A parade of speakers stepped to the microphone on July 18 to praise Dr. Al Gedicks, who coached opponents of the proposed Back Forty mine, and many similar projects, over a career that spanned decades.

Gedicks passed away on May 9, 2026, at the age of 77. The Menominee Indian Tribe of Wisconsin hosted a memorial gathering for Gedicks at its conference center in Keshena, Wisconsin, to celebrate his lifetime commitment to social and environmental justice.

Speakers recalled Gedicks as a crucial advisor to grassroots movements that fought against mining and oil drilling projects in Wisconsin, Michigan and overseas. Most recently, he advised the Menominee Indian Tribe of Wisconsin in its so-far successful effort to stop the proposed Back Forty mine in Menominee County, Michigan.

Gedicks was known for motivating and equipping grassroots activists to lead their own movements, rather than stepping in to control their agenda and strategies.

“Dr. Gedicks didn't just bring science to our movement; he stood beside us as an ally,” said Dawn Wilber of the Menominee Indian Tribe, who worked closely with Gedicks in opposition to the proposed Back Forty mine. “He listened. He respected indigenous knowledge. He understood that this fight was never only about stopping a mine. It was about protecting our relatives, honoring our ancestors, and ensuring that the next seven generations would inherit clean water and living culture.”

Gedicks grew up in New York state and attended a Catholic school. He was an altar boy and a Boy Scout, took judo lessons and loved to swim, like his dad.

He went to high school at Maryknoll Seminary in Pennsylvania, then studied for the priesthood at Maryknoll Seminary in Glen Ellyn, Illinois. After two years he decided to pursue a secular life of service but, according to his brother Bob, the Maryknoll values seemed to stick with Al for the rest of his life.

Those values include simple living, embracing ecological justice and interconnectedness, promoting equitable access to life's essentials, and inclusion, according to Paula Mohan, one of the event organizers, reading from Bob Gedicks’ research, along with dismantling unjust structures by crossing geographic, cultural, racial, and ideological borders.

Gedicks enrolled at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1968, according to his brother Bob. He was suspended from the university for his alleged involvement in anti-Vietnam War violence and returned as a graduate student in Sociology in the fall of 1972.

During that period, Gedicks researched how U.S. copper conglomerates extracted wealth from Chile and Peru, as lead research coordinator for Community Action on Latin America (CALA). He produced a study that blamed U.S. copper interests for the 1973 military coup that overthrew Pres. Salvador Allende, who had nationalized the copper mines in Chile to keep more of the revenue in-country.

That study was the genesis of Gedicks’ “globalization from below” analysis, which held that resistance to multinational corporations required grassroots, cross-cultural and trans-national organizing efforts.

“Al understood that the best way to fight multinational corporate power is with multinational people-power movements carrying out ‘globalization from below,'" recalls long-time collaborator Zoltán Grossman. "For decades before the slogan ‘Think Globally, Act Locally’ was coined, he was making those connections at the local scale of towns and counties.”

Gedicks founded the Center for Alternative Mining Development Policy in 1977 to help Lake Superior tribal nations resist corporate mining initiatives. He founded the Wisconsin Resources Protection Council in 1982 and served as its Executive Secretary of the WRPC for more than four decades until his death.

Over the years, Gedicks was involved in a long list of environmental and social justice campaigns, starting with his opposition to the Vietnam War. He helped push the “prove it first” mining moratorium law through the Wisconsin legislature in 1997. (The law was repealed in 2017). He supported the grassroots campaign that defeated ExxonMobil’s proposed Crandon mine east of Rhinelander, Wisconsin, in 2003. He was in the fight to stop the Flambeau mine near Ladysmith, Gogebic Taconite’s Penokee Hills mine in northwest Wisconsin, the Eagle mine in Marquette County, Michigan, the Enbridge pipelines, the proposed Tamarack nickel mine in Minnesota, the Copperwood mine in the western Upper Peninsula and, of course, the Back Forty.

“Al always showed up,” said Allie Raven, a member of the Bad River Ojibwe tribe who worked with him on the Penokee Hills mine campaign. “And not only did he show up, but what he did was he provided the context.”

“He showed us that our little struggle, was just not some isolated incident; it was connected to environmental issues throughout the globe, and that especially indigenous people were at the heart of the struggle and most vulnerable. And so, what we considered to be probably a losing battle was really transformed by the stories and the research and the careful, persistent work that Al continued to do to help us understand what we were struggling against, and that we could win by having the facts straight and having the community involvement.”

Gedicks was small in stature, but he was fierce. He had multiple black belts in Aikido, according to Omar Poler.

“One of the reasons he took it up was all the threats he got from the mining companies, and I like to think that if any of them [started something], that he would have taken them down,” added event emcee and long-time Gedicks collaborator Zoltán Grossman.

“And there was also that sweet side of Al,” Grossman said. “The laugh that we all remember, that kind of started as a chuckle and a twinkle in the eye, and then exploded into a full-throated laugh that just let everything out and had us all just sighing a little bit.”

Gedicks influenced generations of students as a professor of environmental sociology at UW-La Crosse from 1985 to 2012. He published two books, “The New Resource Wars: Native and Environmental Struggles Against Multinational Corporations,” and “Resource Rebels: Native Challenges to Mining and Oil Corporations” and numerous scholarly publications. He left behind an unpublished manuscript, “Extractivist Battlegrounds” that recaps his entire career.

Gedicks was a self-effacing person who spoke quietly in conversation, “but he had lots to say, a veritable reservoir of information with an astonishing ability to organize,” according to Roscoe Churchill, who worked with Gedicks on the campaign to stop the Flambeau mine. (Churchill died in 2007. His comments at the memorial were read by another Flambeau activist, Laura Gauger.)

Gedicks was also known as a “doer” who wasn’t motivated by praise or notoriety -- someone who would have dismissed the idea of a memorial event in his name.

“He’d probably be pissed if we're doing this, and you know he wouldn't want to be a part of this,” said Guy Reiter of the Menominee Tribe, at the July 18 gathering. “You know, it's like, so we got work to do. What are we doing here? Let’s start organizing. We should be planning on what's the next steps here for all of us.”

The July 18 memorial gathering, and Prof. Gedicks’ life and times, are detailed in this Facebook album assembled by his friend and colleague, Zoltán Grossman.

This story was written by a real human being. Google Gemini Pro AI was used as a research tool. Props to all who shared their stories about Dr. Gedicks at the July 18 memorial.