It’s why Pearce, a Citizen Potawatomi tribal member and National Geographic Explorer, is promoting a vision of an indigenized Mississippi with a series of large-scale map installations placed all along it. The project, which she calls Mississippi Dialogues, is a collaboration with tribal nations whose traditional territories include the river, and it aims to correct what Pearce calls a “pervasive misunderstanding” of the Mississippi as a line, a thing to be crossed or traveled up and down rather than a living artery at the heart of many homelands.