
Imagining Life-as-Place: Harm Reduction for the Soft Anthropocene
By Sarah Lewison
During the summer of 2023, at a conference of the Mississippi River Open School, an experimental learning group I belong to, the brilliant Dakota astronomer Jim Rock invited us to enact a performance of reinhabitation. We met near the site of Wakan Tipi Cave in St. Paul, Minnesota, a place sacred to the Dakota people. Upon gathering, each participant in our group was asked to name and express gratitude toward a river or body of water that connected to their lives in a meaningful way.