There’s a creek in Southern Washington, tucked within the folds of the West Cascades, that feeds into the Columbia River Gorge. Like so many of the riparian corridors in the Pacific Northwest, it’s brimming with waterfalls and conifers and the most immersive, porous, GREEN. Green ferns, green moss, green light filtered through leafy green trees. A temple of chlorophyll.
I spent a soft, green day here last summer, swimming in the pools carved into the rock bed. I remember running my palms along the slick walls, feeling like I was touching the physical embodiment of time. The slow burnishing of water on rock, shaping the basalt across millennia.
This creek is a part of the Columbia River Basin, a watershed that stretches from Northern Nevada to the Canadian Rockies. It’s one of the largest watersheds in the US, and spans a total of 258,000 square miles. A watershed is kind of like a geological bathtub. An area of land that channels snowmelt and rainwater to a common point. Headwaters flow into streams which flow into rivers, growing in size through a network of tributaries, and eventually draining into a larger waterbody, like a lake or ocean. The Columbia River Basin drains into the Columbia River, which cuts through the Gorge and eventually flows into the Pacific Ocean.
Watersheds are essential to life. They provide our drinking water and sustain our agriculture, among countless benefits to non-human life. And like all of earth’s precious resources, they occupy a strange space - poised between ecology and bureaucracy, where ancient geological forces meet our practical, urbanized present. The process of researching your local watershed likely involves a slew of government websites. A maze of agencies, boards, and districts, all sporting a tidy acronym: the DWR, the EPA, the DPH, the PUC. Bodies of government managing bodies of water. Some of the local municipal sites provide a brief history of their city’s water supply - millions of years of geological history condensed into several sentences, strung between annual reports and county codes. Few mention the indigenous history of the region, which in the case of the Columbia Basin, spans at least 10,000 years. The Lower Columbia River alone has ancestral connections with the Atfalati, Cascades, Clackamas, Chinook, Clatsop, Cowlitz, Kathlamet, Molalla, Multnomah, Skilloot, Tualatin Kalapuya, Wahkiakum, and Wasco peoples. Many of whom continue to steward the river today, despite a history of displacement and oppression at the hands of colonial settlers.
I lived in Portland Oregon for four years, a mere thirty minute drive from the Gorge, and gave little thought to where my water came from or what watershed I was situated within, let alone the vast scale of indigenous history at play. It wasn’t until I moved to a house off the city water grid in California that I fully grasped the importance. For three years my water was pumped up from a creek down the hill and stored in a large redwood water tank. This creek is a part of the Redwood Creek Watershed, situated within the Mount Tamalpais Watershed on Coast Miwok land. It’s fed from the headwaters of Mt Tam, flowing through Muir Woods and into the Pacific Ocean. Sometimes this creek would flood during storm surges and wash the pump downstream. Other times it would run dry and threaten to cut off our water supply. Having grown up in California on this very mountain, I’m no stranger to periods of drought. But the precarity of such a small, and clearly finite source of water helped to reorient my awareness around just how precious water really is. A truth at once so obvious and so easy to forget.
I find myself thinking about water a lot these days. Watersheds. Water access. Water pollution. Water scarcity. Water rising. Water shapes the news on a daily basis, where there’s seemingly too much or not enough, a system of extremes fueled by the climate crisis. I watch as water is used as a weapon in Gaza, restricting access to drinking water and food as a form of government sanctioned famine. Palestinians dying of thirst while bound by the Mediterranean sea.
I don’t have words for the horrors inflicted on the Palestinian people at the hands of the Israeli government. Horrors facilitated by US weapons and US tax dollars. I don’t have words for 34,000 killed and counting, 19,000 orphaned. Or for how it would feel to withstand so much severing. Severing of limbs, family, home, land, and reality. The cruelty of what’s happening in Palestine, and more broadly around the world under our colonial systems, often seems insurmountable. And most days, my words of dissent feel impossibly small. A drop in the metaphorical bucket, wilted in the face of such towering atrocity.
Words, like water, form pathways. Shaping our cultural landscapes, etching grooves of narrative that deepen and expand over time. I look to water when I’m feeling wordless and small. The rivers shifting the rock bed, carving channels through seemingly impassable terrain. I watch the trickling headwaters that feed the creeks, gaining power through their passage. Water reminds me that change is an active process, enacted through persistent, collective motion. An accumulation of individual voices and steps, flowing in tandem and forging alternative pathways through the calcified structures of our empires. To be like water is to be actionable. To protest, to write, to create, to boycott, to donate, to learn, to disrupt. To resist the urge to close our eyes. And to trust in our collective human power to reshape reality.
