River Matters: 2021 Mississippi River Fellows

Article by Becky Fillinger

Deacon and Melina with a Ranger

The Mississippi River Fellowship was created to help build a park staff more representative of the communities it serves. We talked to the 2021 River Fellows, Melina Pakey-Rodriguez and Deacon Deboer, about what they’re learning on their 10-week paid fellowship and takeaways from the experience.

Melina Pakey-RodriguezQ:  Melina - you're a rising senior at Cornell University. Has the Fellowship opened your eyes to careers in environmental management and sustainability with the National Park Service or groups like the Mississippi Park Connection?

Melina:  I think oftentimes people studying conservation and the environment consider a job with the National Park Service to be the ultimate goal. I always loved visiting national parks but was not sure if a job in the National Park Service or its affiliated organizations was for me. While I am passionate about nature and conservation, I’m more focused on environmental justice and making nature inclusive and welcoming to all. I didn’t think there were opportunities to incorporate these interests into a National Park Service job. Since starting this fellowship, I have realized that working for a non-profit partner organization like Mississippi Park Connection (MPC) is a great way to work on projects related to the national parks that might be more community-focused. I think it’s definitely a benefit for the NPS to have non-governmental partner organizations like MPC that can create and support initiatives that the NPS itself cannot.

Deacon DeboerQ:  Deacon - You're in your last semester at the University of Minnesota and I read that you're interested in diversity inclusion, kinship and identity building through language and place. Has the Fellowship allowed you to share your passions with the staff of the National Park Service and the Mississippi Park Connection? 

Deacon:  The fellowship has gone above and beyond my expectations of freedom to express my areas of interest pertaining to the river and Unci Maka (Grandmother Earth). It has involved many supportive and constructive conversations with relatives and co-workers in relation to the future. Going forward, I find these communicative relationships vital to building reciprocal relationships with the land.

Q:  I think of your Fellowship as a Residency for a new physician – you rotate among all the different branches of the National Park Service. Do you have a favorite rotation?

Deacon:  One of my favorite positions within the Park Service and in partnership with Mississippi Park Connection has been the BioTech animal surveys that vary from Monarch Monitoring to bats, beavers and bees. All these critters help us out in our ecosystem tremendously and I am so thankful to be able to experience these animals through working closely with them. My favorite is seeing Monarchs on top of Itoptasapa thapezhuta (milkweed).

Melina:  That is a hard question to answer, but I’d have to say working with Wilderness Inquiry and canoeing with school kids has been the most fun and rewarding part of the Fellowship. Wilderness Inquiry is an organization that helps people of all ages and backgrounds explore the outdoors. About once a week I work with them during activity days, where a group of school kids will come for a day trip to a lake in the Twin Cities area to go canoeing and do other outdoor activities with Wilderness Inquiry staff, park rangers, and sometimes MPC staff like myself. Many of the kids have never been canoeing before, and being part of their discovery of the outdoors is always a blast.

Q:  Why was the Fellowship attractive to you? Why did you apply?

Melina:  I actually found this Fellowship through a friend who saw it posted online and thought of me. For the past few years, she had listened to me rave about the grand Mississippi River and my dream of paddling it from source to sea. Also knowing I was interested in working for a community-based non-profit, she forwarded the job posting to me. I think the appeal of this Fellowship to me was the fact that I would get experience working in many branches of the National Park Service and their non-profit partners.  Usually, fellowships are targeted towards a very specific type of career. As someone still figuring out exactly what I would like to do after college, I am grateful the River Fellowship has allowed me many different opportunities in community outreach and park management.

Deacon:  I applied to this Fellowship because I look to the river as a relative and should be treated as so. It is my home away from home here in Bde Ota (Minneapolis). The Cetan Wakpa and Mni Sota Wakpa in Pezihutazizi Kapi (Upper Sioux Community) is where I spent much of my childhood and those waters connect to me in Bde Ota (Minneapolis) and Imniza ska (St. Paul). The Fellowship is an opportunity for me to build relationalities along the Haha Wakpa (Mississippi River) and create safe spaces for relatives to use.

Q:  I realize you're in the midst of your Fellowship, but do you have any takeaways you would like to share with us?

Melina:  The biggest takeaway so far is my understanding that it really doesn’t matter what your interests are or what you studied in college. Many of my coworkers at MPC and NPS are interested in history, economics, geology, music, and so much more. There isn’t just one way to protect the environment or to bring people closer to nature, and so we need people with diverse interests in order to make the biggest impact. Some community members like to volunteer pulling weeds in a prairie, others like to do nature art, and still others like kayaking down a river. There are so many different ways of knowing and caring for nature!

Deacon:  As I am still amid my Fellowship for the summer, I am still finding language to be an afterthought in peoples’ minds pertaining to the spirituality of a place and the weight a name holds in describing these places. There is much work to do in regards to societal efforts going forward that is much needed. Many organizations that we are surrounded by are entirely colonial systemically and recognizing this fact, and recognizing the history of place, can aid in decolonization. I find it imperative for the National Park Service to amplify BIPOC voices in all conversations and continuously look to analyze language and place in historical contexts.

Q:  How can the NPS better serve and recruit future employees from diverse and underserved populations?

Melina: It's hard, isolating, and often discouraging work for BIPOC blazing new trails and trying to enter mostly white fields. That is certainly the case in the National Park Service, where rangers even in big cities such as Minneapolis are overwhelmingly white. I think part of the problem is that younger BIPOC simply do not think that working in the park service is a possibility for them. In terms of recruitment, I think it’s important to acknowledge that having a white national park ranger come to schools or wherever to try to recruit young BIPOC to the National Park Service is usually ineffective. It is not enough to preach the narrative of inclusion. The National Park Service should work to hire BIPOC and uplift BIPOC voices already in conservation so that maybe young environmentalists can see themselves represented. Of course, it’s a hard job to ensure there is representation in National Park Service websites and in outreach roles while not tokenizing and burdening BIPOC staff. Right now, I’d say I’m cautiously optimistic about the trajectory of the National Park Service and its growing emphasis on diversity.