The Congress at the Lake

What can Indiana Dunes National Park—and this summer’s Environmental Humanities Congress on the Lake—teach us about the coexistence of nature and industry?

  
Standing on a sand dune in Indiana Dunes National Park, we looked out over the marram grass as geologists Erin Argyilan and Todd Thompson explained the forces that had created this landscape. Spanning 15 miles of the Lake Michigan shoreline from Michigan City to Gary and containing more than 15,000 acres, Indiana Dunes National Park, though modest in size, is the fourth most biodiverse national park, with 1,100 flowering plant species, more than 350 bird species, and a wealth of ecosystems: besides dunes, there are oak savannas, swamps, bogs, marshes, prairies, rivers, and forests.

The views here, however, are not unbroken vistas of wilderness. To the northeast, the NIPSCO Michigan City Generating Station looms, and to the northwest, the Chicago skyline is visible on clear days. Elsewhere in the park, views of dunes, lake, or other natural features are often juxtaposed with markers of industry: steel plants and other humanmade landmarks encroach from all sides. Indeed, the park itself (which became a national lakeshore in 1966 and a national park in 2019) is broken up by communities like Beverly Shores, the Ports of Indiana-Burns Harbor, and Indiana Dunes State Park (established 1925). The complexity of the region, with its competing interests, as well as the stark juxtapositions in landscape encapsulate the many tensions at work in this place.

Indeed, it was these very complexities and tensions that had drawn us here for the Environmental Humanities Congress on the Lake in late June 2025. A group of environmental historians, philosophers, rhetoricians, graduate students, scholars, filmmakers, activists, artists, creative writers, educators, and community members, we assembled at various locations on Lake Michigan, from Chesterton to Gary. As the Congress conveners explain, the Calumet Region was selected for its deep and rich natural and human histories:

It is a geographical palimpsest of historical, cultural, political, and ecological antitheses, and so offers itself as a veritable microcosm of the most pressing environmental challenges we face as a society, an ever-changing marker of our complicated history with each other, a unique and fragile habitat for one of the most diverse biological habitats in North America, a living laboratory of the natural world for public education, and an ongoing space of dialogue between plural communities with vastly different interests, values, and needs.

The Congress was the brainchild of John Arthos, an associate professor of English at Indiana University Bloomington. He looked to the Rhetoric Society of America 2019 Project on Power, Place, and Publics at the University of Nevada, Reno, as a touchstone as he worked on developing the Congress over three years. The Reno project served both as “model and anti-model,” he told me; though it was deeply rooted in place, it was also built on the traditional conference structure in which outside experts come in to offer their wisdom to the locals. John wanted to create a conference at which the academics coming in gained from local people as much wisdom—if not more—as they offered. “It’s a real struggle to make something like this happen,” John said. “How do we bring folks here to be listeners and have the local folks have a strong voice?”

Besides going on geologic and architectural tours of the area, Congress participants were offered many additional opportunities to extend their knowledge of the region. In fact, only one day of the Congress was devoted to traditional conference panels—and it was noteworthy that many of the panelists were rewriting and rethinking their work as the Congress unfolded, and they foregrounded these reconsiderations and hesitations in their talks.

The Congress opened with a land acknowledgment, which has become a relatively common practice, but in this case, it was no shallow gesture. Congress organizers worked hard to connect with and include the local indigenous people—the Pokagon Band of Potawatomi—in multiple Congress events. John N. Low, professor of comparative studies at Ohio State University and an enrolled citizen of the Pokagon Band of Potawatomi, delivered a keynote address on Potawatomi storytelling, and Potawatomi activist and educator Billie Warren led a workshop on sustainable interactions between people and the natural environment.

