Water

Micro-essay

Water separates us and connects us; it gives and sustains life; in many cultures water in general, or specific bodies of water, is sacred. Water challenges binary notions of sovereignty, according to which only nation-states can be sovereign: rivers do not obey state borders—to borrow from Epeli Hau’ofa, water is “making nonsense of all national and economic boundaries” (151)—oceans carry migrants from homelands to settle (in) new countries.

Water is also dangerous. It can harm, or even kill, if polluted and consumed, or when one tries to cross a raging body of water. It cannot be tamed or domesticated. As Barbara Sostaita writes, “Even the dams that allegedly tamed the wild river have a life span. Concrete wears down. The water will flow again” (46).

Most of us, most of the time, think of water as a resource, and a scarce one at that. We are witnessing a movement, around the world, to protect bodies of water from pollution and desecration by recognizing them as rights-bearing legal persons. The notion of water as person has been criticized by those who think of it as “more than human”; it has led to successful dam removal in the case of the Klamath River in California and Oregon; it was rejected by India’s Supreme Court that declared the Ganges and Yamuna Rivers are not living beings.

Joanne Barker calls us to “embrace the life of water to recognize the ways our movements cogenerate, to find our coalescence” (28). This project is on land, food, and spirituality, and water is indeed intimately connected to all of these things, but water is more than that. Barker thinks of water as an analytic, and we can learn from her and think of water as both theoretical and methodological framework for our scholarly work.

Land

• Stephen Most, Rivers of Renewal (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2006). (video resource also available)
• Traci Brynne Voyles, The Settler Sea: California’s salton Sea and the Consequences of Colonialism (University of Nebraska Press, 2021).
• Kazim Ali. Northern Light: Power, Land, and the Memory of Water (Minneapolis, MN: Milkweed, 2022).
• Joanne Barker, “Confluence: Water as an Analytic of Indigenous Feminism,” American Indian Culture and Research Journal, 43.3 (2019): 1-40.
• Manzanar, Diverted: When Water Becomes Dust (2022 documentary).

Food

• The Science In Indigenous Water Stories, Indigenous Women’s Connection To Water (By Wendy F. K’ah Skáahluwáa Todd, Arianna V. Northbird, and Chessaly E. Towne):

Spirituality

• Charles Sepulveda, “Our Sacred Waters: Theorizing Kuuyam as a Decolonial Possibility,” Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education, and Society 7, 1 (2018): 40-58.
• this river (2016 documentary)
• Resistance As Grounds For Futurity: Placemaking And Unsettling Through #Stopline3
• Blocking Machinery With Their Bodies: Inside The Fight Against An Oil Pipeline
• Dorothy Christian and Rita Wong, eds., Downstream: Reimagining Water, Environmental Humanities Series (Waterloo, Ontario: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2017).