Cedar Tree Institute

from Marquette Monthly December, 2011

Jogging down the stairs at Heathrow Airport to the underground train running to London, I carry in my overnight luggage a small container of wild rice, formal letters from the Keweenaw Bay Indian Community, and a document signed by a hundred faith leaders. My twenty-eight-year-old traveling companion, a local organic farmer, writer and activist, carries in his duffle bag—along with a newly purchased bargain-basement suit—a bottle of homemade maple syrup and seven packets of background information on a controversial proposed sulfide mining project near our homes in Northern Michigan.

It’s April 2008 and we travel with support from a number of Michigan-based nonprofit groups, arriving in England a couple of days early for the annual general meeting of one of the world’s largest multinational mining corporations. For twenty years Rio Tinto has been listed as a top choice for investors on the London Stock Exchange. The company also has been documented as being responsible for some of the worst environmental and human rights violations that exist in the modern mining industry. We’re here because they’ll soon be coming, dependent on final government permits, to our neighborhood.

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from The Mining Journal September 19, 2011

To the Journal editor:

This week the Mining Journal reported, as a lead story, Inghan County Judge Paula J. M Manderfield’s denial of a request for an injunction to stop Rio Tinto’s Kennecott Minerals Company from dynamiting Eagle Rock, the entrance to the proposed controversial sulfide mine in Powell Township.

What some readers may appreciate knowing, is that five citizens from our community representing 200 members of the medical profession, 100 faith leaders, and 10,000 citizens of Marquette County joined two members from the Keweenaw Bay Indian Community and two attorneys from the National Wildlife Federations and traveled to Washington D.C. ten days ago to meet with high ranking officials from the Water Division of the United States Environmental Protection Agency. Their purpose was to express an outrage of what is happening to the families who live in the mine’s vicinity and raise objections about the safety and integrity of Kennecott’s operations.

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from The Mining Journal April 22, 2011

To the Journal editor:

Healthy religious communities, especially here in the Upper Peninsula, hold at the center of convictions a respect for individual conscience. That’s one of the reasons for the “quietism” of many faith leaders when taking public positions on ethics and public policy.

But when religion tilts too far in this “private” direction, churches and tabernacles become silent, irrelevant to important issues facing us as citizens. Dynamic symbols and spiritual teachings on justice and compassion are robbed of their power for change and reduced to sentimental musings.

At the annual meeting of Rio Tinto in London a few weeks ago, it was announced the blasting of Eagle Rock for Kennecott’s proposed sulfide mine in Marquette County is scheduled to begin in coming weeks. During days ahead, trucks full of explosives and dynamite will be traveling up County Road 550 to begin work.

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from Marquette Monthly December, 2010

A secret of the living dance

“I go around pitying myself, but forget I am being carried across the sky by a Great Wind.”
—Ojibway saying
 
These are uncertain times. Jobs are hard to find, local merchants are struggling to make ends meet as we approach the end of another calendar year. With rising unemployment, the haunting specter of a continuing economic recession hangs like a winter’s cold, dark sky over our Northern Michigan communities.

Paradoxically, this also is a season of gift-giving, family gatherings, feasts and lights, hymns and carols, rituals of prayers and thanksgiving. For those of us involved in churches and synagogues, it’s a time we inevitably witness astonishing acts of benevolence. How do we fit these opposing realities together?

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