Episode 2- Givers: Waters

The above image comes to us from the National Park Service. It shows the boat the "Emma Dean" (named for John Wesley Powell's wife) beached in the Grand Canyon. It is dated 1874. Powell's expedition was a complicated cultural moment in the history of water in the Mountain West. The image shows the ways in which human presence can be dwarfed by the morethanhuman and shows the frailty of early technological explorations of water (note the common chair where Powell sat). Click Here to look at it and other photos from the expedition yourself.

Episode 2 Synopsis - In this episode, Michelle and Emily dive into a discussion of water and its mutli-faceted meanings for people and the morethanhumans who make the Mountain West home. In a region largely defined by aridity, water is (literally) life. The hosts welcome guest Heather Whiteman Runs Him, member of the Crow nation, associate clinical professor of law at the University of Arizona and the Director of UArizona's Tribal Justice Clinic. Episode 2 takes us on a journey down rivers and into aquifers in order to begin to think about how the false dualisms of nature/culture and nature/technology can best be understood through studies of water. The hosts also ask that listeners consider water as a particularly profound example of the power of the morethanhuman to affect historic developments. The goal of the episode is for listeners to learn that every drop of water from their tap is More Than it appears to be.

Postscript. Click here to listen to our Postscript on the sources that most inspired the stories we share in this episode.

meme via: San Jose State University Writing center

Links and Citations for Learning MORE THAN you already know!

• Water and its presence or absence has long been of literary interest to writers in the West. To open this episode, we read from the brilliant Tohono O'odham (nee Papago) poet Ofelia Zepeda. To learn more about her and read more of her poetry, click here.

• Despite the low amount of annual precipitation in the region, water is still essential for all living things. Some of those beings are more obvious in their embrace of water than others. The ocotillo is one of the best examples. Before rain, they look like dead thorny sticks, and after they look green and almost cuddly. Beware! They are still thorny sticks.

  

  

  Photo left from National Park Service, J. Jorado, photographer. Photo right from United States Forest Service by Charlie McDonald, photographer

• The image below is of Glen Canyon before the dam was constructed to create Lake Powell and generate hydropower for the southwestern United States. The Bureau of Reclamation took 192 photographs of the canyon prior to and during the construction of the dam, which was enabled by the Congressional passage of the Colorado River Storage Project Act of 1956. The images can be found in the Colorado Plateau Digital Collections archive hosted by Northern Arizona University and you may view them here. The filling of the canyon both destroyed places held sacred by many native peoples including the Dine (Navajo), Hopi, Kaibab Paiute, San Juan Southern Paiute, Ute Mountain Ute, and Zuni people, and it also provided new access for outsiders to sacred sites like Rainbow Bridge. To begin learning about the controversy head to this site.

  

• Water has served as impetus for much conflict in the Mountain West - one particularly clever act of civil disobedience occurred in 1982 when Edward Abbey and Earth First! unfurled a piece of plastic meant to look like a crack along the dam. See a video of Abbey addressing the gathered crowd by clicking here!

• One of the most profound flood events for Tucson that we describe in the episode occurred just a year after Abbey's and Earth First's Glen Canyon protest. In 1983, the region experienced a 100 year flood event, and these kinds of weather events live in popular memory of communities showing another way in which water exerts historic power.

The photo on the left shows the Rillito River "normally" (photo from Arizona Daily Star). The photo on the right shows the river during the 1983 flood (photo by ECTran71 - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=94247976).

• To read about the Compact that Dr. Whiteman Runs Him discusses in our interview with her, click here. And to see a scanned copy of and read a transcript of the original 1851 Fort Laramie Treaty (commonly known as the Horse Creek Treaty) that set the American government's boundaries of Crow territory, click here. If you are a teacher and/or interested in the larger historic context of the treaty, the Smithsonian Institution's online exhibit about the treaty is quite useful. The National Park Service's efforts to identify the exact location of the treaty gathering is fascinating and you can read about it here.

  

Sign on Crow Reservation by US Department of Agriculture.

• Here is a copy of the US. v. Winans case that Dr. Whiteman Runs Him says EVERYONE should know. It's only 14 pages long! ;~)

• One of the most mind blowing examples of infrastructure being constructed to control the power of water is the Central Arizona Project - and you can learn a lot about that by perusing this storymap.

• And lastly, learn more about Nicaraguan priest and poet Ernesto Cardenal by visiting The Poetry Foundation's site about him.

Thank you for tuning in and for wanting to learn MORE THAN you did before! Join us for Episode 3 where we discuss some of the most important Helpers in the region, many of whom you can't even see.