Episode 2 - Givers: Waters

MB = Michelle K Berry

EW = Emily Wakild

HWRH = Heather Whiteman Runs Him

EW: 0:00

Hello, my name is Michelle Berry. And I'm Emily Wakild, and we are your hosts for More Than: a Podcast. We're both historians, but before you push stop, let us explain what kind of history we study. We're both environmental historians.

MB: 0:18

Oh dear, Emily, I'm not sure that that makes us seem any more interesting. How about this instead? Basically, we tell stories about the past and try to make sure that our stories include animals, plants, bugs, dirt, weather, and the like. And we have created this podcast to convince you that history and even nature are more than you ever thought they were.

EW: 0:42

We also both live and work in the U.S. Mountain West. Think of the region connected by the Rocky Mountains, where we've spent most of our lives. We met in graduate school and we've been friends for almost 25 years. In this podcast, we bring you stories about different parts of the ecosystems that you can find throughout the U.S. Mountain West, from the Sonoran Desert, where Michelle lives, to the Northern Rockies, where I live.

MB: 1:06

These stories have fascinating historical components and connections to contemporary issues. In addition to hopefully showing you how much more history can be, we also call the podcast More Than, because unlike typical history, we're going to put the morethanhuman at the center of each episode.

EW: 1:25

We are convinced that once you hear about the power the more than human has had in the past, you will love history and nature even more than you do now.

MB: 1:38

Now, each of the topics we have chosen has many histories, so we're only picking a few to focus on in each episode. But for many of the episodes, we'll also have a special guest or two to tell us even more about that particular topic. Join us as we explore more than you could ever expect to in a podcast about the environment and history.

Hello and welcome to episode two, Givers, Water. We are thrilled to be here today with you talking about one of our favorite topics, water. And we want to remind you as you move into the podcast, since this is just episode two, that sometimes some of our episodes may be a little longer than an average podcast because it takes more than 20 minutes to tell you cool stories with ample detail. If you need to or want to, just go ahead and listen, pause and pick back up and come back later. As always, our goal for each episode in our podcast is to offer stories that make you think a little bit more than maybe you ever have about a particular topic. And we love water. I think you and I have spent many years of our friendship talking about water. down here especially, but in both of our places, we drink a lot of water because it's so dang dry. I think of all the beings in the Mountain West for me personally, none is as powerful or as interesting historically, physically, even emotionally as water. And I think I was aware of how powerful water was from a very young age. We were river rafters. I was a skier. And so you sort of know when you're going through a rapid in a raft that that river is a powerful entity. But I don't think I really was quite as aware of how precious it was because I grew up surrounded by it. The idea of how scarce and how precious it is really came to me when I moved to Tucson. When I was younger, I grew up in and near rivers. I used irrigation ditches. I also was known to sit in them to cool off. I was surrounded by tall cottonwoods and vast expanses of alfalfa and for better or for worse, Kentucky bluegrass. The mountains that surrounded me were full of snow and it was always just present. We would talk about it, right? It was very obvious when water was going to be scarcer than other times. If the snowpack was low, we would talk about the ramifications that was going to have. If the cubic feet per second in the river was high, it would affect how we both approached work and play. And I think before I moved to Tucson, I just, I was aware of water, but I didn't realize how fully in control of everything water is.

EW: 4:23

Totally. And I know you're going to tell us more about the Sonoran Desert...

MB: 4:52

That scarcity, I think, is really interesting in a place like the Sonoran Desert, where Tucson is located. It receives about 12 inches of precipitation a year, which is hardly any at all. And with that minuscule amount, you'd think it'd be really easy to ignore water, right? It's just not around. It doesn't rain a ton. It snows now and then, but not very often. But here, when water arrives, it's so obvious. The monsoons are the summer rainstorms across the region. And if if you've ever experienced one, they arrive with big booms of thunder, and of course the monsoon itself is actually wind, and these days the winds are very, very strong. They seem to be getting stronger all the time, but maybe I'm just imagining it. By the time they get here in the Sonoran Desert, by the late June or early July, it can easily have been five months, and I'm not exaggerating, since a single drop has fallen from the sky. And you think, okay, well, the native plants are adapted to just live their best lives without water, but that's not really true. Even native plants, need that water. So at that moment, right before, right as the heat is building and right before the rains arrive, the Ocotillos look like these thorny sticks. There'll be a picture of the Ocotillo on our website. So if you don't know what it is, you can go check it out. They're the coolest plants ever, but they look quite dead right before the monsoons happen. The Palo Verdes, some of the most ubiquitous trees in the region have mostly shed their leaves in an attempt to conserve water. They are photosynthesizing using their green branches and trunks, palo verde, right? Green pole. But no leaves, so they look kind of skeletal. And even the native mesquite trees look forlorn. And then...the rains come.

