Riverine
Artist, writer, and activist Shanai Matteson’s contribution weaves together a collage of her own past memories and readings of the Mississippi River with her more recent experience as part of the Anthropocene River journey. In this text she asks why the reading of one river with borders and boundaries continues to endure, when to be “riverine,” is to be one defined by “all the water that moves through her”—to know many rivers.
Riverine /ˈrivəˌrīn/
adjective
relating to or situated on a river or riverbank; riparian
My mother never learned to swim.
In the stories she tells about the place where we both grew up, the Mississippi River is not the origin of life, but a point in time and space where she narrowly escaped death.
When my mother was barely thirteen, her brothers tossed her from the riverbank into moving water.
A half-century later, she can still taste mud and feel her body being pulled by the current, moving her away from home against her will.
//
The Mississippi did not consume my mother.
Instead, it carried her body to deadfall—a tangled mass of branches washed into the river by rain.
This raft gave her something to grasp, suspended her at the surface. It held her there until her limbs ran aground on a sandbar.
In her telling of this story, she then clawed her way up the bank, hanging onto the roots of a willow tree.
//
My mother doesn’t tell her story this way:
The trees saved her.
The river swept her away, but it also moved her safely to shore.
Her brothers tossed her in, but it was the Mississippi that showed her how to survive.
//
I first learned the River as something to fear.
As a girl, I was taught to leave it be. To respect how fast it moves and its unseen depths. To know the power of water to take life—but not to give it.
I heard stories of the ways it can flood and ruin the things we’ve built—but not much about the river as our reason for being here.
//
Be wary of muddy edges.
Worry your way through change.
//
When I tell my mother’s story to other women—particularly women with roots in rural places, close to water—they almost always recall a similar experience.
The time their brother or father or another man tossed them into water.
The time they nearly drowned because they did not heed a mother’s advice.
How they survived submersion, barely.
What this fear meant for their path into the wider world, all the ways they learned to stand by and watch—to stay safe on shore.
//
How many women are pulled into life this way?
Denied the power of water to live life, and taught instead to fear it?
//
I wanted to be near the river, because the river was where I was told not to go.
It was a place of ghosts as well as our garbage.
It contained the possibility of death, and also a kind of immortality.
The river was where stories had sudden endings, which meant no end at all. Young men or women, who did not survive drowning, were trapped forever in their cars, always drunk or doing something they shouldn’t do.
They died of water, or of ice.
And in that way, they lived on as local legends, more real to me than the long gone men whose names were on plaques in our City Hall.
Photograh by Shanai Matteson
The Mississippi River was “away.”
It was where we put things we didn’t want to see or think about anymore.
For some, it was somewhere to dump broken appliances, old mattresses and other furniture, and farm machines that no longer served a purpose once the farms went under.
It was also a place for women who did not know theirs.
They haunted us with their warnings: Stay out of trouble.
//
But I knew that away was where I wanted to go, so the River was my favorite place.
It was the place where I went the night I drank alcohol for the first time, sitting on the bank with my cousin—both of us retelling stories our mothers had told us about the drown girls.
It was where I went the first time I kissed a boy, under the river bridge, where mosquitos bit every place our skin was bare.
I went swimming in the river too, once I’d learned how.
First with cousins, then with cabin boys from the Cities. I felt the thrill of being carried away—cool mud between my toes, crawling back up the same way as my mother—except I had chosen this.
//
Palisade, the town where we grew up, was only home to 113 people by the time I knew it.
It’s not far from the headwaters in northern Minnesota, and about 1,000 miles from the river’s mouth.
The name Palisade refers to an embankment and, for some people, this conjures the vistas of Palisade Head on the north shore of Lake Superior, a place people go to view the expanse of that inland sea.
If you look up the town of Palisade on Instagram, you’ll find countless photos mistakenly geotagged, smiling people at the edge of a cliff, the horizon fading behind them.
The Palisade where I grew up had no vistas. It was a riverine swamp, with a small rise in the land imperceptible to most people, where a railroad could make a water crossing.
//
The origin of the town of Palisade is a railroad bridge.
