Priorities on the River

Prairie Island
During our fifth day on the river, we landed on Prairie Island and got hit with a tornado so ended up staying there for a few more nights than expected. Prairie Island is a reservation for the Mdewakanton Sioux people along the Mississippi near Red Wing. I had never really spent a long period of time on reservations before.
At Prairie Island, there were big debates between Xcel Energy and the Native Americans that live on Prairie Island of why they should and should not put the power plant there. I didn’t get to hear too much about it but what I did hear was the arguments of Xcel saying that it’s not their land and they can do what they want because they’re the one that purchased it. While the people at Prairie Island argued more about how the river should not be treated as a wasteland and should be respected more. It was interesting to see how the two differed in how they saw the land and hearing how frustrating it was to the US side not understand the importance of the river to them and just brushed it off because they don’t understand the meaning of the river like the people at Prairie Island.
This just kind of brought me back to my other independent study for International Relations where I am focusing on the displacement of people on the river, more focusing on locks and dams. Right away at all the locks and dams, I have looked at the most affected people are indigenous communities. This fact does not surprise me at all because it is always communities of minorities that get the short end of the stick for a lot of the time. It just pains me to hear that Xcel just wanted to make even more money and continued to ignore the environment and what the community that had been living there for so long in what they needed.

While we were at Prairie island we also were able to talk to ecologist and water specialist that works for the reservation there. We were able to talk about their struggle of going between what the community and elders want to see and what was best for the environment of the water. There were some gaps in the conversation, especially to why there was a power plant right next to the reservation at Prairie Island.