 All right. Welcome, everyone, to our next to last event of the evening. My name is Andy Gervage. I'm the President of the Anthropology of Consciousness. And what a day we've had so far. I hope many of you have been able to participate in some of the earlier sessions. They've been absolutely mind-boggling. Everything is being recorded and will be in the next few weeks on our Association YouTube page. But this panel has been a long time in the making. Dr. Nicole Torres and I have been working together at this organization, planning conferences, working on special issues of the journal on militarization of consciousness in all manner of topics for a number of years. And over the past year, we've been having a lot of conversations about water and water and consciousness and water and life. We were able to listen to a couple of podcasts that are in our asynchronous media guide about sacred water with Amber Magnolia Hill. And she was interviewing Dr. Carly Newday and then in another episode, Isabel Friend, who's here on this panel. And we were blown away by those. And so not only did we reach out to Amber to try to see if she would allow those podcasts to be a part of our offerings for this conference, which they are. We reached out to Isabel and then started talking to other folks. Nicole has been working extensively with water protectors and water activists in her region and around the country. And there's a lot here and a lot here to discuss. And I can't think of an issue that's more fundamental to where we are as a species right now to where we are in relationship to our other ancestors or non-human ancestors on the planet. And that's what gets at the very core of this conference on ecological upheaval and sea change, but to really the heart of what this organization is as a group of interdisciplinary folks who study consciousness and the importance of it in human identity and human activity. I'm speaking to you today from Portland, Oregon, which rests on the traditional village sites of the Multnomah, the Kathlamat, the Clackamas, the Chinook, Tualatin, Kalapua, Malala and many other tribes and bands. As the original caretakers of this land, I want to just take a quick second to acknowledge their presence, their dignity, their continued struggle for respect for restoration and for reparations. I would not be here being able to speak to you today if they weren't here first and if they weren't displaced first and if they don't, to some extent, still live in a state of displacement and separation from the land that they originally inhabited and took care of and took much better care of than we have. So we acknowledge them, and we commit this panel and really our organization to doing our part to helping right some of those historic wrongs. I just want to mention a couple of quick things for those of you that are unfamiliar with the functionality of Zoom webinar. You might already notice that if you're not one of the presenters, your camera and your audio doesn't work. So for the time being, if you want to interact with us, please do turn on the chat function because we're going to be sharing a lot of information with you throughout the panel in the chat function, and there will be questions about upcoming things for tonight and tomorrow. All matter of things are going to be coming your way in that chat function, it'll also be a way for you to interact with one another. And with us, during the panel presentation there's also a Q&A button if you roll over the bottom of your screen there's a Q&A there and I would prefer if you posted your questions there because this is where we can keep them separate and not lose them there's going to be a lot of information in the chat window, and if you post a question there we might not see it. If you do, we'll try to grab it and it'll be fine and you can always re-ask it at some point. There's also likely at the end of the session we're going to turn everyone's mics and cameras on and be able to have a larger round table but for now you'll just be watching the panelists have their conversation and interacting with us through the chat or the Q&A feature. Lastly, and then I'll hand the reins over to Dr. Torres. If you are so moved to do so and have the ability to do so, go ahead and go up find your name on the attendees list and change your name. Two things we would ask, one is that you would have your name be something either exact or closely resembling the name that you either registered for or were invited into the session with this way we can sort of keep track of who's here. We don't want to throw anybody out or have any kind of issues. We just want to keep track of security and kind of monitor who's in the session and who's not. And if you're interested in doing so in order to make the space more inclusive and a little more fluid and diverse for all manner of different folks. And so we know how to refer to you go ahead and put your preferred pronouns next to your name as well. This is not a requirement but we'd love it if you would go ahead and do that as well. Okay, that's it for me. I'm going to turn the panel over to my colleague and my dear friend Dr. Nicole Torres to take it from here. Thank you all for coming. And thank you to the panelists for just being here and being willing to participate in this conversation. And, you know, I do want to stress this is a conversation there are some slides, however, they're just kind of a way to frame the conversation and to actually ground us a little bit in the visuals of water. And I will, you know, take some time to introduce each panelist, but at the same