Andrew M. Freiman (PhD student in English, U of Mississippi): River Talk

Decades before I was born my great grandfather on my father’s side went to work on the banks of the lower Mississippi. He maintained lights on the levy system to make sure that barges and other watercraft could position themselves in the deepest areas of the river. One day, early in the morning, a wire shorted and electrocuted him. He fell into the river and drowned. He had known the water for years. His family slowly moved downstream from St. Louis where they first arrived from Prussia in 1865. The river was, in some ways, what he knew best about America—maybe all he knew. My mother’s family moved into Mississippi after the 1830s—once it had been stolen from the Choctaw and Cherokee. I am from a settler-colonial family that has always (in their own way) been drawn to the Mississippi river.

I have known the river my entire life, but that knowledge was predicated on ignorance, the whitewashing of this land’s native and indigenous past—histories, realities, ongoing struggles, that I am only beginning to understand. This knowledge is a gift, and I am honored to be able to learn with and be taught by the scholars and students that are part of our collaborative project.

One of the things we often talked about during our trip is the problem of representation/ visualization—how can we visually represent human interaction with an ecological area while also keeping in mind the spiritual stories that go along with it? How can we create images, presentations, videos, etc. showing the affective possibilities of a place? Sometimes these questions were geographically and temporally expansive—how to visualize water in the Mississippi River valley overtime (100s of years, for instance)? And others were maybe materially impossible—could we find some of the land around Lake Itasca soaked by animal fat from ancient dinners? Could we hold it? Sara’s photo-essay answers many of these questions, and so does Bonnie’s sketches. While in Minnesota and while reading Sara’s and Bonnie’s work I found myself thinking about these questions in new ways—orchestrated through voices, layered in ways seen and unseen.

I’ve always been interested in the visuality of info graphics (please check out Bonnie’s work!) and I found myself trying to imagine a map of movement in the state of Minnesota seen from a fixed perspective high overhead (maybe from the vantage point of a thunderbird?). I imagined witnessing glacial movement, the movement of grasslands and forests north; seeing how human life suddenly thrived and later how the Dakota and Ho-Chunk were forced out of the state by white settler-colonialism in all of its different entities and machinations. The creation of wagon trails, railways, highways; planes and jets shooting across the sky. How bodies, food, products, and everything else now move through the state at every hour of every day gliding on rubber wheels over blacktop ribbons in every direction. Then I imagined this information through weight, carbon footprint, types of weaponry, amount of people killed directly or indirectly by our individual lives. Ages groups, types of diets, proximity of foodstuffs, types and amounts of waste—the list goes on and on. In the virtual reality of my mind I noticed that (more or less) the land stayed patiently put. At least it seems that way from our speedy perspective in the fast lane of modernity. In this moving map the waters of the state have been dancing their dances and the earth has been breathing, some of it making its long, slow walk to the Gulf of Mexico.

At different points of the trip and at different points of the river I took out my phone and made short minute-long videos—as a way to try and capture that world that seems so still yet is the most important element of all the stories we share with each other whether they are personal, cultural, or spiritual (none of these are mutually exclusive). The land isn’t the backdrop of our lives. It isn’t just a landscape that is either beautiful or in need of human intervention—the land, as the Dakota have always known is Maka Ina, earth mother. The hands that hold and nourish us. Everything that raises us.

Click the Image for a Video from the Headwaters

We offered our prayers to the river. Offered tobacco. We thanked the water and each other, were silent and humbled.

The lake is 1,475 feet above sea level and 2,340 miles from the Gulf of Mexico. The water takes around 90 days to make the trip and along the way gathers with other water from over a million square miles of the country.

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At these stones the lake begins to flow as a river to the Gulf of Mexico. Some of us took off our shoes and walked into the water. Others moved back and forth over the stones or the small footbridge downstream. Others sat on the bank and watched as the waters continually birthed a new world. This water will reach the Gulf of Mexico in 90 days (December 11^th).

In the Gulf this water will see oil rigs and pipelines, maybe taste oil or gasoline too.

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At five o’clock in the morning I recorded the sky through the trees—the sounds of birds waking up the rest of the woods, the sound of water under the bridge. After this recording I walked back to the lake and went swimming in the cold waters.

When I was 8, I swam in the Mississippi at Memphis, Tennessee with my family. This is the first time I can remember swimming in this river. Swimming here at 35 was so important to me I’m not sure how to share it, if I even want to.

