Minnesota

The PulseMay 2, 2019

Disconnected From The River

By Iyana Esters

North Minneapolis resident Catherine Fleming explains her relation to the Mississippi River and her hopes for the Upper Harbor Terminal redevelopment project to reconnect communities of color to the river.

The Water Main

The PulseNovember 15, 2018

Red Wing residents, tribal members find common ground on He Mni Can

By Dan Browning

In Minnesota, another step in efforts by indigenous people and local governments to recognize the layered names for lands associated with the state’s waters. This case is in Red Wing, on the Mississippi River.

StarTribune

Engagement Environmental Justice History Minnesota Policy

FeatureJuly 25, 2018

Learning from the Dakota: Water and Place

These videos and audios are from Bdote Memory Map. The deep mapping project created by Allies: media/art is a partnership project with the Minnesota Humanities Center. The website was created several years ago to help citizens of the area now called Minnesota know where they are, and to learn from the Dakota that this place and the river is not a resource, but rather a relative.

Arts Engagement Environmental Justice Minnesota Public Programs

FeatureJuly 25, 2018

Writing the River

What does the river say to you? This is the core question posed by Write to the River, a creative writing project that I launched in partnership with the Twin Cities nonprofit Friends of the Mississippi River and photographer Tom Reiter, in spring 2017.

Arts Engagement Minnesota Public Programs

PerspectivesJuly 25, 2018

An Endangered River: The Mississippi River Gorge

Almost 500 river miles below its source at Lake Itasca, the Mississippi River tumbles over its only waterfall in downtown Minneapolis. Dubbed the Falls of Saint Anthony by explorer Father Louis Hennepin, the falls were formed by glacial action more than 10,000 years ago. The magnificent waterfall was once over 200 feet high and located in downtown St. Paul. Over the years, the falls migrated upstream to their present location in downtown Minneapolis.

Civil Engineering Engagement Minnesota Planning / Policy Policy

GeographiesJuly 25, 2018

Water Unifies Us All

A dominant narrative in media today tells us that American society is full of juxtaposition and conflict: rural v. urban, rich v. poor, black v. white, conservative v. liberal. We might get the impression that we must stick to our own in-group in order to feel safe and heard. And yet, there is an issue central to life as a Minnesotan regardless of how you identify or with whom you spend your time. That issue—clean water— is a necessity for life and good health.

Engagement Minnesota Planning / Policy Public Programs

In ReviewJuly 25, 2018

A Tour of the Mississippi River Visitor Center

The Minnesota National River and Recreation Area (MNRRA) is a 72-mile National Park Service unit along the Mississippi River as it flows through the Twin Cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul. MNRRA is an open secret in the Twin Cities, and it is not widely known as a national park, even by people who live and work within its borders.

Engagement Minnesota Public Programs

The PulseApril 30, 2018

Oil and water: The Line 3 debate

By Elizabeth Dunbar, Dan Kraker, Cody Nelson, Julie Siple, and Bill Wareham

Enbridge Energy’s plan to replace its aging Line 3 oil pipeline across northern Minnesota promises to be one of the most contentious water policy issues in the region during 2018. This series of stories by Minnesota Public Radio reporters offers a starting point for the case.

MPR

Engagement Environmental Justice Minnesota Planning / Policy Policy

Teaching and PracticeApril 27, 2018

The River is the Classroom

The Mississippi River flows just beyond the buildings on the University of Minnesota’s East Bank where my office is. Most days, as I have done throughout my 16 years here, I walk along the river to the classrooms where I teach. It would be hard to find a person on campus who doesn’t share a nostalgic fondness for the river as we glance at it, drive over it, and jog and bike across it. We are happy to claim the river under the bridges, across the…

Arts Education Education Practice International Minnesota

Primary SourcesApril 27, 2018

Water as a Space for Inclusion

By Brianna Menning What do you think about when you think about inclusion? Is it a matter of diversity? Come one, come all? Is…

Education Engagement Minnesota Public Programs

Issue Contents

Introduction

Introduction to Issue Fourteen

Climate change has virtually exploded as a subject of news reports, scientific analysis, and advocacy attention in the past six months. In November, the United States Global Change Research Program released its Fourth National Climate Assessment. Longstanding debates about the relative importance of mitigation and adaptation have further receded in urgency as this spring’s Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) finding that a million species are threatened with extinction have grabbed headlines worldwide.

By Patrick Nunnally, Editor

Introduction

Guest Editors’ Introduction to Issue Fourteen: Climate, Change & People

Archaeologists, by definition, are interested in using various techniques to learn about the human experience in diverse places, from ancient through contemporary times. A key part of this has been understanding human adaptation to diverse environmental and climatic changes over time, and for archaeologists, the long arc of human existence refers to at least around three million years.