time, you know, please know that this is a conversation that I and I was we were talking to the panelists earlier, you know, just as a, this is a generative conversation. And we are going to dedicate some time at the end for some focus Q&A's but if you do have questions, please make sure you during the panel during the discussion please make sure you put them in the box. And just to just to give you a little bit of information about myself. You know, I am both cultural anthropologist and clinical social worker I do ground my work and in eco psychology, which means I do eco therapy applied eco psychology. I live in the, the homelands of the Lummi Nation and the Nooksack people's here as well as many others. The Lummi specifically means people by the sea. So there. So the, the importance of water here is, is, is even within the context of their name. I, I personally am very much a water person, you know, although a few years ago I shouldn't say a few years ago I should say, you know, unconsciously I did not know about that and I've learned over the course of my life that I am deeply informed and shaped by water, not just simply physiologically. But also, I have, I have a, I feel like I have a particular affinity to water and consider myself a water steward. But opening up with, I want to open up introducing this particular panel with a few poems first, and a kind of an acknowledgement of where we're going. Let's just start off with this, this slide here, and this is something that I found while I was reading a book called to become a water protector by Winona LaDuke and I just want to read this in honor of understanding the deep relationship that the native peoples on this land have with water, and being water defenders, water protectors and water stewardship. And this, this particular passage is from the elder Josephine Mandaman. She is Ojibwe from the Lake Superior Ontario area. Just here, we've known for a long time that water is alive, water can hear you, water can sense what you are saying, and what you are feeling. There's been a place where I put tobacco in the water, where the water is so still, it was dead. I prayed for it. I put my tobacco in the water. And my tobacco started floating around. So the water came alive. It heard my prayers. It heard the song. So I know it listens, and it can come alive if you pay attention to it. Give it respect, and it can come alive, like anything, like a person who is sick. If you give them love, take care of them. They'll come alive. They'll feel better. It's the same with our mother, the earth, and the water. Give it love. And just to kind of acknowledge another stream where water is quite powerful and it, and has a particular force within the world, of course, is through the, the, through Ireland and through the Scottish Isles and the poet, John O'Donohue, this is a passage from his poem, In Praise of Water. The imagination of the primeval ocean where the first forms of life stirred and emerged to dress the vacant earth with warm quilts of color. I just would like for us to sit with that, those two things for a moment and just feel the power of those words and how they connect with water. And with that, let me read to you a little bit about, and share with you a little bit about each of the panelists today. We have Anne Conrad Anteville, we have Isabelle Friend joining us, Malina Juarez Perez, and Roxana Pardo Garcia. And Anne has spent more than 30 years developing a sacred relationship with the land and water through ancestral earth based spiritual traditions. She has been a long time activist for ancient and second growth forests, wilderness and water, and co founded advocates for Redwood Creek, ARC to challenge and change federal state and local regulations for better mitigations of forestry practices on salmon watershed habitats in Northern California. She has worked with environmental fishing, spiritual and grassroots organizations, along with local tribes to discover and implement creative solutions to protect endangered forests, watersheds and wild beings. She currently lives in the Johnson Creek watershed in Portland, Oregon, where she loves watching blue herons, white egrets and bald eagles hunt and hunt for fish. So thank you for being here. And I'll introduce Isabelle friend. Isabelle is an international water active advocate speaker activist and educator. She has been studying water for 11 years and teaching about water for six years and six countries. Isabelle is passionate about bringing modern scientific understanding together with ancient ancestral wisdom in a way that grounds primal elemental practices into our 21st century lifestyles. And Malina Juarez Perez is an assistant professor with a dual appointment in political science and women, gender and sexuality studies at Western Washington University. Research centers the connections between politics, oppression, health and well being Malina utilizes critical and decolonial approaches to address the colonization of Latinx and Chicanx communities with a focus on the imposition of Western gender sexual and racial categories. Her current projects include developing radical self love as a decolonial praxis and decolonizing methods, pedagogy and minds. Roxana Pardo Garcia, aka Laracce is a self identifying hood intellectual Chingona, who was born and raised on occupied Coast Salish territory. Roxana is the founder of Laracce Productions and the current owner, cultural worker and certified Chingona of her business. So thank you all for being here. And I want and before I open it, I asked you some questions that are related to this discussion. I