In the wetlands of the Northern Great Lakes, the sacred grows on the water. Centuries ago, wild rice growing in watersheds and along slow moving rivers in the region marked the final home of a migrating people. The Ojibwe, who often call themselves the Anishinaabe or the “true people,” followed a prophecy from the Atlantic coast to the Great Lakes, and have harvested manoomin (wild rice) in the late summer ever since.

​Now, climate change threatens the survival of the crop in their ancient homelands of Northern Wisconsin.

Warmer winters, disease, and floods have caused entire crops of rice to fail in the last decade along Bad River and in watersheds along Lake Superior. For the people who have always relied on it for physical and spiritual sustenance, the loss of this sacred rice reflects the loss of wild places all over the world.​

“I’ve been hearing these stories since I was a kid” said Joe Rose, looking into the middle distance. Rose is a Bad River Ojibwe elder, professor emeritus and former director of Native American Studies at Northland College for forty years. He’s an environmental scientist and an Ojibwe storyteller.

In an unused conference room at the Bad River reservation lodge, Rose passed a Styrofoam cup of coffee from one weathered hand to the other, and told me about a prophecy that has guided the Ojibwe for hundreds of years. He told the story of the Seventh Fire.

The dreams of eight prophets some 500 years ago revealed the Ojibwe journey from the Atlantic coast through the centuries to their current moment in history. These dreams told of Seven Fires or epochs in the story of the Ojibwe. The first three prophets compelled a migration from the east coast, and provided stopping places along the way to their final stopping place. That place would be marked by a sign, it would be “where food grows on the water.”  This is the link between the Anishinaabe and wild rice—it signified their final destination—their home.

The next three fires foretold the arrival of French with whom the Ojibwe traded and became more powerful, and then the rise of the United States and its anti-native policies. As the United States grew and pushed westward, the Ojibwe were forced to cede territory, their religion was outlawed, an attempt to forcibly relocate them resulted in the death of 400 Ojibwe in the Sandy Lake Tragedy, also known as the Wisconsin Death March, and eventually 19th century boarding schools would strip their children of their tribal identities. Later epochs foretell the power and devastation the white invaders would have over not just native land and lives, but also on the future of the human race itself.

And then there was the Seventh Fire.

This is the link between the Anishinaabe and wild rice—it signified their final destination—their home.
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“We are in the eleventh hour of a very serious environmental crisis,” Rose said.  He placed the coffee cup on the table and leaned forward. He swept his hand over the table and outlined two roads diverging. “And that is where we are, at the fork in the road.”

Down one road, was the Eighth Fire, a peaceful final world. Down the other, was catastrophe.

“It was prophesied that in the age of the Seventh Fire, a new people would arise and retrace their footsteps and learn the way of the ancestors,” Rose said. “If Ma’iingan (the wolf) no longer has a place to retreat, if there is no wilderness, Ma’iingan will soon pass out of existence. Then soon after, the Anishinaabe will pass out of existence. And then so too will all of humankind.”

Bad River, Wisconsin, winds along a stretch of Highway 2, deep in the forests of Northern Wisconsin. Tall, thin pine trees and bone-white birches crowd in from just beyond the road, and a view of Lake Superior slices through them, only a few weeks free from its partial blanket of ice. Snow still hides in the forest on the shadowy side of the road in mid-May. With snow melt, Bad River  ran swollen and fast through the reservation.

In June, wild rice begins to grow, floating and fragile where water moves slowly, spawning from winter dormancy in the wetlands. But there’s no telling if it will be healthy enough to make it to the end of the season with the flash floods and hot spells of a warming planet.

There have always been good and bad years for wild rice. Peter David from Wisconsin’s Great Lakes Indian Fish and Wildlife Commission (GLFWIC) knows you can expect to have a thin harvest every four years or so. But in the past eight years, the crop has failed as many times as it’s been successful.

Twice, a brown-spot fungus broke out and swept the entire region. The crop couldn’t germinate and respawn the following year; no rice grew at all. In 2016, a massive flood that took out part of Highway 2 and stranded residents without power for four days also wiped out the wild rice.

