Colonization hurts everywhere. Our planet’s body, which is interwoven with our bodies which are interwoven with our animal and plant kin’s bodies, are undergoing a treatment of terror, theft, and toxification that has precedence only in the prophecies our ancestors received centuries ago. This scale of mass death can only be comprehended in the language of mythos—in the symbolism of a scorched earth. We are living the nightmares our oldest stories warned of. Yet, what if there are more stories to be told?

“I often feel I am trapped inside someone else’s imagination, and I must engage my own imagination in order to break free.” — adrienne maree brown, Emergent Strategy

In 2026 the United States commemorates 250 years of the American Dream. The following year, Canada observes 160 years of the Promise of Progress. It’s easy to see where those stories lead...

We don’t have to settle anymore. Gunn Lake Potawatomi Elder Lee Sprague dreams of an Indigenous People’s Century on Turtle Island dawning in 2026.

“Turtle Island is the land beneath our feet, and it is the imaginary place that exists before colonization and will exist after colonization is over.” — Aragorn!, The Fight For Turtle Island

To honor 10,000+ years of Indigenous Peoples nurturing Turtle Island and celebrate 10,000+ years to come, we’re building an intermodal carnival to travel across the Great Lakes by boat, bike, horse, foot, and caravan. The Great Lakes Carnival will overflow the basin with a traveling circus (The Garden of White Lies) as ten thousand Lost Worlds reemerge to tell their stories. Parades, games, contests, counter-memorials, crypto-cartographies, trashion shows, live performances, public displays of cultural medicine, silence rituals, poetry slams, wetland restoration projects, and unapologetic celebrations of life will ask the questions: Whom and what do you belong to? And what do you imagine the deep future of the Great Lakes to be?

”My ability to think and imagine is a resource belonging to the commons, of which I am a steward. I have a responsibility to increase my resistance to discouragement and despair. [...] How I live my life right now extends the impact of my ancestors and enriches the soil my descendants will plant their own lives in.” —Aurora Levins Morales, Medicine Stories

The hollow husks of false belonging premised on race, class, and nation-state are cracking and more people are digging through the rubble to search for the understories of who and what we are in the cosmology of being. Our call across the inner seas is to beat the drum for a Great Lakes sovereignty, to pool our visionary gifts, and undermine the great garden machine. To midwife a world while we hospice another, tapping into what Ricardo Levins Morales calls the urgency of patience. Our accomplices include you, as well as the wetlands, tributaries, salmon, mnomen, muskrats, mythic creatures, and ancestors that will make the carnival come to life.

We are calling all water protectors, treaty walkers, boat builders, freshwater jellyfish, philosopher queens, culture keepers, earth medics, abolitionists, unpopular educators, refuseniks, social disorganizers, unelected officials, sea monsters, slow wave cineastes, post-activists, algal blooms, and poets of the misanthropocene. May we find each other in the wake.