Through the exploitative actions of “military invasion, slavery, and settlement,” colonialism “often paved the way for the expansion of capitalism” (“Indigenous Climate” 154). The forces of colonialism and capitalism jointly “laid key parts of the groundwork for industrialization and militarization—or carbon-intensive economics—which produce the drivers of anthropogenic climate change” (154). In the Upper Mississippi River valley, this industrial, capitalistic society began as the projected imaginings of colonists who envisioned Indigenous land in terms of its future colonial uses for military forts, trading posts, mills, factories, and powerplants. Thus, envisaging the colonial presence on the landscape established the mental groundwork necessary for the subsequent social and material reconstruction of the valley.

 

Pike’s acts of colonial imagination, even before leading to tangible changes to the river and its inhabitants, were monumental in the process of formulating colonial relationships to the valley. Pike established a treaty with local Dakota in 1805 that granted the U.S. a tract of land around St. Anthony Falls in what is today Minneapolis, Minnesota, “for the purpose of establishment of military posts” (231). It would not be until September of 1820 that Colonel Josiah Snelling would initiate construction on the fort (Afinson 66). Though there was no physical construction during these fifteen years, this treaty and Pike’s writings regarding the auspiciousness of the location near St. Anthony Falls for colonial development reflected and projected the mentality of the U.S. government that the river was a resource belonging to the U.S. This colonial imaginative act and others marked a key shift in the history of human relations with the Upper Mississippi River: the U.S. government conceptualized the river, the surrounding land, and its native inhabitants as subordinate entities implicated in the larger goals of colonial and capitalistic expansion.