In GLFWIC’s office, Peter and his wife Lisa, showed me photos of the rice beds on possibly the oldest laptop still in use, with a handle on the top to serve as  its own briefcase. In a healthy year, almost all the water in Dean Lake is carpeted in a verdant green. But then the next year, the same lake isa sickly pale brown. It’s the fungus. The entire crop is dead. He clicks on the next photo of a blue lake. There is no rice at all.​

By his estimation, there isn’t much long-term hope for rice in the region. And when the rice fails, the ecosystem ripples with the effects. The rice beds don’t just supply the Ojibwe with a sacred and vital source of food, but they also serve as a habitat for countless species, from the muskrat to the moose. Migrating swans, geese, and ducks rely on the rice beds for cover and food along their journeys.

As the climate warms, wild rice may continue to survive farther north, moving into Canada where the winters will continue to be cold. Attempts to save the wild rice are also complicated by the sacredness of the plant itself. David explained that genetic mutation or otherwise altering wild rice to make it more durable in warmer climates isn’t an option because of the importance rice holds for the Ojibwe and their migration story.

“That doesn’t help anyone in Bad River,” David said.

Joe Rose grew up ricing in the late summers in the Kakagon Sloughs, processing it the traditional way: drying, parching, hulling, and winnowing the rice all by hand. The first time I met him, he was coming back from three days of sapping maple sugar in the bush, just like his grandparents taught him when he was young.

His relationship to the reservation and the traditions of the Ojibwe informed his environmental activism. Anishinaabe teachings rely on the balance between the human world and the natural, represented by the wolf, or ma’iingan. Ma’iingan’s territory is ever-shrinking due to the influence of humanity and the Anishinaabe have long fought to retain the wild places.

By his estimation, there isn’t much long-term hope for rice in the region.
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Rose organized and spoke out against potential mining operations and toxic waste dumps that could harm the local ecosystem. In 2012, Bad River helped beat a proposed open-pit iron-ore mine in the neighboring Iron County. Runoff from the mine would have threatened the rice. But non-native members of the neighboring Iron County—eager for the mining jobs—struggled to see the significance of the plant, Rose said.

Mary Annette Pember wrote in Indian Country Today about an incident during a tribal presentation on the importance of wild rice at a county board meeting. A county board member interrupted the presentation to ask what economic value wild rice had to the region.​

“All the white man thinks about is money,” Rose remarked afterward.

While the Ojibwe continued to fight environmental threats to Bad River, the United States emitted roughly 15 trillion pounds of greenhouse gases annually, and the fossil fuel industry grew to be worth over $5 trillion. All the while, global temperatures continue to rise.

“We’ve been successful in fighting these attempts to harm the land,” Rose said.  But the threats to wild rice due to climate change don’t come from one industrial source the tribe can rally against – it comes from all industrialized areas of the globe  The tribe has had to go to extreme measures just to try and keep wild rice alive in the region. A hot dry summer can prove deadly. “In 2007, the Lake Superior level was about two feet lower than normal, and the rice was sitting in mudflats rather than floating. So for the first time in history, the tribal council closed the sloughs to ricing. And then it happened again.”

Non-native members of the neighboring Iron County—eager for the mining jobs—struggled to see the significance of the plant
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The flooding poses another deadly threat. In the summer of 2016, when the wild rice was beginning to form roots to attach itself to the bottom of lakes and rivers,  a massive storm hit. Ten inches of rain flooded the river, the highway, and the homes and workplaces on the reservation, destroying ten homes completely. It took four days for power to return to the area. It cut off the tribe from normally routed supplies of food, water, and medicine. The storm affected a huge part of northern Wisconsin, leaving three people dead.

The tribe once again closed the sloughs to ricing as so little of the plant survived the flooding.​

The World Resources Institute explained that climate change will cause a greater number of extreme weather events, including heat waves, storms, droughts and wildfires. The Great Lakes themselves are warming, which creates a problem for an entire ecosystem built for long winters. Earlier retreats of lake ice could not only devastate the rice, but nearly every part of the region’s wildlife.

Bad River isn’t the only native community under threat. These threats are made more pressing by the current administration’s attitude towards climate change. By removing the U.S. from the international Paris climate accord and encouraging a “Second Renaissance” of oil and gas sector expansion, the Trump administration is backing away from the critical global goal scientists have set to stay within two degrees of warming.