also want to go back to just kind of grounding the conversation and just talking a little bit about some of the connections here. Interestingly, I just wanted to kind of frame this conversation, going back to some of the work that one of our board members and founder Stefan Schwartz has written about over the past few years, and also has done water research going back I think, at least 15 or 20 years. So this discussion of water is not new to the anthropology of consciousness. And I just, I was surprised so much by some of the things he said in the talk I listened to recently about water. There are a few quotes here he mentioned that water has been destiny since our earliest recorded history and this is in his, this is on Vimeo a recording of one of his lectures water is destiny. Water wars are reported by the Samaritans who date to 6000 BCE. In addition, he talks about the word rivals coming from the Latin word Revales, which means one taking from the same stream as another. This is a really interesting, you know, etymology in terms of water wars, how water is treated today, and how it relates to practices of enclosure and privatization. And it takes he also said here, which was mind boggling to me, it takes two million pounds of water to produce 2000 pounds of grain. And finally, he says, near the closing of his, his talk that we do not live on the earth, we live in the earth. So, this discussion is not new to the to the society for the anthropology of consciousness. This is actually the words of one of its founders. So we're kind of coming full circle to really think about how. I think it was 40 years ago at least 3039 40 years ago that this organization was founded, I might be mistaken, and people feel free to correct me in the chat. But this is a this is a very important and still relevant conversation that continues for decades later. So, I'm going to open it up to the panelists and invite you all to talk about tell us about your background, and how you developed a connection to water, and and you are the on the top of the list and just going to go down alphabetically and ask you all to kind of talk about yourselves and introduce yourselves. So, I have been kind of my water activism. That's been very, very public thing. But the motivation behind my water activism the spiritual motivation I really have shared with very few people so this is a little bit new for me, and I hope that my candor isn't somebody helpful for all of you, sending this round table today. To my background. I grew up in Chicago as a concert cellist, and I lived and studied in very large cities so I grew up in Chicago I studied in New York, and Los Angeles and work there. While I was taking classes at the University of Rochester and the University of Southern California. I began to significantly challenge my understanding of consciousness with in anthropology classes. And I became particularly interested in pursuing the concept of the divine feminine. And I followed the adventure that pursuit, allowing it to transform my consciousness and my life. And if we can show the next slide. So here we see to ancestral waters from two of my ancestral streams. So on the right are swallow falls in the Akagani rivers watershed in Maryland, which I swam many summers as a child, when I was visiting my grandmother, who was the ancestral. She was living on Muskogee Creek line and she was living on Muskogee Creek land. The tribe is then relocated to Oklahoma. But she was still living in this land. On the left are the falls of fall lock on the river fall lock, which was until a moment in Western Scotland, where I performed a special water ritual in honor of my Celtic ancestors and their waters and ancestral contacts. So I have these two ancestral streams that I feel have led me to my work with water. In 1986, when I was completing my master's degree at the University of Southern California, I met the teacher of the Irish Earth based spiritual tradition with whom I was to study for a number of years. And in Ireland, the indigenous spiritual tradition is the fairy tradition, by which has meant the powerful and vast forces of consciousness, foundational to all life and death processes on the planet. And two years into this study, my teacher offered that her students a challenge that we could learn the tradition in real depth if we lived in daily relationship with wilderness. And I was all in, and I decided to move with her and four other students to a remote wilderness area in Northern California. I had a four-wheel drive from the nearest small city. The last hour of which was a four-wheel drive truck path, unnavigable in certain seasons, where we lived in army tents through all seasons for several years. Every remarkable experience is there, painful internal and external struggles and confrontations, and a significant shattering of realizations during this time period. And chiefly, I was able to shed many restrictive layers of modernist constructs of consciousness, as they had very little bearing on my existence in that reality. The resulting freedom allowed the emergence of a renewed and opening intellectual consciousness, body consciousness, and feeling sensitivity to other beings and spiritual consciousness of the sacredness of the land and of all living beings. And it was this transformation that led me to develop new relationships with water, watersheds, and the living beings and watersheds. And if we could just show the last slide briefly. So some of my teachers there were Rain, Redwood Creek, and the Coho Salmon, which is sacred to the tribes who do live on their ancestral lands