This time was my first real and only lasting baptism.

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We met with Sharon Day, an Ojibwe activist and medicine woman, at Hidden Falls Regional Park over dinner. She walks along the country’s rivers to raise awareness of their ecological health while also reminding us that clean water means life.

She spoke of taking water from the Gulf back to its source to remind it what it once was, so that the two could speak to one another, share their stories together. So that the waters could know that there are good people who still know and still love its world. Imagine what the water had to say about the hands that carried it, the voices that prayed; imagine what the water already knew.

That water has a language, a memory, that water can gossip.

Imagine what it would say about us after 90 days of travel and an industrial corridor?

This post originally appeared in November of 2015.

Every American has seen this picture, Norman Rockwell’s “Freedom from Want,” published in the November 1943 issue of The Saturday Evening Post.

To some, it’s a joke. The perfect white family (perfectly white) are all smiles as they prepare to carve the bird. Dad is wearing his tie for the occasion, but mom has on her sturdy print dress and practical apron. Rockwell frames the iconic moment of American thanksgiving as a family snapshot, with uncles and aunts, kids and cousins, just leaning into frame, all sharing a laugh–probably about last thanksgiving. The dog ate one of the pies; mom forgot to turn the oven on, so dinner was really late.

Yet, the 1943 context for “Freedom from Want” is war. Look at the meal. It is paltry by comparison to many American Thanksgiving meals today. A few sticks of celery, pickles, and jellied cranberries are all that accompany the rich roasted turkey at the illustration’s center. There might be something more exotic beneath the lid of the silver server in the foreground, but I bet it’s potatoes.

Where are the candied yams, the marshmallows, the heaping plate of green beans, corn, store-bought dinner rolls, the Readi Whip? That would come after the war. In 1943—with everything from butter to tires being rationed—this was indeed a great meal. This is what the young men and women who would normally be at the table in peacetime were off fighting for.

Another important context for the illustration is an essay of the same title by the Filipino farmworker-turned-activist, Carlos Bulosan. The editors of the Post asked Bulosan for a piece to accompany Rockwell’s painting. For Bulosan, the Thanksgiving feast brings to mind laborers like himself, who harvest the crops that adorn the holiday table. “So long as the fruit of our labor is denied us,” he explains, “so long will want manifest itself in a world of slaves.” Tough words. Hard to wash down with gravy and stuffing. For the everyday worker in the fields, “It is only when we have plenty to eat—plenty of everything— that we begin to understand what freedom means.”

But what does this have to do with repatriation? Actually, more than you’d think. With the exception of marshmellows and whipped cream in a can, the iconic dishes of the middle class American Thanksgiving are indigenous to the western hemisphere. Thus we pause this week to remember and to repatriate the foods native to this hemisphere—unadulterated and sustainably grown and harvested—to the late-autumn feast.

Varieties of Andean potatoes, new to the old world in 1492.

“Indians” are there too, they’re just (as Philip Deloria would say) “in unexpected places.”

When Bulosan makes his pitch for better treatment of the working poor, he does so as a immigrant whose faith in America is based in a kind of second-hand manifest destiny: “Our history has many strands of fear and hope that snarl and converge at several points in time and space. We clear the forest and the mountains of the land. We cross the river and the wind. We harness wild beast and living steel. We celebrate labor, wisdom, peace of the soul.”

The cleared forests and leveled mountains are Indian land and they no longer produce the corn, beans, and squash—the wild turkeys, venison, and waterfowl—that furnished the first Anglo-American Thanksgiving table.

Even as he pleads for justice for the worker of the fields, Bulosan elides the primal scene of want—Native peoples standing in ration lines.

Ration Day at the Commissary, Pine Ridge Reservation, S.D. (1891) Nebraska State Historical Society.

Corn fields set ablaze by the troops of “freedom.” Mountains ground down for precious metals, uranium, and coal.

But this post is not intended as a “gotcha” moment for Carlos Bulosan and Norman Rockwell, nor an indictment of giving thanks for a bountiful harvest. It is a plea for the repatriation of our indigenous foodstuffs and their former land base to a state of sustainability.

Making maple syrup at the Meskwaki Settlement . Photo courtesy of the Meskwaki Tribal Museum.