Native American environmentalism has long led movements against mining, drilling, and pollution, with the Dakota Access Pipeline multi-tribal protest just a recent example of a long history of activism. Four tribal nations, including the Quinault, even announced an intention to follow the Paris agreement. Native traditional relationships between people and the natural, wild world has influenced the larger environmentalism movement. And for the Ojibwe, that looking backward was prophesied all along.

The choice of which path to take, the Eighth Fire or annihilation, isn’t just for the Ojibwe to make—the Seventh Fire specifies that it will be the “light-skinned race,” the same people who caused the destruction of the environment, who will be the ones to determine the fate of the world.

Sacred wild rice is withering and dying in the changing climate at Bad River, but stories like this are unfolding in every place on earth where the people live close enough to the land for the impact to be unavoidable. And while Rose still retains hope, the time to make this choice is now. According to Rose, we entered into the age of the Seventh Fire several decades ago, and our window is closing.

“So,” Rose said, placing his hands flat on the table. “Wild rice is only symbolic of what could happen to everything.”

Twenty years ago on March 26, 39 bodies were found beneath purple shrouds inside a San Diego mansion. Members of Heaven’s Gate, taking a page from Derek Humphry’s 1992 how-to guide — Final Exit: The Practicalities of Self Deliverance and Assisted Suicide for the Dying — imbibed barbiturates and vodka with applesauce or pudding, tied plastic bags around their heads, lost consciousness, and were soon dead.

This marks the last cult-driven mass suicide in the United States up to the present day. In the 20 years before Heaven’s Gate, America’s new religious movements — like Jim Jones’ Peoples Temple in Jonestown and David Koresh’s Branch Davidians in Waco, Texas — had claimed more than 1,000 lives (over 900 alone just in Jonestown) either in suicide, governmental stand-offs, or a combination of both.

Meanwhile, some of the other religions that emerged around the same time, such as the Church of Scientology and the Family International (formerly the Children of God), continue to exist today with no such incidents — surfacing complicated questions about why certain new religious groups commit or incite large-scale acts of violence, while some don’t. (Certainly the majority of organized religions have a long and bloody history; killing in the name of god is one of humanity’s all-time favorite past times.)

What was it about the second half of the twentieth century that allowed for new religious movements to emerge, gain a following, and lead people to their deaths? Is the absence of such an event a testament to the evolution of our collective psyches, our law enforcement, or something else?

Why hasn’t such an event transpired in two decades?

The temporal proximity of the suicides at the Waco siege, Jonestown, and Heaven’s Gate (the details of which we’ll get to in a minute) makes it tempting to connect them on a psycho-socio-cultural level. But experts say they’ve found no correlation whatsoever — could their 20-year window be a coincidence?

“We kept looking for patterns,” Dr. J. Gordon Melton, distinguished professor of American religious history at Baylor University and author of Melton’s Encyclopedia of American Religions, told me. “But we couldn’t find any.”

The lack of a twenty-first century Waco — which had a death toll marked by suicide, but was primarily the result of violent governmental intervention — is, for Melton, due in part to a change in law enforcement tactics, as well as media coverage.

“There was a lot of pressure on the media to stop calling new religions ‘cults’ and treat them a little more even-handedly and not assume that any group that was ‘weird’ was also dangerous.”

Though familiar, the term “cult” is not terribly helpful as an analytic category, as it describes very different groups depending on who you’re talking to. In 2009, the Russian Ministry of Justice put out a list of totalitarian sects and extremist cults; Mormons made the cut. In Utah, however, 55% of the population is Mormon. This is some troubling math.

As Benjamin Zeller, an associate professor of religion at Lake Forest College and author of Heaven’s Gate: America’s UFO Religion, told me, “One man’s cult is another man’s mainstream religion.” “Cult” is a pejorative term that Zeller defines as: “Someone else’s religion that you don’t like.” Contemporary sociologists prefer to call these groups “emergent,” “alternative,” or “new religions.”

The term ‘cult’ is not terribly helpful as an analytic category, as it describes very different groups depending on who you’re talking to.

