what the river reveals: remembering like the water

I was co-facilitating a writing workshop in the Downtown Eastside, Vancouver, unceded Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh territories, when one of the participants told us about the dragonfly she saw hovering over downtown. She saw a glimmer of wings darting up and down, left and right over the streets, buses, cars, and high-rise buildings. Guided by some elemental instinct or generational memory, this dragonfly was searching for water to lay her eggs. “The funny thing is,” she said, “the water is there—it’s just underground.” As a group, we talked about the network of tiny streams tucked beneath the city, and how the water returns in quiet, often unseen ways: puddling rivulets of spongy grass and emergent ponds, flocked by birds, after heavy rainfall. The workshop was on climate change, a theme that touched on love and grief, childhood memories and future visions, relationships with our non-human neighbours.11Some of the finished pieces can be found in Megaphone Magazine’s latest anthology, Stealing Looks at the Sun (2022).  It was a prescient theme choice for a year defined by scorching heat, wildfire smoke, record overdoses, and the pandemic expounding the pressure. For those of us with the privilege of distance, the interlocking impacts of the climate crises were getting harder and harder to ignore. 

Just that past fall, the Abbotsford floods devastated local farmers, with significant loss of poultry and livestock and over 3,000 people forced to evacuate their homes. While the events were heartbreaking to witness and assuredly more so to experience, nonstop coverage of the damage neglected to mention that Sumas Prairie, the site of the flood, was the dwelling place of an extinct lake. Extinct is not quite the right word, as it evades responsibility. Sumas Lake, which stretched between the Sumas and Vedder mountains on unceded Stó:lō land, was extinguished by white settlers in the 1920s, who pumped the water into the river and parceled the lakebed into farmland. The death of the lake was apocalyptic for the Séma:th and other Coast Salish people related to, and reliant upon, its life—the ending of a world. So I question the popular narrative of the flood, which fails to acknowledge any “before” other than the Before and After of the disaster. The protracted and murderous mechanisms of settler colonialism, white supremacy, and capitalism, which drained the lake in the first place, are the original disaster—systems that still deal death and exacerbate the climate crisis in the name of progress. But other befores do exist, as lovingly documented in Semá:th Xo:tsa: Great Gramma’s Lake,22This collaborative book and exhibition, co-authored by Thetáx Chris Silver, Xémontélót Carrielynn Victor, Kris Foulds, and Laura Schneider, “recalls a time when the lake was thriving, using memory and story to allow the lake to live on today.” From The Reach gallery in Abbotsford website. kept alive by the Séma:th, the berries, and the medicine, all of whom are still here. And so too is the water, finding its way back home. 

I’ve been learning a lot from water, especially from Vancouver artist Laiwan’s 2021 Chinatown installation, ​​How Water Remembers. Laiwan’s project, created in collaboration with Skwx̱wú7mesh storyteller and ethnobotanist T’uy’t’tanat-Cease Wyss, re-stories the salt water marshland (known as Skwachays) that underpins much of the city of Vancouver, including Chinatown. In Laiwan’s words, the attention to waterways and reclaiming of ancestral knowledge can “daylight other ways of knowing that had once been invisible underground networks, in the same way underground streams are daylighted and recovered for fish, phytoplankton and numerous critters to once again find their way home.”33Background notes on How Water Remembers, from the artist’s website. She includes this quote by Toni Morrison: “You know, they straightened out the Mississippi River in places, to make room for houses and livable acreage. Occasionally the river floods these places. ‘Floods’ is the word they use, but in fact it is not flooding; it is remembering. Remembering where it used to be.” The grandmother in Semá:th Xo:tsa: Great Gramma’s Lake tells her grandson about how after Semá:th Xo:tsa was drained, farmers would still find sturgeon alive, wriggling in the mud. Even after the lake was lost and the fences were built and the English road signs were erected, the water remembers the lake, and the sturgeon remember the water.  

Like the dragonfly over Burrard Street, I’m seeking and sensing the water buried underground, following its wake, histories, and trajectories. Under escalating climate catastrophe, the voice of water will only get louder. But it’s more than that. Water is teaching me a language of freedom and fluidity, softness and solidarity, communion and treaty. When I ascended Burnaby Mountain in the spring of 2018, invited to practice solidarity with Tsleil-Waututh water protectors warrioring up44This phrase was a call to action from Ta’ah (Amy George), Tsleil-Waututh grandmother, shared with supporters at anti-pipeline and land sovereignty actions that spring. against the Trans Mountain pipeline, an Elder brought me to the watch house and told me to introduce my ancestors to those of the territory. I looked up through gaps in the cedar boards, where living branches swayed with the rain, and brought to mind all the unnamed ancestors whose lives gave me life: the migrating Hakka, the river-aged Fujian folk, my own ocean-traversing grandparents. Like other diasporic descendants, relating to water is, for me, an inescapable inheritance. 

But I was raised by the river, so it is to the river I turn now for revelation. 

