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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…

On November 29, 2016, fast food workers around the USA went on strike for a $15/hour wage. About 300 protesters gathered at Coffman Memorial Union and called on the Minneapolis City Council and the University of Minnesota to pass a $15/hour minimum wage for all Minneapolis workers. Image courtesy of Fibonacci Blue via Flickr. (CC BY 2.0)
Geographies

The College Union: Where Tradition Meets Decolonization on Campus

Higher education has undergone many changes since the first colleges in the old world came to be. Institutions of higher learning respond to societal pressures and needs, which means that education is ever evolving and dependent on the social context in which institutions find themselves. However, there is no denying that the first institutions of higher learning were not welcoming places for people not of the elite classes. These institutions were, and are, places where the education of future leaders has been the premier goal (Cohen and Kisker 2010). To achieve this goal, institutions of higher learning have employed a mixture of curricular, extra-curricular, and co-curricular tools…

Wild rice growing in northern Minnesota. Image via Superior National Forest, (CC BY 2.0), via Wikimedia Commons.
Perspectives

Data Science in Indian Country

At the end of July 2022, some 150 individuals from across the country gathered at the University of Minnesota Twin Cities for “Data Science in Indian Country,” the Fifth Geoscience Alliance Conference since 2010. Founded by Dr. Nievita Bueno Watts of  California State Polytechnic University, Humboldt (Cal Poly Humboldt), Prof. Anthony Berthelote of Salish Kootenai College, and Dr. Diana Dalbotten of the University of Minnesota’s St. Anthony Falls Laboratory, the Geoscience Alliance (GA) is a coalition of students, educators and staff, Indigenous community members, and others committed to broadening the participation of Native Americans, Alaska Natives, and people of Native Hawai’ian ancestry in the geosciences…

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.

Defensoras and allies on retreat in Celendín. Image courtesy of Natalia Guzmán Solano.
Feature (Peer Review)

Formless Like Water: Defensoras and the Work of Water Protection

In this article, I write about defensoras del agua y medio ambiente, water and environmental defenders: the women participating in an anti-extractivist struggle in northern Peru, defending water against the expansion of a large-scale mining operation in Celendín’s headwaters which mobilized a social movement against state and corporate forces attempting to expand the Yanacocha mine to nearby territory.

Women working at a laundry site at Ch'onggye Stream, circa 1930s.
Feature (Peer Review)

Women and Urban Waterways in Korean Modernist Literature

Pak T’ae-wŏn’s 1938 modernist novel Scenes from Ch’ŏnggye Stream (Ch’ŏnbyŏn p’unggyŏng, 천변풍경) is one thought-provoking example of these human-environment relationships in literature.  Scenes from Ch’ŏnggye Stream provides an intimate portrayal of ordinary life for lower-class Koreans living along the Ch’ŏnggye Stream in a rapidly urbanizing and modernizing 1930s Seoul under Japanese occupation; it reveals how environmental, social, and political factors can mingle together to influence urban river environments and culture.

Detail From Figure 8. Point Hudson, a well-known camping spot for Indigenous individuals who were traveling to hop fields in search of work. Image courtesy of Alexandra Peck.
Feature

Mariners, Makers, Matriarchs: Changing Relationships Between Coast Salish Women & Water

Historically, Coast Salish female identity depended upon water. Waterways provided women with countless economic opportunities, fostered family ties, created plentiful food sources, and encouraged female autonomy. Even as female maritime practices changed drastically throughout the pre-colonial and colonial periods, Coast Salish women imagined new ways to maintain connections to water.

Harris County flood rescue. Image by Lt. Zachary West, 100th MPAD/Texas Military Department.
Geographies

Floodplains and Hurricanes: Mapping Natural Disasters to Uncover Vulnerable Communities

Using GIS mapping, I can identify at-risk communities most impacted by water-related natural disasters in the Houston Metropolitan Area (HMA), which is highly susceptible to hurricanes, tropical storms, and excessive flooding. Geospatial analysis reveals that at-risk communities are not randomly distributed throughout the HMA; populations like women and children are at higher risk of disproportionate outcomes during flooding events.