The cover image for this issue is a meditation on layers. In its two-dimensional form, it reveals dark but reflective water, distinct aquatic vegetation, an autumnal shoreline, and powerlines stretching across the deepening blue in the sky. The image reveals the layers of the visible place (the water, plants, and sky), but also evokes the layers that are invisible…
The early morning sun shone off the water. I parked at the “Flooding Ahead” sign and walked past deep gouges in the ground. The teeth marks of a bulldozer’s blade were still visible where it had dug in to strengthen the walls of an earthen berm along the edge of what was once a ditch and is now simply a slough meandering along a larger expanse of lake…
The Mississippi River in the Twin Cities region is a truly remarkable landscape corridor. It serves as part of an important flyway for North American birds, is the ancestral and traditional homeland of Dakota people, and has been the site of several developments that have global and national significance…
“Why are you doing this work?” P’Ong’s question caught me a bit by surprise. I was sitting with P’Ong on a thin bamboo mat covering the tile floor of his home near the Yom River in northern Thailand. P’Ong had spent the day introducing me to his village including both the people and places that were part of the anti-dam protest movement there…
I slide my kayak into the tranquil waters of the Chesapeake Bay as the first glow of sunrise is appearing behind me in the eastern sky. The bay is quiet today, waters smooth as glass as only happens a few times during the summer. There are many mornings when the winds and the tidal currents conspire to make it impossible for a small craft like a kayak…
Author Harry Saddler’s book on Melbourne’s Yarra River is an engaging account of his years exploring its native species and human communities. He acknowledges the river’s First Nations name of Birrarung, writing with a boyish enthusiasm. At times I felt his emotion jumping out of the pages, almost channelling David Attenborough’s passion for species and the environment…
Protecting the water is protecting life. Two-spirit Anishinaabe activist Taysha Martineau thus insists that Enbridge’s Line 3 tar sands pipeline “should scare you so much that you feel called to step into that water”. But if that is true, then how did Line 3 succeed in going into operation? Clearly something is missing…
The University of Minnesota is working to share community-based academic projects and partnerships involving water resources—as well as other social and environmental concerns—as a way of illustrating the University’s research-based, public engagement activities…
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…
When Open Rivers launched in fall 2015, we made a promise to try to include at least one Indigenous voice in each issue. Since then, many issues have featured multiple Indigenous voices, including many involved with the TRUTH Report. Now, with Issue 23, “Connections in Practice,” a majority of the authors—faculty, staff, and students—are enrolled members or descendants of Tribes and Nations from throughout North America. They represent a growing cohort of university faculty and other professionals who work in two worlds, creating networks, honoring their traditional ways of knowing and being, while also nudging their non-indigenous colleagues to expand their own worldviews…
Water is life. It is a familiar phrase, frequently spoken today. Even so, little thought goes into what this simple phrase means. We exist in water throughout our lives, dependent on it from conception, surrounded in water in our mother’s womb, until our last water vapor breath. Water is so common, we are so accustomed to our submergence in it that we fail to notice how vital it is and fail to recognize our dependence on it, taking for granted the water vapor-laden environment we exist in every moment of every day…
“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…