EW: 6:54

.....when I lived in Tucson, we lived far from the river and the river's overgrown and intentionally inaccessible and so I was thrilled to run up Mountain Avenue and get to the Rillito and I went up a berm onto a bridge and looked down and was absolutely stunned that it was just dirt there was no actual water and the entire wide wash which it clearly could dynamically and had in the past moved across still had walls and braces so it couldn't go everywhere it wanted, but the river could move and you could see the sand where it had pushed things around, but there was not a drop of water in sight. And I was completely stumped and puzzled. It looked like a skeleton, right? It was a skeleton of a river or a mummy with the bones and the beds, but none of the actual liquid. And it was such a puzzle to me to have all this infrastructure, the bridge, the walls, the streets, with no actual river to be contained with it. And it's so weird that everybody talks about it like it's an actual river, right? Like, oh yeah, you cross the river and you go, there's nothing there. Almost always with a few exceptions, a few days of the year, right there's no water in it. And, then, within about a week, I was biking to school and got caught in the deluge of a monsoon. So that five-month pent-up waiting period for that water to arrive, and that was similarly as dramatic, right? It seems like the silliest word to use in the desert. I was so puzzled by the word monsoon, which was something I always associated with South Asia, not with the desert. But then you experience one, and I... This first time, I literally had to dismount my bike to ride home because there was so much water on the roads and in the gullies and on the sidewalks. And it was so powerful. I couldn't... I'm not a great bike rider to begin with, but I could not ride through the water as it moved. And so at that point, it was certainly not a little river, but a huge one in the bed where it belonged. But that was also fleeting. And... that monsoon in the desert was miraculous, but also so demonstrative of this feast or famine, right? All or nothing relationship with water that certainly Tucson has and a lot of the Mountain West in particular experiences.

MB: 10:08

Well, we can talk later about the feast and the famine and the impulse in the Mountain West in particular to capture water for those times of famine when the water isn't coming. To have some sort of reserve has propelled a lot of historical developments in terms of water management in the U.S. West. And we can definitely talk about that later in the episode. But I love that story because we all experience it. I have some new neighbors here who are from some islands in the Caribbean. I don't know which ones at the moment. Anyway, they are very big on trying to control the floods in our neighborhood because they think that this is very dangerous and what have you. And I sort of laugh and just think, I kind of like it when Willard Street has the river basically running down it three or four times a summer. You know, there have been times in the Tucson Basin when we've had really serious floods that were really actually dangerous. 1983 was one of those hundred year floods. And I think that those kinds of weather events those kinds of water moments live culturally in memory in this region in really profound ways. And one of my favorite authors, I don't know if you've read her, her name is Ophelia Zepeda. And she's Tohono o'Odham and grew up in a small town on the reservation here. And she has a doctorate in linguistics. She teaches at the University of Arizona. And she's also just this extraordinary poet. And I want to read a little something from her. Is that okay?

EW: Yeah, do it. Absolutely.

MB: This is only a little part. It's only an excerpt because it's a much longer poem. It's called "The Floods of 1993 and Others." And I just love it. So just a little excerpt from it. "Old trees..." (and if you ever have a chance to hear Dr. Zepeda talk in person, either on YouTube or to go hear her in person, I am not going to do her incredible writing justice, but here it goes). "Old trees uprooted, grasses, twigs, and branches, all forced, all pointing with limbs in the same direction, as if telling us the one that did this to us went that way. Barrel cactus hanging in un-cactus-like manner, upside down in between tree trunks and large branches. They silently scream, it's still good, put me in the rocky soil. The screams are inaudible. Even if every curved thorn joins in, the park service employees don't hear them. Or if they do, they ignore them. Too busy repairing concrete."

EW: 12:49

Amazing. I love un-cactus-like behavior, right? Oh, I have to use that in my life. And the juxtaposition of the plants with the concrete is the sort of foil in there.

MB: 13:09

Yes. And the focus of what we worry about after a flood happens, the focus is to repair all that infrastructure you just talked about, not understanding why it's there rather than, oh, what living being should we maybe salvage and put back into the rocky soil? It's fascinating.

EW: 13:23

And those living beings have all of this animate life, right? They have voices. They have fingers that are pointing. All of that, I think, really speaks to the ways that the West is a desert by most classifications, right? And what's so striking about the deserts in the American West is how much life is actually part of them. It's not a sandy wasteland with no life in it, but in fact, there are all kinds of ways that plants and animals and really all of these elements work together to produce this amazing ecosystem. This place for life and how much that life is observable and really kind of part of the way that people in those places also identify and come to be part of it.

Michelle: 14:38

Yeah, exactly. And just also the notion that there's all kinds of water. I think when I teach this with students in environmental history, they have a tendency to really just think about the water that's coming out of their tap. Sometimes if they're not from the desert places, they have a a deeper kind of physical attachment to bodies of water, the ocean, lakes, et cetera. But a lot of folks who are sort of from these parts, they don't really think about surface water. They think about just water coming out of the tap and it's just kind of somehow a miracle. But we, as historians, study all kinds of different kinds of water, right? We have that water that we refer to as quote unquote wild water, although what that means, can be really complicated and we can talk about it at some point. Then there's urban water. There's groundwater. All of it can be classified in a variety of different ways. But every single drop has multiple eons of history captured in its H2O molecule. This episode, I think, has taken us a bit of time to conceptualize, Em, because there's so much to be said about the history of water in the Mountain West. And some of it can be super dry. And some of it is very painful and it's almost always associated with a lot of conflict, sometimes actual physical violence. And those are deep, detailed stories that deserve telling. So I think you and I, as we thought about this episode, struggled about which of those stories do we actually tell.

