Mississipi River Reflection

Reflection 2 I, as well as the majority of my fellow Minnesota citizens, have crossed the ‘sacred’ boundary of the headwaters between Lake Itasca and the Mississippi River. The experience was almost a rite of passage for the oldest group of kids at my summer camp. Every year the eldest group of teens took a day trip up to visit the headwaters. As a younger kid, I remember waiting patiently, returning to camp every year, until I was finally old enough to participate on the trip. The trip meant receiving a higher level of responsibility for yourself and your safety. It was a kind of graduation.

Reflecting back on this memory after reading the writings of Heyman and Solomonson, it seems this non-visual social achievement meant much more to
How Heyman illustrates his argument, I get the feeling that the nation’s leaders and nobles at the time were in a very frantic state. Tension and unease of all of this land they have ‘acquired’. This explains the violent and messy quality of the first expeditions and reports on the source of the Mississippi. This notion of territoriality is defined perfectly further on in Heyman’s work,

“‘typically human territoriality is seen as the strategy whereby individuals and groups exercise control over a given portion of space.’ But, as Agnew points out, ‘territoriality is put into practice through popular acceptance of classifications of space (e.g., ‘ours’ versus ‘yours’).’This is especially so when considering processes of colonization whereby territorial belonging is reassigned: territory that was once ‘theirs’ is made ‘ours’” (316,
Heyman writes,

“many recent scholars have begun looking at the ways that such scientific practices themselves constitute the very objects they purport to merely describe. This work holds that ‘nature’ or ‘social nature,’ should not be viewed as a pre-given and stable category but as socially constructed in the sense that ‘nature’ is made intelligible to us through various practices and discourses, among the most important of which are scientific ones” (305, 2010).

Even in 2016 an extensive article was posted to the Star Tribune by Wendell A. Duffield. Titled, “‘Why Lake Itasca may not be the headwaters of the Mississippi River”, the article is only concerned about what is written on our maps. “Should we call the stretch of the Mississippi between Itasca and Lake Bemidji the Little Mississippi? Should the Little Minnesota be renamed Minnesota? Hmmmm. Maybe the Little Minnesota and Minnesota Rivers should retain their present identities and join the Itasca River at the Twin Cities to become the Mississippi?” (Dunfeld, 2016) How is the only interest here renaming the water corridors and bodies, instead of being more concerned with the displacement of indigenous peoples that happened in the process of the first ‘naming’? Furthermore, why aren’t we as concerned with the scientific discovery that almost half of the entire