By Sigma Colón and Juli Clarkson
Editor’s note: This feature article has been peer reviewed.
As an “extractive zone,” the Klamath River has long been a space where capitalist extraction has been challenged and resisted. Considering the intertwined structures of colonialism and capitalism, Macarena Gómez-Barris describes the extractive zone as a material and conceptual process that “names the violence that capitalism does to reduce, constrain, and convert life into commodities, as well as the epistemological violence of training our academic vision to reduce life to systems.”[1] Rather than succumb to the totalizing logics of colonization and commodification, Gómez-Barris offers alternative acts of perception that broaden our understanding of natural and social ecologies. Efforts to honor the Klamath River as a lifeway and to protect aquatic habitats on tribal lands have culminated in what is currently one of the largest dam removal projects in history. This watershed moment for Indigenous Nations and salmon of the U.S. Pacific Northwest will give new life to the once abundant Chinook runs that were decimated by the Klamath Hydroelectric Project. Inspired by ongoing dam removals, by Gómez-Barris, and by the collection of works in The Routledge Companion to Contemporary Art, Visual Culture, and Climate Change, we worked together to consider how humanist work and visual art together can move us away from thinking of rivers as mainly freshwater systems to instead recognize rivers as creative ecologies that animate visual and conceptual representations co-produced among artists, scholars, and rivers.[2]
In what follows, we explore how activists, artists, scholars, and rivers might co-create riverine engagements that interrupt the extractive capitalist, heteropatriarchal, and watershed-colonialist projects that have degraded rivers and continue to exacerbate the current ecological crisis. Embracing our commitments to humanist work and visual art we worked together to consider the creative, agential, and living force of rivers that: challenges the permanence and progressive conceptions of dams and hydroelectricity; is integral to Indigenous Traditional Knowledge and movement building; empowers feminist activism; and offers distinct aesthetic ways of deep looking and understanding. At the heart of our exploratory project to conceptualize rivers as creative ecologies is our collaborative effort to let our considerations animate and inspire our own writing and art.
Watershed Colonialism on the Klamath River
Historically one of the most abundant salmon habitats on the West Coast and deeply significant to the Klamath Tribes of the upper and lower basins, the Klamath River’s transformation began in 1905 and culminated in the Klamath Hydroelectric Project that includes four hydroelectric dams and a fifth dam used to regulate water levels.[3] As one of the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation’s earliest projects, it embodies ideologies of “watershed colonialism,” meaning the ongoing processes that facilitate settler occupation by using rivers as sites of extraction and as resources for exercising power over regions.[4] Shifting settler colonialism’s emphasis as a “land-centered project” structured to dispossess Indigenous people of their ancestral lands and make way for capitalist resource extraction, the concept of watershed colonialism focuses on rivers as sites of occupation, but also of struggle and resistance.[5] In the Klamath basin, watershed colonialism manifested as colonial hydrology and engineering projects that devastated Klamath River ecologies. These projects used the river to irrigate arid land in the U.S. West and sustain settlers through federally subsidized agriculture and ranching. Klamath Tribal communities continually resisted the federal government privileging dams and irrigation for settlers, and, more recently, they reclaimed the river.[6] With their sights on dam removal, in 2019 the Yurok Tribe of the lower basin passed a resolution granting “rights of personhood” for the Klamath River.[7] Rights of Nature legislation that provides ecosystems with legal personhood status has a long history that in recent years includes the Whanganui Iwi of New Zealand granting the Whanganui River legal personhood and the Ganges and Yamuna Rivers in India becoming “legal and living entities” with personhood rights.[8]
The ongoing recovery of the Klamath River watershed and successful challenges to colonial hydrology could be considered steps towards addressing centuries of watershed colonialism and its attendant extraction. Kelsey Leonard et al. advocate for broader implementation of Indigenous-led policy, research, and caretaking including a Water Back framework for advancing “the return of Water and kin to Indigenous governance in a way that empowers the resurgent Indigenous Water relationships that are integral to Indigenous cultural, biological, spiritual and political sovereignty; this includes cosmogony, ceremony, access, law and policies.”[9] They challenge conceptions of water as a “colonial asset” meaning “the view of Water as a resource that is extracted and valued only for its usefulness to humans, a perspective that diverges from most Indigenous cosmologies.”[10]
