Ecological Restoration or Healing?: Conflicting Ontologies and Missed Opportunities in Public Debates Surrounding Mississippi River Gorge Restoration

ABSTRACT

This article describes an instance of public debate about the proposed dam and lock removals along the Upper Mississippi River Gorge in Minnesota, showing ways that environmental controversy plays out in settler colonial and Indigenous publics, attending to who and what gets heard and valued in public debate about potential river restoration. Importantly, this essay attends to ontological incommensurability that may exist between Indigenous and non-Indigenous publics in public debates about the environment. I ultimately argue that in settler colonial contexts, Indigenous ontologies - storied realities and experiences that are emergent in practice - in relation with the river cannot be heard by settler colonial publics because they fundamentally challenge settlers' ontological claims to land and water as resource for their exclusive use. Such claims are rooted in colonial violence that contribute to destruction of ecosystems. This essay shows, however, that Indigenous individuals and communities continue to create unique realities with story and visual art to exert presence in the face of settler attempts of erasure, and it shows how better understanding of political ontologies allows for more thorough and ethical engagement when controversies about land and water arise in public debate.

KEYWORDS:

• Natural resources
• public controversy
• ontology
• ecological restoration
• Indigenous
• settler colonialism
• water

Acknowledgements

The author would like to thank Matt Turner and Caroline Gottschalk Druschke for their encouragement and support in developing this article. He would also like to thank the two anonymous reviewers who provided indispensable feedback.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 When I use the concept, “settler colonial,” I refer to a specific form of colonialism in places like North America, Australia, and Palestine with genocidal tendencies (Wolfe, 2006; Veracini, 2011; Svirsky, 2017). Settler colonial states require land for exclusive settler use in perpetuity whereas colonial states only require land for extractive purposes for a limited period (Svirsky, 2017). In settler states, then, Indigenous populations must be removed to best ensure settler land use and occupation. This essay takes for granted that settler colonialism is undesirable, but for the sake of space and focus, it does not fully engage with the robust critical settler colonial literature available as a guiding framework. Instead, the guiding threads here are tied to better understanding political ontologies and the role of public comment, especially between settler and Indigenous publics. Throughout, though, I do take for granted that better understandings about Indigenous ontologies is a counter-settler move that unsettles “settler certainty” about its future on colonized land (Mackey, 2016).

2 This isn’t to suggest that Indigenous people, nations, and communities don’t also make use of both traditional and western sciences (Whyte, 2013; Carroll, 2014) in the context of natural resources management. In this case, however, I focus on novel Indigenous approaches to public comment and community engagement.

3 In an effort to be respectful of the integrity of the stories, the section below tends toward the descriptive.