“Nibi Chronicles,” a monthly Great Lakes Now feature, is written by Staci Lola Drouillard. A Grand Portage Ojibwe direct descendant, she lives in Grand Marais on Minnesota’s North Shore of Lake Superior. Her nonfiction books “Walking the Old Road: A People’s History of Chippewa City and the Grand Marais Anishinaabe” and “Seven Aunts” were published 2019 and 2022, and the children’s story “A Family Tree” in 2024. “Nibi” is a word for water in Ojibwemowin, and these features explore the intersection of Indigenous history and culture in the modern-day Great Lakes region.
When I was a girl, our family lived about five blocks from Lake Superior. My mother had a garden on one side of the front yard where she planted flowers inside a half-moon of old, birch trees. The birches, along with a stately mountain-ash, shaded most of the lawn all throughout the day. Just outside the circle of shade you would find a mix of grass, clover, dandelions, plantain and a good showing of wild strawberry plants.
Growing up with strawberries in your front yard is not news-worthy, because this native plant often lives just underfoot wherever human beings in Ojibwe country may roam. The Ojibwe name for a strawberry is Ode’imin, which literally means “heart berry,” due to their heart-shape. Or, perhaps our human hearts are berry-shaped — either way, strawberries are vital.
I admit that I may have taken strawberries for granted until recently, when I found a patch of little white flowers in the yard, a grouping of plants that I had never noticed before. Like the strawberries of my childhood, the plants situated themselves just outside the circle of shade provided by a birch and mountain-ash, that grow together at the edge of the yard. This discovery inspired me to learn more about native strawberries and the human-berry connection.
Strawberry Eaters of the Great Lakes
Strawberries in the yard, June 2025. (Photo Credit: Staci Lola Drouillard)
Ode’iminan (plural), are medicine and food for Ojibwe-Anishinaabe people, as well as many of our animal relatives: birds, rodents, chipmunks, pine marten, fisher, fox, wood chuck, raccoon, skunk or most any small-to-medium-sized mammal that is omnivorous. Chel Anderson, a North Shore ecologist and botanist, added wood turtles and Blanding’s turtles to this long list of strawberry eaters in the Great Lakes region. A historical perspective on berry picking comes from Beatrice Flaaten Ogren’s short biography of the Charlie and Petra Boostrom, an early settler couple, who lived about 35 miles inland from Lake Superior on Clearwater Lake. In a July 9, 1962 diary entry Petra documented that:
“We all went picking wild strawberries. We had short cake for supper and picked over berries until 12:30 a.m.” The next day, she wrote, “made jam out of our berries. Got 31.5 nice jars of jam.” Ten days later Petra recorded that her crew picked enough for another 26 jars.
This volume of wild strawberries is impressive even for hardcore berry pickers. Comparing the small patch in my yard to Petra’s bountiful harvest 63 years ago led to some larger questions about the current condition of strawberry patches across Anishinaabe Aki.
Ode’iminan of Anishinaabe Aki
On the Ojibwe calendar of 13 moons, the full moon in June is Ode’imini-giizis or Strawberry Moon, and berries usually ripen in early July. Each region across Ojibwe country has cultural stories and symbolism rooted in the relationship between strawberries and humans.
Sparked by a social media story about her childhood memories from Strawberry Point, I reached out to Elaine Fleming, a writer and cousin from Leech Lake, to ask how the berries were doing in her part of Anishinaabe Aki. She said that she had recently visited a few berry patches and all are showing some good progress, except for areas disturbed by construction. Confirming that the Leech Lake strawberries thrive in sandy soil with a lot of sun, she noted that over time, she has noticed that the berries are getting smaller, and in the places where she likes to sit down on the ground to harvest a lot of berries at once, some patches are getting out-competed by other plants.
She shared how her family would spend all day picking berries, followed by a swim in Strawberry Lake. These days she plants a pollinator garden, which includes strawberry plants, of course. I agreed with her assessment that many people are now used to the much larger, farmed strawberries that you buy in a grocery store, which are related to our wild strawberries, but are not nearly as sweet.
This brings me to the jar of wild strawberry jam that sits between my cousin Sue Zimmerman and I, on her table in Grand Portage, which is covered with a strawberry-print tablecloth. We have just had some tea and rhubarb cake, and to accompany our conversation about the state of local berries, Sue brought out a small jar of her homemade jam, harvested from her (undisclosed) patch of berries close on the Grand Portage Reservation.
