This is a past event.

This week John Baeten will present "Active Flows from Inactive Mines: The Heritage of Contamination at Swan Lake."

Abstract:

Located in Northern Minnesota’s Mesabi Iron Range, Swan Lake has been turning red for the past century. Situated downstream of the historic Hawkins washing plant, Swan Lake was at the center of the first legal case filed against a mining company in Minnesota over the contamination of surface waters from migrating tailings. Archival records from the post-WW2 era reveal that these historic waste flows continued to affect Swan Lake communities, but State agencies geared with protecting the lake appear to have forgotten the historic decisions that allowed these landscape transformations to develop. This institutional amnesia continues to impact how the broader Swan Lake ecosystem is managed and understood, evidenced in recent Environmental Impact Statements where the historic context of the region is limited to the past 20 years of land occupancy.

Although they have ceased producing ore, post-mining landscapes remain very active – seen in the environmental flows that manifest from historic waste streams, reclamation efforts aimed at erasing visible signs of past mining efforts, and the cultural flows that heritage managers produce to articulate the past to present communities. Using Swan Lake as a case study, this presentation will examine the historic decisions that led to the contamination of Swan Lake, and demonstrate how industrial heritage can function as a tool to inform current stakeholders and land managers about these post-mining flows.