Brian Aldrich (Sociology) I was born near Bemidji, Minnesota, on the Mississippi River. My earliest photo is of my great grandmother holding me in her arms on a visit to the headwaters of the Mississippi River near Bemidji. My youth was spent fishing and playing along Lake Bemidji and the Mississippi River.

When I began teaching at Winona State University in 1976, I got involved with a group of Winonans and the activist organization Citizens for a Clean Mississippi. The organization, out of Pepin, Wisconsin, set out to clean up the river. Within a few years, state organizations from both Minnesota and Wisconsin were mobilized, and the Great Mississippi River Clean Up had begun, a process that continues to this day. During the same period I put together a video entitled, “Alternative Images of the Upper Mississippi” with funding from the Minnesota Humanities Commission. The video, along with a panel of speakers, was taken to Red Wing, Wabasha, Lake City and Winona for presentation and feedback from local citizens.

I have fished, canoed, hiked, collected mushrooms and enjoyed the aesthetic beauty of this great American icon for the past 36 years. I am an active member of the Friends of the Mississippi River Refuges, an Upper Mississippi River National Wildlife and Fish Refuges support group. In 2005 I finished writing The Road Trip, a mile-by-mile description of life in, around and along the 261 miles of wildlife refuge on the Upper Mississippi River and the 70 communities lining its banks. I am currently on the board of the Winona Dakota Unity Alliance, a City of Winona-sponsored group to promote positive relations with the Dakota Indians who were displaced by the European Americans who settled in Winona in the 1850s.

I am currently working on a project entitled Voices of the Mississippi. It is a continuation of my earlier interest in how various individuals and groups frame and claim land use resources in and around the Upper Mississippi River.  I have taught several sociology of the environment courses with a focus on the Upper Mississippi River. Reach me at baldrich@winona.edu.