River

by Molly Stevens

History

The Upper Red River of the South has at least thirteen discrete river terraces in its valley (Zeiger 2024). Visually, you might recognize these river terraces by their stair-step pattern; the land flattens out and falls down a few feet, at the same elevation on both banks, over and over again. In the case of the Red River, there are thirteen such stairs—indicating periods of aggradation and incision. Aggradation occurs when the river becomes shallower and wider, meandering steadily, moving more slowly and flooding periodically to form plains. Small sediments of sand and silt wash over the river’s banks, accumulating in layers. Periods of incision reflect a much different river environment—marking episodes of dramatic lowering in the river’s base level; in these events, the river literally cuts down through the earth, carving out its path with fast-flowing water—carving out the stair steps that we see on the landscape today.

Potamologists map these river terraces with the intention of reading them backwards. They begin by collecting data on the shape of the landscape, the size of the sediments, the height and distance of the terraces, and from there, they construct a history across time and through space—of the assumed evolution of the river’s flow, its route, the sediments it transfers—explaining the shape that gets left behind (Zeiger 2024). These are the key tools and expectations of the field of geomorphology—where “the present is the key to the past” using these clues of the landscape (“Uniformitarianism”). This geomorphological history gives us a sense of what has (or might’ve) happened to the actual land in and around this rust-colored river.

This type of history is constructed using what we can see—and what remains on the landscape. It tracks these periods of climate change and of unusual sediment transport, treating the river as an object of study whose history is readily available—to anyone who looks. But I’m not sure this method paints an accurate picture, and I’m not sure the river itself is so open to this sort of excavation. Instead, I’m interested in what kind of history might emerge when we treat the river differently—not as an object of study but as a living, breathing body. How does the landscape remember, how does it hide, and how do we acknowledge those histories that have been erased through the violence of settler colonialism?

Memory

“You know they straightened out the Mississippi River in places, to make room for houses and liveable acreage. Occasionally the river floods these places. ‘Floods’ is the word they use, but in fact it is not flooding; it is remembering. Remembering where it used to be. All water has a perfect memory is forever trying to get back to where it was” (Morrison 99).

Morrison stipulates that a river not only has a history—of space, of place, of shape—but also a memory. This memory and this act of remembering involves the river’s defiance to control—to the straightening out of its banks, to the assemblage of dam’s obstructing its flow. Jenn Cole uses this capacity of remembering to tell a history of the river upon which she grew up: the Kiji Sibi River. Cole finds that in the wake of its damming, the Kiji Sibi’s flow changed, it slowed, and later it flooded. These floods, Cole noticed, were of the same fast and destructive quality that the river had before it was dammed (Cole 9).

Cole tracks a performance history of logging along the riverbanks, treating the river as a “relative who remembers” and a “living archive” (Cole 10). Cole writes, “Following the performance history of logging is an exercise in witnessing historical forgetting and representational erasure. It is also an exercise in re-presencing Indigenous histories and cosmologies, if one looks in a different way” (Cole 14).  Cole trusts the river and its capacity to remember, wrestling with the possibilities of the violent history of extraction to serve not just as a destructive force but also as a “fault line along which Indigenous presence upsurges” (Cole 14). Out of this break in the earth—this fault line—Cole allows the river to express its memory of Algonquin presence within and around the Kiji Sibi.

Beyond this capacity to remember, the river might also serve as a place to spur or gather collective memory—a site of action, of community, and often of violence. This understanding of the river not only as a body occupying a space but also as a distinct place or location complicates the histories that we might find (or fail to find) and that the river might remember. Susannah Hopson considers this idea of collective remembrance at two sites of immense violence at Bear River and Sand Creek during the Civil War. Hopson details the process of memorializing the massacres at both sites, contrasting the collective, public memories of each—which she attempts to uncover across Native and Euro-American cultures (Hopson). Ultimately, Hopson finds that this attempt at reconstruction is futile—at least in a traditional “historical” sense. She writes, “a site of such resounding loss is subject to too many contested interpretations to serve as a viable means of expressing a form of collective memory” (Hopson). The unspeakable violence at Sand Creek will therefore not emerge in a single, collective memory as far as Hopson is concerned. Maybe that means there is no precise historical narrative to be uncovered. And yet, the violence at Bear Creek did have a witness—and a singular, perpetual one at that: the river itself. I wonder then how the river is not only the site or location of such atrocities but also the witness and survivor of the colonial violence committed on its banks.

