Vermilion
“The lake was originally called Onamaniig which means ‘ochre’ because it was remembered by Anishinaabeg as a place that the people of the Red Ochre culture lived.”
—Margaret Noodin
The red eye
of a loon
for vision,
depths of water
who can say
what will pass
as, protection
reeds
edges of place
are only
temporary,
circling
filters the blues
and greens
as they have
always done
dives for minutes
crayfish, light re-
fracted, what could be
slowed
just enough
to catch a meal
or your eye,
indelible flash,
a crimson ribbon
ablaze, crossing
the lake
where you stand
watching
just then
with the grasses
from shore.
Copyright © 2021 by Molly McGlennen. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on November 3, 2021, by the Academy of American Poets.
“Vermilion is one of the largest lakes in northern Minnesota. Official state documents boast its capacity for settler recreation, the ‘lake of the sunset glow.’ The lake was already named, however, before French fur traders ever translated what they deemed discovery. As Ojibwe language scholar, poet, and friend Margaret Noodin told me, the Anishinaabeg knew and named the place in a storied and cartographically rich way. For Native peoples, the land is carefully remembered and related to. Those are the stories that I am interested in telling through poetry, the ones that orient our relationship to places on Indigenous terms.”
—Molly McGlennen
Molly McGlennen
Molly McGlennen is poet of Anishinaabe descent and the author of Our Bearings (University of Arizona Press, 2020); Fried Fish and Flour Biscuits (Salt Publishing, 2010); and Creative Alliances: The Transnational Designs of Indigenous Women's Poetry (University of Oklahoma Press, 2014), which won the 2015 Beatrice Medicine Award for Outstanding Scholarship in American Indian Studies. Originally from Minneapolis, Minnesota, she is an Associate Professor of English and Native American Studies at Vassar College in Poughkeepsie, New York, where she currently lives.