in this part of Northern California, including the Uruk, Kupa, Talawa, and Weot tribes. And I'll speak more about them later. So thank you for the introduction, Nicole. Thank you, Anne. And Isabel, I'm going to ask you to go ahead and introduce yourself please and and your and how and your background and your relationship with water. Thank you. I'm Nicole. And that was beautiful and thank you I resonated with so much of what you shared. Personally, my background, as Nicole mentioned, I've been studying water for the past 12 years and teaching about water for the past six years. And for me that all started when I discovered the work of Victor Schauburger, who was, they call him the water wizard of the late 1800s. And since then I've been foraging for wild waters all over the world and wild crafting spring water and making my body water of the blood of Mother Earth and that really has been the most transformational practice for me. Before that I had studied nutrition I was a health coach in New York and so I've always been fascinated by human optimization because I recognize that as living beings as water beings we have infinite capacity and we are barely scratching the surface of what we're capable of. And at the time I thought that that was through food because you know they always say you are what you eat right. It's even more true that you are what you drink because we are 70% water by volume, but molecularly we're 99.95% water molecules. So when I sort of shifted my paradigm of understanding from being, you know, a homo sapien to an aqua sapien basically that really just it shifted my entire life and my entire work and even before that I had studied herbal shamanism. So that was sort of my first introduction to communing with the more than human world of animate elements. And so my, my approach, although it is very scientific it has a lot to do with really merging elemental practices with with our modern lifestyles and I apologize it's sunrise here. My screen is very blown out and bright right now. But yeah, I'm a consummate water nerd. I love to study I love to research everything from the ecological to the spiritual to the scientific when it comes to water even after 12 years I still learn something new just about every day. And I know that that will continue for the rest of my life if I study water every day for the rest of my life I will still be learning new things about her. And yeah. It's my, it's my pleasure to be here thank you for inviting me. Thank you as a bell. Thank you so much. Malina. Hi everyone. Thank you for this invitation. As Dr. Torres mentioned, I'm an assistant professor at Western Washington University. Based here, almost Dr. Torres is neighbor. I'm here in Lumi and looks at plans next to the sale they see her name so called Bellingham Washington. My mother is Eva Perez Arrula she was born and raised in Rancho de Guadalupe, Guanajuato, Mexico. My father is David Juarez Cisbitia born and raised in Durán Es Arriba, Guanajuato, Mexico. And they're showing the photo here this is Rio Lerma. This river goes right by my house in Mexico. And now you can't really see it. It's very dark and gray. And my, my dad tells me stories about growing up they would go into the river and they could actually see the fish swimming, because it was so clear and fresh, and it's always been, you know, a source of life for them. But now, because of lack of infrastructure they actually put the sewage in there, and then they use that water to grow crops so it's not the same as it was before. I was born in California in Turlock and agricultural community. I've studied in North Carolina and Spain, Czech Republic and New Mexico so I've been, you know, traveling different places. But my, my, my connection to water and my conscious connection to water is really recent so I'm probably, you know, the baby here the newbie here. And even saying that it really started this year, even up to last week when I first picked up this book and drowned by Alexis pulling gum, gums black feminist lessons from marine mammals that really kind of solidified this relationship that I'm trying to build with water and I'm going to read a short poem from the book after I'm done with my little spiel here. I'm involved with different community campaigns around water. The most intense work I've done was a few years ago when I went with a group from Albuquerque, New Mexico to standing rock to stand there and solidarity. I participated in some actions there and then also part of a very powerful water ceremony, which I think really unlocked and stripped away something that was blocking my connection to water. Even though I really, I understood the importance of water. I understood it from more of a paternalistic way, a more of a very disconnected way of I understood we need water to survive and to live, but I didn't really look at it as, you know, a being that we needed to have a relationship with. And that was part of me growing up with a lot of fear of water actually, you know, growing up in the poor community we didn't have swimming pools, we only had canals which you couldn't swim in they're not safe. So I always had a lot of fear of water. And so I didn't really think that that relationship was was anything deeper than just defending it from pollution or you know from from exploitation. And my actual understanding of water came through my connection with the moon, which I've been trying to cultivate for the last couple of years. And so the moon or Koyachalki is a really important source of power in Chicano feminism. And so I was trying to through the moon connect to my lineage