Confluences along the Mississippi
The Mississippi river represents a confluence of the local and the global, visible through industry, culture, and the ecological changes the entire watershed has undergone. The Mississippi and its confluences have sustained and connected Native peoples across regions and millennia, and it continues to do so. For us, the word “confluence” doesn’t simply mean the meeting or junction of two rivers. We want to think about the different realities that rivers and their flows bring together, about the eddies created when history and the present clash, such as the historic processes of pollution, erosion, and flood control and how they have shaped the lives lived along the banks. We also want to keep our sights on the present and the Indigenous artists and activists who engage with the river today. Confluence is more than the joining of two waters, it is also the joining of multiple worlds, cultures, and temporalities; it isn’t a fixed moment in time but a constant becoming, a constant flow. It isn’t just the past, but the present, and the future as well.