Even still, this designation of the river as a “witness” or a “survivor” is just not quite right. It, too, simplifies the river, attempts to capture its capacity in a reductive way—constraining it to language and “study.” Instead, perhaps the river and its ability to remember, to breathe, to exist ought to evade my classification. It’s not merely a survivor—and it’s not some separate witness. In the opening line of her poem, “The First Water is the Body,” Natalie Diaz writes, “The Colorado River is the most endangered river in the United States—also, it’s part of my body” (Diaz). Diaz inscribes the Colorado into herself, explaining that the Mojave people’s true name, Aha Makav, literally means “the river runs through the middle of my body” (Diaz). This phrase, Diaz submits, is no metaphor. Rather, she carries the river in her body as “a verb,” “a happening,” a site of movement (Diaz). She writes, “A river is a body of water. It has a foot, an elbow, a mouth. It runs. It lies in a bed. It can make you good. It has a head. It remembers everything” (Diaz).

This idea of a river’s remembrance is a process that has a natural ebb and flow. It is not constant or singular. Of the Bitterroot River, where she grew up, Fern Stewart writes that the river’s original Salish name has been lost. And yet, Fern finds that its name might someday return or evolve: “There is something quite grounding about knowing a River has preceded and will proceed you. I am thankful, in my short lifespan, to know the Bitterroot. Maybe it will find a new name or remember its native one someday” (Stewart).

Disruption           

Construction of the W.A.C. Bennett Dam began in 1961 and culminated in 1968 (Baird). This 2-km long hydropower dam rests upon the Peace River, north of its confluence with the Athabasca River in British Columbia (Baird). I use the word “rests” but that’s not quite right. Obviously, the dam isn’t “resting”—it’s obstructing and it’s displacing.

The W.A.C. Bennett Dam cost over 750 million dollars and created the third largest reservoir in Canada—the Williston Reservoir (Baird). Reservoirs like this one are very lucrative due to the potential energy which they store. During periods of high energy use, hydroelectric dams release large volumes of fast moving water. At lower energy times, the water might stand still.

Dams displace in a few distinct ways. During these periods of high and low release, they literally displace and manipulate the water, changing the shape of the river’s banks and diminishing the water quality up- and downstream (Baird). Dams disrupt not just the water but those organisms who call the water home; fish can’t pass the dam (no, a fish ladder isn’t enough), as it literally blocks their path upstream. The W.A.C. Bennett Dam and its massive reservoir worsened the Peace River’s water quality, transformed its water levels, and threatened the existence of its community; over 1500 indigenous peoples, mainly Sekani people, lost their homes on its banks (Baird).

In capturing the historical impacts of these hydroelectric dams, assessments of water quality, discharge, and channel shape might be made. This sort of data reveals scientifically how the river has evolved and informs attempts to remediate those effects. But what is the river’s “former state”? Data might play one role, but a history can’t (and shouldn’t) be reconstructed merely from discrete measurements. Rather, Indigenous Elders and fishers from the area carry a story of the river’s character, demeanor, and ecosystem throughout its history—including prior to its disruption in 1961. In the wake of the damming, Elders noticed that the river’s medium-size floods occurred less frequently and its levels were much lower (Baird). Floods and dynamic flows—consistent with a truly free-flowing river—are essential for maintaining a diverse and harmonious ecosystem, from the caddisfly larvae on the riverbed to the communities living on the riverbanks.

Indigenous Elders of the Peace River found that since the damming, “access to harvest areas is more challenging, abundance for some targeted species is reduced, and the quality of harvested animals and fish has declined” (Baird).  This decline in abundance of species and quality of harvest is not just an ecological concern but a direct threat to cultural continuity. Traditional fishing, trapping, and hunting practices have become more difficult to sustain and seasonal ice patterns less predictable (Baird). These practices tell a story of symbiosis between the river and the people around it—a symbiosis that has since been deeply altered. In “reconstructing” the Peace River’s story (if such an endeavor is possible), the river and its peoples cannot be separated, and future river restoration efforts ought not merely to include the First Nations peoples but to center their leadership, knowledge, and stewardship in that process. Moreover, studies that fail to center these histories lose the real story—the real evolution of the river pre- and post-impoundment—entirely.

Restoration

Marty Holtgren, fisheries biologist and social scientist, equates the removal of the four hydroelectric dams on the Klamath River to a beating heart: “For the first time, and you're right, like what you said, over a hundred years, these fish are coming back up and reconnecting to these communities that have been disconnected. You know, I look at it like our bodies, we have arteries, but the heart's the main mechanism, right? And these arteries are all cut off by the dam. So all of those connections up to the arteries, you know, have been severed” (Benincasa).  

This dam removal project was a result of a Tribally-led initiative to free the river—and to restore fish populations to a 400-mile stretch of river that had previously been inaccessible (Kimbrough). These dams absolutely devastated the fish populations; Brook Thompson, a Yurok tribal member, recalls seeing fish “lined up on the shore, just rotting in piles,” during the 2002 fish kill (Kimbrough). Now, after decades of advocacy from Indigenous tribes—the Karuk, Yurok, Shasta, Klamath, and Modoc—Chinook salmon have been observed spawning in areas that hadn’t seen fish in a century (Kimbrough). This is the largest dam removal in history. The Klamath River runs free.

