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Pike Island in St. Paul, Minnesota at the Minnesota River (left) and Mississippi River (right) confluence named Bdóte, “where two waters come together” in the Dakota language. Image courtesy of Laura Rockhold.
Teaching and Practice

Do You Know Where You Are?

By Laura Rockhold. Over recent years I have been on a journey, one that has deepened my understanding of, and engagement with, the Indigenous names of the place I call home: Minnesota. As a writer, poet, and visual artist, much of my work explores themes of interconnectedness between the personal, ecological, universal, and spiritual; I have found naming to be one way of praising, participating, and communing with others and nature and even myself, as so much of who we are is rooted in language and place.

The Coosa River in Wetumpka, Alabama, after rain. This portion of the river is below the Jordan Dam. Image via Flickr by brian_esquire. CC BY-NC-SA 2.0 Deed.
Teaching and Practice

Centering Water: Practices of Commitment

By Boyce Upholt, Katie Hart Potapoff, Michael Anderson, Britt Gangeness, Angie Hong, Coosa Riverkeeper, Greg Seitz, and Andy Erickson. Water is part of our everyday lives. We depend on clean water for health and sanitation, for livelihoods and recreation, for habitats, histories, and futures. Since water is so important to humans (and nonhumans) in myriad ways, how do we demonstrate our reciprocal commitment to water?

Detail of a mixed-media haiku created by Benjamin at the Metamorffosis Festival, Bangor, UK.
Teaching and Practice

Creative Connections with Rivers: A Toolkit for Learning and Collaboration

We are three people who draw on research and practice to create arts-based learning, engagement materials, and interventions with and for diverse audiences. We purposefully integrate and apply different artistic methods in non-artistic disciplines, such as ecology and environmental conservation, physics, climate science, and human health. We came to know each other and work together through a four-year project that was awarded to the lead author and focused on rivers in a fragmented world. Our project had local and global foci on rivers, and many of the activities, including those shared in this article, were designed with and for people in the United Kingdom but with a view that the ideas could be adapted and applied in other contexts.

An aerial view of Northrop Mall, part of the University of Minnesota Twin Cities’ East Bank area. Image courtesy of Ben Franske.
Teaching and Practice

The River at our Doorstep: Student Projects Tell Stories of the Mississippi River

The Mississippi River, by all accounts one of the great rivers of the world, flows through the middle of the campus of the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis. During fall semester, 2022, the University Honors Program continued a long-standing commitment to introducing students to the river at their doorstep by offering an Honors Seminar…

The Hiawatha Wampum Belt, depicting the five original nations of the Haudenosaunee and their interconnections.
Teaching and Practice

Teaching Indigenous Epistemologies at the University of Minnesota

It has been argued that the twin ongoing and overarching crises facing students in higher education today are the urgencies of calls for justice and the threats from a changing climate. Indeed, these are inextricably intertwined. Students will face them no matter what their profession, or however they find themselves living as a citizen in the world. As Vicente Diaz reminds us so eloquently in his contribution to this collection, “the epistemological system on which our present political, economic, and cultural existences are based is unsustainable. We need radically different ways of defining what it means to be human, of understanding human-ness in relations of kinship and reciprocity, and of understanding and respecting the living world around us.”…

Illustration of major rivers for ‘Confluence: The History of North American Rivers’ courtesy of Robert Szucs, www.grasshoppergeography.com.
Teaching and Practice

Teaching the History of American Rivers

Like Open Rivers, I have long tried to answer the question of the value of river history and how can it be put to work to achieve environmental justice. While we each have a home or favorite river that captivates us, there is a broader, if unspoken, understanding of rivers and the role they play in shaping our history. Last fall I organized a conference that attempted to address this challenge. Called All Water Has a Memory: Rivers and American History, the conference featured presenters from academia, nature writing, and environmental and community activism who shared their history and experience of individual rivers in three sessions: Slavery and Freedom, Indigenous Resistance, and The Environmental Movement…

Tettegouche State Park, Silver Bay, Minnesota. Image courtesy of Josh Hild.
Teaching and Practice

On Teaching The Relentless Business of Treaties

In spring 2020, two faculty members from the University of Minnesota Morris each incorporated a book called The Relentless Business of Treaties: How Indigenous Land Became U.S. Property by Martin Case into their course curricula. The book focuses on demystifying the stories and interconnectedness of the white, male treaty-signers responsible for dispossessing Indigenous peoples of their land. The following article shares their perspectives and reflections on teaching this text.