The University of Minnesota Twin Cities campus sits on both banks of the Mississippi River, one of the world's great waterways. The river has sustained the land, plants, animals, and peoples who have lived on it for millennia, yet too often it remains a blue line on a map, or "just water," a minimizing of its power, necessesity, and history. In the spring of 2015, the Institute for Advanced Study, along with the River Life program, presented a symposium entitled "The Once and Future River: Imagining the Mississippi in an Era of Climate Change," which was funded by the Andrew W.

This lecture will discuss how our understanding of the category "land" shifts as and when we try bring into conversation the concerns of postcolonial histories and those generated by discussions of climate change and the Anthropocene.

This talk presented as a part of the 2018 Sawyer Seminar. It is additionally cosponsored by the departments of History, Political Science, and American Indian Studies.

In what world do we imagine the past to be settled in light of its refusal to perish and allow things to start over anew? What are the conditions that make for this imagining, this fantasy or rather, demand of a new start point?