Land

New film on urban gardening in Detroit uses creative marketing strategy

By |

Detroit native Mark McInnis is giving away seeds to help introduce his new film on the explosion of urban gardening in his home city. In Urban Roots, McInnis connects  the decline of the city’s auto industry to the rise of  vacant lots that now provide space for gardens. McInnis’s mother worked for Ford Motor Co. in Detroit throughout his childhood. “That job put braces on my bother’s teeth, paid for our skateboards and our weekend trips up north,” he said.

Land

Book examines Ojibwe connection to Isle Royale’s good place

By |

LANSING–In many ways, Michigan is a state of connections, including historic links between the Ojibwe people of Minnesota and Isle Royale. Such connections can be explored in words and pictures that illuminate the linkages that bind land and water, peoples and places, present and past. Minong — The Good Place (Michigan State University Press, $24.49) provides an in-depth account of the intimate relationship between the North Shore Ojibwe people and Isle Royale, which is now a national park in Lake Superior off the west coast of the Upper Peninsula. Timothy Cochrane, the former national park historian, describes how the Grand Portage Band had used the island and its resources, including the prized siscowet trout, the caribou that became especially prized when mainland moose numbers dropped in the 1800s, the beaver whose skins were traded and the maple syrup produced in the spring. The Ojibwe were involved in copper mining on the island, as well as commercial fishing operations.

Water

Book tells tale of tragic Lake Huron freighter sinking

By |

By Eric Freedman
Nov. 30, 2009

LANSING — The Edmund Fitzgerald is the best-known of the Great Lakes’ doomed ships, but the freighter’s demise with its entire crew off Whitefish Point in the Upper Peninsula is by no means the state’s only such maritime disaster. Andrew Kantar, a Ferris State University professor, tells another such story, that of the ill-fated freighter Daniel J. Morrell. It sank in 1966 off the tip of the Thumb in Lake Huron, northwest of Harbor Beach. “Each of the Great Lakes has its own tragic history, and Lake Huron’s violent moods have become legendary,” Kantar writes in “Deadly Voyage: The S.S. Daniel J. Morrell Tragedy” (Michigan State University Press, $16.95).