These terms are highly fluid, as religion remains a tricky thing to generalize and define. Heaven’s Gate, however, fits into any of these three categories with little resistance.

Formed in 1973, this was certainly a “new” or “emergent” religion. It had deep roots in Christianity, but with New Age twists that easily earned it the “alternative” title. These twists — such as the belief that the earth was a garden in which aliens planted souls — made outsiders consider its adherents eccentric if not “brainwashed” (another rhetorical nuisance for sociologists).

At the site of the suicides, there were plenty of bizarre details for the media to latch onto as well. Members believed they were going to evolve into aliens, and nine of the men had voluntarily been castrated in Mexico. They were all wearing uniforms — complete with black Nike sneakers — and they all had five dollars and a roll of quarters in their pockets. (Apparently this was an inside joke about always having bus fare.)

For Zeller, their peculiarities made them interesting, but not dismissible or mockable. “From the outside, it looks ridiculous,” he told me, but when examined more closely, it reveals our implicit bias toward more sanctioned, organized religions, and our intrinsic desire to Other these groups rather than understand them.

“It was never satisfying to me to just say they were ‘crazy’ or brainwashed. I think that it is too simple for us to assume that they are unlike us, and that they are ‘others,’ and we can just assume that they were irrational.

The vast majority of these people have basically what I would call everyday ordinary goals in their lives. They want to be happy, they want to feel like they are part of something which gives them meaning, they want to be able to put food on the table and have a place to sleep, they want to find success in a relationship, in love, they want to raise children, they want the same sort of boring stuff the rest of us want.

It’s just that the majority of them, they want it in such a way that none of the existing religions worked [for them]. The people who join new religions are looking for something they can’t find anywhere else, and they tend to want solutions which seem more extreme to the rest of us.”

Heaven’s Gate’s was founded by Bonnie Lu Nettles and Marshall Herff Applewhite, who called themselves “Ti” and “Do,” pronounced like the musical notes. They met in 1972 at the Houston hospital in which Nettles was a nurse. Applewhite was going through a divorce; he had recently been fired as a music teacher for having an affair with a student.

Nettles’ knowledge of mysticism attracted Applewhite, who, despite being raised Presbyterian (and briefly attending seminary school) was interested in other forms of spirituality; at their first meeting, Nettles read Applewhite’s astrological chart. They were the only two dedicated members until 1975, when they became involved with Clarence Klug — he was at the helm of a metaphysical group called “Self-Initiation” — and the L.A. metaphysical scene. After a couple dozen people left Klug’s group to join Nettles and Applewhite, momentum built. At their height a few years later, Heaven’s Gate had several hundred members.

Heaven’s Gate’s doctrine changed throughout the years, but adherents consistently preached asceticism, denying themselves anything that engaged too much with their humanness, such as having sex or eating for pleasure. Ultimately their goal was to enter the “Evolutionary Level Above Human,” a material ascendance into space and a metamorphosis from human flesh into a nongendered body that Applewhite described in a recruitment video as a “very attractive extraterrestrial.” This migration was necessary because, in one of their more confusing beliefs, the earth was going to be “recycled”; in other words, our planet was slated for a kind of watered-down Armageddon.

It is too simple for us to assume that they are unlike us, and that they are ‘others.’

Heaven’s Gate members originally believed a UFO would take them away. Later they predicted they’d ascend after being martyred. Applewhite and Nettles had long predicted they’d be killed for their beliefs and then come back to life, fulfilling the role of “the Two” in Revelation who are killed by a beast, rise three days later, and are taken up to heaven in a cloud.

Eventually all the remaining members chose to take their own lives. (Except for Nettles, who never got the chance, as she died of liver cancer in 1985.)

Applewhite harbored notions that he would be assassinated, most likely by the U.S. government, a fear which, in part, fueled his eventual suicide. His fears had precedence: The incident at Ruby Ridge in 1992 and the Waco siege the following year were evidence that clashes between alternative groups and the government could be deadly.

The Weaver family at Ruby Ridge in Idaho and the Branch Davidians — led by David Koresh in Waco, Texas — had both been illegally stockpiling weapons for the apocalypse. When the FBI intervened at Ruby Ridge, and Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms (ATF) agents intervened in Waco, long, violent standoffs ensued, resulting in 79 (including a dog) combined deaths.

