EDITOR’S NOTE: Superiorland Yesterdays is prepared by the reference staff at the Peter White Public Library in Marquette.

30 years ago

MARQUETTE — A documentary film about traditional fiddle music of the Ojibwa-French culture in the United States and Canada being produced by Marquette filmmaker Michael Loukinen has been awarded a $28,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Arts. “The national endowment grant comes at a particularly good time,” Loukinen said. “It will allow us to continue editing the film, a job that’s about three quarters complete at this time.” Work on the film, now in its third year, is expected to be finished late this year, said Loukinen, who is in New York editing the documentary. Loukinen, a sociology professor at NMU, has been making documentaries for the past 10 years. His current work involves preserving the music of the Ojibwa and French “Metis,” or mixed-blood culture, which dates back to the 1600s when French voyageurs and trappers came to the region. Filming for the documentary has been done in the Upper Peninsula, the Wolf River area of Wisconsin, northern North Dakota, central Ontario, and southern Manitoba. In February, one of the film’s musicians, Coleman Trudeau, was awarded a $5,000 grant for his contribution to Metis music. The endowment funds bring the grant total for the project to more than $81,000. Other grants have come from the Detroit Institute for the Arts, the Wisconsin Arts Board, the Michigan Council for the Arts and NMU. Loukinen said he is also using income from his three previous documentaries to help finance his current project, which has a budget of more than $100,000.

60 years ago

IRON RIVER — The M.A. Hanna Co.’s Wauseca Mine in Iron River has been awarded the “Sentinels of Safety” trophy by the U.S. Bureau of Mines. The bureau’s director, Marling J. Ankeney, said the award was for the best safety record in the metal group of the 1959 national safety competition. The mine operated during the year without a lost time injury. Each of the mine’s 200 employees will be awarded a certificate of honor at a recognition ceremony for employees and their families.