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Figure 9. Mural of TEK featuring three Haida matriarchs of the land, air, and water. The mural is the work of Amanda Phingbodhipakkiya (findingsproject.com). Image courtesy of Wendy F. Todd.
Feature (Peer Review)

The Science in Indigenous Water Stories, Indigenous Women’s Connection to Water

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…

Approaching sundown at the Sax-Zim Bog in northern Minnesota, USA.
Feature

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…

The landscape adjacent to a water blessing by the Indigenous Women's Water Sisterhood. Image courtesy of the University of Minnesota Duluth.
Feature

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…

Robin Wall Kimmerer and Diane Wilson in conversation. Photo: Rebecca Slater, by Rebecca Studios.
In Review

Indigenous Wisdom: Re-story-ation to Resist, Resurge, and Inspire

I was fortunate to attend an in-person conversation between two Indigenous scholar-authors, Diane Wilson and Robin Wall Kimmerer, at the University of Minnesota’s Northrop Auditorium on May 17th, 2022 (Kimmerer and Wilson 2022). In this column, I share part of my reflections and stories as an Indigenous scientist inspired by Robin and Diane’s conversation, specifically Robin’s emphasis on the importance of healing our relationships with the land and nonhuman relatives, and the need for “Re-story-ation” of the land. As I understand it, re-story-ation means to return our stories to the land and to remember how to hear the stories the land tells…

University research has a legacy of doing harm to Indigenous communities. However, a new collaborative project is showing how research can be done in a better and inclusive way. (Shutterstock)
Primary Sources

Collaborative Indigenous Research

Collaborative Indigenous Research is a way to repair the legacy of harmful research practices A recent disclosure from Harvard’s Peabody Museum has brought attention, yet again, to the need to rethink the relationships between universities and Indigenous communities. Recently, the Peabody Museum announced that it has been holding locks of hair collected throughout the 1930s from more than 700 Indigenous children forced into residential boarding schools in the U.S…

Fortney Farm in Soldiers Grove. Image courtesy of Tim Hundt
Feature (Peer Review)

Storying the Floods: Experiments in Feminist Flood Futures

Life in Wisconsin’s Kickapoo River and Coon Creek watersheds, the focus of our Driftless work, has been punctuated by major floods in 2007, 2008, 2016, 2017, and the worst in recorded history in 2018. As flooding becomes more frequent and more severe across these watersheds, community members are working together to re-imagine ways to live well together with worsening floods.

Left: Coordinators meeting at an oxbox in the river. Right: With corn growing on the left, the wildflowers in the filter strip provide valuable habitat, as well as filtering runoff from the fields. Images courtesy of Mollie Aronowitz.
Feature

Collaboration for a Common Goal

We seek to tell a story that demonstrates how combining a common goal with compromise and deliberate action leads to creative solutions and meaningful progress. Our professional backgrounds and experiences are diverse—our group includes a professional land manager, a clean water policy attorney, a conservation agronomist, and a municipal watershed manager. Through each of our personal stories, we will share examples of action-oriented strategies for improving the quality of Iowa’s land and water.