Cinematic River Ecologies
Challenging processes of watershed colonialism—materially, by removing the concrete and steel of dam infrastructure, and conceptually, by conveying the fluidity, impermanence, and potential transformation of rivers and people outside of colonialist infrastructure and extractive relations—inspires co-constitutive acts of creation. Among visual art traditions, film has been integral to contesting ongoing impacts and practices of watershed colonialism, but also to conveying the aesthetic and contemplative aspects of rivers that emphasize fluidity as an integral part of conceptualizing river reparations.[11] Across the global north-south divide, river documentaries creatively capture Indigenous-led deadly struggles against capitalist development that threatens life-sustaining freshwater flows. For example, Katia Lara’s documentary Berta Vive (2016) about Berta Cáceres who campaigned against the Agua Zarca dam on the Río Gualcarque in Honduras, and Michelle Latimer’s series Sacred Water: Standing Rock Part I and Red Power: Standing Rock Part II (2017) about the Standing Rock movement against the construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline in the U.S., capture historical violence and current militarized state violence against peaceful water protectors who risk their lives to fight against Indigenous water dispossession and to keep rivers flowing and free from oil contamination.[12] Leonard et al. emphasize that “Indigenous communities have advocated on behalf of Water for generations” and they describe rematriation—“the process of returning Water, Land, culture, and spirituality to Indigenous women to address the ongoing impacts of colonialism, patriarchy, and gender-based violence”—as integral to Water Back.[13] In her analysis of Traditional Indigenous Knowledge and water protection, Deborah McGregor also examines the importance of women’s care, maintenance, restoration, and advocacy for waterways.[14] Themes connecting gender with water advocacy come up in Lara and Latimer’s documentaries; these artistic cinematic portrayals contribute to, and are themselves outcomes of, movement building and the community connections that grow from Indigenous people’s commitments to river ecologies.
The vestiges of colonialism are made visible through art, even as absences. In filmmaker Thomas Riedelsheimer’s documentary of artist Andy Goldsworthy, Rivers and Tides: Andy Goldsworthy Working with Time, ecological installations come to signify cycles of time, settlement, and human impact. While in his native Scotland, Goldsworthy notes that “there’s an absence in the landscape because of the effects of sheep; they’ve written on the landscape.”[15] Theorizing with sheep and responding to Goldsworthy’s observation about the lack of trees and emptiness left behind by sheep, Julian Yates notes that “their presence remains as an aching absence, a writing deployed by English colonizers in order to unwrite particular human persons and a place.”[16] Goldsworthy uses art to address the erasure by covering stone with wooly threads that conjure the presence of sheep.
In the final scenes of Rivers and Tides, Goldsworthy again uses stone to symbolize transformation and temporality. In this scene—that beautifully captures the ephemeral quality of his art—Goldsworthy meticulously grinds small, red, iron-rich stones found strewn about the riverbed. Leading up to this moment we see him casting about searching for these otherwise imperceptible rocks. Having found the red in the river, he makes it visible in such fleeting and dramatic gestures that what remains is the visceral reaction that comes with seeing what looks like blood gushing down the river. Goldsworthy uses the bright red powder to create concentrated pools of blood-red water inside rock crevices, streaks of it dripping from stones; the color, he says, “seems so alien, but it’s a part of the river, at its very core.” Throughout the film, Goldsworthy uses the river as a visual and conceptual metaphor and here, at its apogee, it becomes a river of life: first, by the ostensible lifeblood shared by humans and nature; second, by the simulacrum of the earth bleeding; and third, by the natural cycle of the rock. He describes the powdered rock as an instant in a cycle that moves from solid to liquid forms of stone. At the time of this insight, he is central to that natural cycle—violently speeding up a process that in geological time would take countless years.