Emily: 16:07

And what you've just hinted at is that, you know, water has meant power through so much of history. And one of the really interesting pieces of the work a historian does is to say when to start and what to start with, right? And where do you start with water that is, you know, the element that makes our planet so special? And how do we go about thinking about how it's shaped this landscape that we care about so much?

Michelle: 16:36

I think one of the places that we often start with thinking about water in the West, and especially when we're centering Anglo-Americans, is with the fabled journey of John Wesley Powell and his iconic journey down the Colorado River. And that just seems like such an obvious place to start. But because his journals are so interesting, we've decided to put him in here. and just read a little excerpt from his journals. You can see these journals online, dear listener, if you wanna go read more, which is what's so fun about so much history of the US West is how much it's been digitized and how available it is for all of us to look at and to read and to think about. This particular excerpt comes from August 10th, 1869. After 71 days on the river, Powell and the party had reached the mouth of the Colorado Chiquito or the Little Colorado, And they remained there for three days, sort of trying to figure out what the heck to do next, because their food had been reduced to flour and coffee and some bacon and maybe some dried apples. Half of their blankets had been lost. Their clothes were torn and ragged. And all of that happened with the power of the river. Powell described the experience in these words, "...an unknown river yet to explore. What falls there are, we know not. What rocks beset the channels, we know not. What walls rise over the river, we know not. August 13th. We're now ready to start on our way down the great unknown, our boats tied to a common stake, chafe against each other as they are tossed by the fretful river. They ride high and buoyant for their loads are lighter than we could desire, but we do have a month's ration remaining. The flour has been resifted through the mosquito net sieve. The spoiled bacon has been dried and the worst of it boiled. The few pounds of dried apples have been spread in the sun and reshrunk into their normal bulk. The sugar has all melted and gone on its way down the river, but we have a large sack of coffee. The lightening of the boats has this advantage. They will ride the waves better, and we shall have but little to carry when we make a portage."

Emily: 19:13

I mean, if I'd lost all the sugar, I'm not sure I would be that optimistic. I'm just going to say, of all the things that they held on to.

Michelle: 19:23

And as a tea drinker, the coffee would just about make me cry.

Emily: 19:26

Yes, exactly. Not the trade that I would want. But the metaphor that's embedded in his description there, that the power of the river to take away that nourishment that their party needs to complete their journey, is incredible. In his prose, just so dripping with this elegant framing of his respect for what it does there. He continues that the day before had been a little bit better, and you can see his awe, less for what the river taketh away and more for the things that it was providing. So he says, "scenery on a grand scale, marble walls polished by the waves, 2,500 feet high, three portages before dinner. This afternoon, I had a walk of a mile on a marble pavement, polished smooth in many places, in others embossed in a thousand fantastic patterns. Highly colored marble, sun shining through cleft in the wall, and the marble sending back the light in iridescence. At noon, a cleft of canyon on left, quite narrow, with a succession of pools, one above another, going back and connected by a little stream of clear water." Okay. talk about, I mean, one of the things he talks about in here is how beautifully the great canyons came through in this intersection of rock and water, right? Even in the midst of this tragedy, he's delighting in the elegance of the marble. The potholes, the size, and he's estimating the size there. And it's such an instinct for his survival, but it's also this wonder and this deep awe for the things that the river has carved out in this canyon.

Michelle: 21:48

Yeah, absolutely. And you know, I think we could do, and so much has been done on the Powell journey. We could probably discuss the big lake behind Glen Canyon dam which is Lake Powell. So the guy has been, has been, uh, is very visible to historians and in our history and in our memories. So we could do an entire podcast on that journey, but there's a lot more to get to. And there's a lot of different perspectives that aren't in Powell's journals and, and were not represented in the Powell quote unquote expedition and exploring party. And we're going to have an amazing guest today named Heather Whiteman Runs Him who works at the University of Arizona and the Tribal Justice Center. So we're going to talk a little bit more about different kinds of perspectives that lend a different take on what history means in general. So we could talk about a lot of stuff. Groundwater Management Act of 1980. We could talk about the actual building of the Glen Canyon Dam in the 1960s, which we might. There's stuff from your neck of the woods up in Idaho that we could definitely spend hours and many, many episodes talking about. But we're going to follow the river.....Thought you were going to go on that one. Still a work in progress.

