In 1995 two Bad River tribal members, Lawrence "Butch" Stone and Alan "Buster" Couture, began having dreams that an environmental disaster was coming to the Bad River Reservation. While taking part in traditional sweats, Stone and Couture, among others who would form the Anishinabe Ogichidaa activist group, began receiving messages through dreams and visions from Native American spirits and ancestors. The messages began a year before the EPA published an announcement that sulfide would be moved by rail over the reservation on Wisconsin Central Railroad tracks.