Mississippi River Centers Inaugural Wakpa Triennial Art Festival In Minnesota’s Twin Cities

“Wakpa” is Dakota for “river.”

Even before the Dakota were on this land, there was the river. Many rivers, but one superior to all others: Ȟaȟáwakpa. White people called it the Mississippi River.

The inaugural Wakpa Triennial Art Festival takes place June 24 through September 16, 2023, throughout Minnesota’s Twin Cities, the state capital of St. Paul side-by-side with its big brother Minneapolis. Ȟaȟáwakpa winds through them both.

The river makes as good a place as any to start thinking about the event.

The father of rivers shares a story common across the continent with thousands of its offspring. Native people used these waterways to participate in vast trade networks. European traders tapped into them upon arrival. As the colonizers steadily pushed Indigenous inhabitants off their land, the rivers were increasingly used for industry.

They were dammed and dredged and diked to scale up shipping and textile production and power generation. Their natural cycles of flooding were halted by white men. Concrete barriers went up. Their banks were straightened. Adjacent wetlands were pumped dry.

America’s rivers then became toilets, early residents piping their waste directly to the banks and later, civil engineers directing sewage overflow their way during times of heavy rain. Trillions of gallons of herbicide and pesticides flowed into them from farms and lawns. Toxic industrial waste. “Dilution is the solution to pollution,” the operative phrase for industry.

Once a paradise for fish and birds and plants, the country’s rivers nearly died. Riverfront land was often the least valuable and least attractive in cities across America through the 20^th century.

It wasn’t until the last 25 or 30 years that the value of rivers for people, not products, began to be understood and appreciated by places fortunate enough to be blessed with a river.

“I grew up here and the river used to stink like a sewer,” Colleen Sheehy, Executive Director of Public Art Saint Paul and the Project Director of Wakpa Triennial Art Festival, told Forbes.com. “It’s taken decades for us to turn back to the river. There’s a lot about the river that not only people coming from outside the Twin Cities, but people here I think will discover.”

Artist, boat builder, fisherman, former professor, clean water activist and Twin Cities native Seitu Jones is aiding in the discovery. His Wakpa Triennial project, artARK, will provide opportunity for more intimate acquaintance with the river. The 20-foot-long wooden and aluminum pontoon boat will serve as something of a research vessel with an artist/naturalist as part of the crew.

ArtARK will use art and ecology to foster a greater understanding of the Mississippi River watershed and residents’ role as river stewards.

“I live two miles away from the river, one of the greatest rivers in the world, and many folks–my neighbors–will pass over the river three or four times in a day, but nobody ever gets to the river’s edge,” Jones told Forbes.com.

When the project is completed later this summer, the public will have the opportunity to tour the Mississippi River aboard the artARK. The experience will be participatory as guests can help interpret and present scientific data including pH and oxygen levels, temperature, turbidity, clarity, salinity, and observations of invertebrates, fish, birds and mammals through writing, visual art, and performance with the help of the vessel’s artist/naturalist.

“There’s been much more attention placed (on the river) as this recreational and environmental and inspirational resource (in recent years),” Jones adds.

Instead of using and abusing the Mississippi River, the Twin Cities are increasingly caring for and restoring it. A river once working for industry, is now working for people.

Sewage is being treated before making its way to the river. New public parks are bringing people to the river’s edge. The once-radical possibility of removing the river’s locks and dams through town are being considered, part of a national trend returning health to riverine ecosystems and the people who live by them.

“The river going through St. Paul is stunning; there are beautiful limestone cliffs and bluffs along the river in the downtown–it’s spectacular,” Sheehy said.

Sean Sherman’s (Oglala Lakota) Owámni restaurant overlooks the river by St. Anthony falls in St. Paul. Sherman, “The Sioux Chef,” was named one of Time magazine’s 100 most influential people for 2023 due to his ongoing efforts promoting Indigenous food ways.

Reservations at the restaurant are extremely hard to come by, planning should be made months in advance. While waiting for a table, enjoy views of the river, thankfully, now, without the sewer smell.

A Thriving Arts Community

The Wakpa Triennial will feature over 40 public events and programs, community-based performances, and temporary public art installations throughout the metro area. Most will be free to attend. In addition to sites along the river and in parks, new commissions will be found in galleries, museums, and alternative spaces indoors and out.

Why now?

Sheehy believes the Twin Cities’ arts community has finally grown to a level where it can support an event of this ambition.

