The St. Anthony Falls area of the Mississippi River in Minneapolis has always been a place of change. It has also been a place of power—both the evident waterpower that drove the nearby mills, but also the less visible emotional and spiritual power of moving water. For millennia, Dakota people have recognized the power of these falls. Andrea Carlson, an artist of Ojibwe descent, created a work in 2017 called “The Uncompromising Hand” that imagined Spirit Island, a historic feature of the falls, being erased through the power of not being included in US Army Corps of Engineers renderings of the falls. Writing or drawing—rendering—are acts that go far beyond simply applying pen to paper or keystrokes on a computer; they call a world into being or, conversely, erase it. Carlson’s meditation, which led to an article in the Winter 2018 issue of Open Rivers, considers the varying ways different cultures regard spaces as “sacred,” who has what kind of authority for making the futures of a place, and the powers of artistic work to imagine the world differently.
See On The Uncompromising Hand: Remembering Spirit Island by Andrea Carlson in Open Rivers.
Still image from the video 'The Uncompromising Hand' (2017) by Andrea Carlson.
Still image from the video 'The Uncompromising Hand' (2017) by Andrea Carlson.
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