Water
Mini Wiconi: Water is Life; or as some friends on Gichiigami have translated: Water as Life. Water is sacred and water is alive. In many Indigenous cultures around the world, water in all forms is considered to be our feminine ancestor, healer, and teacher. Water holds memories and deep connections between the earth and sky, and between all living beings. Rivers, lakes, and oceans are known as sovereign entities that all humans have a responsibility to care for. And because we are born in water, with water being carried in the womb, women have a special relationship with water. It is often the grandmothers’ responsibility to lead other women in protecting and praying for the waters. In Hebrew, singing/saying the word for water: ‘ma’im’ spills into the word for mother: ‘imma’.
Yet in Black and Indigenous communities the world over, water has also been a primary tool of extraction, warfare, and genocide—with womb-bearers being the hardest hit. Water sacrifice zones on tribal lands and in Black urban cores from Diné Bikéyah to Flint and Detroit to Gaza—where water is being poisoned or withheld in service of mining, fracking, or forced removal—have the highest rates of miscarriages, stillbirths, and hysterectomies; not to mention missing and murdered Indigenous relatives, and untold amounts of trauma. In Anishinaabe Akiing, water in the form of snow was strategically used as a weapon of starvation and entrapment during the 1850 Sandy Lake Massacre. In that same place, rich manoomin wetlands are being threatened by copper-nickel sulfide mining for EVs today.
Water is the source of all life. And because water moves constantly, it is the greatest threat to modern industrial society (within three days of not pumping water out, the NYC subway system would return to its natural state as a river). Yet the structures of colonization continually weaponize water and sever our relationship with it. In this season of water melting and joining back together, we invite you to reflect on your relationship with water. How do you protect and care for water? How do we begin to heal places where water has been violated and used to violate many beings' safety and dignity? How can water, the original social media, connect us across vast distances and perspectives?