Contemporary Native American communities are  showing us the way. In Iowa, the Meskwaki Nation is engaged in developing its own Meskwaki Food Sovereignty Initiative (MFSI), a constellation of “local and traditional foods initiatives on the Settlement. MFSI has two main focuses: Education and outreach around food system control; Development of sustainable local farms and farmers.” Among the Meskwaki Nation’s traditional foods: maple syrup.

At the White Earth Land Recovery Project facility, brothers Wayne (sitting) and Gordon Stevens harvest some wild rice on lower Rice Lake.

The MFSI is joined by hundreds of similar organizations across the hemisphere. Northwest Indian College (NWIC)  at Lummi Nation near Bellingham, Washington hosts a Traditional Plants and Foods Program. This program “is a long-term general wellness and diabetes prevention program that recognizes the therapeutic value of traditional foods and medicines.” It features  gatherings “hosted by many tribal communities,” as well as “educational resources, tribal community workshops, and more.” [http://nwicplantsandfoods.com/our-programs]. At the White Earth Nation in northwestern Minnesota, Anishinaabe peoples have established the White Earth Land Recovery Project in order to “facilitate the recovery of the original land base of the White Earth Indian Reservation while preserving and restoring traditional practices of sound land stewardship, language fluency, community development, and strengthening our spiritual and cultural heritage.” [http://welrp.org/]

Wild rice from the Ojibwe lakes of Minnesota; maple syrup from Ojibwe and Meskwaki “sugar bush;”

mesquite beans on the Tohono O’Odham lands of Arizona and Sonora; acorns the Pomo harvested on California’s great Oak savannas;

wild caught salmon from the northern watersheds the Tlingit have fished for a thousand years.    These are the harvests for which we should give thanks and work to ensure their lasting place in our world.

Finally, this repatriation of indigenous plants and animals is one way to address the cruelties of the “freedom” and “want” nexus that Bulosan pointed out so many years ago—not only for the working poor, but also the middle class Euro-American descendents of the family Rockwell depicts in his painting.

Salmon drying in Tlingit country.

We can return this hemisphere, this Indian country, to some semblance of its fecundity and health, but we must do so together—the sons and daughters of immigrant laborers, suburban generations with alphabetic acronyms, Native Americans in the lower 48, Kānaka Maoli of the Hawaiian Islands, Native Alaskans near the Arctic Circle. The earth has grown much smaller (and hotter) since Rockwell painted “Freedom from Want” and we know perhaps better than he and Carlos Bulosan the consequences of inaction. Instead of “clearing” the indigenous lands and peoples, we should embrace both it and them.

Santee Sioux intellectual and activist Vine Deloria, Jr. foresaw the choices we now face, and the role of indigenous communities in solving them:

When the Indian considers the modern world, . . . he sees it being inevitably drawn into social structures in which tribalism appears to be the only valid form of supra-individual participation. The humor becomes apparent when the Indian realizes that if he simply steps to the sidelines and watches the rat race go past him, soon people will be coming to him to advise him to advise him to return to tribalism. I appears to many Indians that someday soon the modern world will be ready to understand itself and, perhaps, Indian people (“Custer Died for your Sins,” 226).

Deloria wrote this in 1969, and while the word tribalism may seem outdated or dangerous to some who associate it with extremism and fundamentalism, for Deloria it was quite the opposite. It was the way humans gathered together for companionship and preservation long before there was anything like nationhood and its oxymoronic pursuit of freedom at the expense of community.

Centuries ago, colonists demoted indigenous women from leadership roles. We’ve been fighting to get them back ever since.

Source: Perspective | Two Native American women are headed to Congress. This is why it matters.

According to a recent article in Indianz.com, “one of the biggest threats facing tribal sovereignty are the coordinated attacks on the Indian Child Welfare Act.”

Enacted in 1978, the Indian Child Welfare Act (ICWA), intends “…to protect the best interest of Indian Children and to promote the stability and security of Indian tribes and families by the establishment of minimum Federal standards for the removal of Indian children and placement of such children in homes which will reflect the unique values of Indian culture… “(25 U.S. C. 1902). ICWA provides guidance to States regarding the handling of child abuse and neglect and adoption cases involving Native children and sets minimum standards for the handling of these cases.­­­­­­­­­” (Bureau of Indian Affairs).

