Matter: Middle English: via Old French from Latin materia “timber, substance,” also “subject of discourse,” from mater “mother.”

“I am a teacher and I don’t want my students to believe, no matter how old or how young, that we are a conquered nation and we are gone. I want them to know that we are resilient, and we are still here. Our language and culture is intact and we hold all of our knowledge.” Anita Gates, of the Dakota Nation spoke these words on Friday afternoon of Field Station 1: Sediment, Settlement, Sentiment, while resting on a bench outside the co-operative farm Mississippi Mushrooms, at Upper Harbor Terminal, outside of Minneapolis.

It seems impossible to sense the changes the Mississippi River, its cultures and its ecologies have endured without foregrounding the aligned trajectory of the so-called biocultural diversity of the region. Native mother tongues—which tell stories shaped by relations and ways of life in places and through landscapes—spill out and over, exceeding the boundaries of frames like “biocultural” and “diversity.” This sensing must also include heterogeneous communicational traditions, and mother tongues, that settler-colonialist changes to the Mississippi have erased, also through Euro-American naming and nomenclature.

Artist Andrea Carlson, of Minnesotan and Ojibwe origin, tells us how language and the terms used to denote concepts matter. They matter not only imaginatively in their capacity for mattering, but also materially as the tale of Spirit Island demonstrates. Terms that abstract from place and personhood find uneasy companionship with Ojibwe ways of life—just as “field station” and “Anthropocene” rewrite our current moment as contemporary histories that tell different stories about a common world and uncommon histories. Even romanticized notions of “divine feminine”, often associated with indigenous women, Andrea tells us, distract from really knowing and actually loving indigenous women—knowing them by their names—on their terms:

In her video piece, entitled Anthropocene Refusal, screened atop of Lock and Dam Number 1, where Field Station 1 is playing out, Andrea tells the stories of ten Native women that live in around the Mississippi headwaters. Does the film help us, as viewers know these women? Andrea tells of fifteen-year-old Ojibwe activist Autumn Peltier, who delivered teachings of water at the United Nations. It was Autumn’s great aunt, Josephine Mandemin, who started the Water Walkers movement by carrying a copper bowl around Lake Superior. Autumn Peltier’s talk with the UN emphasized how we are all produced with and within water from the beginning — in the amniotic fluids we share with our mothers, their mothers, and the mothers before. Much like the continuous line of a beating heart through genealogical chains, as placental mammals, we are carried by and through an ancient river sourced within the vessel wombs of our mothers—a common, protective and nourishing matrilineal flow.

Even the anamniotes, amniotes, and wombless among us have river and mothering stories to tell. The endangered paddle-fish (Polyodon spathula)—or in Ojibwe Mayagi-name (pronounced nuh-may), meaning “strange sturgeon”—indigenous species in the upper Mississippi are vulnerable in part due to blocked passage up river to the shallow water locations they favor for egg spawning and breeding — blocked by the walls comprising Lock and Dam No 1. The closing down and blocking of a continuation in a 65 million year continuous line of life for this species, localizes the story of the Anthropocene in the deep time of the American paddle-fish. The species is popularly named the “primitive fish,”, as it has one of the oldest fossil records of animal life, dating c. 300-400 million years ago, 50 million years before the dinosaurs. It is artist Molly Avery who tells us this fish story, through a fictional entanglement between fish and human mother:

In Avery’s collaborative video piece Returning the River, a work projected onto the cement walls of the lock that blocks the paddle-fish journey, a mother goes to the Mississippi River to ask if she can bear a child. Molly tells us of her own motherhood on the Mississippi:

The river precipitates other histories of motherhood—mothers ferociously prevented from mothering. Amina Harper, collaborating with Andrea Carlson on Anthropocene Refusal, tells us another tale. Through its becoming as a capitalist and colonial transport thruway, the Mississippi River conveys memories of generational trauma from a slaving culture that took black babies from their mother’s arms to be sold down-river, exacting violent genealogical fissures and erasures. It is a relief, Amina tells us, to be able to think about and imagine the Mississippi River through another’s eyes, if only temporarily. Amina’s mother, who lives at the Mississippi headwaters at Lake Itasca, suggested that her daughter and her friend and colleague begin the film’s story at the source of these flows.

Motherhood and mother tongues percolate through the conversational tributaries that comprise the confluent passage way of Field Station 1 in the Twin Cities of Minneapolis—St Paul: Sediment, Settlement, Sentiment. As multiple as the river’s histories and mother tongues spoken in this region, these tales and embodiments locate river history most potently in the last term of this Field Station’s title. This section of the Anthropocene River seems to soak up, and soaks us in, the sentiment and care of tender—and sometimes thwarted—mothering.