We are so excited to have Heather Whiteman Runs him with us today for our guest on episode two of More Than, a podcast with the water episode. We are thrilled to have you, Heather. I know Heather through a mutual colleague and I think dear friend for both of us, Reid Gomez. So shout out to Reid for introducing us because I have since just kind of followed Heather around asking her to do things. She's probably like, go away, you weirdo. So at any rate, welcome, welcome. And thank you for being here. Just a little quick bio. She is currently an associate clinical professor here at the University of Arizona with me. And she runs the Tribal Justice Clinic in the University of Arizona Law School. But she hails from Crow Country in Montana, where she was once in the Office of the Executive Counsel for the Crow tribe. And she has her JD from Harvard University. And she has done work in Boulder, Colorado for the Native American Rights Fund. And so lots of brilliant knowledge and experience when it comes to Native rights and especially regarding water. So do you want to add anything else to introduce yourself to our audience today?

HWRH: 24:35

Yeah, I guess I'd just add that I'm a citizen of the Crow Tribe or the Apsáalooke Nation in Montana. I grew up on my reservation my whole life until I was about 15 when I left to pursue my education and have kind of gone back and forth ever since. But yeah, my family... is multi-generational ranchers as well as being tribal members on our reservation. My father and my brother are full-time farmers and ranchers and I guess my son and I are helpers whenever we can be up there to pitch in. But yeah, so I always think it's important to me and the work that I do to be informed by both being part of a culture with generations and generations on the land as well as part of the agricultural community that's arisen on our land, somewhat over our objections, but also my family members early on really saw the overarching goal for them to be self-sufficient and to figure out ways to adapt to changing world, changing power dynamics, new neighbors, things like that, in the most productive way that they could. So that's a big part of my family's history and values that I grew up with. I've been practicing in the area for a while now. I think there's always more to learn. There's always something happening that changes everything, right? And in the world we're living in today, of course, with climate change and long-term drought and just really, really, you know, dramatic upheaval in our natural world. I think, you know, being an expert in any field of law is a challenge because things, you know, if the law responds to what's happening to people and to the natural world, hopefully more and more, then yeah, things are gonna keep shifting really quickly. But my first, work on water issues was as a tribal attorney. I worked on a few smaller cases on behalf of clients in New Mexico, smaller issues like permit changes and things like that, where the tribes had a stake in when and where water was taken out of surface waters that they had a stake in. But I think my real immersion in the field of water law happened for my tribe - the Crow tribe. Our tribal leaders, the council decided that we needed to figure out what our water future would look like. At that point in time, the Crow tribe had had a compact with the state of Montana governing water issues and water allocations, rights, priorities in times of shortage, things like that. It had been out there for, I think, over 10 years at that point and just sort of been a political hot potato. You know, the compact was in place. It wasn't finalized. There was also the federal role that had to be figured out. So the tribe still had a lot of work to do if they wanted to follow up on the terms of the compact with the state. So people had just sort of been reluctant to really dig in and say, this is what we're going to do because it was, you know, any allocation of waters, any kind of agreements to handle shortages, a certain way is controversial, especially in the arid American West and in agricultural communities and communities where there's longstanding conflicts over water, water management and land, like on the average Indian reservation. So, yeah, we had to figure out what the best path forward for the tribe was. And our legal staff worked with community members, with our leadership, with different branches of our government to figure out what our goals were and how we would best achieve those goals. And ultimately what we came up with was moving forward with a compact and negotiating with the federal government to secure a federal settlement to address a lot of the longstanding water infrastructure mismanagement issues on our reservation, water infrastructure gaps on our reservation, So that's some of what we were seeking to do with that. We ended up negotiating what we felt was a very good settlement for the tribe, where we'd have water service to each reservation community, safe, secure sources of water brought in to serve people in their homes. And we'd also rehabilitate the aging and really neglected agricultural irrigation infrastructure on the reservation. We did a number of studies of different irrigation projects within our reservation land base, understanding that we're talking about a 2.4 million acre reservation. So there are a lot of separate units that maybe don't work as well together as they could and have individually been neglected at different points in time, but we're all in pretty bad shape. So we needed funding to bring those things up to speed and modernize and hopefully to serve new lands. So those were some of the things that we sought to achieve with our settlement. And ultimately we were able to do that. We also secured hundreds of thousands of acre feet of water for the tribe's uses, which is really important as well. You know, getting that decreed right, ultimately the end of the settlement that assures the tribe has access to a secure amount of water that's sufficient to build to meet our present needs and to build out to future needs as well. So that's really where I got into the water work, was working for my tribe and getting our settlement through Congress and then bringing it home and getting approval from the tribe. So the tribe had the final say in the whole matter. It's an up or down vote by all tribal members who are eligible to vote. And we ultimately received an 80% approval rate, which is incredible. I think pretty good for any community these days with political divisions and the internet being a factor in how information is presented and the veracity of information that's presented. It was a challenge, but I think at the end of the day, we did what our leaders had asked us to do and what the vast majority of our community told us they needed and wanted.

EW: 31:23

What a fascinating example, Heather, of how infrastructure grows up around something like water, and it has these legacy effects that have to be dealt with in the present to also plan for the future, right? And to try and get input on that from a broader community is a really challenging thing. So what a really great example.