and my relationship to the cosmos, just as a way to heal from trauma that I carried, and you know that graduate school actually really compounded. And so in developing this relationship to the moon, I started realizing more and more that it's not just the liquid that we need to protect or preserve, but really a being that we need to be in relationship with a being that I am part of as well, that I have been water and that there will be water, and that it has so much wisdom for me to you know connect with. And so I want to, you know, uplift Dr. Nicole Torres here because she's my primary teacher in this and, you know, if it wasn't for her guidance I would not be as far along in that conscious connection as I am today. And so just to return to the book on drowned if it's okay I wanted to read this this poem that has to do with the Salish Sea, and it's taken me a while you know I've been here for two years to really connect to the land in the water but when I read this it kind of something clicked in me so I want to share the story with you and so this book. It's also called black feminist lessons from marine mammals. It's what can we learn from our, you know, relatives living in the sea, as the sea level rises we have a lot to learn from them as mammals ourselves so this, this, this story is lessons on how to be fierce. If you let them tell it before 1970 the orca codename blackfish were despised military bases had guns pointed towards the water to kill them on site for no nourishing reason. Teenage boys shot them with 22s and slash them with knives and left them to die slow painful deaths and the adults in their communities applauded them for taking down a giant pest. Now post 1970 with the capture of normal and a whole generation of southern resident orcas, mostly babies. If you let them tell it, thanks to oceanarium marketing orcas are loved, meaning featured on posters made into stuffed animals, starring as a mean sea world marketable captives for capitalism, loved. I advocate for a different definition, I would say the orca before and after 1970 are influential in matrilineal multi generational groups all over the planet, orca families influence all of the other species in the range. Their seals to move on to land, they impact the migration of animals as great as moose and humpback wells. In truth, the orca is a large dolphin, but there is no species on earth too large to fear her and give respect. Orcas greet each other respectfully as distinct resident groups and celebrate their own social order. They collaborate on the care of their young. They are not afraid to express their grief for months and years in public. Yes, I would say the orcas are powerful, influential, necessary, nuanced and majestic, brave and committed. Those are the words I would use. Whereas the Miami's aquarium says that an orca named Lolita is a beloved attraction for all ages, and the safer and the smallest cell to ever hold an orca, then she would be in her resident home in the Salish Sea. I add my voice to the voices of her Lumi relatives, and say that's not her name, and it never was. This summer the Lumi had a naming ceremony for this well, who was sometimes known as token team. Her name and sacred name is Kalishevna, a name that refers to a native village near the range in which she would live if she had never been captured. A group of people with whom she could have been intangible sacred relationship, a name which as I read it means home, the possibility of home for the last surviving member of her generation, who were captured by scores for the love of orca fandom. What does that actually mean to love someone whose love leads generations? Ecosystems shape themselves around her, great and small dream her at night. What does it mean to love someone who has seen her children taken and at the risk of capture, stayed to witness and scream? Who will carry around the corpse of her child until her grief has reached another stage? Who will not pretend that her heart is not broken when it is? Do we know how to love a love that huge and unapologetic? Could we learn that? I am grateful for the Lumi who are currently suing for repatriation. I support their just demand that Kalishevna be returned to her home, which is her name. Return her to her name, which is her home. Can you not hear that? Her name is home. She should be there inside her name. I love you with all of screens. I love you with all of witness. I love you with a love so old and deep, so complicated I can't name it. Oh love, if I could live inside my name, I say it love. I want to live there in a home where home is home. I live in love you cannot grasp or capture. I want to live inside my name. My name is love. I want to live in love as home. I want to live in it. Expensive and influential, specific and sacred. I want to earn the right to say it love. Thank you. Thank you so much Melina. That was beautiful. Roxana. Welcome. When I started this. I don't know if I want to go. I just kind of want to sit in this poem. I'm just like, I got something that I got to do. But I will be here with you all today. So my name is Roxana Pardo Garcia A. Kayla Roxy. And yes, I'm a hood intellectual. I see we got a lot of academics in the room. I wouldn't say I'm an academic I'm more of a street scholar. I'm someone who learns being in community, kind of boots on the ground out here doing work in the community that raised me. And the community that raised me where I was born and raised as an occupied Coast Salish territory. So do I'm a Suquamish. And I'm a small business owner that does a bunch of different types of community