Mark Denning and Siobhan Marks led the group in an opening water ceremony, to give thanks to the water, and to pray over river water that would be held in a copper pail for the entirety of the seven-mile journey.

They chose the Kinnickinnic River to recognize what has been dubbed Milwaukee’s forgotten waterway.

Kletzsch Falls on the Milwaukee River in Glendale has posed an obstacle for migrating fish since it was built in 1935. However a new fish passage on the eastern shore of the river (visible in background) is allowing Lake Sturgeon and other fish to access upstream portions of the river.

Fire smoke and tobacco filled the predawn air. The honking of Canada geese echoed across the Milwaukee River oxbow north of Hampton Avenue as the light of sunrise sliced through gray clouds. Dozens of people, many bundled in knit caps and some wrapped in blankets, gathered at the water’s edge in Lincoln Park on Saturday, April 20, 2024 to participate in an 11-mile walk for the water.

“Why do we care?” asked Nicholas Miller, pursuing his PhD in Multispecies History and Anthropology at UW-Milwaukee in fall 2023. “Why are we putting so much energy into restoring these? They were here before and we’re trying to repopulate them. Why is that important to people?”

Long before there were Great Lakes, there were lake sturgeon.

With bodies like torpedoes, sturgeon entered the Great Lakes as drainage basins flexed following the recession of the continental ice sheet some 14,000 years ago.

The species has endured for over 100 million years.

It was this big. So begins, with arms spread wide, every great fish tale.

One such story is about the Milwaukee River in Kletzsch Park, where the work to add a “fishway” bypassing the Kletzsch Dam is part of a larger strategic effort to renegotiate our relationship with water. Considering the past 200 years, these projects seek to reverse our relationship to the river: from cinching its flow with dams to redesigning watercourses from a whole watershed view led by respect for species other than our own. This includes lake sturgeon, a species locally wiped out, but now the focus of a decades-long collaborative effort to restore naturally producing populations in a river system their ancestors once called home.