By Jonee Kulman Brigham. Earth Systems Journey is foremost a form of participatory public art and secondly an environmental education curriculum model. Big Stone Lake Stories is one of over a dozen applications of the Earth Systems Journey model. Each application is adapted to the specific people, place, and program where it occurs, and with each iteration new insights emerge.
By Kachina Yeager, Shelley Buck, and Sage Yeager. Mni Wičoni. Water is life. For many of us, water truly is synonymous with life—and not only because human life as we understand it necessitates water for survival. For me, as a Dakota person who also happens to be a poet, I think of water as a type of lineage. I can use waterways as a map that transcends borders of nationhood, of spatial and temporal constraint. In this way, water is a map of not only my life, but all those lives interwoven into the same cycle of water.
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.
By Erik Martin Redix. The drive along the North Shore of Lake Superior between Duluth and the international border on Highway 61 is an iconic Minnesota experience. At just over three hours long, the trip offers unparalleled scenery in the upper Midwest. Visitors pass through a handful of small towns and over two dozen short scenic rivers along the shore of Lake Superior. These rivers are narrow and relatively short, descending anywhere from 20 to 40 miles down the rugged landscape of Minnesota’s North Shore into Lake Superior. For example, Brule Lake, the source of the Temperance River (and the South Brule River as well) sits 1,851 feet above sea level and, over 39 miles of North Shore terrain, it descends to 697 feet above sea level at its mouth. These steep descents result in dozens of waterfalls that beckon visitors from across Minnesota and North America.
The North Shore lies within the traditional historical territory of two modern tribal nations: the Grand Portage Band of Lake Superior Chippewa and the Fort William First Nation.
By Emily Levang. What if we related to water as our kin? I went to the St. Louis River estuary in early January together with my friend Cristin, who shares a dedication to care for this ecosystem. This estuary is the largest tributary to Lake Superior, which holds 10 percent of our entire world’s fresh surface water. As our world heads deeper into the water crisis, protecting this source of life is ever more vital. I try to begin with listening.
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…
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 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…
“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…