Portions of the Upper Mississippi River form what is known as an “anastomosed stream,” or a set of stable braided channels, which suggests a way of thinking about an “Anthropocene curriculum” as the ongoing processes of flowing together, separating, and swirling back, as one travels downstream into the uncertainties that lie ahead. The geomorphological process of anastomosis is defined as the “creation of mouths” in a stream, an idea that resonates with the idea of how curricula can become multivocal. This framing takes inspiration from botanist and ecologist Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass,0.3.1 in which she describes her work as the braiding together of traditional ecological knowledge (TEK), Western science, and her own life story. Another core reference is the River Semester0.3.2 organized by Augsburg University in Minneapolis, Minnesota, which offers a full semester of courses for domestic and international students as they travel for one hundred days on and along the Mississippi River.

In moving through the set of research items of this pathway, which considers questions of curricula by tracing the flow of the Mississippi River, we can think of a set of interwoven themes and a final confluence, sketched out below. These channels roughly correspond to the various regions through which students on the River Semester program travel, from the headwaters to the sea, and to the importance of listening, paying attention to many voices, and moving forward despite the lack of a single clear path ahead.

At the Mississippi’s headwaters at Lake Itasca in Northern Minnesota, we begin conceptually with the “river itself” and the most significant sociopolitical reality that defines it: the ongoing legacies of and resistances to settler colonialism and slavery. This history in particular requires that we begin the journey with a land acknowledgment.0.3.3 TEK likewise invites us to listen to and learn from the river itself—here in the form of a set of evocative underwater recordings.0.3.4 The river also speaks the language of mud, flow, and sediment, a language understood by geologists. There is much to learn from attending to that register.0.3.5 Considering language from the vantage point of TEK, and how and where knowledge is produced, artist Andrea Carlson calls into question the very concept of the Anthropocene.0.3.6

Moving downstream, we enter into spaces more profoundly shaped by Western frames, within which we can listen to the river speaking in other modalities, including that of legal personhood.0.3.7 In the Minneapolis–St. Paul area, the river becomes a commercial highway for massive amounts of products such as corn, soybean, oil, and scrap metal, shipped by barge and rail. The economic prerogatives of these commodity flows drive the massive engineering of the river and the industrialized agriculture in the watershed.0.3.8 These large-scale infrastructural projects are likewise reflected in the epistemology of agriculture’s associated big data.0.3.9 Petrochemical facilities and pipelines are present along the entire length of the river, which gradually become more apparent as one nears the Gulf of Mexico, connecting the Mississippi as part of a “planetary reactor.”0.3.10 Heading into the Mississippi Delta, legacies of slavery and the dynamics of the Plantationocene become increasingly apparent,0.3.11 and along with them so do manifold forms of resistance and creative response.0.3.12 A core aspect of this context—one that likewise runs the length of the river—is the “emotional river,” constituted by the human reactions to the harms and injustices that have been perpetrated along the way. To understand the human experiences in the watershed, we need to listen to the stories of loss, solastalgia, fierce anger, and hope told along this passage through this troubling landscape. You will recognize these powerful undercurrents in all the readings, and clearly articulated by BIPOC voices in St. Louis, Missouri,0.3.13 and Indigenous communities living along the Gulf of Mexico.0.3.14

Lastly, we reach the Delta and the sea, conceived of here as a final confluence, where the results of the multiple braided channels become manifest. This brings us to the realm of action, translation, and connection to the polis as we struggle to make the meaningful changes needed to address the seemingly overwhelming challenges of the Anthropocene. We must remake all our relations from the bottom up, from the headwaters to the sea, and back again. Bon voyage.