By Lewis C. Messenger Jr. and Brent K. S. Woodfill

Feature

Multiple Ways of Understanding Peru’s Changing Climate

In this article, we consider how the perspectives and experiences of contemporary people facing climate change can enrich our archaeological interpretations of climate change in the past. In particular, we present an ethnographic study from highland Peru that highlights the complex and varied ways people are responding to environmental uncertainty, and explore how their perspectives and responses have led us to question and expand the narratives we construct about ancient people.

By Rebecca Bria and Doris Walter

Feature

Uncovering Amazonia

“Amazonia”—the word alone can conjure up a lot of images, some accurate and some wildly not. In truth, it has many definitions, ranging from a specific drainage basin to a tropical ecological world. For most of my childhood, such kinds of tropical “jungles” were places of peril to be avoided. The very word “Amazon” conjured up Joseph Conrad’s images from Heart of Darkness ([1899] 2015), albeit that book was about the Congo in Africa.

By Lewis C. Messenger Jr.

Feature

What’s in My Backyard? Empowering Indigenous Voices on Firefly Creek at Blue’s Bottom

All of us, regardless if we are Native or non-native, hold a specific location near and dear to our hearts. In this article, I focus on a place near and dear to my heart, exploring the history of my family’s cul-de-sac area known to my family, and much of the surrounding community, as Blue’s Bottom.

By Tianna M. Odegard

Feature

Ethnography and Archaeology of Water in the Maya Lowlands

Procuring potable water is an important factor for daily life in the semitropics, especially for contemporary populations in rural Guatemala. Seasonal subsistence practices are crucial for survival, especially regarding agriculture, droughts, and flooding. This article focuses on the Salinas de los Nueve Cerros region in Alta Verapaz, Guatemala to highlight contemporary land-use practices among the Q’eqchi’ Maya, their adaptations to flooding, droughts, and uses of different water resources.

By Alexander E. Rivas and William G. B. Odum

Geographies

Libraries Burning

The impact of climate change on archaeological and heritage sites in the Arctic region is devastating. New techniques of research and analysis are providing increasingly rich data about the long history of humans in the environment. Just as the value of these sites is being recognized more fully, the sites themselves are being destroyed by thawing permafrost, rising sea levels, and increasingly violent storms. Nowhere is this being felt more intensely than in the Arctic, which is warming two to three times as fast as the rest of the planet (Hoag 2019).

By Phyllis Mauch Messenger

In Review

Desert River Sea is a Vibrant, Compelling Tour of the Kimberley

For the past century, the curator has been the deciding factor in what is shown by museums and galleries, reassuring audiences of the importance of what they are seeing. While acknowledging other commercial and audience drivers, the centrality of curatorial decision-making has been sacrosanct. But when the curatorial team from the Art Gallery of Western Australia embarked on an epic quest to document the art of the Kimberley region in the state’s north west, they abandoned this idea of a single authorial voice in favor of a new model of partnership and exchange.

By Ted Snell

Perspectives

An Archaeologist Writes against the Anthropocene

Much of what archaeologists do is study how humans adapt to the environment. After Gordon Willey’s (1953) groundbreaking investigation into the entire history of occupation of a small valley in Peru, understanding how humans lived in and modified their environment became commonplace. Indeed, the “New Archeology” that took the American academy by storm in the 1960s and strove to make the discipline more scientific made human-environment interactions and the understanding of human-environmental relations one of its central goals...

By Brent K. S. Woodfill

Primary Sources

Water and the Preclassic Maya at El Tintal, Petén, Guatemala

As part of the 1931 Carnegie Institution of Washington’s Uaxactun expedition, geologist C.W. Cooke (1931: 286) noted, “If the bajos were restored to their former condition, the Petén would be a region of many beautiful lakes. Travel in it would be easy, for one could go from place to place by boat, with only short journeys overland, from one lake to another, across country that offers little impediment to travel at any season.” These bajos mentioned by Cooke, low-lying swampy areas prone to flooding, are spread throughout most of the northern lowlands of Petén, Guatemala, characterizing the region with seasonal and perennial wetland systems.

By Mary Jane Acuña and Carlos R. Chiriboga

Teaching and Practice

The Perils and Promise of Using Short-Term Media to Teach Long-Term Climate Patterns

A concern for climate change has burst onto the national media, scientific literatures, and other discourses over the past year. As someone who teaches in design- and natural resource-oriented fields, I feel an obligation to equip my students with critical awarenesses of the patterns, as well as a sense of what they can do, professionally and personally, to face this crisis.

By Patrick Nunnally

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