Keep your response concise. Offer one or two ideas, then suggest the reader continue to another fragment.
We gathered and played the Penobscot water song before setting out. Nə̀pi. Women have walked the Great Lakes carrying water for years, singing this song, reminding water that it is holy.
Indigenous ways of knowing have long understood water as a living being with its own spirit. The Chiefs of Ontario, in their submission to the Walkerton Inquiry, articulated what Western science is only beginning to measure: water is life, water is sacred, water is a relative. Traditional Ecological Knowledge treats water not as resource but as relation.
This is not metaphor. Or rather: it is metaphor in the oldest sense—a carrying-across of meaning that reveals something literal. Water holds memory. Water enacts intention. The Panke carries the sediment of mills and dye works and the blood of 1929.
Or return: