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Canoeing with the Cree supplied me with something I had never experienced: a homegrown mythology. Theirs was not the tale of 17th-century voyageurs paddling 600-pound Montreal freighter canoes on the Great Lakes, nor the Anishinaabe’s sacred migration from the mouth of the Saint Lawrence through the Great Lakes to the land where food grows on the water. Sevareid and Port had grown up in a neighborhood less than five miles from my own and sought adventure in a used canvas canoe. They had embraced an ambitious vision and found the nerve to follow the water.

When I turned the last page of this extraordinary tale, the floor pulsing beneath me, I silently declared my intention to retrace their path to Hudson Bay as soon as possible. Little did I know that it would be 15 years before I realized this dream.

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The spring of 2002 was brutal. I had lost my editorial job in Alaska, and it was obvious that my marriage of 13 years was swirling down the drain. I was 34 years old, and I decided to return to Minneapolis to write for the Native newspaper where my career in journalism had begun a decade before.