Haŋ, My name is Erin Genia. I am a multi-disciplinary artist and organizer, and a Dakota tribal member of the Sisseton-Wahpeton Oyate. I am a current artist in residence for Green Roots with the large-scale climate mitigation initiative Island End River Flood Resilience Project in Chelsea, Massachusetts. Through my work over the past year, I have been reflecting on the role of artist in an initiative of this scope, and how can art be collectively utilized to locate outlets and methods for community voices to be heard. Through community-based art, I seek to express the significance of Indigenous environmentalism to climate justice in the context of this ongoing large-scale climate mitigation project. I have been working on a public, community-based artwork around the theme of “Daylighting” that honors the spirit of the Island End River. The river itself, its non-human inhabitants, and generations of people living near the river have suffered from environmental destruction from industry and a societal approach to the river that views it as a receptacle for waste, and a resource to be exploited. How can daylighting be an act of decolonization? How can we address climate change issues without repeating patterns of behavior that created ecosystemic damage in the first place?
Winnissimet and the Island End River Project
The Island End River is a tidal tributary of the Mystic River. It joins at a place called Winnissimet by the Indigenous peoples of the area: Massachusett, Pawtucket, Nipmuc, Wampanoag and others. It was almost completed filled in to make way for industry and the cities of Everett and Chelsea. Most of the river flowage now lies underground seeping through an aging system of culverts. The historic path of the river extends through low-lying areas that were once extensive tidal flats and salt marshes. Just like the marshes of nearby Boston, the tidelands were dammed and filled to support development in the late 19th century. Winnissimet has been the subject of many years of hazardous substance remediation and natural resource restoration efforts due to generations of pollution and mistreatment of the river and land. The surrounding area is heavily developed, largely consisting of impervious surfaces and inadequate stormwater infrastructure. As a result of the fact that the river was buried and re-routed, the entire area that makes up where it used to be – at least 500 acres - floods terribly during king tides and is considered to be a ground-zero site for sea-level rise caused by climate change.
The area is home to critical infrastructure including the New England Produce Center, the regional FBI headquarters, fuel storage for Logan Airport, Massachusetts General Hospital, Chelsea High School and much more. To protect this infrastructure from the incoming waters, the Island End River Flood Resilience Project will consist of a seawall, a pump station, and approximately 50,000 square feet of “nature-based solutions” along the riverfront, including wetland and public access improvements. 
Daylighting is a term used in environmental management to describe when a river or creek is returned to the surface from and underground, culverted state. The Island End River has been mostly covered up, but in 2021 part of the river was daylighted. The stream has been opened up and is now flowing freely through the area, located near the corner of 2nd Street and Market, in between the commuter rail line and an Amazon warehouse. The restored channel has been sculpted to be 80 feet long and about 15 feet deep.
One of the engineers on the project, Jack Kornyak said, “It’s impossible to bring back what was down there in the past, but what we’re doing is presenting a new vision and restore it to some semblance of what it was. We want to build it for people and for water species. This is going to make a difference down there because it radically altars the City’s landscape there and I think you’ll see more change there in the years to come.”
I am inspired by the concept of Daylighting: how can we take things, whether they are rivers, ideas, or histories, that have been covered up or forgotten, and bringing them to the surface? This term also has reference in human rights work, meaning when incidents happen out of sight, or in the dark, human rights abuses are more likely to occur. If there is light, or attention, shining upon the incidents, abusers will be less likely to commit those abuses. This is particularly relevant in considering the riverine area as recognized place of environmental racism.
There are many connections between the concepts and practices of daylighting that can benefit people. In the case of the river itself, daylighting can address flooding concerns, provide habitat for wildlife, and bring some justice to the life of the river and the lives along its path.
Towards Indigenous Environmentalism
As a Dakota artist engaging with Western environmentalism, I believe that the methodologies of decolonization –which deconstructs systems imposed by settler colonialism that oppress Black, Brown, and Indigenous peoples – must be understood and implemented. I have also found that the Dakota constructs of relationality (mitakuye oyasin) time (7th generations), and the reality that “water is life,” (mni wiconi) are largely absent from conversations because our peoples are not in the room where decisions about land use are made. The philosophies surrounding stewardship of the land, carried and practiced by Indigenous peoples of this place have been hidden and obscured through dispossession, genocide, assimilation, occupation and expropriation. Decolonization can teach everyone about our shared experiences of colonialism (which is in its 400th year in Chelsea) and how it has impacted the river, contributed to climate change and created widespread ecological disasters and emergencies for Black, Brown and Indigenous peoples.
In our community conversations and art workshops we have been asking: How can we honor the agency of the river and Earth by honoring the self-determination of Indigenous peoples? What does it mean to ethically engage with Indigenous peoples’ sciences, arts and cultures of this and other areas, as we look towards adapting to the climate change that is already here? How can we learn to NOT repeat the patterns imposed by colonialism that have led us down a path that threatens the survival of all Earth’s inhabitants? How can we shift our relationship with the ecosystem that supports us on a large scale, moving from extraction towards stewardship, to embed these practices into economic, social, cultural and political systems? We must keep asking these questions.