HWRH: 31:44

Yeah, and I think the thing about water that a lot of people don't realize is how critical it is to everything that we do in our daily lives, right? So when we look at a reservation community where we're trying to build things that maybe haven't been built along with mainstream society, we haven't grown the same way, we haven't had the same access to capital or just autonomy in the same ways that maybe some of the surrounding communities have, we're trying to catch up, we're trying to build an economy, we're trying to build governments and fund and run critical services that everybody else in the developed world takes for granted, I think on a daily basis. If you can't rely on having water in your home, that sets you back a long way. If you can't rely on having water in your child's school or in the hospital where you're sick and injured people have to go for care, it's a struggle. So if a government can't rely on having some of those basic services available, it impacts the workforce availability, impacts how our communities are healthy, and everything else sort of falls by the wayside. If you have moms and dads who don't know if their child's school is going to be open all week because there's been problems with having safe water, then how are they going to be able to go to work? And if they can't go to work, they're not earning a wage, and then we don't have a reliable workforce with reliable wages and social services are burdened. And so there's this real snowball effect to water insecurity and it impacts Indian country at a much higher rate than it does the rest of the country. Really talking about that term, people I think struggle with sometimes, "nation building." Do tribal governments have the capacity and the support to rebuild our ability to be self-determining and to exercise sovereignty and govern our lands and resources the way that we should?

MB: 33:40

So I think that you're saying a couple of really important things here about water infrastructure. One is the built part of water, the pipes, the mechanisms to get it from whether it's surface water and flowing in rivers or whether we're taking it out of the ground or whether we're capturing it from rain, right? The ways in which we get the water to be able to use it. But then also all of the delivery mechanisms of it are essential. And that's not easy to build. It takes planning. It takes, as you say, a lot of money and funding to do it. And I think a lot of communities over time have suffered from either a poor quality of water, but also poor delivery mechanisms for the water. I think it's funny because as fellow agricultural folks, Heather and I, we have an understanding of some of that stuff, I think more than others, because you got to get your animals water and knowing how you're going to get it and how much is available is really essential. But I think there's also, in my own work, there was always this discussion about, water among the ranchers I studied, that it was this powerful being in their lives. When rain arrived or snow came or there was this sigh of relief about the life-giving power of water for these people. And I think, not to be rude to city folk, but I think that it's a little bit less in our consciousness in mainstream Western culture about the power, the actual power of water to do all the things that you just said. You spun out this whole story about lives and living life. And it all starts with water. And so I'm wondering if also you could talk a little bit about your tribal um understandings of water are they somewhat different than maybe the mechanical understanding of more western approaches to water that it's this you know almost inorganic thing that we've got to get access to and i'm just wondering if you want to talk a little bit about some of the almost more cosmological understandings of water.

HWRH: 35:50

Sure. So I think every tribe is unique as far as what their beliefs are going to be, and they'll have individual stories and names for entities and entities within water, as well as the water itself. But I think it's fair to say that most Indigenous societies do see water as having a life of its own, and that commodification of water is maybe inconsistent with tribal beliefs and tribal values. So just starting off with that point. In my tribe, we do, we believe that the water is a force of life. Water is life. We also believe that the water holds a lot of powerful entities that we need to maintain respect for and balance really. So I think when we think about opposing forces in the world, right? There are all of these great stories about, in other tribes besides my own, these opposing entities of Thunderbird and the underwater panther. So those are some of the stories that, you know, show there's a balance between the above and the below that maybe water is the point at which they meet and interact in really important ways. So, knowing that and knowing that we do have beliefs that we do have obligations to the water that we need to maintain and continue to practice. And I hate the word practice because it doesn't really encompass what that means, right? But our practices are really grounded in maintaining our reciprocal relationship with entities like water, where we rely on water for life and for sustenance and we can't live without it and that we need to have respect for that. There's... I think a real disconnect then when we look at the ways in which Western water law has developed and the ways that it asks communities to sort of compromise some of those values in ways that are difficult. So we have that perception of water as a living being, as a relative, and then we have this um, set of measures, you know, acre feet per year and practicably irrigable acreage in terms like that, that are just so technical and, and cold. And they're devoid of the life and the relationship. They're really about economics rather than, than values and reciprocity. So there's a disconnect there, but the problem too, I think is that with so many, so many communities where we've been forced into those molds and forced to speak in those terms, um, then we over conceptualize them into places where we're like, this is my water. And I own that water when it flows by my land. And, you know, that's, that's also inconsistent with the law though, right? Like taking that economic ownership oriented dynamic to an extreme becomes inconsistent with the state of the law because the law of water is really about a usufructory right. You have the right to use water for a certain purpose at a certain time in a certain place. And so there's some tension there, right? Between I'm going to protect what's mine and I have a right to it versus I have a right to utilize something in a certain way, in a certain manner. And if I don't do it, what's my recourse? Maybe the law isn't developed on that point yet.

MB: 39:15

I was just going to say that technical is the word that I was kind of struggling for. And it's funny too, because when you start talking about acre feet and prior appropriation, we were joking, Emily, Heather and I about whether or not we would use the term prior appropriation in this conversation. And she did it and she, she's done it! (laughing) No, I'm just kidding.

