Witnessing Oka Apesvchi / Protecting the Water

Oceti Sakowin Land

In 2016, water protectors joined together near the Standing Rock Sioux reservation in North Dakota to protest the installation of an oil pipeline on tribal homelands. The Sioux, known in their own language as Oceti Sakowin, led what became an international protest movement combining Native American rights and environmental activism. #NoDAPL and "Water Is Life" became hashtags and rallying cries for Indigenous-led protests against resource extraction, environmental racism, and disregard for Indigenous sovereignty. A historic gathering of tribes, nations, and peoples, the water protectors at Standing Rock awakened the United States to ongoing maltreatment and injustice within Native American communities and on Native American lands. Successful in bringing together a multitude of supporters but ultimately unable to stop the laying of underground pipe carrying crude oil from the Bakkan/Three Forks area to its destination in Illinois, these protectors created a movement. Art, performance, music, and story shaped the movement and the ways in which larger non-Native and non-activist communities encountered the #NoDAPL cause.

Folksinger Raye Zaragoza (multiracial, Pima) contributed to the protest movement through her song, "In the River." Reminiscent of folk protest songs from the twentieth century, Zaragoza forwards an Indigenous understanding of kinship relations among people and water. She calls on her listeners to recognize their relations in the water itself, singing "[i]n the river are our sisters and our brothers." She calls out the violent suppression of water protectors and pleads for humanity to not "poison our future away."

Video: https://youtu.be/I4eosRdP5gQ (courtesy of Raye Zaragoza) [End Page E-1]

Three months after the release of her protest song, Zaragoza again performed "In the River" while at the water protector camps near Standing Rock. The Facebook live stream of her acoustic performance in –20°F weather calls again to listeners to locate the stakes of protecting water and the specific location under threat. Filmed with the camp as backdrop, the distance between the live-stream viewer and her live performance reminds viewers of their own distance from Standing Rock, even as it challenges them to take up the cause of their relative, the water. We are separated from Zaragoza by distance and time. However, we are all still in relation to the water that sustains us and requires our care. The multiple flags blowing in the wind behind her live performance remind viewers of the multinational and multi-tribal nature of this fight. At least 280 separate Indigenous tribes supported the water protectors, displaying their flags at the camps as markers of solidarity and scale. The protection of water is not simply a Standing Rock Sioux issue, but a human issue, and it requires us, as Zaragoza's live stream invites us to remember, to come together and care for both our present and future.

Video: https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=1374329889304383

(courtesy of Raye Zaragoza)

Inuit and Innu Land

Only a month after Zaragoza posted her music video on YouTube, farther north and east another Indigenous nation protested the poisoning of their water relative. Inuit and Innu governments in Labrador, Canada, objected to Nalcor Energy, a Crown (government-owned) corporation, building a hydroelectric dam in their territory. Nalcor did not plan to clear the land to be flooded of vegetation and other organic materials. As the organic material decayed in the flooded land, it would create methylmercury, a central-nervous-system toxin, which would negatively impact the water quality of communities downstream of the dam. Methylmercury is a neurotoxin that impairs enzymes, cell-membrane functions, motor functions, vision, and has fatal effects on the brain development of fetuses.² It accrues as it moves up the food chain, causing larger animals like humans increased exposure and damage. As the Indigenous governments worked with scientists from Harvard to create an environmental-impact study that adequately addressed the downstream impact of the dam's creation, protestors actively shut down the dam's construction site.

Thirteen-year-old Allyson Gear joined these protestors at a blockade in October 2016 and performed a drum dance. Captured on video and later in a prize-winning photograph by Ossie Michelin, the...