(Joseph Mercier / Dreamstime.com)
For the past three years, members of the Anishinaanabe and Potawatomi tribes have held a sugarbush ceremony at the start of maple-tapping season in Detroit’s River Rouge Park and shown people how to tap trees and boil sap. They’ve got a memorandum of understanding with the city to do that, and organizers claim they had the needed permits for this year’s ceremony. But more than a dozen cops, some in tactical gear, broke up this year’s ceremony shortly after it began. A video posted by the organizers showed one police officer saying, “The sovereign stuff is not valid.” The police department declined to answer questions about the incident.
