Where it flows through the Twin Cities, the Upper Mississippi is in the process of radical transformation. What was a lifeline for industry—logistics, transportation, power—is being reimagined as a river for the twenty-first century. Bit by bit, the infrastructure that reshaped the river and facilitated the rise of the Twin Cities is being abandoned and repurposed. Take, for instance, the Upper St. Anthony Falls Lock, permanently closed in 2015 to prevent the spread of invasive species. The city, the National Park Service (NPS), and others, who collectively aim to “reposition the Lock as a unique destination on the Central Riverfront,” are harnessing this once-essential point of commercial navigation.11Friends of the Lock & Dam, “The Falls Initiative.” The Falls, October 22, 2019: thefalls.org/about/the-falls-initiative

When the US Army Corps of Engineers closed the Upper St. Anthony Falls Lock, the Upper Harbor Terminal (UHT), which is the northernmost port of the Mississippi River, was rendered obsolete. Under the aegis of urban revitalization, the publicly held land that houses the UHT and forms the longest contiguous stretch of real estate on the Mississippi River has been offered to developers who have proposed building a destination music venue, housing, and commercial space on the site—all heavily subsidized by taxpayers.

In tandem with these developments, the Army Corps began its formal “Disposition Study” in 2017 to decide whether it should retain ownership of the Upper St. Anthony Lock, the Lower St. Anthony Lock and Dam near downtown Minneapolis, and Lock and Dam No. 1 by the Ford Parkway Bridge. Some advocates of the potential decommissioning of the dam aim to “rewild” the river, returning the river gorge in Minneapolis to rapids and functionally ending the Mississippi’s role as an industrial river.

We take these and other processes of de-industrialization in and around the Twin Cities as a starting point for an investigation of the histories and practices that formed the industrial river and the futures imagined for it. How do processes of de-industrialization open up spaces to think through the ways the river has been, and continues to be, shaped by colonial and capitalist processes? What are our investments—social, financial, and personal—in the river’s future? How does river infrastructure—present, past, and future—shape the social and environmental lives of the river?

We insist that positioning the Mississippi as an “Anthropocene River” requires an examination of the layers of social, ecological, and technical interventions made upon it. Congress first authorized the Army Corps of Engineers to construct six dams in the headwaters region between 1880 and 1907. In 1910, the Corps built America’s first national dam with a hydroelectric plant at Lock and Dam No. 1 in St. Paul. Today, the Corps operates a “stairway of water” that consists of twenty-nine locks and dams on the Upper Mississippi River between Minneapolis and St. Louis. Perhaps less well known is that a proposal for the Meeker Lock and Dam, the first lock and dam built in the Twin Cities, had already been put forward in the 1850s. This proposal imagined the river as industrial infrastructure and situated it within the singular space of the settler nation-state fifty years before building actually commenced. The remaking of the river for the circulation of commodities and the generation of electricity transformed not only the river, but the value and “best use” of land adjacent to it, as the timber-, flour milling-, manufacturing-, and shipping industries claimed the riverfront.

In this recounting, we must underscore that it is not possible to separate the river’s industrial past and imagined futures from histories of settler colonialism, the dispossession of native land, and genocide. In the processes of claiming the river as a commercial resource, there was both a disregard for the sacredness of sites belonging to the Dakota people along the Upper Mississippi and abuse of hallowed land. Bdote, the confluence of the Mississippi and Minnesota rivers and central to Dakota spirituality and history, was turned into a military base and concentration camp for the Dakota themselves during the Dakota War of 1862. Similarly, an area near ancient burial mounds that became known as Pig’s Eye was converted to a rail yard and a dumping ground for toxic waste. Likewise, Wakan Tipi, a cave that holds spiritual significance for Dakota and other Indigenous peoples, became the site of a brewery, rail yard, and industry.

Neither can one separate the Mississippi’s industrial past from the violence of slavery, anti-Blackness, and the ongoing dispossession and marginalization of African American communities. Before the Civil War, ports along the river were used extensively in the slave trade, including for transporting slaves—like Dred Scott—to otherwise “free” states like Minnesota. In the twentieth century, zoning and redlining practices in Minneapolis segregated African American populations into neighborhoods like North Minneapolis, simultaneously barring access to the riverfront while exposing residents to the toxic effects of industry. Today, struggles over the future of the Upper Harbor Terminal carry these pasts into the present.

As industries have migrated away from the river, as railroads and then interstate highways have displaced barges with trains and trucks, and as manufacturers have closed local plants to exploit cheaper labor overseas, perceptions of the river as a social, cultural, and financial resource are changing. We, as scholars, artists, and practitioners invested in the river’s future, provide context for these intersecting streams of history that manifest within the de-industrializing Upper Mississippi. What is the relation between these pasts and our de-industrializing present? How do they shape today’s struggles over the river’s future? And how might we occasion critical reflection on the histories and futures of the industrial river? Members of the group have guided undergraduates through documentary filmmaking at the Upper Harbor Terminal, led public tours of the terminal and Lock and Dam No. 1, and commissioned this set of reflective essays on the contested histories and futures of the river publicly available as part of the larger Mississippi. An Anthropocene River project. The commissioned essays are at once critical and poetic and range from personal histories of resource extraction in the river headwaters, competing visions for the Upper Harbor Terminal, desires to “rewild” the Mississippi Gorge, settler colonialism, and indigenous water futures in the Anthropocene. Other essays shine a light on the role of real estate capital in remaking the postindustrial river, excavate the many social and geological layers of Bruce Vento Nature Sanctuary, and attend to continuities and discontinuities between imagined river futures today and the settler-colonial futures embodied in the original mid-nineteenth-century plans for the Meeker Lock and Dam.