Ever since Ken and I finished 1913 Massacre, I’ve been watching and learning about the resurgence of mining around Lake Superior. I’ve done some research, talked to some good people, and made a few informal scouting trips to the Lake Superior region, to see if I might perhaps produce a sequel to our 1913 documentary. So far, I haven’t discovered the film that I want to make, can make or must make about the new mining; and when it comes to independent documentary, all three of those, the will, the ability and the necessity are — for me, at least — essential.
Finding the film one must make probably matters most of all. So, after our first couple of trips to Calumet, it became imperative that Ken and I make 1913 Massacre. Our sense that this film had to be made, and that we were the ones to make it, was, at times, the only thing that kept us going. We were hooked, ensnared, done for, in the grip of an often wonderful and at times taxing necessity.
There’s already a lot of exploration, leasing and new mining activity around Lake Superior, and things are just getting underway. I am still finding my way, doing my best to keep up with the complex situation and trying to get hold of the narrative, and I’ve written somewhere in the neighborhood of forty or fifty blog posts about the new mining.
Stepping back for a moment, I have to admit I don’t know where exactly all this is leading, or if it’s heading anywhere definitive at all, but it’s in some way a continuation of the journey I started when I followed a Woody Guthrie song to Michigan’s Upper Peninsula and the work Ken and I did together to produce 1913 Massacre.
In fact, much of what I’ve written so far reads, at times, like a long postscript to our film, and I still think our film about 1913 speaks powerfully to the situation around the Lake today, so I thought I’d share those blog posts here, if only to connect formally the film and its postscript, past and present.