02/26/2026
When I read about those canoes resting beneath the waters of Lake Mendota, I don’t first think about archaeology.
I think about continuity.
Because Lake Mendota rests within Ho-Chunk homelands — and these waters have carried the ancestors of the Nations who are still here.
Sixteen canoes.
Some 1,200 years old.
Some 3,000.
One reaching back 5,200 years.
Five thousand years.
That is not an artifact.
That is a memory still breathing.
They were carved from cottonwood, elm, oak.
Red oak — porous, demanding skill to seal.
Meaning our ancestors understood water, wood, fire, and patience at a level that modern people rarely stop to imagine.
We are told history began when paper began.
But our history was traveling waterways long before ink.
These were not recreational vessels.
They were lifelines.
They crossed the lake for harvesting, hunting, fishing.
They carried food.
Stories.
Children.
Songs.
And the detail that moves me most?
They were not privately owned.
They were communal.
Think about that.
In a world obsessed with possession,
the canoe belonged to the people.
That tells you something about governance.
About worldview.
About relationship.
And when the archaeologist — Tamara Thomsen — recognized what she was seeing beneath 24 feet of water, she did something important.
She consulted first.
With the Ho-Chunk Nation and the Native Nations of Wisconsin.
Before lifting anything.
Before claiming discovery.
Before turning it into a headline.
That matters.
Because these are not “finds.”
They are relatives.
And I appreciate that the decision was made — together — to leave most of them where they rest.
That is maturity.
Not everything ancient needs to be removed.
Not everything needs to be displayed.
Some things are held in place by water, silt, and time — and that is where they remain strongest.
There is something poetic here.
Canoes — designed to travel —
now resting in stillness.
But even in stillness,
they speak.
They say:
We were here.
We knew how to move with water.
We understood engineering.
We understood cooperation.
We understood how to build something that would carry more than one life at a time.
And perhaps the deeper question is not:
Why are so many canoes in one place?
Perhaps the question is:
What gathering happened there?
What convergence?
What seasonal camp?
What ceremony?
What exchange of food and story and kinship?
Five thousand years ago,
people were meeting there.
Planning.
Traveling.
Living full lives.
Not primitive.
Not wandering.
Not lost.
Oriented.
And when Lawrence Plucinski said,
“Let our knowledge be told. Let our history be told of how we traveled.”
That landed.
Because travel is more than movement.
It is relationship.
It is trade.
It is diplomacy.
It is survival.
It is connection.
The waterways were our highways long before asphalt.
And here is the part that humbles me:
The lake preserved what the land might not have.
Sometimes water is not erasure.
It is protection.
The silt covered them gently.
Held them.
Kept them intact until a time when perhaps we needed to remember.
There is a teaching here.
The old ways are not gone.
They are submerged.
And when the time is right,
they rise.
Êkwa — and so it continues.
Walk gently.