During one of his ruminations, Goldsworthy articulates his catharsis related to a representational element that is central to much of his art: “We set so much by our idea of the stability of stone and when you find that stone itself is actually fluid and liquid, that really undermines my sense of what is here to stay and what isn’t.”[17] Goldsworthy captures a process of coming to terms with the fluidity and impermanence of human and natural worlds and through his art we envision rivers as creative ecologies that influence physical and social relations. Rivers and Tides becomes a study in process and creative experience more than a portrait of an artist with his finished works; as Victoria J. Gallagher, Kelly Norris Martin, and Magdy Ma argue, Goldsworthy’s art leads audiences “toward a deeper kind of looking.”[18] This actively engaged method of looking is emblematic of the role that rivers as creative ecologies play in deepening our attention and thinking to address and potentially transform unjust processes that impact ecologies and social existence.
Material Art and River-Based Resistance
While film mediates remote connections to river geographies, textiles symbolize more intimate engagements with waterways that can politicize the affective impacts of dams on everyday life. In Brazil, women in the Movimento dos Atingidos por Barragens (in English, the Movement of People Affected by Dams) use arpilleras—a popular textile art from Chile used in the 1970s to denounce the military violence of Pinochet’s dictatorship—to resist hydropower dams and condemn the violent extractivism and displacement caused by dam infrastructure.[19] Focusing on how women have used arpillera embroidery as a political tool to organize and resist the Baixo Iguaçu dam in South Brazil, Tamara Rusansky emphasizes how this artform had three meaningful effects: it made visible the human suffering inflicted on displaced communities, illustrated the socioecological impacts of damming rivers, and also challenged women’s exclusion from leadership and decision-making processes despite them being most affected by the dam building that destroyed community life.[20]
Using a feminist approach to political ecology, Rusansky argues that the collective process of creating arpilleras produced a political space for women to participate in the struggle against dams. In this struggle, women were traditionally relegated to providing reproductive labor—maintaining the household, providing affective support, doing unpaid care work and taking on additional burdens to maintain family agriculture while men participated in meetings and public hearings and engaged in direct action. Creating textile art to express their struggles and resistance expanded women’s political participation.[21] The transformative impacts of women’s arpilleras were part of the Iguaçu River’s creative ecology—resisting the dams that marked the river as an extractive zone doubled as a challenge to the constraints that had intended to limit women’s political participation to their reproductive labor.
This interview with Verónica Sánchez shows many examples of arpilleras via Museo Violeta Parra.
Like the socially engaged practice of arpilleras, artists’ books can be forms of public art that foster embodied and creative ways of engaging rivers as lifeways that both endure and resist colonialist legacies.[22] Jo Milne argues that the tactile qualities of artists’ books that call viewers to engage by touching, and the temporal element that adapts to and changes with every new viewer, allows them to “transmit and generate the exchange of ideas on multiple levels.”[23] Artists’ books made of materials such as paper, fabric, and leather create unique sensory experiences and provide moments of discovery for viewers who enter layered and interlinked “systems of representation.”[24]
The fluidity and malleability of artists’ books make them useful vehicles for disseminating and transmitting alternative perspectives because viewer interactions with a book’s content changes with each new person handling the artwork. It is these unexpected and dynamic interactions that mark the function of an artist book as what Milne argues, a “mutable mobile.”[25] The mobility of artists’ books comes down to the ease with which they can be shared beyond museum spaces where interacting with artifacts becomes limited if they are displayed behind glass or otherwise not available to touch. Instead, groups of artists have found alternative methods of dispersing their work, including art fairs, gallery openings featuring artists’ books, and library collections. According to Milne, all these methods call for the activation of the artists’ books through the viewer’s touch. It is though the viewer’s ability to touch and engage with artists’ books in a variety of ways that the work mutates with each interaction.
Artist Books Coproduced with Riverine Perspectives
Artists’ books became the medium we chose to reimagine how humanist research and visual art together might inform new ways of thinking about rivers as creative ecologies and sites of public engagement. Through a Lawrence University summer fellowship that funds students working with faculty on research projects, we brought our academic and artistic training to bear on the question of how to make riverine ways of thinking take shape through visual art. After reading Sigma’s ongoing research on the concept of “watershed colonialism,” Juli created two artist’s books that incorporated tactile interactions to capture the degradation and extraction endured by watersheds, but also to think with rivers as creative ecologies that can renew and can be restored. The goal was to subvert the viewer’s touch by transforming their manipulation of the artist’s books into actions that foreground the agency of the freshwater depicted in the books, which are titled Cycles (un)Changed and Release. Contributing to art inspired by the creative ecologies of rivers, these books highlight the fluid, impermanent, and changing elements of rivers.
