This story was originally published by Reasons to be Cheerful
One week into the fall 2023 River Semester, a study away program stewarded by the Mississippi River Open School (MROS), Professor John Kim was on the brink of quitting. Nine college students and eight staff had just embarked on a 100-day educational journey, traversing the Mississippi River Basin by boat from the headwaters to the Gulf of Mexico.
Kim noticed that social interactions within the group that first week centered around TikTok dances. “It just felt like we were incapable of developing meaningful and substantive relationships with each other,” says Kim. Navigating the Mississippi River can be treacherous, and lacking social cohesion was potentially dangerous.
The Mississippi River Open School, founded in 2022, is an educational collaboration between academic institutions and community partners spanning six “river hubs” across the Mississippi River Basin. Each hub operates autonomously, deciding which regional organizations and individuals to work with, and they discuss each other’s work at annual meetings, or “confluences.”
MROS programs adopt an experiential, place-based education model, with students often learning directly from communities on the frontlines of environmental and economic justice struggles. By inverting the hierarchies of higher education, MROS aims to instill students with a sense of responsibility to protect the environment.
When the River Semester cohort arrived at MROS’s northernmost hub in Palisade, a rural town in Northern Minnesota, Kim’s concerns were soon assuaged.
This water-rich region is home to an abundance of manoomin, or wild rice, a vital food sacred to Indigenous cultures. Students and staff had one week to help Anishinaabe organizer Rory Wakemup and his family set up a wild rice harvest camp, after which 60 people were due to attend the camp. Harvest camps are annual gatherings of Indigenous cultural educators, environmental justice organizers and students. People from diverse backgrounds converge to share stories, make meals together, exchange knowledge, learn about the land from Indigenous people and harvest manoomin.
Kim credits the process of setting up infrastructure for the camp as the catalyst for the shift he witnessed in the River Semester group’s dynamic. “At the beginning we weren’t capable of working as a collective. But then over the course of that week, as we’re whittling knockers and putting up tents, that’s when we started congealing as a crew.”
Kim is a professor of media and cultural studies at Macalester College and a steward of the MROS collaboration. His work for MROS includes managing the budget, facilitating connections between regions and co-organizing events at the headwaters river hub.
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Meira Smit, a Macalester student on the River Semester, echoes Kim’s assessment: “Once we showed up to rice camp and we were with other people, our purpose together solidified and showed that we can work together.” The students and staff learned how to set up teepees, whittle knockers and poles (tools for harvesting manoomin), and identify which lakes were suitable for harvesting. Smit, an environmental studies major who “loves learning but hates school,” felt right at home.
Students also learned about the colonial histories surrounding harvest traditions. Participating in these Indigenous practices “makes the history of colonization much more close to you,” Smit explains. “Somebody attacked these practices; even as a non-native person, I could connect to the history of what we were doing.”
This is at the heart of MROS’ approach: Students are not passive consumers of knowledge, but active participants in their own education. Harvest camps are one site for achieving this place-based learning. Since the 2023 River Semester, MROS has co-organized several more harvest camps in collaboration with Indigenous communities.
The scars of colonialist resource extraction are imprinted on the Northern Minnesota landscape. Anishinaanbe people have endured centuries of forced displacement from coercive treaties, logging industry encroachment of treaty-protected lands and, recently, an oil corporation constructing a pipeline through reservations.
Today, new wounds are being opened. Talon Metals is planning a nickel-sulfide mine, part of what the EPA deems the most toxic industry in the U.S. Despite concerns raised by local residents and the neighboring Mille Lacs Band of Ojibwe, Talon claims that because some of the nickel is slated to be used in Tesla batteries, the mine will ultimately benefit the environment. This rests on the assertion that contributing to domestic electric vehicle manufacturing is worth the potentially devastating cost to local ecosystems and communities.
MROS stewards see place-based education that stirs a responsibility to protect the environment as crucial in this region that organizers are calling a “sacrifice zone.”