Last summer, I worked for a river-advocacy nonprofit in Ipswich, Massachusetts. There, I monitored the water quality and documented the effectiveness of their restoration efforts—removing bridges, replacing culverts, and preparing for a dam removal on one of its tributaries. Near the mouth of the river, a large mill dam sits. You can stand and look out at the scene, where below the dam the water surges out, frothy and white. It’s loud. Above it lies a beautiful, calm lake, beside which many large “lake-front” properties have been built. This dam essentially blocks all fish from migrating past it—despite a large, curving fish ladder to one side. The nonprofit actually has a camera underwater at the top of the fish ladder, so they can count how many fish successfully pass the dam. I don’t know the exact number of fish from last summer, but I do know that it wasn’t very many. This dam will be removed in the next few years—entirely a result of local advocacy to free the Ipswich.

Here in Hanover, I have known the nearby rivers in a similar manner—via the study of their waters. Over the course of last spring, each week I drove to a parking lot just north of the confluence of the White River and the Connecticut River. There, I filled three large jugs with water and returned them to the lab to be filtered. This data told us a story of the amount and types of sediments being carried through the river as part of a larger project improving satellite estimations of water quality. In those moments, I treated the water as an object of study, a resource to be extracted, and not as what it really is—a collection of history and memory. Chief Don Stevens, of the Nulhegan Abenaki Tribe, says, “To the Abenaki people, water is the web of life that connects all living things together in past, present, and future generations” (Stevens 1:21). Chief Don Stevens finds that the water “holds the memories and thoughts of our ancestors, so when you look at it, it looks back. You can see yourself in it” (Stevens 9:50). As I dipped my hand into the icy waters of the White River last spring, I touched something alive, something with meaning and truth. I wonder what memories I held there, what questions I might’ve asked, and what I could’ve learned if I had taken a step back and truly listened to the river.

Works Cited

Baird, Ian G., et al. “The Downstream Impacts of Hydropower Dams and Indigenous and Local Knowledge: Examples from the Peace–Athabasca, Mekong, and Amazon.” Environmental Management (New York), vol. 67, no. 4, 2021, pp. 682–96, https://doi.org/10.1007/s00267-020-01418-x.

Benincasa, Pat. One Dam at a Time: When Rivers Run Free. https://www.patbenincasa-art.com/fill-to-capacity-podcast/one-dam-at-a-time-when-rivers-run-free.

Cole, Jenn. “Shanty Songs and Echoing Rocks: Upsurges of Memory along Fault Lines of Extraction.” Canadian Theatre Review, vol. 182, no. 1, 2020, pp. 9–15.

Diaz, Natalie. “The First Water is the Body.” Emergence Magazine, 2023, https://emergencemagazine.org/poem/the-first-water-is-the-body/. Accessed 7 Feb. 2025.

Hopson, Susannah. The Cultural Specificity of Memory and Commemoration: The Bear River Massacre (1863) and the Sand Creek Massacre (1864), University of Hull (United Kingdom), England, 2017. ProQuest, https://www.proquest.com/dissertations-theses/cultural-specificity-memory-commemoration-bear/docview/2164566771/se-2.

Kimbrough, Liz. “Largest Dam Removal Ever, Driven by Tribes, Kicks off Klamath River Recovery.” Mongabay Environmental News, 17 Oct. 2024, https://news.mongabay.com/2024/10/largest-dam-removal-ever-driven-by-tribes-kicks-off-klamath-river-recovery/.

Morrison, Toni. “The Site of Memory.” Inventing the Truth: The Art and Craft of Memoir, edited by William Zinsser, 2nd ed., Houghton Mifflin, 1995, pp. 83-102.

Stevens, Don. “Nebi: Abenaki Ways of Knowing Water.” Youtube, uploaded by Made Here - from Vermont Public, 7 Oct. 2019, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f8NP8qUPtPc. Accessed 7 Feb. 2025.

Stewart, Fern. “River.” Keywords for NAIS at Dartmouth, https://www.nais-keywords.com/river. Accessed 28 Feb. 2025.

“Uniformitarianism.” National Geographic, https://education.nationalgeographic.org/resource/uniformitarianism. Accessed 19 Feb. 2025.

Zeiger, Tyler G. Potamological Investigation into the Fluvial Terraces of the Quaternary-to-Modern Red River of the South: Canyon, Texas to Texarkana, Texas, Texas Christian University, United States -- Texas, 2024. ProQuest, https://www.proquest.com/dissertations-theses/potamological-investigation-into-fluvial-terraces/docview/3053876740/se-2.