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 Thirteen

Simi Kang agreed to guest edit this issue of Open Rivers, moving our work toward questions of environmental equity and justice, and by extension coming to understand their opposites: environmental inequities, injustices, and racism.

By Laurie Moberg, Assistant Editor

Introduction

Guest Editor’s Introduction to Issue Thirteen: Water & Environmental Justice

The work collected here was written about and on the sovereign land of many First Nations. The place it was assembled—the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities—is a land-grant institution that operates on Mni Sota Makoce (called Minnesota), Dakota land, and alongside and over the Mississippi River whose watershed is the major artery of Turtle Island (called North America).

By Simi Kang

Feature

“Contraband” Practice: Doing Environmental Justice with Water

When I asked the following six artists, theorists, community advocates, organizers, and members to contribute to this issue, it was primarily to share a reading or practice related to water and environmental justice (EJ) in our Primary Sources column. In soliciting these citations, I also asked them to answer a series of questions (which you will find below)...

By Karen Bauer, Merle Geode, Simi Kang, Chika Kondo 近藤千嘉, David Naguib Pellow, 심제현 Jae Hyun Shim, and 신 선 영 辛善英 Sun Yung Shin

Feature (Peer Review)

Life Otherwise at the Sea’s Edge

As part of a longer project on sea edges and coloniality, this essay studies ways of being that exceed the human, nonhuman, and colonial divide, and that find historical nodes of power and affective density at the boundaries of the Americas oceanic...

By Macarena Gómez-Barris

Feature (Peer Review)

The Political Binds of Oil versus Tribes

In late 2018, while researching the connections between environmental justice and Indigenous womxn’s activism[1], I was invited to story about how water might respond to environmental injustice and racism. In preparation, I thought about how the lands and peoples to which I belong struggle against “slow violence” brought on by the toxic effects of uranium contamination and nuclear pollution...

By Yvonne P. Sherwood

Feature (Peer Review)

There’s Something in The Water

This essay is a collage of images and writing from an ongoing project "Reading the River: Yemayá and Oshun." I am approaching it as is an experimental documentary that looks at the relationship between Blackness and the Mississippi River as a collision of ideas, cultural practices, political geographies, and intimacies...

By Tia-Simone Gardner

Geographies

Resonant Rivers: Water, Indigenous Relationality, and Other Futures

Two sets of rivers in what is now known as Canada are vital actors in urban landscapes. The McIntyre and Kaministiquia Rivers in Thunder Bay, Ontario and the Assiniboine and Red Rivers in Winnipeg, Manitoba are sites of colonial violence and disappearance: in both cities, dead Indigenous people have been pulled from their depths.

By Caroline Fidan Tyler Doenmez

In Review

Storying Pinhook: Representing the Community, the Floods, and the Struggle

When They Blew the Levee is a fierce love letter to the power of community, one encoded to Black sociality, the broader American social imaginary, and the mythical power of the Mississippi River. In praxis, it is a political tool—a lyrical baseball bat—for the residents of Pinhook, Missouri to wield in a rally against the sustained structural violence of a biased justice system and racialized world.

By Lisa Marie Brimmer

Perspectives

the river

something in the river haunted the island between the city and the border. she felt it, when she was on the waves in the little boat. she didn’t say anything, because what could be said, and to whom?

By adrienne maree brown

Perspectives

Extract: Locating Indigeneity in Immigrant Experiences

When the first major wave of Chinese people voyaged to the United States in the mid-19th Century, their collective journey was not yet a tale about belonging somewhere. It was about extracting resources—namely gold.

By Adriel Luis

Primary Sources

What Helps You Dream?

To create this list of “contraband” practices (forwarded by David Naguib Pellow in our feature of the same name), our contributors responded to the following question: If you were to gift someone one thing (reading/practice/site of engagement) to guide them to environmental justice or a different relationship with water, what would it be?

By Simi Kang

Teaching and Practice

“The Soul to See”: Toward a Hoodoo Ethnography

In his book, How Racism Takes Place, George Lipsitz (2011: 5) contends that “race is produced by space,” and that “it takes places for racism to take place.” While Lipsitz focuses primarily on the intersection of race and space in urban settings, racialized spatial practices in rural environments can be just as devastating to communities of color, if not more so.

By David Todd Lawrence

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