By John Kim. The Mississippi River Open School for Kinship and Social Exchange (Open School) (2022–2025) has engaged pressing issues at the intersections of race, environment, and extraction through education, cultural exchange, and action. A core aspect of this work has been partnerships with communities, many on the front line of struggles against resource extraction and climate-change-related natural disasters.
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.
By Marceleen Mosher. All We Can Save: Truth, Courage, and Solutions for the Climate Crisis, edited by Dr. Ayana Elizabeth Johnson and Dr. Katharine K. Wilkinson, is an anthology for anyone looking to turn away from the brink of disaster and toward a life-affirming future for all of Earth’s inhabitants. The collection brings forward the feminist voices of people at the forefront of the climate movement, weaving together creativity and science through essays, poems, and art that face the existential threat of climate change head-on while illuminating a way out of our current mess with energy, humility, and a spirit of collective action.
By Jacob Napieralski. In 2021, metro Detroit was hit with a rainstorm so severe that President Joe Biden issued a major disaster declaration at state officials’ request.
Nearly 8 inches of rain fell within 24 hours, closing every major freeway and causing massive damage to homes and businesses. The storm was of a severity historically seen in Detroit every 500 to 1,000 years.
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…
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…
Two sets of rivers in what is now known as Canada are vital actors in urban landscapes. The McIntyre and Kaministiquia Rivers in Thunder Bay, Ontario and the Assiniboine and Red Rivers in Winnipeg, Manitoba are sites of colonial violence and disappearance: in both cities, dead Indigenous people have been pulled from their depths.
This fall, I asked these fellows to contribute to this In Review column for Open Rivers by sharing what they are currently reading and why it matters to them. Their responses, like our meetings, offer a robust and varied collection of resources that will, I hope, enrich your own reading lists. Enjoy…