HWRH: 39:39

But when we do that, I used it as, you know, a description of what's wrong, not saying like, Oh, we must just follow prior appropriation.

MB: 39:47

That's right. But it already, it just gets so, excuse the pun, it just gets dry when we go into that, into the legalese, right? And even when I teach it, I notice my students just sort of zone out when we get to that. But when you start talking about it in the way that you're talking about it, Heather, with the living essence of water and and how essential it is to everything then they just get so engaged and interested in it.

HWRH: 40:18

and it's hard too because i think the average person if you ask them to tell you what an acre looks like there's no real you know they don't have a good example ready. They don't have anything ready that they would refer to to say this is about what an acre looks like, much less a foot over an acre of a fluid, you know. So like it's a hard abstract thing. And I've never found a good visual aid to teach acre feet with. But if you if you have one, I'd love to see it.

MB: 40:47

I'll share what I have. Emily, you have another question for us.

EW: 40:54

I do. Yeah.... if you have laws that are made by humans to control things like water, they have to pay respect, as you said, or put in place this relationship between humans and nature. And it sounds like native approaches to understanding water are much better at helping us see the power of those. more than human and also include humans in a recognition of the different types of power. So I'm curious if you think that's so, and if so, why is that?

HWRH: 42:10

I think the why is awfully hard to answer, but I absolutely do think that. I think we're learning as humans about how how poorly we go about doing things when we try to utilize science in ways that really fit our short-term goals rather than recognize longer-term goals, and when we try and confine science to meet the demands of capitalist economies. I think those are where some of the big problems are, commodifying things that shouldn't be commodified. That's a big part of the breakdown. We look at what we've learned recently in places like the Northwest Coast of the United States where, you know, confining waters, creating dams, building dams has done such tremendous harm to ecosystems and habitats and that, you know, the harmful impacts of that are finally being recognized because there's a value in maintaining a value in not, I guess, extinguishing species that has finally been recognized and elevated to the point where we can remove dams. We can remove dams, we can restore waters to flow freely as they should have for the past century, but weren't able to. The movement of, again, removing dams to save fish species that are critical to the spiritual and physical survival of entire cultures and economies, is a relatively new phenomenon, but it seems to me to be a really important step in the right direction. We don't want to see any more fish runs of five instead of five million, right? It's horrible. And the dramatic decrease in numbers of salmon runs, for example, have finally woken people up to where we're going to look at ways to restore the waters to their natural flow and pathway and, you know, prioritize that as one of the most important things we can be doing.

MB: 44:20

I get kind of tired of this term, I can be critical of it, but at the same time, I haven't come up with something better. What we see in the dam removal and the restoration of rivers is this "resiliency." That when you bring water to places, especially places that have traditionally always had it and had particular quality water, the temperature and the flow of the Colorado River has been so altered by, for example, Glen Canyon Dam, but of course also Hoover Dam. If you change the quality of that water, it changes the environment in which those species of fish and all the rest, everything else, the plants and all the rest of it can grow. And when you restore what was sort of their quote unquote originally, it's really mind blowing what happens and how fast it happens, how quickly everything comes back and looks renewed. And I think that's what so much of society right now is looking for as a kind of renewal, regardless of, actually, regardless of the end of the political spectrum you're on. So, okay, so now you get to geek out, Heather Whiteman Runs Him! Please tell us if we had to tell the American people like we're talking to all of them [laughter] to our listeners one case that they should know about either tribal law or water tribal law or whatever whatever one is very important let's make it no it doesn't have to be Supreme Court it can be whatever case you want. What one legal case should our listeners know about and go check out and learn more about?

HWRH: 45:53

Well, that's a really hard question because there's so many that are important. You know, I know that people would expect me to say Winters in this particular interview, but I'm not going to say Winters. I'm going to say the Winans case is really an important case. And that's a case that was decided just a couple years before Winters. And it was actually written by the same Supreme Court justice who wrote the Winters decision. The Winans case involves a dispute between settlers, non-tribal member settlers who settled along the Columbia River on lands that were ceded by some of the tribes in the area who then agreed to live on a reservation but also reserved their right to continue to hunt and fish on lands outside of the boundaries, their usual and accustomed places. So the Winans brothers who had bought the land along the Columbia River were attempting to prevent the tribal members from continuing to go to their usual and accustomed places. It ended up with the United States bringing suit against the Winans to enjoin them from preventing the Indians from continuing their subsistence fishing practices on the Columbia. And ultimately they prevailed with the United States Supreme Court recognizing that treaty rights are not extinguished when a state is established within a former territory and that the treaties were intended to preserve the rights of for a permanent term. That, you know, the treaty rights say through time immemorial or similar terminology, and that that's what everybody meant, and that's what everybody is going to be held to. Some treaties have specific terms in them, timeframes or time limits. Many do not. The treaty at issue in the Winans case did not. So all of these different little things, you know, occurring throughout the process of colonization, assimilative practices by the United States against the tribes. There were allegations that these different markers or acts had somehow implicitly terminated the terms of the treaty. The Supreme Court said that, no, we aren't going to interpret terms of a treaty in that way. They'll maintain their meaning unless they are explicitly abrogated or if there's an agreement by the tribe to abrogate. So I think the Winans case is really important. And it goes into a lot of description about the importance of subsistence fishing, relationships with habitat and places and the place-based nature of some of the treaty rights that were recognized as the reserved rights of the tribe through the treaty, which continues to be a really important doctrine when we have some of these conflicts that still make their way up to the Supreme Court today.

