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Highway 61 at the mouth of the Onion River east of Tofte. Image courtesy of M. Baxley, Bear Witness Media.
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Rivers of Lake Superior’s North Shore: Historical Methodology and Ojibwe Dialects

By Erik Martin Redix. The drive along the North Shore of Lake Superior between Duluth and the international border on Highway 61 is an iconic Minnesota experience. At just over three hours long, the trip offers unparalleled scenery in the upper Midwest. Visitors pass through a handful of small towns and over two dozen short scenic rivers along the shore of Lake Superior. These rivers are narrow and relatively short, descending anywhere from 20 to 40 miles down the rugged landscape of Minnesota’s North Shore into Lake Superior. For example, Brule Lake, the source of the Temperance River (and the South Brule River as well) sits 1,851 feet above sea level and, over 39 miles of North Shore terrain, it descends to 697 feet above sea level at its mouth. These steep descents result in dozens of waterfalls that beckon visitors from across Minnesota and North America.

The North Shore lies within the traditional historical territory of two modern tribal nations: the Grand Portage Band of Lake Superior Chippewa and the Fort William First Nation.

Aerial photograph of Minneapolis and St. Anthony Falls over the Stone Arch Bridge. Image via Unsplash by Nicole Geri.
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On The Physicality of Hope

By Joanne Richardson. We depend on water to sustain us, yet threats to our biogeophysical and social systems, which directly impact our water, are numerous. However, people are not sitting idle. They are tackling these challenges with analysis and action, in ways that ignite hope.

Hope can grow in both grand and unassuming ways. The drama and magic of a new law, policy, or initiative may be fleeting, but these small, unromantic efforts are the bedrock of our water futures, shaping them into more just and sustainable paths.

The St. Louis River in Jay Cooke State Park in northern Minnesota. Image via Unsplash by Ricky Turner.
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Rights of Nature and the St. Louis River Estuary

By Emily Levang. What if we related to water as our kin? I went to the St. Louis River estuary in early January together with my friend Cristin, who shares a dedication to care for this ecosystem. This estuary is the largest tributary to Lake Superior, which holds 10 percent of our entire world’s fresh surface water. As our world heads deeper into the water crisis, protecting this source of life is ever more vital. I try to begin with listening.

Approaching sundown at the Sax-Zim Bog in northern Minnesota, USA.
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Connecting Environment, Place, and Community

“Connections in Practice” is an appropriate theme for this issue of Open Rivers highlighting the four years’ work, since 2019, of the Humanities-led Environmental Stewardship, Place, and Community Initiative. The goals of the [initiative] all have been about connection: connecting Indigenous ways of knowing and practices of environmental stewardship with the humanities; connecting the humanities with pressing environmental justice concerns; connecting three University of Minnesota (UMN) campuses with each other and with Indigenous communities; connecting activism and experiential practice with pedagogy; and connecting all of these to decolonization and institutional transformation of the university…

Canoeing in the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness, Duluth, Minnesota, USA. Photo by Lee Vue on Unsplash.
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Learning Together: The Humanities Futures Labs

We wanted to create a new type of Indigenous humanities work for our undergraduate students while also offering a professional development opportunity for our graduate fellows. Our work started in earnest with a two-week summer workshop for the Humanities Futures Lab Graduate Fellows (HFLGF) in 2022. These fellows are graduate students with a variety of disciplinary and personal commitments and experiences that informed our collective work to create these lab courses…

The landscape adjacent to a water blessing by the Indigenous Women's Water Sisterhood. Image courtesy of the University of Minnesota Duluth.
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Place and Relations Capstone: Indigenizing Education

How can we decolonize the university? For the past four years, Indigenous community members and faculty, staff, and students from the University of Minnesota’s Duluth, Morris, and Twin Cities campuses have developed projects aimed at doing exactly this as part of the Environmental Stewardship, Place, and Community Initiative, funded by a grant from the Mellon Foundation…

Northern Minnesota. Image courtesy of Lee Vue.
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Where We Stand: The University of Minnesota and Dakhóta Treaty Lands

From the Authors: Reflecting on the three years since writing “Where We Stand,” the main thing that we continue to focus on is the need for accountability and reparative action for land theft. Land acknowledgements are even more commonplace than they were in 2020, but they are still often nothing more than nice words, rarely, if ever, accompanied by substantive action. The Daḳota and other Indigenous people want to know what you are willing to give up when you acknowledge you are on someone else’s land. When you give that land acknowledgement, what are you acknowledging exactly? Do you have even the basic knowledge of how the people you name were dispossessed of their land? Do you know the treaties that were used to provide legal justification for that dispossession? The fact that this article continues to be downloaded so frequently, and that we are still frequently asked to present this information to a wide variety of audiences both within and outside of the University of Minnesota, tells us that this knowledge is still far from as common as it should be…

Swimming pool at AUT Millenium training center, Aukland, New Zealand. Image by Artem Verbo on Unsplash.
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Washed Up

Every summer in my childhood my parents took me and my sister to beaches in Maine, mountain lakes in our home state of New Hampshire, and our uncle’s pool in Massachusetts just over the New Hampshire-Massachusetts border. Once the last towel was unloaded from the car, we’d rip off the clothing covering our bathing suits and race to water as if it was simply a mirage, wavering and threatening to disappear.