Welcome to Issue 9 of Open Rivers, which begins our third year of publication! Our tagline, “Rethinking Water, Place & Community,” speaks to our sense that there is a conversation taking place in diverse professional sectors and academic disciplines about the relationships between our human communities and our water communities, and that there is an audience for this conversation, both on campus and in the broader water-oriented professional community.
For millennia, Native American people traveled and traded on the Mississippi River. When colonial powers moved into North America, they quickly saw the importance of controlling transportation and the movement of goods on the river. In 1820, The United States government established Fort Snelling at the confluence of the Mississippi and Minnesota Rivers to protect American fur trade interests in the region and to gain a foothold in the western territory that would become Minnesota.
Wilderness is a feeling. It is more than that, of course—wilderness is the wind and the water, the turtles and coyotes, all that exists beyond and around and within our human selves. But when we speak of wilderness, we’re so often speaking about a feeling: that feeling of smallness, strangely comforting, or of connection, or of wonder at how much there is in the world.
When I’m asked to speak about the work I do as an artist, a cultural organizer, and Collaborative Director of Water Bar & Public Studio, I often struggle with two important points of departure: How do I introduce myself when I have so many different roles in my artistic and organizing life? And where do I begin telling the story of this complex, evolving project—which I did not imagine or develop on my own, and which is more of ecosystem that I tend with others than it is a definable creative project?
The second city in U.S. history to debut a modern industrial urban waterworks system was New Orleans Designed and built between 1811 and 1820, the New Orleans Waterworks displayed the most advanced innovations of its day, both in hydraulic engineering technology and in aesthetic architectural design…
The Lakota phrase “Mní wičhóni,” or “Water is life,” has become a new national protest anthem. It was chanted by 5,000 marchers at the Native Nations March in Washington, D.C. on March 10, and during hundreds of protests across the United States in the last year. “Mní wičhóni” became the anthem of the almost year-long struggle to stop the building of the Dakota Access Pipeline under the Missouri River in North Dakota.