Additional keynotes included a presentation by environmental historian Elizabeth Grennan Browning on the toxic heritage of industry in the Calumet with a focus on the pediatric lead crisis in East Chicago, and a talk by Chicago historian Ann Keating on the ways in which natural resources were turned into commodities in the Chicagoland area. Participants had gotten a small glimpse into the real estate history of the region earlier during the bus tour when we stopped to look at the five Century of Progress homes that were originally built for the 1933 World’s Fair in Chicago and were later transported to the Indiana shoreline at Beverly Shores.

Another highlight of the conference was an afternoon film festival at the Paul H. Douglas Center for Environmental Education in Gary that featured filmmakers of the Calumet. Following screenings of four films, Shifting Sands: On the Path to Sustainability, Rebel Bells, Calumet: The Region’s River, and Cloud Factory: A Portrait of the Calumet Region, filmmakers Patricia Wisniewski, Michelle Yates, Samuel Love, and Marta Frank discussed their work and the region.

Perhaps the most unusual—and also most memorable—event at the Congress was the fire circle council ring held at the Indiana Dunes Learning Center in Chesterton. Though it was too hot to sit around a fire outside, we gathered in a circle indoors as we were joined by local activists, organizers, and community members who spoke about their goals, their challenges, and their needs. Representatives from Rebel Bells Collective (a social justice activist group for young girls in the Calumet Region), Decay Devils (a Gary-based nonprofit working to preserve Gary’s Union Station), Indiana Humanities (the state humanities council), Save the Dunes (a nonprofit conservation organization in Northwest Indiana), the Pokagon Band of the Potawatomi, and others engaged in frank discussion as the rest of us—mostly academics—listened, learned, and asked questions.

“The whole point of this experiment in research is that it’s not arriving fully formed,” John wrote in his notes about the Congress. “It’s an event of understanding. The people coming here to ‘present’—through dialogue, through questioning—will hopefully at some point be pulled up short, because the search for understanding (not knowledge) is a process, not a product.”

As John envisioned, the Congress gave participants ample opportunity to engage with and learn from the local communities of the Calumet Region, and to begin to understand the complex natural and humanmade geography of the region. In their presentations, Haein Lee and Joshua Pontillo, English doctoral students at IU Bloomington, both spoke about criticisms that have been leveled against Indiana Dunes National Park for not being scenic or wild enough. They countered by suggesting that the park offers an understanding of aesthetics that is different from traditional “wilderness aesthetics.”

Indeed, rather than allowing us to escape from industrialization and the traces of human presence—the very industries that make our contemporary lives possible—Indiana Dunes reminds us that we can love the natural and coexist with it, and that the steel plant on the edge of our frame is not marring the landscape but rather is showing us a truer picture of the world and the mark that we leave on it. Similarly, the Environmental Humanities Congress on the Lake is a model for a new kind of conference that seeks to redefine the relationships between scholars and local communities, to provide spaces for frank and necessary conversations, and to encourage knowledge to flow in all directions.

Yelizaveta P. Renfro is the author of Xylotheque (University of New Mexico Press) and A Catalogue of Everything in the World (Black Lawrence Press). Her work has appeared in North American Review, Creative Nonfiction, Orion, Colorado Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, South Dakota Review, Witness, Reader’s Digest, and elsewhere. Her new collection of essays, The Season of Birds and Stones, is forthcoming from the University of Georgia Press in 2026. She is an associate professor of English at Saint Mary’s College in Notre Dame, Indiana.

Read essays by Yelizaveta P. Renfro appearing in Terrain.org: “Loon Boy,” winner of the Terrain.org 13th Annual Contest in Nonfiction; “The Twentieth Bear”; and “Woods in Winter”.

And read Yelizaveta P. Renfro’s Letter to America in Dear America: Letters of Hope, Habitat, Defiance, and Democracy, published by Terrain.org and Trinity University Press.

Header photo of the natural landscape of Indiana Dunes National Park with the NIPSCO Michigan City Generating Station in the background by Yelizaveta P. Renfro. Photo of Yelizaveta P. Renfro by David Chritton.