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 11th).
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?