Cycles (un)Changed
The first artist’s book, Cycles (un)Changed, utilizes a movable book structure allowing viewers to fold, turn, and open to each page in a never-ending cycle. The sense of ambiguity around the book’s beginning and end allows for a new and ever-changing flow of information when a new viewer touches, turns, and explores the contents of the book. The book begins with a close-up illustration of rippling water (see figure 1), then cycles the viewer through collaged stages of water degradation caused by the encroachment of pop-up forms that reference human settlement (see figures 2 through 4). Experiencing the artist’s book in this context challenges viewers to reflect on long histories of colonialist practices that damaged watersheds through their focus on human occupation and prioritization of capitalist extraction at the expense of local rivers and bodies of water.
Figure 1. Front of artist book “Cycles (un)Changed” by Juli Clarkson, 6.5” x 6.5”, 2023. Image courtesy of Juli Clarkson.
Figure 2. Cycle of human occupation in “Cycles (un)Changed.” Image courtesy of Juli Clarkson.
Viewers can change the starting point for viewing the book or flip through it in reverse thereby creating a new lens through which to interpret and understand the work. Cycles (un)Changed exploits the book’s mutating meaning to uncover the effects of watershed colonialism as nonlinear and ever-evolving processes. The book cannot be viewed within an already established and isolated linear manner. Instead, the artist’s book requires multiple interactions, activations, and explorations to reveal the submerged patterns of watershed colonialism that have culminated into the present effects of watershed degradation and decline.
Figure 3. Cycle of human occupation in “Cycles (un)Changed.” Image courtesy of Juli Clarkson.
Figure 4. “Cycles (un)Changed,” 20.5” x 9” opened up. Image courtesy of Sigma Colón.
Release
Artists’ books’ ability to function as mutable mobiles makes them ideal for making theory portable and conveying through material art what Gómez-Barris describes as a “fish-eye episteme,” or way of knowing, that “reveals a submerged, below-the-surface, blurry countervisuality.”[26] Release, Juli’s second artist’s book, engages with Gómez-Barris’s murky, submerged perspective through the subversion of human touch. Artists’ books depend on human interaction and touch to transmit information. Taking advantage of this dependence, the touch of the viewer becomes subverted to centralize rivers as agents of storytelling and lifegiving sources. Inspired by the wave of dam removals in the Pacific Northwest, including dam removal on the Klamath River, the contents of Release are contained within a cover illustrated to resemble a withering dam. A large crack—imagery inspired by the work of Mikal Jakubal—acts as the book’s opening (see figure 5), forcing the viewer to take part in a dam removal themselves to access the book and river within (see figure 6).[27] The submerged fish become visible once the book manipulates human touch to become a force that aids in the release and restoration of a waterway historically controlled by watershed-colonialist processes.
Figure 5. Front of artist book “Release” by Juli Clarkson, 6.25”x 8”, 2023. Image courtesy of Juli Clarkson.
Figure 6. Dam removal captured in “Release.” Image courtesy of Juli Clarkson.
By splitting open and removing the dam, the agency of the river within becomes central as the rushing and vibrant fish-filled waterway becomes accessible to the viewer. The accordion book structure composing the river, with its built-in peaks and valleys, emulates the rough and rocky currents that salmon and steelhead fight against during their spawning season (see figures 7 and 8). Born in freshwater rivers and streams and then migrating to the ocean, Pacific salmon and steelhead return to the freshwater where they were born to spawn and begin a new cycle of life. Dam removal and river restoration supports the continuation of cycles previously interrupted by watershed colonialism. Once the river is released by the viewer of the artist’s book, interaction with the previously submerged fish contents becomes possible, leading viewers “toward a deeper kind of looking” not only mediated by touch, but also engaged in a practice of observation and learning made possible by holding a simulacrum of the river close.[28]
Figure 7. Salmon and steelhead moving against the current in “Release.” Image courtesy of Juli Clarkson.
