Interdisciplinary, Collaborative,
Place-based Research

Indigenous Mississippi reflects our work together on an interdisciplinary, multi-university, multi-year research project on Indigenous art and activism about the Mississippi River. As scholars working in consultation with Indigenous artists, activists, and knowledge keepers, we studied the Mississippi River Valley as a bellwether of changing climates, and we asked how Indigenous art and activism engages and contests those changes. We focused on the river valley’s environmental changes and on its changing climates of colonialism, by which settler colonists have attempted to justify claims to the river valley and re-engineer its flows. These changes manifested in shifting racial, economic, and political climates. Amidst them, the river valley’s Indigenous peoples created and continue to create art and activism that exert continued rights to their homelands, notwithstanding national and corporate claims to land and water.  

Like our project, this website follows the river and its flows to study how Indigenous peoples confront life and make art in the midst of changing climates. Collaboration was a central methodology: we met together in locations along the river over the course of three years, beginning in Ojibwe, Dakota, and Ho-Chunk lands on the upper parts of the river, continuing to Ojibwe, Odawa, Potawatomi, Miami, Menominee, and Ho-Chunk lands in the river’s middle section, and going on to Chickasaw, Choctaw, and Quapaw lands in the river’s southern reaches.  This website reflects both the ongoing conversations of the grant participants and our conversations with Indigenous artists and activists.   

The site navigation map for this website is based on the petroglyph known as “Commerce Rock.” Located about 40 miles above the confluence of the Ohio and Mississippi rivers and 130 miles south of Cahokia, the petroglyph rock maps places of significance to Indigenous peoples traveling along the Mississippi River, and we use it here to orient our travels along and thinking with the river.