work. And one of the, one of the waters that is close to me is Seahurst Beach, which is a part of the sound. And it's a beach that I grew up going to, since I moved to Bering when I was six. It feels like home. And I have other ancestral waters, which are on the western coast of Mexico, my family's from Michoacan. And we are from Sierra Caliente, very hot where my family is from. Not a lot of water, although it's very green. And I just, I know that there's I have this ancestral connection to the Pacific Northwest. Because one of my, some of my ancestors are orcas and they are humpback whales. And they do travel between the Pacific waters of Washington to the Pacific waters of Mexico. And so I do, I really appreciate what you shared. I appreciate everything that y'all shared I'm just kind of like, I want to be from listen to this panel. Yes, you know, by volume our bodies are 70%, which means that when we are working with people we are also working with water. And we are alchemyzing with water when we're when we are working with folks and with people in community. I work with one of the projects that I currently have right now is a food bank, a Latinx food bank specifically. We provide culture development foods to the communities of the neighborhoods that I grew up in. And we're not just providing food we're providing art. We have live music we have artists that come and play music on what people are coming up and getting their food boxes. We give out art, we give out Bandulce we give out books by indigenous and black authors in English and in Spanish. And so it's much more than just, than just, you know, food and I say this because I'm tying it back to this idea of this, you know, 70% by volume and I really like that I just learned that 9.9% molecules is made up of water. But you know, you know when you think about water and what happens when you kind of like if you have a glass of water, and it's full, and you hit the glass. It creates this ripple effect. Right. And that is the gift that if that is the effect that you know, digging or vibration or interaction that something has with the glass of water and imagine what that does to our bodies. You know, for 70% by volume 99% molecules, you know, the interactions that we're having the words that we're receiving the environments that are raising us are constantly sending ripple effects to our bodies. And as someone who grew up in poverty as someone who grew up at intersections of multiple identities who has faced oppression and many different forms and shapes. Those, those, there's certain messages that have been, you know, have been vibrating through my soul and through my body. And so what does it mean for me as a cultural worker, who's trying to shift paradigms to shift the ways. We vibrationally interact with each other. What kind of ripple effects am I sending through you. When I hand you a box of food that is the food that you can that that you can cook your grandmother's recipes with that remind you of your ancestral lands that remind you of convening and of community during the time where we're having to physically isolate. And that's kind of the water work that I currently do. I also also want to acknowledge that we are currently sitting in a really interesting astrological place because we have the sun moon and Venus and Pisces for those of you who are like astrology. That we are actually multiple placements right now are sitting in a very, very strong water sign, which is Pisces. And the relationship that we have to the Astros right this isn't just a relationship we have here on land. This is a relationship that we have to the cosmos. And so that's I just wanted to present like this is kind of how I've been thinking about my work. And again, shifting the vibrations and the energy, which is of course, you know, impacting our and our relationship to ourselves which is our relationship to water within ourselves and within the earth that we are living on. And I think this like consciousness piece like it definitely has been a journey I'm still learning like everybody else here. But I think that, again, I have this really ancestral connection to water, particularly to the Pacific coast to the Pacific Ocean. And actually, like when I started to think about my grandparents. So both of my parents are water. I'm an earth sign, which is really interesting. I'm a tourist. Very, very earthy. But I love the water. I love the Northwest because of its earth and because of its water. And both of my parents are our water science and both of my paternal maternal grandparents are water science. And you come from a lineage and a legacy of a lot of water in my ancestry. Again, this connection to cosmos to earth to self, and to the living creatures that, you know, the mammals in the sea that, that give us so much and so that's, oh yeah that's a picture of the coast of a week stopper. I see what the Neho, which is a neighboring, a neighboring state to my family state which I'm pretty sure we're from this place. And again, a lot of migration happened before we were able to document it. But yeah, I'm so excited to be here with you and have this conversation. Thank you so much everyone and thank you Roxana for for your contacts and really appreciate it. Everything was beautiful thus far. And I am going to read a passage I mean because Roxana what you just said just connects so much to something I read from, and some of you are familiar with this book, Water Codes by Carly New Day. Isabel you I know you know about it because I heard you on Mythic Medicine. And Carly New Day was also a guest on the podcast and