Agléška R. Cohen-Rencountre (PhD student in American Studies, U of Minnesota):
The Bdote, “where the two waters come together,” at the confluence of the Mississippi and Missouri Rivers.
Questions to mull over:
- What are the individual stakes or outcomes that each of us are envisioning (this might be in academic terms; in collaborative practices; in terms of our own art and activism; in terms of our institutional and public pedagogies, etc.)
This is a really special project to me because I have the opportunity to engage active healing in terms of my ancestral stories that I have just begun to learn about.
The stakes include insider/outsider positionality as a descendant of Dakota exile and Fort Snelling imprisonment, as well as an Indigenous researcher, and as an Ina (mother) to my Dakota children.
I envision both the academic and collaborative practices being paramount to my growth through this work. I want to further entangle myself within my Indigenous, Dakota and Lakota responsibilities and the opportunities that I can both create and receive through my home institution.
- What are the conceptual stakes for each of us in a project that exists at the confluence of academic notions of the humanities and walls, and of Native notions of humanness as it is forged in relation to rivers?
I recall being at the headwaters and later talking within our group, questioning what significance the headwaters held and holds for Dakota and Ojibwe people. That question helped me de-naturalize the western ontological gaze of the cartographers who represent imperialism.
As far as Native notions of humanness and how it is shaped by rivers, this is the heart of what I will become further entangled in. I have heard that there is a place near Fort Snelling (presumably The Bdote—for there may be many such places), where during the winter the river freezes and you can step inside a tunnel of frozen water and listen to the river. If I have remembered correctly and this is something I will experience, it is a source of future humanness that I have yet to experience but already wish to share with others—especially my wife and our children. Growing up as kids we always had access to our local lakes and creeks. It was a given that one would familiarize oneself to them all every chance that there was – and we did thanks to my parents. When we got older, growing up during the winter meant knowing about death near the water, so for me the seasonal changes near the water were really stark. This new and important way to familiarize myself to the Mississippi, from season to season is a confluence of inter-tribal affiliation, intergenerational healing, and multidisciplinary collaboration. I know that sacred sites are not really for me say much about in terms of what the stakes are. Which is also to say that I am deeply invested in them but do not really need or have a way of writing about what this means in terms of humanness.
- How are we as individuals and as collaborators conceiving of “changing climates”?
Changing climates means looking at the health of the ecosystems that each prospective agency of recreation, fishing, dumping, and extraction exact upon the overall health of the water. Changing climates due to reintroduction of native species (wolf), or protection of them (eel), are something that I am aware of but do not yet understand through the specific innumerable lifeways hosted by the Mississippi. Finally, climate change in terms of global warming remind me of a music video that Vince shared with us ‘Rise : From One Island to Another’. The anonymous author writes on the collective’s website an invitation to viewers that reads: “Watch this poetic expedition between two islanders, one from the Marshall Islands, and one from Kalaallit Nunaat (Greenland), connecting their realities of melting glaciers and rising sea levels. Kathy Jetñil-Kijiner and Aka Niviâna use their poetry to showcase the linkages between their homelands in the face of climate change.”
The cinematography and poem have stayed with me. The imagery unhinged my land-based, ‘fly-over state’, mixed rural/urban positionalities. When I think of climate change I do not just see weary scientists defending their research in faraway lecture halls, or climate change deniers taking up where pro- Indian Termination fishing and hunting sportsman leave off. I now feel the call from all around, through the water right at my fingertips of my home, local areas and the ocean. All connected through prayer and activism. Through beautiful poetry that connects rather than disaggregates knowledge.
