“From Sea to Source” is an international program reminding us that rivers are, at a basic level, means of transporting materials to the ocean. “Materials” in this case means fish, which are easily overshadowed by all of our other river concerns.
A year or so ago, when I met with Amélie Allard about her work on the fur trade in Minnesota, I was interested generally in her observations about that contested, fraught place and time. When she mentioned that participants understood space from the perspective of rivers and water, rather than land, I was hooked, and asked her to think about editing an issue of Open Rivers. This issue is the result, and her guest editor’s introduction speaks more eloquently than I could to the themes and questions raised here.