I think I believe we can find it in the, what is it the archive the online archive of resources for the conference. So I'm going to read this passage and I'm going to, because it absolutely connects to what Roxana just said, but I want I'm going to invite Isabel to talk about this as well. Here on page 24 of this of Carly New Day's book, Water Codes. She says here. This is about Luke Montanier, a Nobel Prize winning biologist. In his stunning and fascinating experience he successfully conducted an experience in which DNA appeared to replicate itself between the test tubes through the water. In the experiment Montanier and his team took to test tubes one containing a tiny piece of bacterial DNA. The other containing pure water and surrounded them with a weak electric electromagnetic field that is similar to the energy wave energy waves naturally emitted by Earth. The results of their experiment were phenomenal and speaks volumes toward confirming what so many people are already understanding about water and energy transference. They're demonstrating long held and long denied theories. So I'm going to invite Isabel to talk about this first but panelists please if something resonates with you after she finishes talking about that please go ahead and jump in. Thank you for that invitation Nicole yeah that's one of my favorite water experience experiments all of Luke Montanier's work is just incredible in that way. And I think a good place to start is just recognizing that our DNA is actually mostly water it's only held in its chiral structure by the integrity of the hydrogen bond matrices in a column of water that runs through the central channel of the double helix, and then also in in twisting molecular bonds water bonds in between that sort of spiral around it. And so, as we age. Our buy our bio water starts to suffer from entropy, and we start to lose the integrity of that crystalline structure structure of of our body waters and specifically we can see that manifested really clearly in the water of our DNA if you compare the DNA of a younger person to the water of the DNA of an older person. There's a massive difference in its crystalline structure in the bonds between the hydrogen atoms. And what's really magical about that experiment in particular is that it sort of seems to defy the laws of physics right it seems like it shouldn't be possible for that DNA to show up in the other test tube. The more we study water the more we recognize that it actually defies the laws of physics in so many different ways. Because it is the matrix of life itself. It has to break the rules of every other substance known in the universe in order to sustain life so one of its properties for example in its quantum state and the researchers at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory have discovered it's capable of non locality so for for example, one molecule can occupy multiple different locations in space at the same time it can by locate it can even sex to locate. So while we haven't proven this specifically my theory is that this might be part of part of what's happening with that montagne experiment. And also their research of David L. Gann has been just incredible they discovered another phase of water called double helix water. And this is water that the molecular bonds are themselves in a spiral. And it's extremely difficult to create this kind of water even an laboratory and even under an electron microscope which is what most water researchers use to look at the structure of molecular formations, which I consider to be like the culture of the water. Even seeing those those artistic cultural structures in the consciousness of water they use an electron microscope for that. When we're talking about double helix water you actually need an atomic force microscope for that. So we're talking about something very specific and very unique here. And what they're finding is that this is probably the actual foundation for life itself it's it's when life force is channeled through the body of consciousness, which is water. That the specific specific formation of molecules twist together. And when you add amino acids and salts and electrical current into that chemical soup, then you basically have the ingredients for DNA to begin to manifest so there is no DNA without water there's no DNA specifically without water in this very specific quantum state it's it's nothing like the water in your bottle it's nothing like the water that that you drink. And, and then the last thing that I want to say about that is just that when water is in this state. It behaves with a property known as quantum transference, which is basically the ability to communicate in our vast distances so all waters are one. And water isn't conscious of being a separate lake over here and a separate body over here and a separate plant over here and a separate ocean over here and the water in your glass over there all water is one, one body of consciousness. But it's ability to be cognizant and sentient is dependent on its phase its structure and its state sometimes water kind of goes to sleep we call that bulk water. But when water is connected, it becomes an intelligently sensitive and sentient being capable of just miraculous properties. And, and it's largely through this, because one of the things that Montagne did in that experiment he didn't just put the beat the test tubes next to each other. He put the test tubes next to each other and he also played the resonant frequency of the Schumann resonance which is about seven to eight hertz. And largely, probably because of this