It’s a place that was built so the Soo Line could cross the Mississippi.
This crossing made it possible to move things that were being extracted from surrounding land (timber, iron ore) not only north to south by water, but east and west by rail.
Those industries of extraction are also what made it possible for my family to settle there.
Today, Palisade is also where the Canadian oil company Enbridge is seeking permits to cross beneath the river, so they can move oil from the Alberta tar sands to a refinry on the shores of Lake Superior.
//
I was born in 1982, the year before the railroad stopped running through town.
By the time I arrived, the population had declined significantly. Most of the buildings my mother and grandmother had known were vacant or torn down.
In the 1980s, Aitkin County was the poorest county in the state of Minnesota. Many families here did not have indoor plumbing.
//
My mom and her family were among a handful of settlers who stayed in Palisade after the busts of the timber industry and the mines on the Cuyuna Range. After the county stopped clearing ditches. After the farms flooded back to swamp. After the railroad stopped running and no one used the river to move things anymore.
Growing up here, I always had the sense I was living “after” a place had stopped.
I knew from the stories we were told that for a time this was a real town.
I had no sense of what came before that.
//
I knew native people, had cousins who were “Chippewa”’ from nearby reservations—but never understood that this was Anishinaabe or Ojibwe land we were occupying.
The place I knew as a “palisade” for the Soo Line Railroad was written on birchbark scrolls as the confluence of two rivers, what we call the Mississippi and the Willow.
According to Ojibwe tribal attorney Frank Bibeau,1 it was the place between places—a portage connecting the headwaters region to Gigchigami (Lake Superior) and beyond.
The entire area where I grew up is subsumed in treaties that predate the State of Minnesota, a territory that remains for Ojibwe people to hunt, fish, and gather in perpetuity.2
//
In the Palisade Fire Hall there is a glass case they call the town’s Museum.
In it, photographs and newspaper clippings from the past century tell the stories of settler families—including mine—and how we occupied that wet and remote place.
Among them are stories of floods, frequent inundations that happened each time the river remembered that its current course is always temporary.
The nature of that river is to whip and wind.
//
Several articles in the Museum feature photographs of the time Palisade was completely surrounded by water, a temporary island.
All of the groceries had to be brought in by boat. Sick people, and those working elsewhere in the forest or the mines, had to be moved in and out the same way.
For months, the families that lived here were living in the movement of water, river people after all.
//
There is also a story from that same era, when the Ku Klux Klan held a rally in Palisade.
Thousands of people came from across Northeastern Minnesota to hear a man from Duluth equate white supremacy—over black people, Jewish people, and darker-skinned Eastern Europeans—with patriotism and economic security.
The article mentions how many cars lined the river road. It says nothing about the Indigenous peoples who’d been displaced here, and yet were still living; or the fact that at the time, my grandfather, and others like him, who had recently migrated here to work in the mines, were not considered “white” either.
They were in the process of becoming white.
//
There are no stories in this Museum about the Ojibwe people who have and still reside on this river, or about what the riparian landscape was like before there was a town here. Before the railroad. Before us.
//
In the 1990s, when the rights of Ojibwe people to hunt, fish, and gather here were being reaffirmed in court, white hunters and fishermen put up signs on their land warning that they would shoot “Indians” if they trespassed, calling them “spear-chuckers” and much worse.
I remember hearing these slurs around my grandparents’ dinner table. I imagined my uncles with guns chasing “Indians” through the woods, or bringing a human body home the way they brought home the animals they’d killed, which hung from trees to bleed.
//
Today, these memories, and the way they seemed so normal at that time, are horrifying to me, yet it seems wrong to pretend they were not part of our universe—the way we made sense of this river and this place.
Our river, the world as we knew it, was only possible because of the ones we displaced, denied, or erased—violently.
That we displace, deny, and erase still—violently.
On that point, most of the white people I grew up with still maintain that we could not have learned racism living in this small town all of those years, because everyone was white.
//
My mother’s story, about being thrown into the river by her brothers, and surviving on a tangle of tree branches, is also nowhere in the Museum of our river town.