I now live in Berkeley - on the shore of the San Francisco Bay, the largest estuary in California. Berkeley is on the unceded land of the Ohlone people, a collective of around 50 indigenous tribes along the Northern California Coast. I no longer have to pump my water from a creek, but it certainly still comes from one, in this case the Mokelumne River Watershed in the Sierra Nevada. Berkeley has a rich history of protesting, and sits at the confluence of many pivotal cultural movements - the Civil Rights Movement, the Free Speech Movement, the Disability Rights Movement, and the Anti-War Movement to name a few. These movements, which are actively playing out to this day, are often held as separate entities, but at their crux are intricately connected - influencing and upholding one another in the fight for life, respect, and self-determination.
This past year, we’ve felt the waves of one of our current movements - the fight for Palestinian life and liberation. I’ve watched as Jewish and Muslim students link arms, at UC Berkeley and beyond, rejecting the false dichotomies born from Zionism. I’ve watched as cops attack these students in riot gear, more concerned with “disturbances of peace” than with the pursuit of peace itself. I’ve watched the Berkeley Unified School District meetings, where educators defend their right to teach the history of Palestine, and where elementary, middle, and high school students defend their right to learn it.
I’m still learning about the history of Palestine and Israel myself. About who narrates that history, and whose words are carried downstream. I’m still learning the ways in which my own Jewish lineage intersects with that history, and how that lineage has been manipulated into a justification for war crimes. Atrocities carried out in the name of “Jewish safety” that make me, and so many of my Jewish friends, feel considerably less safe.
I’m also still learning about watersheds - about the land that I live on and the resources I use. My own role in the colonial structures at play, constructed and maintained in service of me and my conveniences. It may seem circuitous to write about Palestine wrapped within a story about water. But I believe that the forces abusing water are the same forces that abuse human life. Systems of extraction born from false hierarchies, pitched to us as a preservation of our safety and wellbeing, but in reality, robbing us of that which is most precious: our humanity and our earth. Learning which rivers we drink from, and who has historically tended those rivers, is a very small step, but I think it can help us to confront our own presumptions around access to land and resources. Even the word resource, which at its simplest definition means “a source of supply”, implies that the water, rocks, trees, minerals, oil, and animals of our earth are just a stockpile of passive, lifeless materials, ready for the taking. An ecological Home Depot that we can pillage into oblivion.
I look to the Land Back Movement, an indigenous-led campaign seeking to reestablish indigenous sovereignty and stewardship of ancestral lands. Just a few months ago, the sacred Shellmound and village site in Berkeley was returned to the Lisjan Ohlone people after years of protests, campaigns, and legal battles. They plan to rematriate the land from its current state, a paved parking lot, back into native landscape, along with an educational facility, a museum, and place for ceremony. It’s easy to celebrate this win. To understand the value of an education center versus a parking lot. It’s harder to confront the ways in which we continue to pave over Indigenous history and land. An ongoing erasure that’s actively occurring around the globe, and beneath our very feet. If words are like water, then whose words are we allowing to shape the physical and cultural landscapes of our past, present, and future?
I return in memory to that mossy creek in the Gorge, because it connects me to a set of deeper truths - about water and time and change and care. About the ecological intelligence all around us, full of relevant wisdom, if only we can open our senses long enough to notice. It reminds me that on days like today, when I feel like I’m shouting into the void, I can trust that my voice will carry, however imperfect and small. Drop by drop, voices flowing together. Fighting for a better world.
“Another world is not only possible, she’s on her way. On a quiet day, if you listen very carefully, you can hear her breathe” - Arundhati Roy
Ceasefire now. Free Palestine.
Tess
would read a book by you, tess. thank you for this.
This was too long to post in the body of the essay, but here are some additional resources and links:
1. The Palestine Children’s Relief Fund which provides vital aid and medical care to children in the Middle East: https://www.pcrf.net/
2. The Jewish Voice for Peace, an anti-zionist Jewish organization based in Berkeley: https://www.jewishvoiceforpeace.org/
3. More information on some of the tribes that are actively stewarding the Columbia River: https://www.confluenceproject.org/library-post/tribes-of-the-columbia-river-system/
4. This scene from the movie Crip Camp on the Disability Rights Movement in the SF Bay Area: https://www.facebook.com/CripCampFilm/videos/crip-camp-clip-black-panther-support/726716231415909/