This article analyzes the capacity for public art to build a “métis” infrastructure (Grabill 2007) capable of supporting local experiential and performative knowledge about the environment. The article describes the work of UPPArts, a small, nonprofit arts organization focused on promoting environmental awareness. Their long-term cultivation of partnerships with state agencies, NGOs, and community residents resulted in a robust collaborative arts program that engaged the public in making “nonexpert” (Simmons and Grabill 2008) knowledge based on the embodied experience of living within a contaminated urban watershed. Using field research conducted over the course of the author’s work with the organization, the article presents a thick description and rhetorical analysis of UPPArts’ annual culminating event, a parade known as the Urban Pond Procession. The article argues that the representation and performance of community knowledge in the form of community-made arts projects like the Urban Pond Procession helped mobilize a community into a public that could advocate for its right to environmental remediation and protection. The lesson of UPPArts is that the material dimensions of artistic method matter. The close attention that art-making forces us to pay to how we use materials to make things with each other can reconfigure social relations around the idea of a watershed as a rhetorical common-place (Druschke 2013).

This article provides a historical case study of the Sentinelle Affair, a conflict between French language rights and the English Only educational policies of the Catholic Church in New England in the 1920s. An analysis of this conflict reveals a correspondence between programs of language centralization and the production of language differences in the United States. The article explores the possibility that such language histories of white ethnic groups might provide grounds for creating what Malea Powell calls “a rhetoric and composition alliance.”