gadget how you been, hah? you paddled the missouri river a few years ago, what was that actually like?
“We will sign this contract with a heavy heart…With a few scratches of the pen, we will sell the best part of our reservation. Right now the future doesn’t look too good to us.”
The pen is returned to the table and the Missouri River is pregnant with Lake Sakakawea. Four hundred and eighty square miles of land condemned to death by drowning. It is 1948 and the chairman of the Mandan-Hidatsa-Arikara Nation weeps.
Meriwether Lewis, the amateur scientist, weighed equal volumes of the Missouri and Kansas rivers and recorded the former as twice as heavy because of all the sediment it carried. Thus the river has long been called Big Muddy…But today its nickname is a misnomer because the straitjacketed river no longer braids its channels through miles of life-enriched bottom wetlands. Today’s Missouri is an enslaved river impatient to be free.
Bill Lambrecht opens his book, Big Muddy Blues, with lamentations. He follows this with more lamentations from the humans directly impacted by river engineering. It is 2005, and he brings attention to how difficult it is to access the Missouri River from Kansas City.
In 2020 Jon and i parked on a forgotten beach in Kansas City. I sat and watched our things while he bushwacked up to a taco shop, it was still difficult to access the city.
The most striking showing of the Missouri’s straitjacket, however, is to be seen looking down on open country along the lower river. There you can observe how the system of pile dikes – curving fences of stout timber bilings – stone revetments, willow mattressess, and short “wing” dikes succeeds in pinning down the channel and giving permanence to the banks.
It is 1951. Richard G Baumhoff, in great detail, documented the history of the river and the early stages of river engineering. It brims with anticipation, a bit of sorrow, and already the straitjacket metaphor.
When the Army Corps built six mainstem dams on the Missouri River, life for the indigenous peoples who called the river home changed immediately and dramatically. Gone are our ancient riverbottom homes, our medicines, our sacred places, the earth lodge and tipi village and hunting camp sites created by our beloved ancestors. Gone are the places intrinsic to our origin stories and to events in our oral histories that are alive in our people’s minds and hearts that are still related today.
The loss of our river homes affected every aspect of the quality of our lives: spiritual, mental, physical, emotional, and socio-economic lifeways, all of which make up our very identity as native peoples. Altering the flow of the river altered the face of our Mother Earth, and we are still reeling from and dealing with the consequences of the changes brought by the dams.
Yellow Bird, of the Mandan-Hidatsa-Arikara Nation, pours heartache. These words were spoken decades ago. The artificial lakes still conceal secrets.
a great beast of destruction and life, locked by the might of man and inertia of bureaucracy. it lived and breathed in its valley, roaming freely within its cage of erosion. times of tranquility balanced by times of wild chaos and energy: creation itself reconstructed at a flow, gentle riparian womb provided at an ebb. reason and fate drew the stasis of rectangles, full of will, into its valley, praying for stasis in return. the beast lashed out, over and over, until tempers flared and shackles fettered, victory claimed and subservience proclaimed, waters reclaimed and concrete maintained.
-me just now.
well
hmm
it sure was a thing i did that changed who i was, what i see, and what i think.
man i dunno 
wow!! 56suddenly
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