In the U.S., most consumers take clean and available fresh water for granted, and water usually becomes front-page news only when there’s a crisis. And the past year has seen its share of water-related crises, whether it’s the effects of a prolonged drought in the U.S. Southwest or floods that covered more than one third of Pakistan last year. But seeing water problems as only environmental disasters does not capture the deeply interconnected nature of water in our society.
To mark the release of the book “The Conversation on Water,” a collection of previously published articles on water, The Conversation hosted a webinar with experts with a range of expertise and different perspectives on water issues and potential solutions. The edited text and video clips below convey one or two of the key points each speaker made. The full webinar is available on YouTube.
Rosalyn LaPier, Professor of History, University of Illinois [embedded content]
Indigenous scholar Rosalyn LaPier explains Native Americans’ efforts to gain legal personhood status for natural entities to protect waterways.
Native American tribes in the United States think of particular waterways—whether it’s a river, a lake, or an underground aquifer—as a part of the supernatural realm. Tribal communities make an effort to protect certain waterways because it is a sacred place to them, which benefits other people as well. The Taos Pueblo, for example, spent almost an entire century fighting for the Blue Lake in New Mexico because it was a sacred site. They wanted to protect not just the lake but also the watershed of the lake, which they succeeded in doing.
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Today, tribes are using different approaches both within the federal legal system and tribal systems. One approach is to set aside water systems that they view as sacred and apply personhood status to them. This has been done in other parts of the world and is beginning to be done in the United States as well, mostly now only within tribal communities.
There are different ways that tribes are thinking more creatively, but it’s connected back to their own religious expression. The
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