riverence point is a collaboration between Amanda Maciuba and Mary Wharff which seeks to celebrate the Missouri River watershed. It was inspired by the confluence of the Kaw (Kansas) River and Missouri River in Kansas City, Kansas, and has expanded to consider multiple points within the watershed. This project considers how water shapes human life and how our actions impact river environments. It explores difficult aspects of human relationships with rivers, and at the same time, offers a way to ground our interactions from a more humble place. A place of awe, gratitude, and reciprocity.

Kaw Point and Kansas City occupy the traditional, ancestral, and unceded lands of Indigenous Peoples. The area has been home to numerous Indigenous Nations going back thousands of years, and also to many tribes relocated to and through the area by force over the last several hundred years due to settler colonialism. These nations have included the Missouria, Kickapoo, Oto, Kanza (also known as Kaw Nation), Osage, Shawnee, and Delaware.

The poem was written by Mary Wharff in January of 2017. The images are a combination of etchings, laser-cut relief prints, and monotypes created and printed on mulberry paper by Amanda Maciuba. The type was printed letterpress in Optima. The book was designed, printed and bound by Amanda Maciuba at In Cahoots Residency in Petaluma, California, in the Summer of 2022.

Poem © 2017 by Mary Wharff, Lawrence, Kansas

Images and Book Design © 2022 by Amanda Maciuba, South Hadley, Massachusetts

Documentation by Aaron Paden