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About Map Toolkits Calendar Themes Index
Toolkit River Semester
Farmers Markets, Community Gardens–Fighting Deserts with Greens
Morgan Piper Cordova

August 20, 2024
Along with fostering communities of care, these gardens work for the propagation of communal and cultural narratives. Not just in urban gardens, but in rural communities as well. Preserving narrative history also requires work and …
Repairing
Mutual Earthly Delights
Stephanie Lindquist

July 26, 2023
At the core of a just transition must be a cultural shift to respect water, earth, and all non-human beings. To recognize our delicate position within creation and honor and respect its limits.
Open School Teaching Storytelling Experiential River Semester Field Work Education Engagement
Navigating the Anthropocene River
Joe Underhill

October 01, 2022
A traveler’s guide to the (dis)comforts of being at home-in-the-world.
Crossing Repairing
Spirituality and Ecology: (Re)Membering Black Women’s Legacies
Ebony Aya

July 10, 2023
I no longer have to be cut off from my being. I no longer have to be cut off from the earth.
Repairing Welcoming Open School Talon Metals
An Artist Starts a Mine Tour Company
Sheila Regan, MinnPost
Shanai Matteson

July 08, 2024
"The town of Tamarack, Minnesota, in Aitkin County is named after a kind of pine tree that turns yellow in the fall and loses its needles in the winter. They often grow in wet areas like bogs or swamps, which there are a lot of in Aitkin …
Repairing Open School River Semester
Bookends: Reflections from the River Semester
Meira Smit

August 02, 2024
Meira Smit is a student at Macalester College who participated in the River Semester trip in fall 2023. These reflections explore her time on the river, in Minnesota at the beginning of the trip, and in Louisiana close to the river's mouth.
Crossing Sensing Violence Extraction Environmental Justice Ecology
The Remote Sensation of Disintegration
Imani Jacqueline Brown

November 21, 2022
Experimental film exploring Louisiana’s ecological bodies and their segregation by extractivism—the process of extracting natural resources from the Earth to sell on the world market—witnessed from the water of the Mississippi River, the …
Welcoming Crossing Open School Teaching Experiential Water Conversation
Water Language: A Conversation with Shanai Matteson and Oscar Tuazon
Shanai Matteson
Oscar Tuazon

November 14, 2022
From the Iron Range in Minnesota’s Northern reaches to industrial farming in the South, to the strength and vibrancy of its Native reservations, it’s impossible to write about rural Minnesota as a singular place. While urban areas …
Open School Repairing Engagement Field Study Field Work Reflection Conversation Infrastructure Engineering Speculative
Drawn Together
Aron Chang

November 11, 2022
In designing and operating large-scale infrastructures, humans tend toward fixity—despite increasingly dynamic conditions, such as those at play in the Mississippi River Delta context. The Anthropocene River Campus seminar “Un/bounded …
Open School Indigenous Science and Cosmology Learning from Place Fort Snelling Bdote
A River, Both Warm and Cool
Nelson Mondale

June 22, 2023
This conflict of observational processes and ways of thinking have led to centuries of invalidation of Indigenous science, which, as mentioned many times by Ethan, has proved again and again to offer observations that put one in harmony …
Open School River Semester
Mississippi Mud Book of Recipes
Morgan Piper Cordova

August 20, 2024
What follows is a series of stories and recipes taken from our trip down the Mississippi. Some of these stories are recounted from others’ experiences, others are my own, but every recipe was made and (at least partially) invented by us, …
Welcoming Experiment Reflection Storytelling Sound Media
Head Waters at the Headwaters
Jamie Allen
Temporary continent.

October 04, 2022
The United States of America is just under ten million square kilometers in surface area. Its most conterminous landmass is a topology of creases and folds, mountains and ridges, chasms and embankments. These create, among other divides, …
Toolkit River Semester
Persimmon Pudding; Wild Persimmon
Morgan Piper Cordova

August 20, 2024
Wild persimmon is unlike its domesticated varieties that are more commonly known. It is a squishy orange ball when ripe, and the whole fruit is edible (minus its distinctive green crown). The so-called oriental persimmon, of the varietal …
Monitoring Field Study Sound Experiment Water
Listening to the Mississippi
Monica Moses Haller
Sebastian Müllauer

October 04, 2022
Listening to the Mississippi is an iterative project that has unfolded since 2013 and currently manifests as a sound composition and traveling listening station. Using underwater recordings gathered in 2015 by artists Monica Haller and …
Toolkit
Learning In Place: A Community Harvest Camp Reflection
Shanai Matteson

October 07, 2024
Crossing Welcoming Repairing Storytelling Conversation Experiment History Ecology Species
On the Recuperative Mismanagement of a Cosmopolitan Fish
Sarah Lewison
Swan Parsons
Florian Ruland
Alexandra Toland
Andrew Yang

