COLONIAL MICHILIMACKINAC, read the sign on the gift shop. The Michigan storefront was tucked under the Mackinac Bridge, which crosses the waters at the meeting point of Lake Huron and Lake Michigan. As the crew poured out of their minivans and sedans and pickups and began to prepare for the day’s event, 18-wheelers rumbled on the highway overhead. In the parking lot, resting on the same flatbed it had been traveling on since it left Lummi Nation in Washington state nearly two weeks before, lay a totem pole. To the north ran the Straits of Mackinac. And beyond that, a pipeline.
It was my eighth day on the Red Road to D.C., a cross-continent trip organized and overseen by a collective of tribal citizens, nonprofit leaders and staffers, artists, and allies, who had joined to shepherd the totem pole eastward as a public call for the protection of Indigenous sacred sites and the sovereign rights of tribal nations. Most of the crew had been with the pole since it left Lummi Nation two weeks ago. The Lummi citizens with the House of Tears Carvers, a group of artists who were responsible for shaping it, were easily the most weathered bunch in the caravan. They’d spent the previous three months visiting tribal nations and sacred sites in the West and Northwest before the official Red Road journey kicked off in mid-July. For the whole caravan, and for our Lummi friends—carver Doug James; his wife, Siam’elwit; and his nephew Phreddie Lane—this was the final stretch, today’s stop the penultimate event before the 25-foot-long, 5,000-pound cedar trunk reached its final destination at the doorstep of Deb Haaland, President Joe Biden’s new secretary of the interior and the first Indigenous person to serve in a presidential Cabinet.
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