Her story survives, as most do, in the space between people who whisper to one another:
This is who we are.
This is what we fear the most.
This is how we have survived.
//
Photograph by Shanai Matteson
I eventually learned how to swim.
I wasn’t thrown into water, but was given an inner tube from an old tractor, and pushed gently from the sloping side of a gravel pit into the middle of a deep quarry lake.
My mom thought it was safer to swim here, because the water didn’t move.
You couldn’t see the bottom, but at least it was still.
At least it was a hole we’d made.
That water was clear, and though we didn’t know it, it connected directly to an underground river, the very aquifer we tapped for our drinking water.
All along there was a river under the river.
//
I’ve come to think of the place I grew up as a place where, if you’re paying attention to the right stories, you can see the way different universes converge, with a turbulence that has a lot to teach us.
There are many different rivers, all running over and under each other.
//
There is the river of our settler imagination:
The one that begins at the railroad crossing and goes by the name and logic of a small embankment, as well as a fortress.3
That river is one of desire for control and conquest.
A place to dredge and drain wetlands for farms. A place to take what we want, and to move it to where it can turn a profit. To draw maps that divide the county into saleable squares, giving each of them a name and owner.
This is not exactly my grandfather’s or my uncles’ river. It belongs to the families “out east” who were the beneficiaries of this imagination, memorialized in historical museums by the sheer volume of what was extracted for profit.
This is the river women like my mother are thrown into by force, and where so many bodies never surface.
//
That is the river of our mothers and grandmothers who never learned to swim, but who survived in spite of the violence into which they were plunged.
The river of our fear.
The river we are part of imagining, in our submersion into movement—all that is unseen and cannot be controlled, as well as what we hold onto, and the grace life gives us.
Somehow, we feel our way back to standing.
We learn how to tend to changing relationships, to know the moods of water and other bodies, and we meet the river under the river.
//
And of course, there is the Ojibwe universe, or many.
These are not for me to tell.
//
At the Kickoff to the Mississippi. An Anthropocene River project, Frank Bibeau, Dawn Goodwin, and others shared stories about the migration of Ojibwe people to and through this territory in canoes made of birch; and of the birchbark scrolls on which the rivers were threads connecting each body of water, not just lakes with names, but centers of a universe.
Some of them, including the one many of us think of as “the source” of the Mississippi, are known as false rivers.
They do not begin where we might think, and are not easily traveled.
//
Frank laughed when we asked about the source of the river.
How we seemed obsessed with beginnings and endings.
//
We trace routes that double as political borders or economic corridors, and draw those same boundaries on maps as well as on our hearts.
What is the origin of our desire for a linear story?
What is it about edges and crossings?
//
What if the submersions we’ve survived are not about knowing beginnings and endings at all, but about finding meaning in the muck we meet between those worlds?
Remembering that this moment is one source, unnameable.
Learning to swim is movement within movement.
What can you learn at the murky edge of a living river?
//
During the Kickoff to the Anthropocene River Journey, I explained to others what I believe it means to be Riverine:
A riverine place, or a riverine person, is defined not by borders and boundaries, but by the mud she’s wading into, all the water that moves through her, all the life that flourishes (or doesn’t) there.
A mud lark is someone who scavenges in river mud for things of value, which might be shards of porcelain, mussel shells, or her own life story.
//
When I’m looking for meaning in my mother’s stories—the stories I was steeped in, which became my own, however incomplete—I like to give them a quarter-turn, looking at them like a mud lark might look at glass that’s been polished by the flow of water and what it carries:
What does this piece mean? What can I make of this? What?
//
In the car, near the headwaters of the Mississippi, as we crossed that river several times without even noticing, I told Jamie4 and others who were with us about all the women I’ve known who’ve been thrown into rivers.
I thought this might be a river story worth retelling.
Sadie said, “Those are really stories about turning against ourselves.”5
//
How do we turn back?
//
What if, instead of crawling out and surviving, holding all the heavy lessons of fear and control… we return to the water, because it also contains life and pleasure.
What if it turns out we belong there?
What if we learn how to love letting ourselves go?
