Paper short abstract:

By the 1920s dams built on Wolf River in Wisconsin blocked seasonal migration of lake sturgeon, interrupting foundational relations of the Menominee Nation & fish. I use STS, indigenous/settler colonial, and multispecies studies to tell story of Menominee resistance to this infrastructural violence.

Paper long abstract:

By mid-1920s two dams, the Shawano papermill dam and the Balsam Row hydroelectric dam were built on the Wolf River in Wisconsin. Since then, lake sturgeon, beautiful prehistoric species of fish, was blocked from completing its springtime travel upstream to its spawning location at Keshena Falls within the boundaries of the Menominee Reservation. Blocking lake sturgeon was especially cruel—it highlighted a foundational element of settler colonialism as a structure of elimination, not necessarily or exclusively of beings (natives, humans, or nonhumans), but also of relations of life.

The dams didn't only interrupt. They also enabled whole new worlds centered on white settlers and the new relations they introduce.

This piece is about the afterlife of infrastructure. Since early-1990s, the Menominee moved to pressure Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources (WDNR) to reestablish relations with lake sturgeon. That initially took the form of catch-and-release. Slowly the Menominee, the WDNR, the dam operators, BIA, and FERC engaged in discussions that culminated in a quasi-agreement to build a nature-like fish passageway on the Balsam Row Dam to allow lake sturgeon to return to its historic route. To again make possible new (alternative?) worlds and futures.

In 2016 the WDNR gave its decision on the proposed passageway: Denied.

The paper discusses this story bringing together STS scholarship on infrastructure and relational ontology, settler colonial/indigenous studies, with multispecies sensitivities to rethink this episode as a conflict about how to read the past, intervene in the present, and imagine the future.