November 14, 2022
To close the opening week of The Shape of a Practice, artists created a convivial meal-at-a-distance with so-called invasive species. From a kitchen in Carbondale, Illinois, artist Sarah Lewison, alongside storyteller and soul food …
Welcoming Teaching Food Field Work Biodiversity Engagement Agriculture
Edible Encounters
Lynn Peemoeller

October 04, 2022
Edible Encounters gave us an opportunity to observe the contrast between the wild bursts of biodiversity in the marginal areas along the river and the widespread control of nature exemplified by the endless cornfields in this region. These …
Crossing Storytelling Radioactivity Imaginary Energy
Born Secret
Jeremy Bolen
Brian Holmes

October 05, 2022
The video follows this “Anthropocene mode of production” to its top-secret origin at Oak Ridge Laboratory, where the Manhattan Project drew on hydroelectric power furnished by the river-basin development program of the Tennessee Valley …
Repairing Field Work Settler Colonialism Landscape
After Extraction
Ryan Griffis

October 04, 2022
This field guide combines creative non-fiction and images to depict a partial history of extractive land use in Central Illinois, and is accompanied by a set of exercises, questions, and prompts that act as a tool for learning about the …
Repairing Open School Environmental Justice
Practicing (?) Environmental Justice
Sam Wegner

January 23, 2024
What is environmental justice? Is it a movement? Is it an outcome? What follows is my thought process on how environmental justice fits (or doesn’t) into bottom-up and top-down spaces; and how young people should seek to understand it.
Repairing Mining Extraction Infrastructure Water Talon Metals
Infrastructuring Inequality: Investigations of a Proposed Nickel Mine in Northern Minnesota
Alix Johnson

July 11, 2023
Educating the public and students about a controversial underground nickel mine in Tamarack, Minnesota to fuel the transition to electric vehicle (EV) drivership.
Open School Crossing Welcoming Repairing River Semester
River Semester Map and Daily Blog
River Semester

December 09, 2023
From August 28 - December 9, 2023, the River Semester travelled downstream with stops at river hubs along the way. Follow their progress as they travel downstream.
Toolkit River Semester
Angola Catfish
Morgan Piper Cordova

August 20, 2024
On the river near St. Francisville, just south of the Louisiana State Penitentiary, we met Bubby Foster with a cooler full of river monsters. He motored over to our boat in the midst of a crossing. It was late and we had just finished an …
Open School
The Shape of a River: Mississippi
Myriel Milićević

October 04, 2022
Students analyzed case studies on the Mississippi, developed their own questions, exchanged with the case study authors, and designed new maps of relationships. The work considered questions such as, what approaches and methods were used …
Crossing Experiment Reflection Storytelling Sound Media
Good River, Bad River, Little River, Big River
Temporary continent.

October 04, 2022
“Mississippi” is a francophone adulteration of Anishinaabe (Ojibwe, Algonquin) name given to the river, indicating something along the lines of how “great” or “big” a river it is. “People are enthralled by it,” Bob Chance, manager of …
Open School Slavery Violence Landscape Architecture Virtual
Shifting Landscapes: Urban Enslavement in Antebellum New Orleans
Walter Greason

February 08, 2023
Students and faculty around the world began to create new virtual and augmented reality projects like Sojourners' Trail - the first interactive, Afrofuturist classroom game. Sojourners' Trail featured a time-traveling framework to explore …
Welcoming Open School Crossing Repairing
Reflections on Confluence 2
Ebru Bodur
Nick Karpinski
Kendra Keefer
Ashish Kumar

September 28, 2023
From May 25th to May 28th, 2023, the Mississippi River Open School gathered in the Twin Cities for Confluence 2. These four reflections are a multi-faceted portrait of the Confluence.
Toolkit River Semester
Wild Rice: The Three Sisters
Morgan Piper Cordova

August 20, 2024
Ricing works this way: two people are in a canoe, aluminum in our case, one standing with a push pole and one sitting with a knocker in each hand. I held the push pole–and though we started early in the morning, the sun baked my flesh and …
Repairing
A Big River Continuum
Monique Verdin
Karen Goulet
Rebecca Dallinger

November 14, 2022
From the Iron Range in Minnesota’s Northern reaches to industrial farming in the South, to the strength and vibrancy of its Native reservations, it’s impossible to write about rural Minnesota as a singular place. While urban areas …
Toolkit Repairing
Indigenous-led Land Based Learning and Winter Camping Retreat in Minnesota Northwoods
Meira Smit

June 21, 2024
This trip prioritized BIPOC activists at Macalester who are interested in finding a healing space alongside stressful movement building work. We enjoyed the company of fellow activists and learned about the land in this 4-day winter …
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