“I’m old enough to have seen (the Twin Cities’ art scene) develop from the major institutions to this wonderful density of small organizations that are connected to communities and neighborhoods and specific artistic disciplines,” Sheehy explained. That development extends to artists. “From being a place where a lot of artists would move away to pursue careers in New York, L.A., and now we’re a place where artists are thriving.”

Wakpa also furthers a national and global trend.

“These kinds of biennials and triennials have been increasing as efforts to lift up an art scene (and) create exciting new work that gets people out traversing a city, learning more about the city,” Sheehy said.

Discovery is a major goal for Wakpa.

“When I’ve gone to these kinds of art festivals in other cities, they’ve been a beautiful way of learning a city because typically, if I traveled to another city, I’ll go to the big museums, but I don’t necessarily get into the neighborhoods,” Sheehy said.

You are on Native Land

Minnesota, along with parts of South Dakota, North Dakota, Nebraska and Canada are the ancestral homelands to the Dakota people. Scandinavians found it in the late 19^th century. They were given free land taken from the Dakota to farm and homestead.

Minnesota is still often associated with these Nordic immigrants–look at the Minnesota Vikings football helmet. More residents of Norwegian and Swedish ancestry continue living there than any other state.

But St. Paul also has the largest Hmong community in an urban area in the United States. Minneapolis has the largest Somali population outside of Mogadishu.

In the 1950s, 60s and 70s, a federal program known as the Indian Relocation Act incentivized tens of thousands of Native people from across America to leave their reservations and move to cities for greater economic opportunity. It was another government effort to disassociate Native people from their land and culture under the guise of “progress,” and Minneapolis was a major relocation hub.

To this day, it has one of the largest Native populations of any American city.

“There are these cultural communities that people can experience and help to dispel the idea that we’re this all-white German Scandinavian area,” Sheehy said. “There’s a lot of diversity that is adding so much to our understanding, our experiences of city and art and food and customs.”

The Wakpa name was selected only after consultation with Dakota leaders and artists.

Of the more than 100 Minnesota-based artists contributing to the festival, a majority are people of color.

Organizational partners include Wakan Tipi Center which honors sacred Dakota sites in the area, Oyate Hotanin, an Indigenous arts organization, the Asian Economic Development Association, Center for Hmong Arts and Talent, the contemporary Native American art gallery All My Relations Gallery and the Hmongtown Marketplace.

And the Philando Castile Peace Garden.

Philando Castile and George Floyd and Duante Wright…

George Floyd was murdered by a white police officer in Minneapolis, not Mississippi. The Twin Cities prides itself on being one of the most progressive and educated communities in America, yet, police murder has been the area’s defining attribute since Floyd’s death was witnessed worldwide.

It wasn’t an isolated incident. Cops in the Twin Cities have an outrageous record of unwarranted violence against minorities.

Philando Castile was a young Black man shot and killed by police in the metro area in 2016. The longtime employee of the St. Paul Public School System perished sitting in his car after being pulled over for a broken taillight.

Minneapolis police rampaged in the days after Floyd’s murder. They were heard on their own body cam footage enjoying “hunting” peaceful protestors.

Like Castile, Duante Wright was a young Black man killed by police while sitting in his car after being pulled over in suburban Minneapolis for a traffic stop. His death occurred during the trial of Floyd’s murderers in 2021.

A damning report from the Department of Justice released on June 16, 2023, found the Minneapolis Police Department for years has engaged in a pattern of excessive force and racial bias among other civil rights abuses.

“We’re still struggling to recover and rebuild,” Sheehy said of the demonstrations following Floyd’s murder. “Not only physically rebuild, but to rebuild what future we want here that’s based on equity and inclusion, and to address these sadly persistent disparity gaps that exist in the Twin Cities, and in Minnesota, between white communities and communities of color.”

Wakpa Triennial leans in, placing these conversations and sites front and center.

“One node of the triennial in Minneapolis is around Minnehaha and Lake Street, it’s called the Longfellow neighborhood, it’s the location of the third precinct building that was burned, that was the focus of a lot of demonstrations. That’s the precinct Derek Chauvin worked at,” Sheehy explains.

Chauvin is the officer who choked Floyd to death.

“The building wasn’t burned to the ground, but it’s standing empty with a fence around it for these three years,” Sheehy said. “There’s a lot of rethinking and rebuilding in that node because there were a number of important small cultural businesses and organizations whose buildings burned and it’s an opportunity to come to that neighborhood, think about what happened there, and learn more about how the neighborhood is rebuilding.”

Artists and the arts community will be key to that effort.

Rebuilding a community following Floyd’s murder, and Wright’s, and Castillo’s.

And rehonoring Native homelands.

And restoring a river.