EW: 48:46

That's a great example of tribal sovereignty being reaffirmed. And as you said, the importance of all land not being equal, right? The specifics of a certain place and the habits of use on that particular place because of the features that it has. And affirming that as part of the treaty rights is a really interesting thing. I think our listeners would be really curious to go and look at that case and to see it as one of the many examples where tribal rights are reaffirmed And that legal precedent sort of stands throughout time in particular ways. And in relation to, as you said, sort of salmon and other beings, but also to the water into the land of the sort of innate, inert, more than humans on those places as well. I have learned so much from you already. And this has been such a wonderful conversation. But is there anything else our listeners should know about water as a more-than-human shaper of life.

MB: 49:48

Tell us everything, Heather. It's all on you!

HWRH: 49:55

I'm just going to have to start my own podcast and have you guys come on and help me get through it all. But no, I think, you know, there's a real recognition, I think, emerging in society that our conceit as humans and the way that it's been supported through the way that our laws have developed is leading us in the wrong direction and that we need to have a dramatic change a shift in our approach to governance of resources and how that relationship is supported through legal institutions. There's development of things like laws of nature movements and things like that that I think start to move the dialogue in the right direction and maybe will become more accepted and developed as concepts of law that can be applied and utilized by decision makers in places like federal courts, tribal courts. There's a big movement in tribal courts and the laws of nature and embracing those and utilizing them and institutionalizing that approach is a really important and dramatic but necessary shift. We see constitutions of some nations in South and Central America and in other parts of the world as well, where laws of nature or the rights of nature to exist or rights to a healthy environment are constitutionalized. So I think the more that we can move the dial in that direction, the better off we'll all be for the longer term.

MB: 51:18

Thank you so much, Heather. This has been been absolutely incredible and we appreciate everything. We thank you so much for your time and your brilliance and and of course, all your good work out in the world, because your work has really tangible, practical effects on the ways that water flows and flows, especially, to Native nations. And we are deeply appreciative of that.

HWRH: 51:41

Well, thank you so much. And thank you for having me on your show. And thanks for this really fun dialogue this morning. Thank you.

EW: 51:57

Wow, that was so interesting.

MB: 52:00

We could talk to Heather for hours. She's so awesome. And I always learn so much anytime I engage and interact with her. She's terrific. And I think also that just everything she talked about represents the ways in which there are just countless stories about the power of water to affect historical developments, to affect individual lives and communities all across the Mountain West and all across our region. But we can't tell all of those stories in the interest of time. Oh my goodness, can you imagine? It'd be like a 7,000 hour podcast. So what we thought we'd do today, dear listener, is just to leave you with some reflections and our hope is that the concepts that are in our reflections will follow us as we continue to build our podcast ecosystem in subsequent episodes.

EW: 52:55

One of the things I keep thinking about is that water is inert. Right. It moves, but it's also inert. It gives life, but it doesn't have it. It's not actually alive. And water is life. This saying we've talked about. But water is also inorganic. So it's not often conceived of as being living in any traditional or sort of even nontraditional way. Right. but it still has a life of its own and it provides life for everything on earth. It's what makes our planet unique and life-giving, right? And so we heard from Heather about how the Crow and other native peoples understand that water is life and that phrase, but it also moves and it's a fluid, except when it's not, right? It can be ice, it can be snow. And because of that movement, it sometimes requires, often it requires, or humans feel drawn to this need to help it move or to make it safe or to clean it up and to get it where we want it to go or to go away from places where we don't want it or there's too much of it. And that movement requires infrastructure or for us to get out of water's way. And we see this all around us, pipes and dams canals, ditches, There's also all of these interesting ways where the earth provides that infrastructure, right? We can think about riverbeds like the Rillito or ocean shores and sandy beaches. We can think about the catchments or the headwaters where water comes down a mountain. And then we can also think about the tiny things that inhabit that water, both good and bad, right? And we can understand water through math and chemistry, what kinds of microbes they are, what types of salinity a particular type of water has, but we could also understand it with heritage and culture. And that's part of what makes water so cool and so malleable. Water animates art, right? One of the ways that graphic designers can show movement when you touch a screen is ripples and your finger makes those ripples on the screen, right? And so that kind of expression is mimicking the typography is what it's called, right? It's mimicking the way water moves and it takes on those characteristics.

Michelle: 55:20

One of the I've been thinking about a lot in the different characteristics of water is just recently with the Hurricane Helene. And the power that that has had over an entire region of the United States where water was sort of these lazy rivers that went through North Carolina. And speaking of art and Asheville, North Carolina and that artist community, it's fascinating to watch now the power of that water to take away and to completely change forms and change communities. And so I think that's a really important point.