Growing up in Calgary, my earliest memories of water were of the Bow River: the swirl of rushing movement, streams of blue scattering sunlight, frozen pale in the winter, brown in the spring like the rest of the city. And then there was the reservoir, a great swath of still green water further south. As a kid, I used to wonder why this great body of water wasn’t called a lake. Nobody told me at the time that reservoir meant man-made, and the enormous swell of pent-up water was the result of the Glenmore Dam. Built in 1932, the Dam walled off the downstream flow of the intersecting Elbow River, supplying the expanding city with drinking water—and increased waterside properties.55In testament to the intergenerational wealth reaped from the river and from those who stewarded it, many areas bordering the reservoir and subdued Elbow River are still among Calgary’s most expensive neighbourhoods in the SW quadrant, based on residential sale prices (CREB website, stats from 2019). Nowadays, hydrologists are raising concerns about the impact of relentless real estate development on the river’s alluvial aquifer, that liminal zone hidden underground wherein pulses the river’s “slow, hidden heartbeat.”66Kevin Van Tighem, “Requiem for a River,” Alberta Views, April 1, 2022. Pressure on the watershed exacerbates floods, like the 2013 one that swamped downtown Calgary and swept away entire houses. A 2017 study showed that the intensity of flooding damage in houses located by the Elbow River was due to groundwater flooding, the subsurface water table rising up through the permeable aquifer.77“Groundwater flooding, not sewer backup, blamed for damaging homes along Elbow River in 2013,” University of Calgary. Study: “Groundwater flooding in a river-connected alluvial aquifer,” led by Jason Abboud. Recommendations for the city include installing groundwater monitoring wells and limiting development. The river is remembering, and it’s speaking back. 

But first, a history. After all, “city,” like country, is an innocuous word for a jagged thing, deployed to draw blood. Calgary was settled as a North-West Mounted Police (which became the RCMP) outpost on the floodplain of the Bow and Elbow Rivers on Treaty 7 territory. The Numbered Treaties, contrivance of the newborn nation-state of Canada, served to expedite the theft of Indigenous land and restrict Indigenous movement in the prairies.88I frame the Numbered Treaties through the lens of accumulation and subjugation not to convey any dismissal for the nations who took part in these treaties in good faith, but to contextualize how the project of Canada was built on an unjust foundation; many promises made in the treaties were later broken or never fulfilled. Maybe one way of thinking of it: how Canada used treaties was an early example of cultural appropriation. Shortly afterwards, the Indian Act—formalized the same year as Fort Calgary—codified assimilation and apartheid into Canadian law.99The Indian Act, which has been modified but still exists, would go on to influence Hitler’s brand of fascism in Nazi Germany and the South African government’s apartheid system. As part of Treaty 7, Tsuu T'ina Nation 145 (formerly the Sarcee Indian Reservation) was created; reservation, like reservoir, speaks to restriction, a walling off and hemming in. The gathering place at the confluence of rivers became ground zero for settlement, Fort Calgary, a quadrant of tall sharp-tipped wood posts we used to visit on school field trips, my hometown’s original incision. Perhaps a better metaphor—one that is in fact, quite literal—would be the first fence posts in a wall. A wall contains, closes off, turns land from complex relational network1010This description of land is informed by much of Leanne Betasamosake Simpson’s work. In “I Am Not a Nation-State,” she describes her nation, and Indigenous nationhood more broadly, as a “​​web of connections to each other, to the plant nations, the animal nations, the rivers and lakes, the cosmos and our neighbouring Indigenous nations... an ecology of intimacy.” See the piece in its entirety on Unsettling America: Decolonization in Theory & Practice. into private property to be enforced and policed. But in this history of water, the ground is porous, and walls are always constructed, never inherent. To remember that such walls (and by extension, other carceral systems like prisons and borders) require relentless fortification to quell the flow of life is to invoke their eventual impermanence. Poet Rita Wong wrote about the fight against Site C Dam, “the land will have the last word, on its own time.”1111Rita Wong, “What I learned about violence in B.C.'s Peace Valley,” Canada’s National Observer, July 30, 2020. Along with the river, the land and the people are talking back.1212Mike Gouldhawke puts it this way: “In settler-colonial societies, land appears as an immense accumulation of property titles. To traditionalist Indigenous Peoples, in contrast, land is not a thing in itself but a social relationship between all living and non-living beings… The land has always been here and we’ve always been reclaiming parts of it.” This is from his piece in Briarpatch’s Land Back issue. In other words, what seethes at the edges of progress is worth paying attention to. And nothing seethes when staunched like the water does.

