Boyce Upholt: What Do Our Monuments Say About Who We Are?

Emergence Magazine is an online publication with annual print edition exploring the threads connecting ecology, culture, and spirituality. As we experience the desecration of our lands and waters, the extinguishing of species, and a loss of sacred connection to the Earth, we look to emerging stories. Our podcast features exclusive interviews, narrated essays, stories and more.

For thousands of years, the southern Mississippi River has been shaping the land it traverses—and the structures humans have built along it. Over vast stretches of time, Indigenous societies were building hundred-foot pyramids, fifty-acre plazas, and intricate clusters of hillocks along this wild waterway. In this narrated essay, Boyce Upholt charts the shifting course of the river and the civilizations that have emerged alongside it. Beholding the 2,200-mile levee system that now curbs the river’s torrent, he wonders: what do our monuments say about who we are—and the crises we face?

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Boyce Upholt is a freelance writer. He is the recipient of the 2019 Award for Investigative Journalism from the James Beard Foundation and was named a 2016 “Writer of the Year” by the International Regional Magazine Association. His work has appeared in Mother Jones, The New Republic, The Atlantic, TIME, The Oxford American, and The Believer, and has been included as a “notable” selection in the Best American Science & Nature Writing series. He is currently working on a book about the Mississippi River.