Organizers of Indigenous sugarbush ceremony shut down by Detroit police say it's not the first time they were harassed

Members of Michigan’s Indigenous community have gathered for a sugarbush ceremony to collect and process maple sap in Rouge Park for the past three years. But when the Detroit Police Department shut down this year’s gathering with helicopters and threats of arrest, many say they were left traumatized.

On Friday, at around 8 p.m., a ceremonial bonfire was interrupted by nearly 14 officers who told gatherers they had two minutes to put out the fire and leave or else they would be arrested. A video of the incident released on social media shows officers in what looks like paramilitary gear watching as people pack up chairs and other supplies.

While the DPD has since apologized, the sugarbush organizers aren’t buying it. It turns out this is the second year the police have encroached on the sacred tradition. Community members felt it was another assault in a long history of terror enacted on native people by law enforcement.

Rosebud Bear-Schneider, an Anishinaabe food educator and organizer of the Detroit Sugarbush Project, said what happened on Friday was a violation of Indigenous religious rights.

“Putting in taps, collecting sap, boiling it down, and turning it into syrup or sugar is a community event for us,” she explains. “When we are harvesting anything from the land, we give thanks, set good intentions for that season, and offer respect for those gifts that we are taking through ceremony.”


Soufy, an Anishinabek from Southwest Detroit who was at the gathering, tells Metro Times the group was offering prayers when the police shut everything down.

“The first thing that the cops were told when they showed up was that there is a ceremony happening and you cannot interrupt. But they weren’t trying to hear anybody and started saying things like ‘we’ll be the judge of that,’” he says. “We weren’t doing anything wrong.”

Soufy’s partner, Hadassah GreenSky, can be seen on the video telling officers the group is protected under tribal sovereignty, to which one officer replies, “the sovereign stuff is not valid.”

When officers arrived on the scene, Detroit activist Antonio Cosme, another Detroit Sugarbush Project organizer, met them on the road away from where the ceremony was taking place in the forest.

He says he showed the leading officer the group had a burn permit from the Detroit Fire Department and a memorandum of understanding (MOU) from the city. Meanwhile, other officers began to approach the bonfire happening further down in the trees.

“That night they acknowledged our MOU and determined we were good. But by the time they radioed the other officers that had gone down, it was too late. I ran back toward the ceremony to see what was happening because I saw my friends leaving and everybody was scrambling and fearful,” Cosme says. “I started yelling at the police at that point and told them, ‘You fucking underlings aren’t paying attention, we were cleared.’”

Then it became a dispute over a city ordinance that prohibits entering public parks after dark. However, the ordinance in question bars entry from 10 p.m. unless signs are posted stating the park closes earlier, and it was only 8 p.m. when police forced ceremony goers to leave.

DPD released a statement about the incident saying the MOU Cosme presented was actually expired and there was “no evidence of compliance with key components of the expired MOU, such as a fire permit and proof of insurance.”

DPD Chief James White later apologized in the statement for the mishandling of the situation, saying, “the officers’ actions were only due to the bonfire in the middle of a public park without a permit and was not directed as a means to break up a sacred cultural ceremony.”

“I have directed our Executive Manager of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion, Mary Engelman, to identify opportunities for our officers to work with the organizers,” White said in the statement. “I’ve been in contact with the Michigan Department of Civil Rights, state and local elected officials, and community members. We plan to meet with Michigan Sen. Adam Hollier and the Native American community to learn and grow from this situation.”


But Cosme calls the empty apology “trash.”

“The MOU is beside the point, the police were misbehaving and only apologized because the media caught on to it,” he says. “The asshole cops walked to the fire and started asserting themselves disrespectfully.”

Bear-Schneider confirmed that at the time of the incident, the MOU has been expired for a couple of weeks and the group has been waiting for the National Wildlife Federation to issue them a new one since November.

“Regardless of that, several of us working on the Sugarbush Project are tribal citizens and we have rights that allow us to have these types of gatherings,” she says. “There’s also a lack of understanding that it’s a very short window that we have for maple tapping season. We can’t tell the trees to wait because of bureaucracy.”

She agrees the apology is only an attempt by the DPD to ”cover their own asses” and the police response was unnecessary.

“You would never think to go into a church or religious building and act that way, but some natives are out here practicing our cultural rights and responsibility to this land and so it’s OK?” she says.

Cosme tells Metro Times the police harassed participants at last year's gathering as well. That time, he says, police approached the group with guns drawn, but left when the proper permits were presented. Police were allegedly responding to reports of gunshots, although Cosme pointed out there is a police firing range in Rouge Park near where the ceremony was taking place.

The group has since filed two police reports against the offending officers, one on Friday night and another on Saturday morning at the DPD 6th Precinct.

For Cosme, the whole incident is a symptom of a police state.

“Think about what’s been happening in Detroit. The police are cracking down,” he says. “They’re clearing the city of Black and brown people. There’s a culture of officers with big attitudes and bravado here in ‘new Detroit’ because there’s a bunch of new cops with bigger budgets. These police need better training.”

Despite the debacle on Friday night, community members have continued their work in Rouge Park tapping the maple trees and collecting sap into buckets before the season ends.

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