River of Souls

Anishinaabe traditions tell us when we leave this earth, “we will dance through the doorway to the next world in spirit form”. Our spirits will find our ancestors who have also passed on before us, and we will rejoice and dance in the sky and call it Waawaate, the Northern Lights. The Anishinaabe refer to the Milky Way as a “river of souls” and branches of the river fall down the Earth, and you travel on that river in the After-World, a place where we can reconnect with our ancestors. By first acknowledging our pasts, we can begin to look for our future. For my grandparents Nona, Erwin, Leona, and Francis…