Big River

The news about the Mississippi River flooding has been, well, overflowing. I've been following it closely... the Iowa River floods, and everyone in town seems to be talking about the 500 year flood that happened in 2008, worried it will happen again. On top of that, I'm working on a project for Northern Spark, a one night festival happening in Minneapolis-St. Paul. The project I'm working on, Mississippi Megalops, is aboard a steamboat in St. Paul, on the Mississippi river.

My last of my infrequent posts on here showed the source image for this flag, a 1944 Army Corp of Engineers image of the various paths the lower Mississippi has taken over the centuries. It is an incredible image, and it was made in the wake of the Army Corp's work to create a flood plan for the Mississippi following the great flood of 1927. In that flood, the river was over 100 miles wide in parts (that's almost 1/2 the distance between Iowa City and Chicago, if you can imagine. I always thought it was incredible that this river is a mile wide in parts.

My interest in making this flag, a flag for a fictitious nation or state of the Mississippi River, came in part from listening to this incredible podcast with Lisa Brooks, who spoke about the place of rivers for Native Americans, at the center of territories instead of as borders. Imagine if I-80 was a border rather than a corridor....