that time, it was a complicated collision of cultures, but also a collision of mutually lucrative trading activity. One that continued with varying degrees of intensity for decades. Today, Grand Portage is co-managed by the National Park Service and the local Chippewas, which only seems to make sense.

If you want Uncle Sam’s “official” Grand Portage story, click here for a deeper dive.

While you’re doing that, I plan to take a deeper dive into the luxurious heated pool at the reservation community center, which is a $10-a-month-perk for seasonal interpreters.

Ahhhh…

Thanks for subscribing and following the Nomadkins Grand Portage adventure!

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P.S. If you’re wondering how and where I scored this gig, I found it at volunteer.gov.