Figure 8. Accordion structure of “Release,” 6.25” x 56” opened up. Image courtesy of Juli Clarkson.
Conclusion
According to Sara Ahmed, “in contemporary social theory, the primary motifs for the social are of fluidity,” in part, because flows capture changes in social experience, “the fast speeds of late capitalism, the precarious conditions of labor, the loosening of social ties.”[29] She warns, however, that movement metaphors can obscure the immobile qualities of institutions that not only refuse to change structures of power that reproduce injustice, but also mischaracterize people who challenge those structures as the real problem. Fluidity, malleability, and impermanence are key elements to our understanding of rivers as creative ecologies, but we recognize that it takes diverse aesthetic and activist strategies, Indigenous movements for water defense, and envisioning and knowing outside of a colonial mindset to not only shift how we see rivers, but to fight against the ongoing forces that relegate our lifeways to little more than extractive zones.
Footnotes
[1] Macarena Gómez-Barris, The Extractive Zone: Social Ecologies and Decolonial Perspectives (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017), xix.
[2] T. J. Demos, Emily Eliza Scott, and Subhankar Banerjee, editors, The Routledge Companion to Contemporary Art, Visual Culture, and Climate Change (New York: Routledge, 2021), 2–3. This work challenges the peripheral place of the visual arts to the central concerns of environmental humanities and art history’s delayed consideration of ecology.
[3] Michael C. Blumm and Dara Illowsky, “The World’s Largest Dam Removal Project: The Klamath River Dams,” Oregon Law Review 101, no. 1 (2022): 1–50.
[4] Sigma Colón, “Watershed Colonialism and Popular Geographies of North American Rivers,” Open Rivers: Rethinking Water, Place & Community, no. 8 (2017), https://openrivers.lib.umn.edu/article/watershed-colonialism/.
[5] J. Kēhaulani Kauanui, “‘A structure, not an event’: Settler Colonialism and Enduring Indigeneity,” Lateral 5, no. 1 (2016).
[6] For more information about grassroots activism on the Klamath River, see the Un-Dam the Klamath: Bring the Salmon Home campaign, https://bringthesalmonhome.org/.
[7] Anna V. Smith, “The Klamath River Now Has the Legal Rights of a Person,” High Country News, September 24, 2019. For a list of countries that have passed rights of nature legislation, see the United Nations Rights of Nature Law and Policy, http://www.harmonywithnatureun.org/rightsOfNature/.
[8] New Zealand Parliament, “Innovative Bill Protects Whanganui River with Legal Personhood,” March 28, 2017, https://www.parliament.nz/en/get-involved/features/innovative-bill-protects-whanganui-river-with-legal-personhood/; Michael Safi, “Ganges and Yamuna Rivers Granted Same Legal Rights as Human Beings,” The Guardian, March 21, 2017, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/mar/21/ganges-and-yamuna-rivers-granted-same-legal-rights-as-human-beings; for an antecedent of these legal and epistemological systems, see the “People’s Agreement of Cochabamba,” April 24, 2010, produced by Bolivian Indigenous movements, https://pwccc.wordpress.com/2010/04/24/peoples-agreement/; and Mihnea Tanasescu, “When a River is a Person: From Ecuador to New Zealand, Nature Gets its Day in Court,” Open Rivers: Rethinking Water, Place & Community, no. 8 (2017), https://openrivers.lib.umn.edu/article/when-a-river-is-a-person-from-ecuador-to-new-zealand-nature-gets-its-day-in-court/.
[9] Kelsey Leonard, Dominique David-Chavez, Deondre Smiles, Lydia Jennings, Rosanna ʻAnolani Alegado, Lani Tsinnajinnie, Joshua Manitowabi, Rachel Arsenault, Rene L. Begay, Aurora Kagawa-Viviani, Dawn D. Davis, Vincent van Uitregt, Hawlii Pichette, Max Liboiron, Bradley Moggridge, Stephanie Russo Carroll, Ranalda L. Tsosie, and Andrea Gomez, “Water Back: A Review Centering Rematriation and Indigenous Water Research Sovereignty,” Water Alternatives 16, no. 2 (2023), 378.
