Welcome to Emergence Magazine's podcast. I'm Emanuel Vaughn Lee, executive editor of Emergence

Magazine, located on the unseated ancestral lands of the Coast Mewalk people of present-day

Marin County. Each week, we feature a new interview, narrated essay, or story, exploring the threads connecting

ecology, culture, and spirituality.

For thousands of years, the Mississippi River has been shaping the land through which it flows.

Humans have always lived alongside it,

both drawn to and unnerved by the power of its immense body.

And this relationship, ancient and dynamic,

has been laid bare by the monuments we have built around it.

From burial grounds and villages to levees and locks, our constructions have

reflected shifting paradigms of connection, control, and climate. In this essay, writer Boyce Upholt

delves thousands of years into the past to a time when indigenous communities were carefully building

100-foot earthworks, intricate clusters of hillocks and symbolic effigies from soil along the banks of the Mississippi.

Glimpsing their ancient cosmologies in complex civic organization with the windows of archaeology,

Boyce questions the theories of societal evolution,

cultural stereotypes, and settler narratives often superimposed upon these earthworks. Considering

3500 mile-long levee systems that now curbs the river's torrent, he wonders, if our modern

monuments were built not to tame or control,

but to be a conscious connection with their ever-changing landscapes, what might they look like? My weight remains heavy upon this land.

Allison Hedgecock, snake mount.

The Mississippi River appears on most maps as a line of blue that cuts the continent in half,

a convenient borderline between the hidebound east and the wilder west.

...