Detroit River Stories

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In this episode, I talk to Joanne Coutts, an activist and cartographer about her work mapping Detroit's buried creeks.

Many of the maps we discuss can be found at her website.

As always, if you have feedback for us, want to get involved, share your own story or suggest someone for us to talk to, please reach out to us at [email protected].

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In this episode, Bailey Flannery and Rachel Wilson talk to Captain Rick Armstrong, Commander of the US Coast Guard Sector Detroit. Our conversation explores the wide range of responsibilities and tasks of Coast Guard, focusing on everything from search and rescue to icebreaking along the Detroit River. If you've ever wondered what, exactly, the Coast Guard does in the Detroit area, this is the episode for you!

If you have feedback for us, want to get involved, share your own story or suggest someone else for us to talk to, please reach out to us at [email protected].

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In this episode, Bailey Flannery and Desiree Cooper discuss how Cooper's decision to "marry Detroit" (by way of marrying a Detroiter) has irrevocably shaped her as a creative and person. This includes her long journalistic career at Detroit Free Press, which led her to eventually interviewing and documenting the life and legacy of Sarah Elizabeth Ray (also known as Lizz Haskell), one of Detroit's long-forgotten Civil Rights leaders. 

This conversation covers:  

• Cooper and Ray's parallel journeys from the South to Detroit, and how Cooper fell in love with Detroit's "mystique" and "swagger."
• The centrality of play and leisure to the civil rights movement, including Ray's own case, which was based on her forced removal from the Bob-Lo boat SS Columbia. (Spoiler: She took her case all the way to the US Supreme Court--and won.)
• Ray's lesser-known second act, which centered on protecting childhood through Action House. 
• Futures currently realized and in jeopardy along the Detroit River.
• Why the Detroit River is laughing at us, and why we should laugh with it.

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In this episode, Bailey Flannery sits down with Captain Paul Lamarre III to discuss the winding life path that has led him to become the Executive Director of the historic freighter and museum ship the SS Col. James M. Schoonmaker; the Director of the Port of Monroe; a member of the Board of Directors for the National Museum of the Great Lakes; the President of the American Great Lakes Port Association; and, most importantly, a man who does not waste a single moment and a son who makes his dad proud. Their conversation touches on: 

• Paul's childhood on (in) the Detroit River and the long Lamarre family legacy of captaining on the Great Lakes.
• How a cancer diagnosis in his twenties brought Paul back to these waterways, inspiring his life's work of championing the histories and futures of the Great Lakes maritime industry.
• Relationship-centered leadership and cultural change on the Great Lakes.
• How the maritime industry is embracing the responsibility and opportunity of environmental stewardship.
• The profound roles small ports like the Port of Monroe are playing in supporting green infrastructure and local economies, creating a "better quality of life and community that surround the waterway."
• The Sophia Loren of tugboats.

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Dr. Juanita Lyons and Steven Johnson recount how their father, Albert Johnson, founded the Motor City Yacht Club in 1960s Detroit to help foster a black power boating community when other local yacht clubs were exclusively white. Juanita and Steven also share memories of their childhood spent boating, swimming, fishing--living, really, on the Detroit River and the Great Lakes, as well as how this shaped their passionate adulthood relationships with these bodies of water. They also speak to the dramatic changes they have witnessed in boating culture and policing throughout the years (including "river rage"), ultimately calling us to respect and love the water and others who frequent it.

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Lissa MacVean is currently a researcher and lecturer at the University of Michigan–Ann Arbor, where she studies the physics of water in lakes, estuaries and marine coastal environments. But before she began her more formal studies of waterways, Lissa actually grew up along the Detroit riverfront in a commune based out of the Episcopal Church of the Messiah, which was dedicated to high-quality, affordable housing, “shared economic lifestyle,” and racial integration. 

In this episode, we explore Lissa’s childhood in the commune, how this connects to her present work studying the physics of bodies of water, and the lasting impact of the now-dissolved Detroit riverfront commune.

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City of Detroit Councilmember Gabriela Santiago-Romero discusses how her representation of District 6 stems from her childhood calling to protect the water and fight for justice, from Puerto Vallarta to Detroit. She also addresses how both increased ICE activity along the Detroit River and Detroit's status as a "border city" impacts residents' relationships with the waterfront, especially those of undocumented immigrants. Finally, she details her work with other representatives and local organizations to change policies that have limited vulnerable populations' intimacy with the Detroit River, making different futures--and histories--possible.

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University of Michigan English & Education graduate student Marquise Griffin recounts a summer internship spent sailing a schooner along the Detroit River and Great Lakes that shaped his understanding of the intersection of blackness, boating, movement, and literacy--particularly being able to read and write oneself as a "water person" of color. He also explores how this experience has deeply informed his own pedagogy of transformative (dis)orientation and (dis)comfort.

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The final episode of season one features conversations from three chance encounters at the Detroit River International Wildlife Refuge. On August 21st, 2021, Planet Detroit and Friends of the Rouge hosted a Storybooth Blitz, welcoming all who happened across the booth on the riverfront that day to share their stories and memories of the water--and they did, telling tales of a small band of activists protecting the watershed one creek and wetland at a time; a downstream small town recreating itself in the face of industrial abandonment; and a girlhood and womanhood spent on the water that traces the decline and revitalization of the Detroit Riverfront. 

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Family Chiefs of the Wyandot of Anderdon Nation Sue Szachta and Linda Filipek discuss how the Detroit River has acted as border, connection, and home at various times in the Nation's history, as well as how the River informs their personal relationship with Six Points at Gibraltar, a site that is both sacred ancestral burial grounds and an up-and-coming educational center that brings awareness to ecology, history, and Indigenous issues. Sue and Linda both hear the River calling them to embrace their histories and futures as "water people." Do you?