WORTHINGTON — In the breakdown lane along Route 9 at the Worthington-Windsor border Monday, a small group of grandmothers in reflective jackets gathered around a smooth, egg-sized stone, hauling a copper bucket of water and carrying a small leather satchel of tobacco.
After placing the stone on the forest floor about 20 feet off the highway, the women lowered the bucket onto the stone and sprinkled the tobacco over the water. The group’s lone man and designated protector then touched the stone with the tip of his eagle staff, adorned with eight flame-like curves.
Together they prayed for clean water.
It was just one ritualized stop along a more than 2,000-mile journey for the Grandmothers Rise for Women and Water, which began July 1 in Calais, Maine, and is headed to Lac Courte Oreilles Reservation in Wisconsin in time for Sept. 23. From Sep. 24-27, they will attend the Women and Water Indigenous International Clean Water Summit.
The walk is being organized by the Greenfield-based Visioning B.E.A.R. Intertribal Coalition, which provides education, training and technical assistance to Indigenous and multicultural communities.
The walks mission is to advocate for clean water and what organizer Grandmother Star Stone described as balance among the genders and all nations of the Earth. And the journey itself, done in line with the spirit, philosophy and rituals of Native peoples, originated in dreams.
Stone, an 86-year-old Worthington resident, said she had a dream about a world in which people value women. Meanwhile, in Wisconsin, Maryellen Baker had a dream that if 5,000 women gathered to pray, the world’s water would be restored and policies would be enacted to protect the precious resource.
“Why we’re walking is for an awareness of how critical water is for every form of life,” Stone said. “There’s no life without water, and if you don’t take care of the water there will be nobody here.”
The water being carried by the group came from the St. Croix River in Maine. It is stored in a large glass container because, Stone said, it cannot be kept in plastic. As the journey continues the water must remain in motion.
“It has to travel over the Mother Earth, and it cannot stop, and it cannot look backwards,” she said, as she carried the bucket forward along the side of the road.
The water is discolored from tobacco leaves.
“It’s gotten a little funky as we go because it’s gotten some tobacco in it,” said Stone, as she took out the glass pitcher from her truck.
The eagle staff has eight “flames” at the top, though the eighth has not yet been lit.
“We’re anticipating it will get lit and then everything will be the flames,” Stone said. “We’ll acknowledge that we’re all related and everybody is kin. That was the promise.”
Holding the staff was Ryan Grist of Madison, Wisconsin. His presence, Stone said, is part of bringing balance between the genders.
“Even all the relations between men and women are getting balanced too while we walk — a sense of really what it is to be someone who supports and protects women as a man while we’re walking,” she said.
“It’s an honor,” Grist said. “I’m here because it’s really a courageous act. I’m a non-Native ally to support Indigenous leadership and bringing balance back to the world — protecting our waters, healing ourselves and each other.”
Tobacco is used in the ritual but not smoked, Stone said. It is significant because it is one of the four sacred medicines in Native culture.
As they walk, their truck follows behind them in the breakdown lane, inching along the road as they resume their journey through towns in Frnaklin County. Groups of people have joined them along portions of the route. In total, 88 people have signed up to join them on different legs of the walk.
As the brief ritual concluded in Worthington, Stone reflected on the impacts of pollution and plastics found in fish, as well as the ways human activity has negatively transformed the natural world.
She discussed how the arrival of European colonists brought new plants and food sources to North America, changing the fauna and the foods available to people.
“When people came here, they didn’t have the same food, and the food that they were eating was extremely different than the people from England or the colonists had,” Stone said.
“So people don’t think much about the fact that the fauna changed when they brought seeds from home. A lot of food we eat now is food that comes from someplace else. But all that wild food is still out there, and it’s there if people know how to pick it, where to look. That food is still growing,” she said.
Stone also spoke about differing concepts of land ownership, contrasting the Western idea of land as property with the belief that people are connected to and responsible for the land.
“What we believe is that the land owns us, not the other way around,” she said.
Stone said the colonists viewed elements of the natural world as resources to be used, including trees needed for shipbuilding.
“People for whom this was all like an object, like the trees were an object to make masts for their navy, and that is why they really came here is that they needed trees because they had already deforested England,” she said.
To follow the journey or participate, visit Visioning Bear’s Grandmothers Rise for Women and Water page.
