“Nibi Chronicles,” a monthly Great Lakes Now feature, is written by Staci Lola Drouillard. A Grand Portage Ojibwe direct descendant, she lives in Grand Marais on Minnesota’s North Shore of Lake Superior. Her nonfiction books “Walking the Old Road: A People’s History of Chippewa City and the Grand Marais Anishinaabe” and “Seven Aunts” were published 2019 and 2022, and the children’s story “A Family Tree” in 2024. “Nibi” is a word for water in Ojibwemowin, and these features explore the intersection of Indigenous history and culture in the modern-day Great Lakes region.
There’s a revealing family story about great-grandma Elizabeth, who was so driven to go to sugarbush in the spring, that she braved a brutal blizzard on foot with kids in tow, to meet her sisters at the sugarbush, just as they had always done.
While researching local Anishinaabe history for the book Walking the Old Road I visited the old family sugarbush just east of Grand Marais, and saw the remnants of where great-grandma and her sisters Theresa and Kate would set up camp for several weeks every spring. Being there among gete aninaatigoog — old maples — and imagining what it must have been like before roads and modern camping gear, helped deepen my sense of belonging to them and to this place.
The research also led me on a path through a different stand of sugar maples, even closer to home. I was researching the story of an Ojibwe man named Shingibbiss, who spent his last day on earth in the sugarbush just behind our house. His obituary was posted on May 2nd, 1907 and read, “Shingibbiss died at the sugarbush at Good Harbor Hill Friday, aged about 80 years, leaving a wife. He was well known and much loved. His body was interred at the cemetery at Chippewa City.”
Connecting the trees that we tap in spring to Shingibbiss and his family is a wonderful example of how our paths cross with our ancestors on the landscape in a serendipitous and spiritual way. It also makes the act of zhiiwaagamiziganike — making maple sugar, an important part of who we are as Ojibwe-Anishinaabeg. I suspect that continuing to collect sap when the days are warm and the nights are cold is what grand-grandma and Shingibbiss would expect us to do.
Sugar Maples in Decline
Sap collecting bucket at the old Drouillard/Anakwad sugarbush. (Photo Credit: Staci Drouillard)
The 1854 Treaty Authority is an inter-tribal natural resource management organization that protects and implements the off-reservation hunting, fishing and gathering rights for the Grand Portage and Bois Forte bands in the lands ceded to the United States government under the Treaty of La Pointe, 1854. The organization is currently monitoring the phenology of the sugar maple sap run, as part of their “monitoring and assessment plan” detailed in the 2016 Climate Change Vulnerability Assessment and Adaptation Plan.
According to the Assessment, the condition of sugar maple stands is “on the decline across the 1854 Ceded Territory and on reservations.” Specific examples include data from the Fond du Lac Ojibwe Reservation, which has seen “dieback in their sugar maple crowns likely due to drought stress and earthworm-influenced reproduction failure.”
In addition, research at Menominee Tribal College “has shown sugar maple growth rate declines of 30%, even in large mature overstory trees.” This decline is associated with the introduction of European or Asian varieties of earthworms to the soil. Because a maple sapling’s roots are shallow, they require a layer of duff and leaf litter for protection. Worms are not native to ceded territory and once introduced, eat the layer of duff, as well as young maple leaves, changing the soil and eventually the ecosystem of the maple forest.
Part of the 1854 Authority’s approach to adaptation includes an educational component including public outreach on invasive earthworms, reminding people not to transplant trees from outside the region into maple stands and dump your extra fishing bait in the trash, instead of throwing it in the woods.
Another non-native pest may also be affecting maple trees. As the Assessment reports, “gypsy moths have also been captured in sugar maples, including at the Grand Portage Reservation,” adding, “even though they are not a preferred target species of the insect.” The report also cites the unpredictability of weather events like drought and reduced snowpack, contributing to their assessment that sugar maples have “medium vulnerability to projected changes in climate.”
Ani ayaabawi giizhigad — the days are getting warmer
And then there is the element of temperature. Tribal researchers who compiled the data state that “overall warming has been suggested as being very beneficial to maple species, both theoretically and experimentally.” According to the Assessment, “by the 2050s, average winter temperatures in the region are expected to increase by 5 degrees to 6 degrees Fahrenheit, and there will be approximately 21 fewer days below freezing annually.”
Maple woods where Shingibbiss spent his last days. (Photo Credit: Cathy Quinn)
The trend toward warmer temperatures and shorter winters also affects the amount of snow, “which diminishes insulating cover for root systems, allowing for deeper penetrations of freezing temperatures into the soil. This freezing exposure to root systems could damage (and may already be damaging) the sugar maple.”
This brings us back to Shingibbiss and his last sugarbush. His obituary is dated May 2, 1907. And while weather data for the region does not reach back that far, I used the National Weather Service’s database to find the high and low temperatures on May 2 from 1985 through 2024.
Note that the best conditions for a good maple sap run require below freezing temperatures at night (less than 32 degrees) and highs in the upper 30s to mid 40s during the day. This temperature-related, pressure differential is what causes the sap to circulate throughout the vascular system of the tree. It is a scientifically-based process that is not negotiable.
As anyone who collects sap knows, if it is too warm at night, the sap won’t run. My calculation found that the average high temperature for May 2 over the last 40 years was 47.2 degrees. Conversely, the average low temperature was 34.2 degrees. If the sap was running on Good Harbor Hill in the final days of April, 1907, it has taken about 78 years for temperatures to warm up between two and three degrees here on Good Harbor Hill. Our own “maple log” where we track data about our annual sap collection, confirms that the temperature differential required for a good sap run today, occurs three to four weeks earlier than it did in 1907.
The 1854 Treaty Authority has asked tribal sap harvesters to share the details of their 2025 tapping season with their researchers, as part of the “monitoring and assessment” plan related to sugar maples in ceded territory. They will compile the dates of the sap run for different areas of maple forest from Fond du Lac to Grand Portage, record the high and low temperatures during the run, monitor snow depth and any other observations that people collect at sugarbush. This data will be used to help researchers understand “the full extent of climate impacts upon sugar maple in the 1854 Ceded Territory and on reservations,” which to date, “is not fully known.”
The temperature today on Good Harbor Hill is 38 degrees. There is snow and cold temperatures predicted for the weekend, but the first week of April looks like lows in the upper 20s and highs in the low 40s — perfect conditions for zhiiwaagamiziganike.
Catch more news at Great Lakes Now:
Nibi Chronicles: Invisible Borders
Nibi Chronicles: Protecting the protectors
Featured image: Maple woods where Shingibbiss spent his last days. (Photo Credit: Cathy Quinn)
