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Robin Wall Kimmerer and Diane Wilson in conversation. Photo: Rebecca Slater, by Rebecca Studios.
In Review

Indigenous Wisdom: Re-story-ation to Resist, Resurge, and Inspire

I was fortunate to attend an in-person conversation between two Indigenous scholar-authors, Diane Wilson and Robin Wall Kimmerer, at the University of Minnesota’s Northrop Auditorium on May 17th, 2022 (Kimmerer and Wilson 2022). In this column, I share part of my reflections and stories as an Indigenous scientist inspired by Robin and Diane’s conversation, specifically Robin’s emphasis on the importance of healing our relationships with the land and nonhuman relatives, and the need for “Re-story-ation” of the land. As I understand it, re-story-ation means to return our stories to the land and to remember how to hear the stories the land tells…

The Hiawatha Wampum Belt, depicting the five original nations of the Haudenosaunee and their interconnections.
Teaching and Practice

Teaching Indigenous Epistemologies at the University of Minnesota

It has been argued that the twin ongoing and overarching crises facing students in higher education today are the urgencies of calls for justice and the threats from a changing climate. Indeed, these are inextricably intertwined. Students will face them no matter what their profession, or however they find themselves living as a citizen in the world. As Vicente Diaz reminds us so eloquently in his contribution to this collection, “the epistemological system on which our present political, economic, and cultural existences are based is unsustainable. We need radically different ways of defining what it means to be human, of understanding human-ness in relations of kinship and reciprocity, and of understanding and respecting the living world around us.”…

Defensoras and allies on retreat in Celendín. Image courtesy of Natalia Guzmán Solano.
Feature (Peer Review)

Formless Like Water: Defensoras and the Work of Water Protection

In this article, I write about defensoras del agua y medio ambiente, water and environmental defenders: the women participating in an anti-extractivist struggle in northern Peru, defending water against the expansion of a large-scale mining operation in Celendín’s headwaters which mobilized a social movement against state and corporate forces attempting to expand the Yanacocha mine to nearby territory.

Women working at a laundry site at Ch'onggye Stream, circa 1930s.
Feature (Peer Review)

Women and Urban Waterways in Korean Modernist Literature

Pak T’ae-wŏn’s 1938 modernist novel Scenes from Ch’ŏnggye Stream (Ch’ŏnbyŏn p’unggyŏng, 천변풍경) is one thought-provoking example of these human-environment relationships in literature.  Scenes from Ch’ŏnggye Stream provides an intimate portrayal of ordinary life for lower-class Koreans living along the Ch’ŏnggye Stream in a rapidly urbanizing and modernizing 1930s Seoul under Japanese occupation; it reveals how environmental, social, and political factors can mingle together to influence urban river environments and culture.

Mt. Stem by Digba Coker, 2022. Image courtesy of Digba Coker.
Perspectives (Peer Review)

The Summit of STEM: Navigating the Uneven Terrain

Endless hours writing and analyzing samples in the lab was not the most difficult part of graduate school, however. It was walking into a class and seeing that, yet again, no one else looks like me. It was walking into a room and knowing I must fight twice as hard to disprove any underlying biases people might have of me. It was when comments were made that weren’t necessarily targeted at me, but that impacted me because I was the only black woman in the room, lecture hall, or meeting.

In Bangladesh, Rohingya women in refugee camps share stories of loss and hopes of recovery. (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0) UN Women/Allison Joyce.
Perspectives

Water as Weapon: Gender and WASH

The association between WASH services and gendered vulnerability to violence in rural locales and urban slums in developing countries has received the most study, but women everywhere are vulnerable when they lack access to, or are accessing, WASH services. All of which leaves one asking why global leaders focus on the possibility of future water-related conflict rather than respond to the very real crisis conditions in which women and girls exist now?

Kenyan women carry water buckets filled with water on their heads during World Water Day after fetching the water at one of the illegal freshwater points in Mathare slums in Nairobi, Kenya, 22 March 2019. International World Water Day is held annually on 22 March as a means of highlighting the importance of freshwater and its management. The theme for the World Water Day In 2019 is 'Leaving no one behind', highlighting whoever you are, wherever you are, water is your human right. EPA-EFE/Daniel Irungu.
Primary Sources

Time and Trauma

Through interviews, surveys and focus group discussions with 258 households in Mathare during 2016 and 2017, I found that women faced huge challenges and trauma in collecting water. Besides the woes of finding a running tap and wasting valuable time waiting in queues, procuring water entails physical hardship that often leads to mental agony that sometimes even threatens the women’s safety.