Offering me a spoonful, which tasted like the marriage of sun and strawberries in a jar, she added that her recipe has just two ingredients: berries and sugar. Sue noted thatthe patch she visits this time of year was looking good, with lots of flowers and no sign of overcrowding. Then she told the story of how, several years ago, she went out berry picking alone, and abruptly turned around and went home after noting fresh cougar tracks in the mud near the patch. When she went back to pick berries a few days later, she asked her husband Dell to go along, adding that she “had her 10-gauge,” just in case.
Where the Forest has Changed
Strawberry bloom. (Photo Credit: Staci Lola Drouillard)
As an ecologist and botanist, Chel Anderson works in the woods every day. I asked her about this year’s crop of berries and she said, “my general sense is that they’re pretty much on track, maybe a little bit on the later end in terms of blooming,” adding that, “I saw some amazing flowering going on. Even down closer to the lake, there’s a lot of flowering happening now.”
The most common variety of strawberry found near Lake Superior is fragaria virginiana. It grows three to six inches tall and according to Chel, are seen “in a wide range of conditions.” Chel felt it was important to add that, “The one place I don’t see them where I think they might otherwise be these days, is in places where the forest has changed. This would be along the shore where the changes to the canopy have occurred.”
She writes extensively about this in her book North Shore: A Natural History of Minnesota’s Superior Coast. Her research for the book often incorporates the plant history of the North Shore before and after European colonization, and documents the effects of logging and other human impacts on the “nearshore” forest, which historically benefitted from “heightened humidity, cool temperatures, and richer, cooler, and moister soils along the lakeshore.”
She shared evidence compiled by U.S. Forest Service ecologists who estimated that because of these conditions, “catastrophic disturbances were relatively rare” along the shoreline, “occurring every 150 to 1,000 years.” This very stable ecology created “old growth conditions, among them a high degree of structural diversity,” including a mix of trees, including expansive stands of white pine trees.
White pines are a species particularly suited to surviving wildfires and played a part in keep catastrophic disturbances to a minimum. As Chel explains, white pines even “require periodic fires to prevent the buildup of fuels.” After the white pines were logged in the late 1800s, the forest nearshore changed, and so did the susceptibility to catastrophic wildfires.
Without the habitat created by white pine, the fires that swept through after the logging era burned hotter, and often destroyed seed sources in the soil, making it harder for diverse plant species to take hold. One plant that benefitted from the change in canopy cover over time is Canadian bluejoint, a native grass that according to Chel, “has really just taken off and spread, creating this heavy thatch” in the understory. Canadian bluejoint is mostly a wetland species that thrives in the nearshore environment that is moist with clay soil.
For a time, birches followed the white pines in the nearshore habitat, but over the past 40 years, these iconic trees have begun to die-out, which is creating yet another ecological change to the forest. In areas along the shore where birch stands are dying, bluejoint grass has already taken hold.
Chel recalls, “Even when I moved up here 50 years ago, everyone thought of it as, ‘Oh, the beautiful birch forest.’ But that was really an artifact of the settlement era. Birch regenerated in a way that wasn’t surprising, because birch is a very fire dependent species, and very good at regenerating after fires. But typically, there would have been other species that would have become established under the birch.”
In learning more about native strawberries, I didn’t fully anticipate connecting the dots between logging, the advent of hotter fires, birch trees and compromised habitat for a diversity of native plants. But berry pickers like Elaine and Sue, and botanists like Chel all understand that strawberries are connected to the health and well-being of other native species, just as human beings are connected to the medicine and food that grows all around us.
Coexisting from Place-to-Place
Chel shared a story of a friend’s prolific strawberry patch located along an old airstrip. I asked why the plants did so well there and she said, “I don’t necessarily want to use the word harmony, because there is a lot of tension for resources, but they’ve found a way to accommodate. They’ve come to some sort of stasis where, as long as the conditions stay about the same, ‘we’re going to exist here together in about the same way.’ And you know, that happens in plant communities all the time. Some disturbance happens, or the conditions change, and some plants disappear, and then others, you know, take their place.
One of the wonders of strawberries is that they can move from place-to-place. As one area becomes incompatible, the plants put out rhizomes—or runners in search of sunlight. As Chel Anderson puts it, “they have evolved that strategy to live because it helps them move around in the mosaic of conditions that happen during a certain time period, and then over long periods of time, they can actively move towards more favorable conditions.”
In my conversations with Elaine and Sue, they both talked about the strawberry’s ability to essentially pack up and move to another place if the going gets tough. And where the strawberries go, the strawberry eaters will follow.
Mi’iw (that’s all).
Catch more news at Great Lakes Now:
Nibi Chronicles: Manoomin as medicine
Featured image: Heart beadwork by my great-grandmother Elizabeth Anakwad Drouillard. (Photo Credit: Staci Lola Drouillard)
