Guest Editor’s Introduction to Issue Thirteen: Water & Environmental Justice

By Simi Kang

Re-printed from: http://editions.lib.umn.edu/openrivers/article/guest-editors-introduction-to-issue-thirteen/

Dear readers,

The work collected here was written about and on the sovereign land of many First Nations. The place it was assembled — the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities — is a land-grant institution that operates on Mni Sota Makoce (called Minnesota), Dakota land, and alongside and over the Mississippi River[1] whose watershed is the major artery of Turtle Island (called North America).

While land acknowledgements often feel like folks checking a box on a list of things one must do as a good liberal, multicultural scholar, I think they are spaces for non-Indigenous settlers and arrivants[2] to begin reshaping our relationship to environment and water. As a mixed-race person whose families are composed of settlers and arrivants, I believe that learning about local histories (here, that includes The Dakota War of 1862, which was central to the U.S. government’s ongoing genocidal project) and patronizing American Indian–owned spaces for arts, business, and cultural production are politically imperative for those of us who live on settler colonial land.[3]…

Read the rest of Simi’s guest introduction and issue 13 of Open Rivers at: http://editions.lib.umn.edu/openrivers/article/guest-editors-introduction-to-issue-thirteen/

Simi Kang has been working with us on Field Station 1 activities.