Katie Hargrave / A proposal for a flag for the Mississippi River
What if we think of the Mississippi River as a territory, with laws, with politics, with people, and with a history? Forget the "what if;" the Mississippi has all of those elements. It is a development company, an efficiency factory, and a radical political force. Mark Twain wrote in Life on the Mississippi of the character of the river. As the river shortened itself over time, cutting through the mud, it "could have transferred a slave from Missouri to Illinois and made a free man of him." The Mississippi built two hundred miles of land at its mouth, creating valuable real estate. The river made itself faster, by shortening and narrowing itself over thousands of years, making the transport of goods more efficient. These moves sound like the decisions of a government, but the Mississippi is a interstitial zone rather than place in itself. It is water, not land. It moves; it is not solid; it cannot be contained.
By examining a US map, we know the Mississippi as the inbetween. It forms the the border of ten states. But as Native American historian Dr. Lisa Brooks addresses in her book, The Common Pot, Native Americans saw rivers as the center of territories rather than borders. It makes sense: the river, that thing that allows trade, transport, and life giving water, should be central rather than periphery. Perhaps we should look to these Native Americans as advisors; afterall, it is the Ojibwe who name the river misi-ziibi.
Though this river already has plenty of symbols associated with it, if we are to think of the river as a nation, it would surely need a flag. The US Corp of Engineers studied the territory touched, created, and altered by the river in their 1944 Fisk Report, drawing gorgeous maps that seem to incapsulate Twain, the Ojibwe, and the character of all who've encountered the river. Using the Fisk Report as a guide, perhaps the power of the Mississippi can be the true flag.
Commissioned for Work's Progress's project Mississippi Megalops as a part of Northern Spark festival in MN.