Introduction
Fifty-two years after its physical demolition, the Dakota sacred site Spirit Island was artistically resurrected by Ojibwe multimedia artist Andrea Carlson. In Carlson’s 2017 projection installation The Uncompromising Hand, artistic renditions of drawings and photos of the limestone island scroll across the St. Anthony Falls lock wall, the life-size apparition appearing just yards from where the island had protruded from the Upper Mississippi River in Minneapolis, Minnesota. In one iteration of a photo of the island from 1899, Carlson recolors the island to a vivid red-orange amidst a blue backdrop:
Still image from Carlson's The Uncompromising Hand (2017). From her 2018 Open Rivers article, "On the Uncompromising Hand: Remembering Spirit Island."
By pairing the complimentary colors with the highest contrast between exposure values, she accentuates the contrast between the background and island, adding depth to the photo. She transforms the island into the most prominent feature in the photo, obscuring the colonial landmarks of the quarry, railway bridge, and factory in a monochrome blue. Carlson then disembodies the island from its photographic context, transforming it into a solitary entity on the lock wall. She removes the island from a static historical picture and inserts it into place and thus into the contemporary moment, making an absent island a dynamic part of the present.
Carlson’s artistic reimagining of Spirit Island responds not just to its physical destruction but to acts of colonial imagination that projected the absence of the island prior to its quarrying. To open the falls to larger-scale shipping operations in the mid-twentieth century, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers created a navigational channel between the St. Anthony Falls Upper and Lower Locks, and to do so, the Corps demolished Spirit Island (“Changing” 18). Before it was physically dismantled, however, architects drew the island out of existence, as Carlson explains:
So many proposals for the ‘development’ of the river started off as drawings, hand-rendered maps and ideation renderings by architectural firms [...] They had to imagine in a lock and dam and imagine out some islands (Peters)
Such envisaging involves “imagin[ing] out” the physical Indigenous presence from the landscape. Through drawing, architectural firms replace this sacred site with imagined “developments” that advance the area’s trade, manufacturing facilities, and power plants. In other words, these “ideation renderings” support capitalistic goals and industrial expansion, not environmental or Indigenous longevity (“An Interview”). Through such drawings, colonists deliberately mentally erase Indigenous pasts, presents, and futures by superimposing an imagined colonial future over the land.
By visually reinserting a marker of Indigenous presence along the Upper Mississippi River valley, Carlson re-centers the narrative of St. Anthony Falls from the colonial tale of Indigenous extinction to tell one of Indigenous resistance. Atop the disembodied red-orange Spirit Island, Carlson inscribes Dakota words for the sacred area of St. Anthony Falls:
Owámniomni (turbulent waters, aka St. Anthony Falls), Dakhóta Makhóčhe (Dakota Land), Wakpá Tháŋka (Great River, aka Mississippi River), and Ȟaȟáwakpa (River of the Waterfalls, aka Mississippi River ("On The Uncompromising Hand")
Inscribing Dakota terms on this site resists colonial erasure by returning “place names to their original owners’ tongue” (“On The Uncompromising Hand”). Indigenous language revitalization efforts in the Minneapolis area continue to resist colonial erasure by asserting the historic and ongoing cultural connection of Indigenous peoples to the valley.
My thesis shows that, in the Upper Mississippi River valley, acts of colonial imagination serve as the foundation for both Indigenous erasure and anthropogenic climate change. While colonists sought to remove and erase indigeneity—from both narratives and the landscape—contemporary Indigenous artworks such as Carlson’s The Uncompromising Hand reject such fictions of Indigenous annihilation. Carlson’s multi-media work allows for an imaginative revisiting of Indigenous and environmental pasts, presents, and futures to prove Indigenous perseverance in the face of social and environmental apocalypse. By artistically reimagining Spirit Island, she asserts Indigenous histories in the valley while reclaiming Indigenous contemporalities and reimagining Indigenous futures. She formally and symbolically subverts acts of colonial imagination that projected colonial futures onto the river valley at the expense of Indigenous peoples by visually reinserting Indigenous presence into the contemporary Minneapolis river valley landscape.
In my thesis, I examine the work of two contemporary Indigenous multi-media artists alongside an early U.S. colonial narrative, using a multi-disciplinary framework that draws on scientific, humanities, literary, and historical scholarship. I begin by examining the exploration narrative of U.S. soldier Zebulon Pike, The expeditions of Zebulon Montgomery Pike: to headwaters of the Mississippi River, through Louisiana Territory, and in New Spain, during the years 1805-6-7. I reveal the initial acts of colonial imagination in the Upper Mississippi River valley that are visible through his journal entries and corresponding letters to his military superiors, emphasizing that Pike’s interaction with the valley landscape is centered around envisioning a colonial future and, by extension, obscuring Indigenous pasts, presents, and futures. I then interpret Heid Erdrich’s 2013 poemeo (poem-video) “Pre-Occupied” as an artistic rejection of colonial attempts to erase Indigenous presence. In the final section, I return to Andrea Carlson’s The Uncompromising Hand, analyzing how her projection exhibit creates a temporal multiplicity that enables reflection on colonialism as a socially and environmentally disruptive force in the valley. Her work reimagines human relationships with the river, underscoring sustainability through cultural change and resistance.
By analyzing Carlson and Erdrich’s art alongside Pike’s colonial narrative, I demonstrate that Indigenous artistic acts intervene in a long history of colonial imaginations that have, in connection with capitalism and industrialism, had real impacts on the social and environmental landscape of the Upper Mississippi River valley.