[10] Leonard et al., “Water Back,” 392.
[11] For more on the connections among river films and colonialism, see Sigma Colón, “From Watershed Colonialism to Hydroredemption: River Restoration, Care and Collective Action in River Documentary,” Resilience: A Journal of the Environmental Humanities 10, no. 3 (2023); and Isabelle Carbonell, “Multispecies Cinema in Wretched Waters: The Slow Violence of the Rio Doce Disaster,” in The Routledge Companion to Contemporary Art, Visual Culture, and Climate Change, eds. T. J. Demos, Emily Eliza Scott, and Subhankar Banerjee (New York: Routledge, 2021), 139–148.
[12] Katia Lara, dir., Berta Vive (Honduras: Terco Producciones, 2016); Michelle Latimer, dir., Sacred Water: Standing Rock Part I and Red Power: Standing Rock Part II, Rise TV Series (Toronto, ON: Vice Studio Canada, 2017).
[13] Leonard et al., “Water Back,” 377, 379.
[14] Deborah McGregor, “Traditional Knowledge: Considerations for Protecting Water in Ontario,” The International Indigenous Policy Journal, 3, no. 3 (2012): 1–21.
[15] Thomas Riedelsheimer, dir., Rivers and Tides: Andy Goldsworthy Working with Time (German: Mediopolis Film, 2001).
[16] Julian Yates, “Sheep Tracks: A Multi-Species Impression,” in Animal, Vegetable, Mineral: Ethics and Objects, ed. Jeffrey Jerome Cohen (Punctum Books, 2012), 191.
[17] Riedelsheimer, dir., Rivers and Tides.
[18] Victoria J. Gallagher, Kelly Norris Martin, and Magdy Ma, “Visual Wellbeing: Intersections of Rhetorical Theory and Design,” Design Issues 27, no. 2 (Spring 2011): 35.
[19] Tamara Rusansky, “Embroidering Resistance: Emotional, Embodied, Everyday Struggles of Women Affected by Dams in Brazil,” Geoforum 127 (2021): 126–136; For more on the MAB and arpilleras, see: Movimento dos Atingidos por Barragens, October 30, 2021, https://mab.org.br/2021/10/30/mab-lanca-acervo-virtual-arpilleras/.
[20] Rusansky, “Embroidering Resistance,” 129.
[21] For an examination of reproductive labor see: Aren Z. Aizura, “Reproduction” in Keywords for Gender and Sexuality Studies (New York: New York University Press, 2021); Rusansky, “Embroidering Resistance,” 130.
[22] Elaine Speight and Charles Quick, “‘Fragile Possibilities’: The Role of the Artist’s Book in Public Art,” Arts 9, no. 1:3 (2020).
[23] Jo Milne, “Artists’ Books as Resistant Transmitters,” Arts 8, no 4:129 (2019): 2.
[24] Milne, “Artists’ Books,” 2.
[25] Milne, “Artists’ Books,” 5.
[26] Gómez-Barris, The Extractive Zone, 15.
[27] Mikal Jakubal, Elwha Dam Crack 1987, photograph, 1987, https://www.mikaljakubal.com/product/elwha-dam-crack/. Jakubal’s artistic crack painted on the Glines Canyon Dam is part of a longer history of ecological art used to protest dam development that includes Earth First! creating a plastic crack on the Glen Canyon Dam on March 21, 1981. For more on this ecoactivist “Crack the Dam” strategy, see Sarah Ann Standing, “Earth First!’s ‘Crack the Dam’ and the Aesthetics of Ecoactivist Performance,” in Readings in Performance and Ecology, ed. Wendy Arons and Theresa J. May (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012).
[28] Gallagher, Martin, and Ma, “Visual Wellbeing,” 35.
[29] Sara Ahmed, On Being Included: Racism and Diversity in Institutional Life (Durham: Duke University Press, 2012), 185.
Recommended Citation
Colón , Sigma and Juli Clarkson. 2024. “Rivers as Creative Ecologies.” Open Rivers: Rethinking Water, Place & Community, no. 27. https://doi.org/10.24926/2471190X.11735.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.24926/2471190X.11735
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