Unsettling Infrastructure: The Feral Qualities of Water in an Archaeological Tale of Railroads and Pipelines

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Unsettling Infrastructure: Theorizing Infrastructure and Bio-Political Ecologies in a More-Than-Human World" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

The eastern Great Plains of North Dakota and west-central Minnesota are home to the remnants of one of the world’s largest ancient glacial lakes, Lake Agassiz, as well as the United States’ longest river, the Missouri. These two powerful water entities shaped and disrupted the settler infrastructures of the Northern Pacific Railroad and later, the Dakota Access Pipeline. These vibrant entities embody what Anna Tsing and colleagues call Feral Qualities or “the ways entities attune to infrastructure.” Drawing from Indigenous philosophies and multispecies ecological lenses, this paper examines the boom-and-bust infrastructures from a turn of the twentieth-century boom town in west-central Minnesota and the recent oil boom of western North Dakota. I consider new approaches to theorizing infrastructure, anchored in the recent historic and archaeological investigations of Winnipeg Junction, a short-lived railroad town of Scandinavian immigrants.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Unsettling Infrastructure: Theorizing Infrastructure and Bio-Political Ecologies in a More-Than-Human World   •
• Society for American Archaeology 88th Annual Meeting, Portland, OR (2023)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 37510.0