Blistered: A Night of Traveling Cinema in Cloquet’s West End

Emergent Seas presents the first stop of a walking film festival about migration and home.

Cloquet contains many worlds and it’s hard to know the people until one walks in their shoes. For one night only, an original slate of short films will be screened that interweave to explore the blistered histories of migration to Cloquet. The French word “cloquet” means “blistered,” referring to a cloth design woven with an irregularly raised or “blistered” pattern.

All films are original “walking head” documentaries by Augustin the Wind, part of a larger storying initiative across the Great Lakes called Emergent Seas.

1. Treaty People Walk: A Reverse Anishinaabe Migration
Cloquet, MN sits in the heart of Nagaachiwanaang, home of the Fond du Lac band of Lake Superior Chippewa. The territory was established by the 1854 Treaty of LaPoint, signed by Chief Buffalo among others. Sherry Couture, hereditary chief of Fond du Lac, walks with a fellowship of “treaty people” to honor these foundational agreements and to pray for the water. Follow as the treaty people walk from 1854 Territory to 1837 Treaty land and beyond, as the fellowship begins to reverse the path of the Great Anishinaabe Migration east across the Great Lakes, stepping into prophecy.

2. Muffler Alley
Jim Northrup II, son of famed writer of the same name, walks in the footsteps of his father along the rez road where he grew up. As he strolls down memory lane, or “Muffler Alley” as he calls it (so named for all the potholes), Big Jim revisits the backwoods that taught him how to live in a good way. Here he harvests teepee poles, reflecting on the funny nature of home, protection, and the trees that make him stand for the land.

3. Where the Waters Stop
Nahgahchiwanaang is an Ojibwemowin word that means, “Where The Waters Stop”, or “End of the Lake”, depending on your translation. Author Thomas D. Peacock shares stories of the Second Migration of the Anishinaabe while the games of colonization come eerily to life.

4. The Snowshoe Priest
In the spirit of St. Paul and the desert mystics, Augustin the Obscure writes a letter to the Cloquetians, relating the story of the Venerable Bishop Baraga. Known as the Snowshoe Priest for the hundreds of miles he would trek across Lake Superior country in the winter to minister to the Ottawa and Ojibwa, Baraga covered ground from Michigan’s Upper Peninsula all the way to Fond du Lac in the early 19th Century. Meditating on the history of the Catholic Church in Anishinaabe Akiing, Augustin calls on other stories of the time that may have influenced Baraga’s dogged pursuit of Indigenous souls, and points to a green path away from the scorched earth that lies ahead.

5. Log Jam
Dan Reed, Finnish-American storyteller, tells the colorful story of lumberjacks and Finnish migration in the early settlement of Cloquet, weaving together histories of the 1918 Fire and log drive booms with stories from the Kalevala and his own plays.

6. Disappearing City
Frank Lloyd Wright designed a failed utopia he called Broad Acre City, an architecture of freedom and democracy that hinged on an open-concept gas station as the community hub. Only one such service station was ever actually built, and it’s in Cloquet. Jeremy Gardner, Cloquet artist-at-large from Baton Rouge, walks down Cloquet Avenue from Frank Lloyd Wright’s only service station reflecting on the famous architect and the foundations of freedom.

7. Always Beside Her
What do we hear when we listen to the houseless in our midst? Duluth is the original home for Nahgahchiwanaang and remains within the 1854 Treaty Territory. Many residents suffer from houselessness and sleep on the streets. Grandmother Lisa Ronnquist of Fond du Lac, known by many as an angel of Duluth, walks the streets every day, ministering to the many people she considers her extended family; enduring daily heartbreak as drug use, death, and missing Indigenous women plague the place where the waters stop, with no end in sight.