When tectonic forces nearly split North America in half one billion years ago, iron-rich magma spilled from the earth and formed the Superior trough. Water vapor and carbon dioxide left millions, billions of bubbles in the cooling magma. Water thrust dissolved minerals like ferric iron through these vesicles, leaving behind concentric bands of fine-grained quartz that would oxidize a brilliant orange. Hundreds of millions of years fractured and exposed these agates to tens of thousands of sunrises and sunsets. Until 100,000 years ago, when glaciers carved through what the region’s earliest inhabitants called Gichigami. Red-iron-stained agates litter this small part of the continent. Each piece, a grain of a billion years. They saw the first of the Anishinaabe peoples circle the Great Lakes and call them home. They saw when the technologies of settler colonialism leveled themselves upon the frigid shores of Gichigami, hungry for iron to fuel the Industrial Revolution. They saw Empires come and go, nation-states rise, and capitalism constructed. They remain today, when the fragile presence of iron induces great anxiety in communities who’ve built their livelihood upon its extraction. What can the stones, themselves an archive of Deep Time, tell us of the land?
