Sprout House was surrounded on all sides by Ojibwe people and history. To the east was Little Earth, a housing project for urban Indians; to the south the Red Lake reservation’s embassy; to the west an Anishinaabe elders’ home; and to the north the Minneapolis American Indian Center (MAIC), the Many Rivers housing development, Powwow Grounds Coffee, All My Relations Gallery, the Minnesota Chippewa Tribe offices, and Ancient Traders Market, all strung along Franklin Avenue, the crucible in which the American Indian Movement coalesced in 1968.

My first sight of Minneapolis was from the car of a jovial Ojibwe woman who had picked me up outside the city and brought me to the Phillips neighborhood, and my first experience of the Native community there was when she dropped me off outside the Hi-Lake liquor store, pointed to a guy, and said, “Look, there’s an Ojibwe now! You can tell because he’s got no butt!” I had heard good things about the city, and over the next few days it grabbed the heart of this gnarly vagabond.

If I was going to follow the hippie path of researching my way to harmony with the Earth, it was clear that I would need to learn a bioregionally appropriate way of life from the indisputable masters of bioregionalism: the native peoples of the land.

When you grow up, you can’t just spend all your time creekwalking and catching frogs. You have to do serious things. Which was why I was at college in the first place, two and a half Midwestern states away from where I grew up.

When I was a kid my parents took my brother and me on a road trip to see the great American West. I may have been twelve; I remember that when one of them bought me a cool cowboy hat and I found a turkey feather to put in it, I thought I was the coolest kid around. We slept at drive-in campgrounds and listened to classic country and we went to see oh so many views. They were the grandest views in the country, some of the grandest in the world. We looked down from the heights of Yosemite, watched Old Faithful erupt in Yellowstone, goggled at Meteor Crater, and peered down into the incomprehensible vastness of the Grand Canyon. And as I followed the family from one view to the next, I thought: What’s the fucking point?

### Weirdo report First off, this is your annual report on a gathering of radicals off in the mountains of Colorado. Now, we’re all living in a time when everyone wants the world to change drastically---not the only such time, but certainly such a one. For a lot of people, that desire can be satisfied by the occasional trip to a voting booth interspersed with a lot of complaining and expressing opinions that seem self-evident, especially on Facebook. Okay. Everyone has their path, and I’m only obliquely attacking that complacency here (partly because it’s a target that requires a large attack and partly because I still feel uncomfortably like part of the problem myself). The point, here, is that those self-evident opinions percolate up to the clicktivist armies *from* somewhere, and one such source is to be found in places like a mountain meadow in southwestern Colorado over the week of the summer solstice.

When I braked two years of traveling momentum to settle down and live on this little peninsula on Lake Superior, I planned to start feeling at home. You wouldn’t guess it from how long I’ve blown around all-anyhow on the winds, but getting into a deep relationship with a place is a project I’ve had in mind for a long, long time, and that I’ve planned to dedicate a lot of my life’s time and effort to.