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Over a century ago, copper mills on the Keweenaw Peninsula of Lake Superior sluiced 64 million metric tonnes (MMT) of tailings into coastal waters, creating a metal-rich “halo”. Here we show that relatively small discharges can spread widely in time and space. Mass Mill (2.9 MMT) dumping into Lake Superior also illustrates the complexity of interactions with Indigenous Peoples. A combination of aerial photos, LiDAR, and a microscope technique for distinguishing end-member particles traces the migration of tailings. The clay fraction spread rapidly across Keweenaw Bay and curled into terminal L’Anse Bay, within tribal Reservation boundaries. The coarse stamp sand fraction moved more slowly southward as a beach sand deposit onto Sand Point, a sacred burial ground. Despite the partial recovery of northern beaches and southern sediments, concerns continue about chemical contamination. Mass Mill provides an excellent example of Indigenous Peoples’ territorial and resource issues with mining. A major difficulty with “legacy” discharges is that there are no longer any “responsible parties”. Initially, federal and state officials were fearful that treaty rights might warrant reparations. Recently, multiple agency/state funding programs supported international (IJC) award-winning restoration efforts by tribal members, illustrating how Indigenous Peoples and governments can work together to safeguard treaty rights.

Existing research on religious identity, especially from a narrative perspective, has tended to focus either on accounts of the past (especially occasions of religious change) or on conceptions of religious identity in the present. Religious communities, however, not only provide a sense of identity and belonging in the present—as a “Catholic” or “Buddhist,” for example—they also promote a particular vision of the religious ideal: The way of being-in-the-world that all adherents are (or ought to be) striving to achieve. Drawing on fieldwork and interviews, this paper describes and analyzes the identity and lifestyle goals of participants in two communities of practice: An Integral Yoga studio and a Catholic prayer house. I find that the ideal spiritual self in both communities is defined by three key characteristics: A sacred gaze, a simultaneous sense of presence and detachment, and a holistic style of identity management. I suggest that in constructing and transmitting a shared vision of the “enlightened self,” these organizations offer practitioners a highly desirable but ever-elusive aspirational identity. This study calls attention to religious organizations as important suppliers of possible identities—the identities, either desired and feared, we think we could or might become in the future—and reveals the situated and contextual nature of adherents’ religious aspirations.