Big Red Canoe - Friends of the Boundary Waters podcast · Friends of the Boundary Waters Wilderness

From Boundary Waters to Bayou - Mississippi Journeys with Devin Brown & Cory Maria Dack

·48 min·3 clips

Cori Maria Dack rejects conquering the Mississippi and asks the river and ancestors for safe passage.

1. Big Red Canoe examines Devin Brown's planned source-to-sea Mississippi paddle alongside Cori Maria Dack's completed 2022 journey. 2. Dave Meyer hosts Brown, a Mississippi Park Connection community programs manager, and Dack, a paddle guide and instructor whose 2018 River Semester covered 100 days. 3. The episode asks how paddlers can travel 2,300 miles while treating the Mississippi as a living entity, widening outdoor access, and confronting personal and historical questions. 4. Devin Brown traces her paddling commitment to a return to summer camp, kayaking in the Gulf of Maine, and a goal discovered through the Mississippi River Paddlers Group in New Jersey. 5. Brown says leaving a technology job and moving to the Twin Cities made regular contact with nature part of her mental-health practice. 6. Brown plans to become the first Black woman on record to solo kayak the Mississippi, with her mother and son potentially following in an RV. 7. Cori Maria Dack describes arriving at a Minnesota summer camp at age 21 without canoe experience and feeling like an outsider among people wearing outdoor brands. 8. Dack says mentors taught her that canoeing, fire-starting, and map reading were teachable, while empowering youth and building community were human skills she already possessed. 9. Dack's 2018 River Semester with Augsburg University and Wilderness Inquiry took 15 students from Minneapolis to Cairo, Illinois while teaching courses on the river. 10. Dack developed a plan to discuss decolonization, racism, fat phobia, ableism, transphobia, homophobia, xenophobia, and capitalism during a source-to-sea paddle. 11. Dack says she wanted fat-bodied, immigrant, queer, trans, Black, brown, and poor people to see themselves represented on the river. 12. Brown and Dack describe offering tobacco to the Mississippi each morning and at day's end after learning the practice from Indigenous elders. 13. Dack rejects phrases such as "conquer the Mississippi" and instead emphasizes permission, gratitude, safe passage, and ancestral protection. 14. The river changes from wild rice beds and the Log Jam near Itasca to sandbars, cities, barges, and the chemical corridor between Baton Rouge and New Orleans. 15. Dack recalls distinguishing buildings from ships, paddling near a nuclear power plant, and using a marine radio around ocean liners and barges. 16. River angels offered hot meals, beds, laundry, groceries, water, rides, and meeting points ranging from homes near the upper river to a bridge on the lower river. 17. Brown expects the trip's mental challenge to exceed its physical challenge and is considering a tent, hammock, bivvy, gear drop boxes, and family resupply. 18. Dack says 134 nights on the ground affected her lower back, while Brown considers the main Mississippi channel, the shorter Atchafalaya route, and boat support near ocean liners. 19. Boundary Waters paddlers and outdoor-access advocates will value Mississippi logistics and representation. 20. Listeners uninterested in paddling, rivers, Indigenous teachings, or outdoor inclusion may skip this conversation.

As heard by us

A reflective river conversation about travel, belonging, and what the Mississippi asks of the people who follow it.

Big Red Canoe treats the Mississippi as something to approach with care, not something to beat. That idea gives the episode its shape. Devin Brown and Cori Maria Dack bring two journeys into view: one already finished in a canoe in 2022, and one still being prepared for in 2024,…

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Why you'd press play

You want a river story that carries adventure, history, and identity from source to sea.

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