People think they know the story of Detroit. But what other stories might we hear if the city and its water spoke for themselves? Tune in to the Detroit River Stories Podcast to find out. This podcast is just one small part of the University of Michigan’s Detroit River Story Lab, an interdisciplinary, grant-funded initiative that partners with regional organizations to reconnect communities with the river and its stories. Through collaborative research, education, and engagement projects, our partnerships amplify marginalized voices and foreground the role of the river and its shores as sites of connection, stewardship, and healing. For more information, visit https://sites.lsa.umich.edu/detroit-river-story-lab/.
Detroit's other rivers: exploring the city's buried creeks
Send us a text In this episode, I talk to Joanne Coutts, an activist and cartographer about her work mapping Detroit's buried creeks. Many of the maps we discuss can be found at her website. As always, if you have feedback for us, want to get involved, share your own story or suggest someone for us to talk to, please reach out to us at drsl-admin@umich.edu.
6 Aug 2025
Working on the Water with Coast Guard Sector Detroit
Send us a text In this episode, Bailey Flannery and Rachel Wilson talk to Captain Rick Armstrong, Commander of the US Coast Guard Sector Detroit. Our conversation explores the wide range of responsibilities and tasks of Coast Guard, focusing on everything from search and rescue to icebreaking along the Detroit River. If you've ever wondered what, exactly, the Coast Guard does in the Detroit area, this is the episode for you! If you have feedback for us, want to get involved, share your own ...
16 Oct 2024
"A little hard to handle" : Sarah Elizabeth Ray and the Fight for Childhood and Play in Detroit
Send us a textIn this episode, Bailey Flannery and Desiree Cooper discuss how Cooper's decision to "marry Detroit" (by way of marrying a Detroiter) has irrevocably shaped her as a creative and person. This includes her long journalistic career at Detroit Free Press, which led her to eventually interviewing and documenting the life and legacy of Sarah Elizabeth Ray (also known as Lizz Haskell), one of Detroit's long-forgotten Civil Rights leaders. This conversation covers: Cooper an...
16 Aug 2024
Little Port, Big Vision : Making Waves in Communities, Climate, and Commerce on the Great Lakes
Send us a textIn this episode, Bailey Flannery sits down with Captain Paul Lamarre III to discuss the winding life path that has led him to become the Executive Director of the historic freighter and museum ship the SS Col. James M. Schoonmaker; the Director of the Port of Monroe; a member of the Board of Directors for the National Museum of the Great Lakes; the President of the American Great Lakes Port Association; and, most importantly, a man who does not waste a single moment and a son wh...
14 Dec 2022
Black Power (Boating) in the Motor City
Send us a textDr. Juanita Lyons and Steven Johnson recount how their father, Albert Johnson, founded the Motor City Yacht Club in 1960s Detroit to help foster a black power boating community when other local yacht clubs were exclusively white. Juanita and Steven also share memories of their childhood spent boating, swimming, fishing--living, really, on the Detroit River and the Great Lakes, as well as how this shaped their passionate adulthood relationships with these bodies of water. They al...
13 Nov 2022
Rooted in the Riverbanks
Send us a textLissa MacVean is currently a researcher and lecturer at the University of Michigan–Ann Arbor, where she studies the physics of water in lakes, estuaries and marine coastal environments. But before she began her more formal studies of waterways, Lissa actually grew up along the Detroit riverfront in a commune based out of the Episcopal Church of the Messiah, which was dedicated to high-quality, affordable housing, “shared economic lifestyle,” and racial integration. In this ...
17 Oct 2022
The Border City
Send us a textCity of Detroit Councilmember Gabriela Santiago-Romero discusses how her representation of District 6 stems from her childhood calling to protect the water and fight for justice, from Puerto Vallarta to Detroit. She also addresses how both increased ICE activity along the Detroit River and Detroit's status as a "border city" impacts residents' relationships with the waterfront, especially those of undocumented immigrants. Finally, she details her work with other representatives ...
24 Sept 2022
Sailing the River, Writing Ourselves
Send us a textUniversity of Michigan English & Education graduate student Marquise Griffin recounts a summer internship spent sailing a schooner along the Detroit River and Great Lakes that shaped his understanding of the intersection of blackness, boating, movement, and literacy--particularly being able to read and write oneself as a "water person" of color. He also explores how this experience has deeply informed his own pedagogy of transformative (dis)orientation and (dis)comfort.
9 Aug 2022
River Walks, River Talks
Send us a textThe final episode of season one features conversations from three chance encounters at the Detroit River International Wildlife Refuge. On August 21st, 2021, Planet Detroit and Friends of the Rouge hosted a Storybooth Blitz, welcoming all who happened across the booth on the riverfront that day to share their stories and memories of the water--and they did, telling tales of a small band of activists protecting the watershed one creek and wetland at a time; a downstream small tow...
2 Jun 2022
We Are Water People
Send us a textFamily Chiefs of the Wyandot of Anderdon Nation Sue Szachta and Linda Filipek discuss how the Detroit River has acted as border, connection, and home at various times in the Nation's history, as well as how the River informs their personal relationship with Six Points at Gibraltar, a site that is both sacred ancestral burial grounds and an up-and-coming educational center that brings awareness to ecology, history, and Indigenous issues. Sue and Linda both hear the River calling ...
5 Mar 2022
Black to the Water
Send us a textTepfirah Rushdan discusses her personal experiences with the Detroit River as a site of spiritual connection, ceremony, and cleansing and how this has influenced her leadership in organizations like the Black to the Land Coalition, which strives to reconnect Black and Brown folks with the land and water from which they have historically been alienated. She also addresses the connection between land allotment along the River and the oft-neglected legacy of Black farming practices...
3 Feb 2022
The River in Her Veins
Send us a textErma Leaphart recounts her childhood spent along the Detroit River and how this shaped her sense of connection to and eventual advocacy for the entire Great Lakes water system. She illuminates how, in the face of climate change and the numerous challenges it poses for the Great Lakes, we might persevere together in hope and in recognition of the water as kindred, as the very blood coursing through her veins--and our own.https://sites.lsa.umich.edu/detroit-river-story-lab/
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