A ‘Truer, Messier’ Way of Knowing the Mississippi River

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. 

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.” 

Xavier Pittman grew up in Houston, largely disconnected from nature. When he arrived at Macalester, he had an intellectual understanding of why protecting the environment is important, but this wasn’t grounded in real-world experience. For Pittman, learning about wild rice harvesting from people who have been harvesting for generations, and about environmental movements from people deeply committed to them, was transformative.

One particularly memorable moment was when organizers from the Stop Line 3 movement — which opposed the expansion of an oil pipeline — guided students on a tour of the pipeline corridor to visualize the proximity of this environmental hazard to the cultural practices students were participating in.

 “[Now] I know these people, I’m talking to them face to face, I’m on this land, I’m making memories here,” says Pittman. “Now I have a stake in this thing.” 

The positive impacts of MROS are personal, coming in the form of budding relationships among people who hail from different places. While these relationships alone are insufficient to impact the plans of mining corporations, they are a necessary step towards building power to challenge the extractive industry. 

This is exactly what Kim sees as the role for educational collaborations like MROS: “The Open School tries to sustain awareness-raising … to contribute to efforts to resist ecological destruction.”

The MROS pedagogy can seem nebulous — even those steering the ship have struggled to define it. But this is by design, because the Open School is, well, open. 

Jeremy Meckler, grant coordinator and editorial manager of MROS, wrote in a piece published on the MROS website: “One of the central pedagogical goals is … a spirit of unplanned creative collaboration … that aims to tear down boundaries and hierarchies all in service of a truer, messier, and more complete model of teaching/learning.” 

Kim defines MROS as a “solidarity-based education program” to “reimagine higher education from the inside.”

“How to enact this guiding principle,” Meckler says, “is one of the things we’ve been trying to figure out for the last three years.” 

One way they’ve done so is by making the resources of higher education accessible to community partners who lead programming with students. In 2024, MROS supported Anishinaabe artist and cultural organizer Annie Humphrey’s retreat for Macalester BIPOC students, where they shared stories and learned about the intersections of art and activism. Both Smit and Pittman cite this experience as a highlight of their time at Macalester. As Smit points out, “One of the core values [of MROS] is that education is for everyone and institutional money is for everybody.” An Anishinaabe elder who shares stories with students is compensated just as a biologist lecturing on endangered fish species is. 

There have been challenges along the way. For students, adapting to a new education style with a looser structure can be difficult. “In school you’re given a role, you’re told what to do,” says Smit, “and in Open School, finding your own role can be challenging when you’ve been taught your whole life to follow directions.” At the start of the River Semester, some students had to adjust not only to camping for the first time, but also to a completely new learning structure. To succeed in MROS, students have to be willing to lean into uncertainty. 

There are also institutional challenges. Kim has written about the central role of higher education in reproducing dominant knowledge practices that allow for continued environmental devastation. Academic institutions, he notes, often treat people on the frontlines of economic and environmental struggles as objects to be studied rather than communities to form reciprocal learning relationships with.

“When you’re trying to do community-based work, you often come up against resistance and pushback from community organizers that are doing work with disadvantaged communities because colleges and universities have a tendency to extract labor from the work they’re doing on the ground,” Kim says. This tendency is rooted in history. For example, Washington University, an academic partner at the St. Louis river hub, has a history of benefiting directly from Indigenous genocide and exploitation of slavery, which went unaddressed for centuries and has created challenges in building trust with frontline communities.

Kim’s activist background and relationships of solidarity with many of the community organizers that MROS works with in Minnesota have made this a smaller hurdle at the headwaters river hub. 

However, the greatest challenge MROS faces is funding. The six hubs are each fiscally sponsored by a college or university and share a budget granted by the Mellon Foundation, which ends in 2026.

MROS pursued federal funding from the National Endowment for Humanities, but their proposal was effectively excluded by the Trump administration’s new criteria because “it ticked all the boxes: environmental justice, racial inequality, climate change,” says Kim.

Without funding, the sun will soon set on MROS, but its organizers already see it inspiring future projects. When the project was founded in 2022, it drew inspiration directly from two similar projects: the Nile River Project and the Clearwater cleanup project. The Nile River Project brought together musicians from across the Nile to raise awareness about water quality issues. Similarly, in the late 1960s, folk singer Pete Seeger built a 100-foot wooden boat, the sloop Clearwater, that traveled the Hudson River drawing attention to its polluted state. 

Now, the work that MROS has done over the past four years may have a similar legacy. MROS participants are already applying lessons to other rivers, including the Paraná River in South America, and Professor Kim is planning a project on the Amazon River. 

Smit, who graduated this spring, credits MROS as inspiration for planning a maple tree tapping event on campus and starting an “elder-in-residence” program at Macalester. As she explains, “Students have this wonderful example of what education can be and have created it in a lot of other spaces by breaking down the walls of the institution.”