• Following a warm, dry winter, several northern Michigan tribes have decided to let their sugar maples rest this season.
• In Peshawbestown, some signs of sugar season, like the sound of woodpeckers and appearance of baby skunks, came too early.
• Despite the unusual year, the Grand Traverse Band continues to ramp up food sovereignty programs and resources.
Tera John is gathering kindling for a fire outside the Grand Traverse Band’s sugar shack in Peshawbestown. The sound of a woodpecker echoes through the woods.
“We listen for that guy to return to sugar bush,” John says. “That woodpecker is saying those bugs underneath the bark are starting to wake up.”
John is a tribal member and works with the Grand Traverse Band's agriculture department on restoring traditional foodways and food sovereignty.
She says the sound of woodpeckers is just one of many ecological signs that the trees are waking up again and their sap is starting to flow — that it’s time for sugar bush.
“We are coming back to this forest, this grove. These maples – we call him ininaatig. That’s our standing brother, our elder brother, the one who, like, gives you the side-eye if you’re not behaving at Thanksgiving dinner. That’s the maple for us,” she said.
Tapping maple trees for sap, syrup and sugar is an old Anishinaabe tradition — one that John and the tribe are working to strengthen after generations of settlement made it harder to practice and pass down.
“The beginning of the year is sugar bush,” John said. “When we report for sugar bush, we check in with our family, get the good gossip. We laugh together, argue … everything that families do.”
March is typically sugar bush season in northern Michigan, when daytime highs get above freezing while nights stay cold. But this year’s mild winter meant that many people began tapping their trees unusually early, in January and February.
John says she became concerned when signs to tap started coming early — things like the sound of woodpeckers and the appearance of baby skunks. She says the snowpack never came all the way up to the trunks of the trees.
“That was a red flag for me," John said. "And I asked my elders about what to do and what to say. And I asked the trees, because they have not been respected or appropriately thanked or allowed to rest for quite a long time.”
With that input, she decided the band’s agriculture department would let the trees rest, then hopefully tap next year.
CJ Minzey, agriculture coordinator at Grand Traverse Band, says he was excited about the decision.
"The way Tera [John] explained it to me, was our tradition was we'd tap three years, and then give the fourth year a break," he said. "I was really pushing to get that going. ... Because I think it'd be nice to give Mother Nature a break."
They’re not alone in that choice. Several other tribes, like the Sault Ste. Marie Tribe and the Saginaw Chippewa, are doing the same.
Different places, different maples
Kathleen Smith works for the Great Lakes Indian Fish and Wildlife Commission, which represents 11 Ojibwe tribes in Minnesota, Wisconsin and Michigan.
Smith, whose title in Anishinaabemowin is ganawandang manoomin, or "she who takes care of the wild rice," does a lot of work with traditional foods in the upper Great Lakes. And she says some places went ahead with sugar bush.
“The areas where I have harvested and helped, the sugar bushes, they’re doing quite well,” Smith said. “They were offering themselves up.”
Smith is a member of the Keweenaw Bay Indian Community. She’s helped out with sugar bush in a few places in the western U.P. and northern Wisconsin this year, where she says they had signs to harvest, like heavy snowpack over the winter and good freeze-and-thaw conditions in early spring.
But with steadily warming winters plus challenges like disease and pests, Smith says it will become more and more important for tribal communities across the Great Lakes to talk with each other and keep rebuilding foodways and traditions.
“So for instance, like the black ash [tree and] the emerald ash borer … we had relatives downstate that were asking us for black ash, since we didn’t have [the borer] yet,” Smith said. “I think it’s important that communities that still have sap running – maybe we could trade for something later on. Because we need to bring that back, we need to be able to help our relatives out as well, that weren’t able to do sugar bush.”
Sugaring down and moving forward
Back at the sugar shack in Peshawbestown, Tera John pulls out a few bottles of maple syrup harvested nearby that she was able to trade for.
She pours the liquid into a cast iron pot over the fire and starts stirring.
“I’m boiling it down,” she says. “I’m going to sugar this.”
After several hours of careful stirring, the syrup will thicken, eventually reducing down to a granular, golden-brown sugar.
John has led a few sugar bush workshops like this one to teach tribal and non-tribal community members about the tradition. And the band’s agriculture department says they’re aiming to tap 600 trees next year, up from around 300 last year.
They’ve invested in new equipment and home tree-tapping kits to give out to families, thanks in part to a big grant aimed at reinvigorating food traditions for tribal members.
Later in the afternoon, the sun comes out and more people have joined around the fire.
John says this – the act of showing up to sugar bush with intention, being outside the sugar shack and near the ininaatigoog, the sugar maples – is vital during this year of rest, for the people and the trees.
“I’m going to sugar this down and show these guys that I mean business to take care of them,” John says. “This is what I’m intending for them – to occupy this space throughout the year, to host workshops, or harvesting, or teachings, storytellings right here so we can live life with these guys.
"They miss our laughter, and our arguing, and our kids running around. They’re supposed to be part of our lives. … We’re coming back. We’ll learn how.”
