On Nookomis, Josephine Mandamin, and the work of paying attention.
There is a particular ache that comes with loving two bodies of water at once. I did not expect it when I left the Great Lakes behind, and I have never quite recovered from it, nor tried very hard to. It follows me down to the seafront most mornings, when the tide at Weston-super-Mare pulls itself out across the mud in that slow, deliberate way it has, exposing a landscape that looks, for a few hours, like something ancient and unfinished. I stand there and think of Superior. I think of Michigan. I think of water I was raised beside, and water that has, in its own patient way, taken me in.
The Shadow Keeper began in that space between two shorelines. It is not a memoir, and it is certainly not a record of anything sacred or ceremonial — I want to say that plainly, near the beginning, because it matters more than the plot does. What it is, instead, is an attempt to let one woman, Nookomis, carry both waters inside her without asking either one to explain the other.
Where the Story Comes From
Nookomis is Anishinaabe — Chippewa, in the language most often used where she was raised — and she comes to Somerset the way I did, carrying a lifetime of one landscape into the daily texture of another. She did not choose to stop loving the Great Lakes when she crossed the ocean, any more than I have. She simply learned to love the Bristol Channel alongside that older love, without letting one erase the other. That doubled attention — that refusal to let either water go unwitnessed — is really the engine of the whole book.
I am not a knowledge-keeper. I am not an authority on Ojibwe or Anishinaabe teaching, and I do not offer this story as any kind of ceremony or traditional record. What I carry is smaller and more personal: fragments passed down imperfectly, the shape of stories rather than their sacred architecture, refracted through my own imagination and my own particular grief. Nookomis's voice is fiction. The history beneath her feet is not.
Josephine Mandamin and the Water Walks
Josephine Mandamin — Biidaasige-ba, 1942–2019 — founded the Mother Earth Water Walkers in 2003, moved by an elder's warning that water would one day become more costly than gold. Between 2003 and 2017, she led thirteen major water walks around the shorelines of all five Great Lakes, walking an estimated 25,000 kilometres and wearing through eleven pairs of shoes in the process. She insisted throughout that water was not a resource to be managed, but a relative to be defended — Nibi aawan bimadiziiwin. Water is life.
I did not know her. Nookomis is not her, and the story is not biography dressed up as fiction. But something in that image — an elder walking the whole rim of an inland sea, one shoreline at a time, because the water asked to be walked — became the quiet centre around which everything else in The Shadow Keeper arranged itself.
The Weight Nookomis Carries
The story moves through histories that are not interchangeable and that I have tried very hard not to blur together. The Anishinaabe/Ojibwe defence of manoomin is its own history. Standing Rock is a distinct struggle. The Missouri River Sioux Tribes and the Three Affiliated Tribes each endured the Pick-Sloan dam programme in their own way. The Diné, the Columbia River Tribes — Nez Perce, Umatilla, Warm Springs, Yakama — each carry their own losses. These are distinct nations, distinct treaties, distinct griefs. If I have failed anywhere in that effort, the failure is mine, not theirs.
Crossing the Ocean: The Bristol Channel
The second half follows Nookomis's attention as it turns toward the water she now lives beside. The Bristol Channel and the Severn Estuary are not the Great Lakes, and I have not tried to make them stand in for each other. But a woman who has spent a lifetime learning to notice what a river is telling her does not simply stop noticing when she crosses an ocean. The story engages with publicly contested ecological debates around the estuary — marine impact, habitat, and what "acceptable" risk actually means when the thing at risk is a fishery someone's family has depended on for generations. None of that is invented. All of it is contested, evolving, and worth careful attention.
Where the Ghosts Come In
The uncanny elements — the birds that gather too quietly, the things that stir beneath the water, the sense of something ancient paying close attention — are entirely fiction. I use them the way gothic fiction has always used its hauntings: as a way of making felt what is otherwise easy to look past. The dread in the story is invented. The reasons for that dread are not.
What We Can Do
Learn whose land and water you actually live beside, and how they came to be called what they're called now. Follow Indigenous nations through their own channels. Support local water-monitoring groups. Turn up to the consultations that decide what happens to your nearest river. Document what you notice carefully and factually. And accept, going in, that none of this resolves quickly — that the work is sustained, collective, and imperfect, the way Josephine Mandamin's walking was, one shoreline and one season at a time.
For anyone reading this in its published form, please look to Indigenous-led organisations, relevant government and regulatory bodies, and established scientific and local reporting for the current, detailed, and properly sourced picture of any issue raised here. This post is a reflection on a work of fiction, not a citation of record.
I still stand at the Weston seafront most mornings and think of Superior. That doubled attention is, I've come to think, the closest thing to a discipline I have — and perhaps the only inheritance I can honestly claim to be passing on.
Read The Shadow Keeper: Gothic Haunting Tales from Somerset →