Heaven’s Gate members however, were already determined to depart their human bodies come hell, high water, or the FBI.

“Members of Heaven’s Gate came to believe the government might come and kill them and that would solve their problem for them,” explains Zeller.

“When the government did not come to kill Heaven’s Gate members, only then did they begin to embrace suicide as an option because it was clear that this wasn’t going to be done to them. Eventually they came to decide they had to do it for themselves. So, paradoxically the Branch Davidians and Waco are part of the story, but it’s because it didn’t happen with Heaven’s Gate that they had to commit suicide.”

While Heaven’s Gate members had been gathering weapons for a makeshift arsenal themselves they decided in the end — reportedly at Humphry’s recommendation — to opt instead for death by apple sauce.

Troublingly, there doesn’t seem to be much of a common thread running through the violent ends of these alternative groups — besides their violence that is — which leaves us reasoning in circles.

Melton explained to me that after the Waco siege:

“Texas rangers were asked what they would have done if they had been in the same position that the ATFs were in, and they said, ‘We would have knocked on the door and arrested David Koresh and we would have taken him away and that’d be it. We would not have used the kind of force that the ATFs used.’

Then you have [Heaven’s Gate]. It peaked at 200 members…and then it just kept whittling down and you were left in the end with a group of people that were ready to commit suicide.”

Between the time Applewhite first approached the other members of Heaven’s Gate about collective suicide and the actual event, only a couple of members chose to leave.

The 1978 mass suicide by over 900 members of the Peoples Temple in Jonestown is, again, not easily compared to Heaven’s Gate, other than in the manner of their deaths — suicide by poison. But while members of Heaven’s Gate believed they were choosing life instead of death, Jim Jones told the members of the Peoples Temple that they were about to be attacked, presumably by the government, and that what they were doing was a “revolutionary act.”

There doesn’t seem to be much of a common thread running through the violent ends of these alternative groups — besides their violence.

Many of those who drank Jones’ grape-flavored cyanide, however, were children, which smacks more of murder than of suicide. All the members of Heaven’s Gate were adults; Applewhite didn’t think children could make decisions about entering the “Evolutionary Level Above Human.”

Heaven’s Gate also tended to attract members of the counterculture of the ‘60s and ‘70s who, according to Zeller:

“… ended up becoming religious or spiritual seekers; they start looking for other options. Most people who join new religions end up having experimented with other new religions or other alternative religious practices beforehand. Obviously there always has to be a group which is a person’s first group they join, but often people then leave that group and join another one.”

Meanwhile Jonestown mostly recruited from some of the most vulnerable populations, including the elderly Black community, women, children, and working class people. A comprehensive 2005 study — Demographics and the Black Religious Culture of Peoples Temple — by San Diego found that:

“African Americans had long supported the Temple with contributions, tithes and wages while living in California, but in Jonestown it was clear that the Social Security checks of black senior citizens made up the primary source of income for almost a year…”

While the human mind loves to compulsively organize and codify our experiences to make sense of our world — particularly violent acts under the auspices of religion — helpful patterns between these emergent religions have yet to materialize.

Instead, it can be far more fruitful to look at the similarities in which outsiders interacted with these groups.

“Cultists are people too,” Zeller summarized. Of course individual crimes — such as financial predation in the Church of Scientology and the rampant child abuse in the Branch Davidians and the Catholic Church — should be investigated and prosecuted, but demonizing some groups only strengthens the “us” and “them” dynamic, which is tenuous considering the subjectivity of the way we apply categories. “There’s no real way to define cult and exclude religion and vice versa,” Zeller explained.

Twenty years after the effective death of Heaven’s Gate, Zeller is still interested in getting inside the members’ minds. In the inescapable dichotomy of “us” and “them,” he explores, to the best of his ability, the latter:

“They made very different choices which look frightening and perhaps ridiculous to us, but we need to understand why they made those choices. We need to understand why they believed and acted the way they did. And then, if we choose to believe it was nonsense, so be it. I don’t think they were right; I have no interest in joining them. However, in my study of them, I’ve come to understand why for them it made sense, and I think that’s important when we look more broadly around the world at all sorts of groups.”