No trip to Grandpa and Grandma’s farm would be complete without visiting Schaller Bay on Burnside Lake, just north of Ely. Mike and Gertrude Schaller owned the entire bay, bought from U.S. Steel after World War II in the late 1940s. The property included maybe a thousand feet of shoreline filled with birch trees and their iconic peeling white bark. Growing up, I was regaled with stories of Ojibwe Indians paddling by the bay, but I never saw them in my time. Gramps not only saw them, he even knew them to talk with them. He always spoke of them with high respect. After all, he himself was of mixed French-Canadian Irish blood and Italian blood, and he was married to a Finn. In the early days of immigration to the U.S., animosity between groups from different national backgrounds carried over from Europe, but not so with Grandpa. He was a particular example of a genuine melting pot and had little prejudice in him. As a result, my growing-up-imagination of people groups like Ojibwe has always been positive, just like Grandpa.

I remember mostly his description of the Ojibwe birch-bark canoes, for which they were well known and which long predated the aluminum Grumman canoes of later times. Sometimes it seems I remember seeing them with my own eyes, paddling soundlessly as they glided through the water. The memory of Grandpa’s stories became my memories. Maybe that is where his (and my) love of canoeing and wilderness camping came from.

This first nation people group (to use more modern terminology) was also called the “Chippewa” in the U.S., but Gramps and the surrounding northern Minnesota tourism industry used the term Ojibwe, which was more common in Canada. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the Ojibwe sometimes teamed up with the legendary French-Canadian voyageurs at the North American fur trading peak. Beaver pelts were the primary currency of the rugged adventurers as they plied the waters by birch-bark canoe (which they learned from the Ojibwe) between the U.S. and Canada. On one end, their routes would connect first with Montreal or, later, farther north, with the Hudson Bay. And on the other end, their travels would take them to various distant spots in western Canada. Cities today like Grand Portage and Portage La Prairie get their eponymous names from locations where the voyageurs had to carry their loads from one body of water to another. The routes took them through either the Ottawa or St. Lawrence rivers, across to the North Shore of Lake Superior, and then followed what became the boundary between the U.S. and Canada.

The fur trade was an arduous task, with voyageurs carrying their loads across portages when water levels were too low for canoe passage. Typically, the canoes were upwards of thirty-six feet long, weighed about six hundred pounds, and could carry three tons of cargo. A modern Grumman aluminum canoe, in comparison, is typically sixteen feet long and weighs about seventy-five pounds. Kevlar canoes are as light as forty pounds, and those made of carbon fiber come in at thirty-five pounds! Suffice it to say, voyageurs were rugged folks.

Back to the Ojibwe, the meaning of their name is disputed, but each explanation tells a little about them. Some interpretations offered include “those who cook/roast until it puckers” which alludes to their seam-sealing process for making moccasins waterproof; “those who keep records of a vision,” referring to their form of pictorial writing and pictographs; or “those who speak stiffly” or “those who stammer,” a name given to them by the neighboring Cree people group, describing the difference in the language. Fascinating history. How much of it Gramps and Grams knew is unknown, but it was probably more than Wikipedia’s research.

I can’t think of Schaller Bay without also remembering the Ojibwe people, and even then, I know so little about them, their way of life, the times before European settlement. Even further back, where did they come from? What people group did they replace when they moved into what we now call northern Minnesota? From where did they immigrate? How long did the migration of Eurasian people take, who eons ago crossed the Bering Strait to what we now call Alaska to spread south and eastward across North, Central, and South America? The pre-colonial history of the Americas is little known to most people.

Today, there is a growing interest in family genealogies, but few people can trace back past a few generations. And in a few generations hence, each of us will be mere pixels on a digital file somewhere or a photo in a picture frame in an antique shop or sitting on someone’s fireplace mantel. Our life is just one link in the long genealogical chain that goes back to our common first parents, Adam and Eve. While we don’t know all the intermediary links, we can take it one step further back. They came by direct creation from God. So we all—whether Irish, Italian, Finn, Ojibwe, or any other racial, ethnic, or national origin—are part of the same human family, whose histories converge in the past. And we are all immigrants whose genealogy began somewhere else!