COUNTRY
WEDNESDAY, MAY 13, 2015
Serving Marine on St. Croix, Scandia, May Township
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SCANDIA CITY COUNCIL: Log House Landing improvement project urgent needs P6
Preventing pipeline spills in St. Croix BY GREG SEITZ STCROIX360.COM AND SUZANNE LINDGREN EDITOR@COUNTRYMESSENGER.COM
The roads don’t often go straight in northwest Wisconsin. They twist around wetlands, ponds, lakes, and rivers, making it a little tricky to find where the Line 61 oil pipeline crosses the St. Croix River and its tributaries. One might end up thighhigh in mucky cattail stands while hiking to river crossings, where brightly-colored posts stick out of the ground on either bank. There is no other sign of the river of oil flowing underfoot. Fish swim, birds feed, the water slips ceaselessly past. By next year, there will be 50 million gallons of heavy crude per day flowing through a pipeline beneath the St. Croix River and its tributaries the Eau Claire, the Totogatic, the Namekagon, and all the countless creeks, ponds, and wetlands that flow into them. River crossings are particularly risky for pipelines. A spill in moving water is many times more difficult to contain and clean up than on dry land, and the power of rivers increases the chance of a rupture. Two oil pipelines have ruptured in the Yellowstone River in the past five years, together spilling more than 100,000 gallons of oil. Both breaks were SEE PIPELINE SPILLS, PAGE 2
Scandia resident drowns in river BY SUZANNE LINDGREN EDITOR@COUNTRYMESSENGER.COM
Troy Michael Henry, a 41-year-old resident of Scandia, was found in the St. Croix River on the evening of May 4, just north of Log House Landing. No foul play is suspected in his death. The investigation is ongoing as the Ramsey
County Medical Examiner's Office determines the official cause of death through an autopsy. According to Washington County Chief Deputy Dan Starry, the medical examiner’s process typically takes four to eight weeks.
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A scribe for the earth BY SUZANNE LINDGREN EDITOR@COUNTRYMESSENGER.COM
Judy Stern isn’t sticking to one genre, in life or literature. She’s been a mother, student, gallery owner, clothing designer, shopkeeper, teacher. And now she’s the author of a trio of literary journals that make up a series, Teachings from Mother Earth. Part lived experience, part history lesson, part acquired wisdom, the books outline attitudes and perspectives Stern gained over a lifetime, following little but her intuition. The books are strongly influenced by decades of learning from American Indians about their traditional cultures. “We Euro-Westerners have more to learn about our world and how it ideally would be from the Indians than we have to teach them,” says Stern. While she remembers meeting American Indians on extended family camping trips to Lac La Croix, Green Lake and Lake Mille Lacs, her drive to learn more was sparked in her mid-30s during visits to a reservation in North Dakota with her then-husband. The marriage was not a happy one, but the encounter set her on a path she’s been happy to follow. “It’s been a lifetime quest,” she says. After separating from her husband and putting herself through art school, Stern opened a gallery in Minneapolis’ Warehouse District, selling contemporary American Indian art. “Nobody was selling modern Indian art,” she says. “Everybody
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Judy: “We Euro-Westerners have more to learn about our world and how it ideally would be from the Indians than we have to teach them,” says Marine’s Judy Stern. Stern will be reading from books in her series, Teachings from Mother Earth, in Stillwater and Marine.
thought it was moccasins and stuff, but no. There was a real strong movement in modern Indian art. … I was the third gallery on one block that grew into a huge district.” She pauses to listen to the music that happens to be playing at the Watershed Cafe. “Wow, that sounds like Indian music,” she says. “Powwow music. That’s kind of spooky.” Then she laughs, “I’m having a hard time sitting still.” Stern recalls the time she spent running the Minneapolis gallery the happiest in her life. She felt a great sense of freedom, talking to people
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about art at the gallery and travelling to find more. She also started designing and selling clothes out of the back of the gallery. Some were inspired by Ralph Lauren, others had a Wild West appeal. But her big hit was a quilted vest made of neckties. “I went to see the movie ‘Annie Hall,’ and she was wearing a necktie with a vest,” says Stern. “I thought, “Hmm, I’m going to make a quilted vest out of neckties. I ended up selling 2000 of those.” She wore the original necktie vest to the United Nations conference for the Indigenous Peoples of the Americas in Sep-
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tember 1977. As her interactions with American Indians expanded, Stern began to wonder about the traditions her culture was willing to throw away. “It really helps to understand what used to be,” she says. “It helps me enormously to ask, ‘What did the Indians do?’ … It’s not that I want to go back to that period. It’s a value guide because we’ve lost our sense of priority.” Stern has been keeping journals since she could write. Eventually, she had stacks of journals, some with entire conversations recorded. With SEE STERN, PAGE 2
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