Figure 3. Archaeologist Doug Birk speaking to St. Cloud State University anthropology students enrolled in the author’s 2014 archaeological field school at the Little Elk River Mission site. Image courtesy of the author.
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Life, Land, Water, and Time: Archaeologist Doug Birk and the Little Elk Heritage Preserve

The title of the 1976 novella by Norman Maclean, A River Runs through It, is also an apt description of the career of Minnesota archaeologist Douglas A. Birk, who passed away unexpectedly in March 2017. Actually, several rivers run through his remarkable and pioneering career, which spanned nearly 50 years. Birk was among the first historical archaeologists to conduct underwater investigations of sites relating to the North American fur trade along the “voyageur’s highway,” the chain of rivers, lakes, and overland portages that run along the Minnesota-Canadian border.

Figure 7. Fall of the Grand Recollet, French River, Ontario, by John Elliot Woolford, 1821.
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The View From Watery Places: Rivers and Portages in the Fur Trade Era

On the drive northward from the Twin Cities on the straight and flat road of I-94, and then Minnesota’s Highway 10, the landscape of urban and suburban development slowly cedes to wide open fields and scattered towns, sometimes lined with rows and patches of trees. This is not the most exciting or scenic of drives, but it’s exciting to us nevertheless, because this is the way toward another season of archaeological fieldwork on a late eighteenth-century fur trade post located on the Leaf River in Wadena County.

An excavation unit has been carefully laid out and is awaiting excavation at Réaume's Leaf River Post, Minnesota.
Introduction

Guest Editor’s Introduction to Issue Twelve: Watery Places and Archaeology

Archaeology, the study of past human societies, has a certain aura of mystery to it that captures the public’s imagination. The authors in this issue, myself included, are broadly defined as archaeologists. Not the Indiana Jones kind—more the geeky and scholarly kind, whose job and passion is not only to uncover how past people lived based on the things and structures they left behind, but also to take prodigious amounts of notes, photographs, measurements, and soil samples.

Detail from Hydrographical Basin of the Upper Mississippi River by Joseph Nicolas Nicollet, 1843.
Introduction

Introduction to Issue Twelve

A year or so ago, when I met with Amélie Allard about her work on the fur trade in Minnesota, I was interested generally in her observations about that contested, fraught place and time. When she mentioned that participants understood space from the perspective of rivers and water, rather than land, I was hooked, and asked her to think about editing an issue of Open Rivers. This issue is the result, and her guest editor’s introduction speaks more eloquently than I could to the themes and questions raised here.

The Nile River, July 19 2004. To the right of the Nile is the Red Sea, with the finger of the Gulf of Suez on the left, and the Gulf of Aqaba on the right. In the upper right corner of the image are Israel and Palestine, left, and Jordan, right. Below Jordan is the northwestern corner of Saudi Arabia.
Introduction

Introduction to Issue Eleven

When I heard about the Nobel Peace Prize Forum’s 2018 focus on “The Paradox of Water,” I hoped for a connection between our journal and the perspectives that speakers would bring to the gathering.  Here, thanks to a great deal of hard work by many people, not least Augsburg political scientist Joseph B. Underhill, is the result: a collection of features and columns that explores some of the many paradoxes of water.

The mixing of the clear and turbid, rural and urban at the confluence of the St. Croix and Mississippi Rivers (detail).
Introduction

Guest Editor’s Introduction to Issue Eleven: The Paradoxes of Peace and Water

This issue of Open Rivers, anticipating and drawing on the upcoming Nobel Peace Prize Forum in Minneapolis, explores the complex intertwining and paradoxes of water, conflict, and peace. Anything so fundamental and complex as water or peace must, of necessity, contain seemingly contradictory or opposite qualities. The beauty of water is in how it reconciles and provides space for those complex, muddy mixes of qualities and characteristics.

Beach and beaver tree at Bdote. A tree has been gnawed down to its core by a beaver.
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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.