Below Franklin Avenue Bridge, looking south. The canoe, NOAA’s Arc, was built in the Micronesian island of Guam in 2012 as part of an Indigenous Sustainability grant funded by the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Agency (NOAA). The name plays on the famous biblical story of saving humanity and other creatures with an ordained vessel, but the use of the “c” in Arc (as opposed to the letter “k”), signifies the historic and geographic “trajectory”—the long ‘arc’—of indigenous Pacific Island mobility. It should not surprise us to find such vessels in, among other places, the Mississippi River. Image courtesy of Lisa Miller/University of Minnesota.
