Uncovering the Cultural Effects of a St. Paul Creek

By Catherine Kane ’26 | Photo submitted by Corgan Archuleta

Around a hundred years ago, on St. Paul’s east side, a creek disappeared. Phalen Creek’s disappearance was entirely intentional, the work of developers and railroad companies who buried the creek in an underground storm water pipe to make way for housing and railroad tracks. The creek was an important water corridor for the native Dakota peoples who inhabited the land, before being forced off by white settlers.

In July 2022, a Native-led community non-profit, the Lower Phalen Creek Project, began organizing to restore the creek and bring it above ground, an approach known as daylighting. Creek daylighting restores the waterway to its near natural condition, a process that improves water quality, waste management, and ecological health. The LPCP’s work is the focus of junior Corgan Archuleta’s geography capstone project, which he completed this past fall with geography professor Dan Trudeau. 

Archuleta became acquainted with the organization through an internship he had with the Twin Cities Metropolitan Council, doing geographic modeling in their wastewater division. During his internship, he learned about the Phalen Creek project, which sparked his interest in the site.

“In my capstone, I’m adding on to the original literature on how daylighting has environmental benefits,” Archuleta says. “I’m also looking at how that environmental healing connects with cultural healing.”

Thus far, his research has been field work at Phalen Creek and the surrounding Swede Hollow neighborhood as well as exploring existing literature on creek daylighting. Archuleta plans on turning the capstone project into his senior thesis, which would involve interviews with local government officials and community members. 

“There is a cultural effect of just having water visible,” Archuleta says of his findings. “In the specific case of Phalen Creek, because of the Indigenous and European-immigration history, the creek’s visibility would unearth the buried stories of environment and people once exiled from St. Paul’s landscape.”

Archuleta believes restoring such relationships of respect and responsibility between people and nature can promote sustainable ways of living and planning.

“Visible water changes how we imagine our city: not as efficient machines of production and consumption, but as places to build relationships of respect and reciprocity between human and beyond-human worlds,” he says.