An Old Story

There is a story about the Point of Rocks I heard some time ago, one of life’s mysteries, that might be cleared up and understood if the gabbro would speak and was willing to tell me, which it might do someday. The story takes place in fairly recent times and is not one of the old stories of the creation of the Earth, yet I feel that it must tie in with those stories. Its brevity generates wonderment and a human desire to know — in Ojibwe fashion, the listener and reader practice the virtue of realizing that knowledge is not there just for the pursuing, that if our understanding is meant to be, it will happen when it should. And yet, in our pitiful way, we cannot help but wonder.

It goes like this: one of the times the rock was being blasted, near where the Bethel Society building is today, between Superior and First Streets, a large crack opened and an Anishinaabe man dressed in old-style clothes stepped out. He looked all around him and then walked away, just walked away.

Dash mih sa’iw noongoom. And that is all there is for now.

Excerpted from Gichigami Hearts: Stories and Histories from Misaabekong by Linda LeGarde Grover. Published by the University of Minnesota Press. Copyright © 2021 by Linda LeGarde Grover. Used by permission.