EW: 55:58

Absolutely. And in those places, those canyons are so steep and the way the earth is shaped, it's not used to doing it that much worse. and there's nowhere for it to go. And so it takes all of the human infrastructure away when the water also flows through it. I've also thought a lot about water as a representation in literary texts. And there's a strong tradition of this in Latin American literature in particular, and that water is a form of liberation. So one of my favorite examples of that is the Minister of Culture in Nicaragua during the 1990s was a man named Ernesto Cardenal. And he lived to be 95 years old. I mean, he was incredibly prolific. But he wrote about the ties between liberation and water in one of his poems. It's one of my favorite poems called Ecologia or Ecology. And the way he ends this poem has been cited a lot of times. It's a really interesting reference, I think, to the ways that water unites different kinds of people, but also to how it's tied to liberation. And he says "we will decontaminate Lake Managua. Not only humans longed for liberation, all ecology groaned for it also. The revolution is also one of lakes, rivers, trees, and animals." That's as "more than" as we can get.

MB: 57:27

I love that, thinking about water as liberation and as providing opportunity and freedom to all living beings on Earth, right? Which just reinforces the power of water. I think water's... and we've talked about a lot of different kinds of waters so far in this episode. So I think we can almost, we always think of water as singular, but I think we can also think about waters as plural in taking many different forms. And I think they are the most important actors in our world. They can flood, but they can also dry out. Yes, they can be wild and they can be tamed, or at least we think we're taming them. So I think maybe more than anything else we talk about in environmental history, water helps us to see beyond the binaries that Western culture is so committed to. Water even disrupts dominant ideas of ownership, right? Since it flows and its amount varies from day to day, month to month, sometimes minute to minute.

EW: 58:34

And water is so slippery, right? And in that slipperiness, it breaks those binaries down. Even of ownership. I love that.

MB: 58:44

Yeah, and I think that... trying to rethink binaries and dualisms that do some harm could be one of the really cool outcomes of our podcast as we continue on building our ecosystem here. You know, it's not easy to measure water, but yet we know it intimately, right? So again, that unknowable characteristic of water, and yet it makes up who we are as beings on earth. I think historical stories across the Mountain West are replete with struggles with and over water. We hear all of the wars around water and trying to access it and stealing water from one's neighbor when you're trying to bring it onto your irrigated field, et cetera. It's provided a backdrop for, even for environmental protests, radical environmental protests, like let's say the case of the GlenCanyon Dam and Earth First's unfurling of a crack down the face of the Glen Canyon Dam in 1982. It's a vivid memory in my young life. And so if people are interested, we've got stuff on our website to go learn more about that. But it has provided the impetus for those kinds of civil disobedient actions and direct action. But it's also provided impetus for Herculean engineering feats that really do inspire awe. We can debate the merits of these sorts of things, but nonetheless, it's pretty remarkable when things like the Central Arizona Project take the Colorado River 336 miles from its bed to meet the saguaro cactus of the Sonoran Desert. This profound development and management, you know, is very much with us in my state and in my town and right now in my water bottle. And that project, it lifts water 3,000 feet, right over some of the driest places in the Mountain West. It takes 20 years,$4 billion to build. We're still spending money because the infrastructure needs to be kept up.

EW: 1:00:47

It's a tremendous investment, right, of money, but also of expertise and talent and engineering to overcome those geographical obstacles for the water, right, to give you that water in your water bottle.

MB: 1:01:04

And it is a creative approach, I suppose. We can critique why so many people are living in this desert, but it's hard for me to do that because here I am. Because that water from the Colorado River Basin Project Act that was passed by Lyndon Johnson in 1968, provides water to 80% of Arizona's population. And it's so fascinating because if you go to the primary sources on the CAP website, you'll find words like pure and natural to refer to the water that's in these canals. But that's another one of those concepts that I think we want to think about. When water managers use the word natural, why are they choosing to insist on that term? Why does that water in the canals need to be, quote unquote, natural? It seems to set us up for another binary understanding that some water is natural and some isn't. And then what has to happen to it for it to stop being natural, right? And then that word pure, I think that begs for definition. I don't have the answers for these questions, but these are the kinds of things that water, as a historical subject, asks us to consider. And I think that's why water is so powerful, why it's been such a fun topic for this episode. And not just as an entity, but as a historical subject. And I think of all the things we've talked about today, I think they all show how water is more than most of us usually think that it is.

EW: 1:02:36

Absolutely. Thank you so much for tuning in, dear listener. We have lots of links to these primary sources, the poetry, the journals on our website, which is morethanapodcast.earth. We hope to see you there. And in our next episode.

MB: 1:02:56

That's it for this episode of More Than a Podcast. We hope you've loved what you've learned and we hope it's made you think a little bit differently about nature and about history. Thank you so much for joining us. There, you can also find sources that we've used and links to other interesting stories to continue your learning. So go check out more than a podcast dot earth. If you'd like to, please leave a review about this podcast and be sure to tune in next time for the next episode of More Than: a podcast.