By the 1920s, Calgary’s population was over 63,000. When the City had secured permits and funding for the dam, it moved forwards in purchasing land in the area deemed necessary for the project. 539 acres of this land were located on Tsuu T'ina Nation 145. The City of Calgary paid Tsuu T'ina Nation $50 per acre for the land, in contrast to the $100-400 given to other landowners. While the government reached a $20 million settlement with the nation in 2013 for the inadequate compensation, like those in twenty-nine other First Nations reserves, residents still do not have access to free-flowing clean drinking water.1313Jayme Doll et al., “Running out of water a constant fear for some on Tsuut’ina Nation,” Global News, March 1, 2021. Following the histories of water unearths the underside of urban development and capitalist prosperity—the reality of continued Indigenous dispossession, what Secwépemc leader George Manuel called the “Fourth World.”1414Peter d'Errico, “Reissue of George Manuel's The Fourth World Aids Indigenous Scholars and Activists,”Indianz, April 9, 2019. More than once, the reservoir has exceeded its capacity and the river erupted, like in 2005. Hydrologists noted that a flood of such magnitude is estimated to occur once every 200 years. Consider the deep time of the water’s cyclical swell, a rhythm older than the country of Canada. Meanwhile, climate crisis, while deepening inequity, has also revealed the fragile falsehood of limitless expansion and the cost of silencing water and its protectors. Lush prairie wetlands, drained for agriculture, no longer serve as a natural sponge to buffer the water’s rise and fall. Warmer temperatures mean melting glaciers, increased rains, and more frequent floods. Discourse around watershed protection may be laced with newborn urgency, but recognition of past injuries is shallow and thus solutions are surface-deep. Look to the water and see fissures are appearing in the wall’s foundation. The water confirms what Indigenous hosts have known since occupation began: the settler-colonial palace is built on soggy, stolen ground. 

I don’t mean to minimize the destructive effects of climate change, or to suggest that floods are a form of poetic justice; across the globe, rising sea levels and extreme weather like floods and hurricanes most heavily impact Black, Indigenous, colonized, racialized, and poor people.1515Environmental and racial justice activists like Elizabeth Yeampierre lay it out clearly: “Climate change is the result of a legacy of extraction, of colonialism, of slavery… [on a] historical continuum... people of color, indigenous people, have always worked multi-dimensionally because we have to be able to fight on so many different planes.” This is from Beth Gardiner, “Unequal Impact: The Deep Links Between Racism and Climate Change,” Yale Environment 360, June 9, 2020. The 2013 floods that swept through Calgary also heavily affected nearby reserves, which did not receive the same level of response, or outpouring of support. On Siksiká Nation, over 100 homes were destroyed and 1,000 people evacuated, some of whom were still waiting for permanent housing five years later.1616Tamara Pimentel, “Five years after devastating Alberta flood, First Nation still waits for home repairs,” APTN, June 28, 2018. What I do want to call attention to is how the water—this profound, sacred, living being with its own voice and agency—is a truth-teller, revealing the roots of the climate crisis, resisting containment, and bearing witness. 

The enduring myth of the nation-state depends on a violent forgetting, a truncated construction of history that eliminates undesirable (genocidal) pasts and subdues dissent.1717Scholar Lisa Lowe describes how “the forgetting of violent encounter” is a project of the liberal archive—a continuation of the colonial archive—in The Intimacies of Four Continents (2015). What is here now has always been. To me, part of the call to decolonize is a call to remember like the water. Collectively retrieving forgotten befores is a political and life-giving act, one that can help non-Native people like me in unlearning loyalty to a singular history. Remembering like water complicates the colonial “past” and rescribes present and multivalent futures, forming—or re-forming—relations with what is still present and bubbling up from below. Before the railway, highway, and sidewalk, the wild rose, yarrow, and sweetgrass. Before the fields of canola, hay bales and grazing cows, the prairie potholes, waterfowl, and shorebirds.1818Prairie potholes describe the myriad seasonal wetlands once found throughout the Great Plains, the shallow depressions having been carved by retreating glaciers over 10,000 years ago. The majority of prairie potholes were drained for agricultural purposes when the land was colonized, and only small pockets remain. (For more, see the Prairie Potholes page on the National Wildlife Federation website). Before the reservoir, the river. I learned as an adult that many of the Indigenous names for the place where Calgary began, including in Siksiká, Stoney, Tsuutʼina, and Cree, mean Elbow, after the rivers meeting. Although my only language is English plus a handful of patchwork words salvaged from my family’s multiple migrations, I’m still learning the language of the water—of kinship, movement, abundance, return, and resistance. And I hope that through this, I’m continuing to honour that Elder’s request on Burnaby Mountain. I’m introducing my ancestors to those of the territories where I live. 

The water also draws me back to ancient ancestral knowledge. In traditional Chinese medicine, blockage or stagnation of qi slows blood flow and accentuates pain, which leads to ill health. Foundational to this understanding is that the vital life force of the universe, material and immaterial, is always in flux, and wisdom lies in following the contours of change rather than coercing or controlling it. I’ve been reading translations of the Tao Te Ching, which brims with water imagery, a precursor of modern science; we are, in fact, mostly water, and the water within us remembers too. Before everything, we swam. Before ears, gills; before tongues, we spoke water. Water is our shared origin point, our common ancestor. 

I think about the water bearing witness, and I recall the river on cold spring mornings: invisible beneath the cover of trees, a snaking dragon-shaped cloud of fog hovering above. Whether we join or reject its course, the water is already at work remembering, destabilizing unjust foundations, steeping soil and seeding life. It may take years, and it may take millennia, but the water always finds a way. It already has.