At the time of its passage, many Native communities were experiencing an epidemic of out-adoption of their children to non-Native families through the intervention of state and private adoption agencies. A staggering 25%-35% of Native children had been removed from the homes of their parents, and of these, some 85% were re-located outside their home communities.

Today, there are efforts underway in the courts to strip ICWA of its regulatory muscle.

On October 4, Reed O’Connor, a federal circuit judge in Texas, handed down a decision in a civil action brought by Texas, Louisiana, Indiana that characterized ICWA as a “race-based statute” that doesn’t meet the “strict scrutiny” required for such laws.

Supporters of the Indian Child Welfare Act at the National Indian Child Welfare Association (NICWA) argue that in order to arrive at his decision, O’Conner “had to ignore decades of federal court precedent that affirmed inherent tribal sovereignty and the government-to-government relationship between tribal nations and the United States as enshrined in the U.S. Constitution, countless federal laws, and treaties between tribal nations and the U.S. government.”

In a statement, the group offered their assessment of the Judge’s rulling:

NICWA is . . . concerned how this will impact tribal-state relations and ongoing efforts to implement ICWA’s 2016 regulations. This includes efforts underway between states and tribes to develop intergovernmental agreements, enforce state ICWA laws, participate in court collaborations, train caseworkers and attorneys, share program resources and information, and support administrative policy development. With increasing cooperation between states and tribes to implement ICWA, there are very serious questions about how this will impact the progress being made and the potential to return to widespread increases in the number of vulnerable Native children being removed from their homes and communities.

The Repatriation Files shares these concerns.

Tribal leaders and tribal citizens at the 75th anniversary of the National Congress of American Indians in Denver, Colorado, on October 24, 2018, where they heard from Sarah Kastelic, the executive director of the NICWA. Photo by Indianz.Com

Sources: ‘Intentional and direct attack’: Tribes vow fight for Indian Child Welfare Act

https://www.nicwa.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/Setting-the-Record-Straight-2018.pdf

PINE RIDGE, S.D. – When Craig Howe announced he was looking for Lakota artists to create work for an exhibit that focused on the Wounded Knee Massacre, he wasn’t short on takers. Twenty-eight pieces by 30 artists are now on display at the Red Cloud Heritage Center as part of “Takuwe” (“Why”).

Source: Wounded Knee Exhibit Explores Tragedy

“Beggars and peasants assembled for Indian meal, July 1847” Nation Library of Ireland.

Last summer, The Repatriation Files recounted the story of how in March of 1847, members of the Choctaw Nation in Scullyville, Oklahoma started a fund-raiser for the people of Ireland, who were suffering through the dreadful Famine. The $170 they raised that day and sent to the Irish has been calculated to be the equivalent of over   $ 4,000 today—an amazing act of generosity from a community just ten years after their own removal from their homelands to the east by the US government.

Now the Republic of Ireland has established a scholarship to support Choctaw students who wish to study in Ireland.

The Irish Times reports that Leo Varadker, the Republic of Ireland’s leader (a post known as Taoiseach) recently outlined the program in a public speech in which he said the Choctaw Gift had “never been, and never will be, forgotten in Ireland.” (Read more)

To read more about the Choctaw Gift, see “Remembering the Choctaw Gift.”

For three years, Nicola Okin Frioli has followed the last of the Zaparas.

Photos By Nicola Okin Frioli. Photo Editor Nick Kirkpatrick. Writer Olivier Laurent

Source: Perspective | ‘Guardians’ of the Ecuadoran Amazon

http://www.bbc.com/news/world-latin-america-42916261

Scientists using high-tech, airplane-based lidar mapping tools have discovered tens of thousands of structures constructed by the Maya.

Sources: Maya civilization was much vaster than known, thousands of newly discovered structures reveal

http://www.bbc.com/news/world-latin-america-42916261

2,000 years ago, people domesticated these plants. Now they’re wild weeds. What happened?

Natalie Mueller is an archaeobotanist at Cornell University who has spent years hunting for erect knotweed across the southern US and up into Ohio and Illinois. She calls her quest the “Survey for Lost Crops,” and admits cheerfully that its members consist of her and “whoever I can drag along.” She’s published papers about her work in Nature, but also she spins yarns about her hot, bug-infested summer expeditions for lost farms on her blog. There, photographs of the rare wild plants are interspersed with humorous musings on contemporary local food delicacies like pickle pops.

Source: Hunting for the ancient lost farms of North America