Walking with the Water: Anishinaabe Water Walkers and the Living Ethics of the Great Lakes

Margaret “Mags” Fielding, Keeper of Littoral Studies, Rawley Point Chapter House — Order of the Great Fifth Sea

I. Introduction — The Water Has Memory

The first light of dawn spills across Lake Superior, glinting against the copper pail carried by a woman walking the shoreline. In that reflection, one glimpses a covenant older than law, a dialogue between human endurance and living water. This image, humble and immense, embodies the spirit of the Anishinaabe Water Walkers: modern spiritual stewards whose ceremony restores not only the balance of ecosystems but the conversation between beings.

In the quiet discipline of these walks lies a philosophy the Order often describes as hydrographic kinship: an understanding that water is not scenery or substance, but relative. The Anishinaabe Water Walkers reveal this through motion, ritual becoming research, prayer becoming praxis. Their pilgrimages encircle the Great Lakes as living ledgers of reverence, asserting that stewardship without relationship is mere management.

This essay examines how the Water Walkers redefine environmental ethics through Indigenous philosophy, challenging Western paradigms that treat the Great Lakes as resources rather than relations. Drawing on oral teachings, ethnographic accounts, environmental reports, and Indigenous scholarship (Chiblow, 2021), this study observes the Water Walks not as protest but as procession, a ceremonial re-mapping of the inland seas.

II. Historical Context — The Lakes Before Law

The Anishinaabe worldview holds that nibi, water, is a sacred being, a living continuity that predates jurisdiction. Migration stories such as the Seven Fires Prophecy recount how the Anishinaabe journeyed to the place "where food grows on the water," establishing a covenantal geography with the Great Lakes. These narratives, still spoken along the shores, anchor the spiritual architecture of the region.

Women, as water carriers and protectors, hold a central role in sustaining this covenant (Aubel, 2011). Within that matriarchal trust, every act of carrying water is both remembrance and renewal. Yet industrialization fractured this relational order. The nineteenth and twentieth centuries brought extraction, pollution, and silence, the sound of the lakes turned mechanical. The transformation of sacred waters into commodities left both ecological and spiritual wounds.

It was from this silence that the Water Walkers emerged, a ceremonial answer to what the Order might call the cry beneath the chart, the moment when the lakes ceased merely reflecting the sky and began pleading to be seen again.

III. Origins of the Water Walkers — Josephine Mandamin’s Vision

In 2003, Anishinaabe Elder Josephine Mandamin received a vision that compelled her to act. Witnessing the degradation of the Great Lakes, she began the first Mother Earth Water Walk around Lake Superior, carrying a copper pail for thousands of miles in ceremony. Her conviction, "Water is life," was not metaphor but ontology.

Mandamin’s vision reshaped activism into devotion. Each step was prayer; each mile, petition. As the walks expanded to all five Great Lakes, participants enacted a collective vow of guardianship (Norman, 2017). Within the Order’s records, Mandamin would be described as a navigator of spirit currents, one who read the lakes not by instrument but by intuition. Her legacy endures through successors like Autumn Peltier, whose voice carries the same steady tone: not outrage, but remembrance.

IV. Ceremony in Motion — Structure and Symbolism

Each Water Walk follows a ceremonial logic precise as navigation. Women carry the copper pail, a vessel of life, while men bear the eagle staff, symbol of leadership and guardianship (Chiblow, 2021). The walk continues from sunrise to sunset, unbroken in movement. This continuity transforms exertion into liturgy, converting geography into sacred text.

The walkers’ rhythm becomes a living metronome of respect, every step an offering, every shoreline a marginal note in the Great Lakes’ ongoing scripture. The use of Anishinaabemowin along the route restores the lakes’ original language, reframing the discourse of ecology from management to kinship.

For the Order, this resonates deeply with our own concept of the Aligned Ledger, that truth is carried forward through motion, not merely inscribed. In this sense, the Water Walk is both map and prayer, each footfall a recalibration of balance between body, water, and world (Williams et al., 2017).

V. Environmental and Ethical Dimensions

The Water Walkers’ ethic diverges from Western environmentalism’s frameworks of policy, protest, and restoration. Their method is relational rather than reactive. To walk is to listen; to listen is to heal.

This ethic speaks directly to contemporary crises, pipeline encroachments, plastic infiltration, the poisoned waters of Flint and Bad River (Norman, 2017). Each act of walking is a refusal to reduce water to metric or commodity. The walkers embody an anthro-decentric worldview (M. Küpers, 2020), in which humanity is one thread among many, not master but member.

Within the Order’s parlance, this is reverence as methodology. The Water Walkers demonstrate that ecological renewal must begin not with governance, but with gratitude, a principle that modern science is only beginning to rediscover (Viaene, 2021; Hodgetts et al., 2021).

VI. Cosmology and Contemporary Resonance

In walking, the Anishinaabe re-enchant the Great Lakes, restoring mythic geography to modern consciousness. The walkers become living instruments of continuity, translating spiritual cartography into embodied experience (Guzy, 2024).

Their movement echoes other sacred hydrologies, the legal personhood of the Whanganui River, the ritual ablutions of the Ganges, each recognizing the sentience of water as moral compass (Viaene, 2021). Through storytelling, media, and education, the Water Walkers have brought these values into global dialogue, contributing to what scholars now call plurilegal water realities (Martinez et al., 2024; Stefanelli et al., 2017).

For the Order, their work reaffirms an axiom long held along these coasts: that the lakes remember. To walk their perimeters is to trace memory itself, as though writing upon a living surface that never forgets.

VII. Reverence as Resistance

The Water Walks transform resistance into ritual, a quiet sovereignty the Order would term devotional defiance. By carrying water, the walkers assert identity and autonomy through ceremony, resisting the commodification of the sacred. Their refrain, "We are the water walking," dissolves the separation between act and actor.

This form of activism resists absorption by institutions that would sanitize its spiritual heart. The walks insist that justice cannot be bureaucratized, it must be embodied. They remind policymakers and scholars alike that without Indigenous self-determination, all sustainability remains cosmetic (Stefanelli et al., 2017; Serrano-García, 2020).

Through reverence, the Water Walkers restore what the Order calls the right proportion of awe, that ethical equilibrium between human need and natural sovereignty.

VIII. Conclusion — Returning to the Shore

The Anishinaabe Water Walkers teach that sustainability is not a system but a relationship. Their movement reframes environmentalism as kinship, an ethic of listening to water as one listens to an elder. The phrase "The lakes are listening again" signals more than renewal; it signals reciprocity.

In this returning to the shore, both literal and symbolic, lies a quiet revolution. Scientific reports may measure clarity or contamination, but only ceremony measures connection. The Water Walkers remind us that to preserve the lakes, we must first remember that they are alive.

For the Order of the Great Fifth Sea, their work stands as a companion practice, parallel in purpose, distinct in lineage, to our own call: Custodes Litoris. Memoria Maris. Keepers of the shore, memory of the sea.

The Water Walkers embody that same charge in freshwater form, guardians walking the living edge where spirit meets science, and remembrance becomes action.