vibration carried on this very specific vibration that resonates to the harmony of our mother earth itself, that water came into a state of structure vibration is one of the things that brings water into structure. And that's what enabled it to be able to communicate with this this quantum transference principle. Thank you so much for that. I mean, you know, so much of what you just said makes me, you know, anthropologically, you know, put so much into context around the importance of water, you know, not just anthropologically but also, you know, why water activism is so vital, like why there is such an importance for water stewards water protectors and water defenders, water ambassadors, and so forth. So if we, if this is the case, and clearly it is, then what are the implications, you know, of privatizing water of polluting water of, you know, I think in Stefan Schwartz, Schwartz's talk from earlier that I mentioned, you know, how fracking actually affects in those communities where fracking occurs. So, you know, there's just so much here to talk about and I just wanted to invite you all to just speak to what are your thoughts on knowing this, you know what I like what you said Isabel about, you know, bulk water being, you know, water that's asleep verse and I'm imagining, you know, that part of what we're doing when we actually, you know, bless water or pray with water or acknowledge that water is a living being that we're awakening, awakening it in some way shape or form. So I invite you all to just kind of play with that and I think it deeply connects to what Roxana is saying also about, you know, the reverberations and the vibrations throughout our communities. So I'll stop here and open it up to you all. Well, I have a thought to jump in with Nicole so this in terms of what Isabel was talking about and what you were talking about. In some ways, it's everything old is new again because there are perennial traditions and indigenous traditions that water has consciousness and in the fairy tradition. And we have the idea that everything has consciousness and that all conscious beings sort of live within one another and we can think of it like the cells in our bodies that each cell has its own consciousness but as they band together they become the consciousness of an organ that becomes the consciousness of our body which we become the consciousness of ourselves and our consciousness is part of the greater human consciousness. And the same is true within a watershed so the watershed, each water, each small tributary of water contributes to the entire watershed, and the watershed consciousness is also shared by the animals who are a part of that and so I think there's an indigenous traditions there's always been an understanding that water has a consciousness. It's really our modernist thinking in part coming from the scientific enlightenment of the 18th century that actually shut down our consciousness of that and years ago I had an anthropology teacher who sort of blew my mind by saying well culture is actually a screening mechanism that shuts things up. It keeps you from thinking in certain ways so that you can think in another way and so part of what I think this kind of rediscovery of our own indigenous traditions when everyone has one. Regardless of what your background is if you go back far enough you have an indigenous connection to the land. And that's in your blood and it's it can be awakened by any person and that we can participate in being alive and we can participate in our water and and that's all. It's an old thing but it's a new thing and it doesn't you know take a lot to do that it's just being willing to be a part of it so that's my thought. Thank you. This is a really good question. And I think I want to I want to kind of kind of zoom out a little bit and then I'm going to like zoom in. So, like colonization right so colonization has legacies right they have capitalism, white supremacy, patriarchy and human supremacy. All right, and then we are living in a moment in time where kind of trauma has been amplified as a result of a pandemic. Right, we're on zoom because of a pandemic. And you know when the when a year literally a year ago, when the world started to shut down, I recall, like, feeling incredibly overwhelmed and not a fear because I was like, Holy shit. Like the seven generations ahead are going to have this moment, and all of the emotions attached to this moment embedded in their genetic code, because was because it like this is not just a, you know this moment in time is not just a, oh this community or that community like we've all been impacted yesterday has been disproportionality. But at the end of the day like all of us have felt the effects of the pandemic right. And we're talking specifically about communities of color, you know there's disproportionality in terms of the impacts of public. Right, and I think about my community and I think about most of my community is living in poverty they're living in intergenerational housing, they're accessing public transportation. They don't have the there's food insecurity that exists, like all of these things are layered right and so all of these things are we're going to have to account for later. And I think about, you know, that the solutions that need to come from this time need to address all of the legacies of colonialism. Not just, you know, white supremacy, but we also need to address human supremacy and our relationship to the water, and to the creatures and all living beings on this planet. Right. That all that we are living at we are, we have multifaceted oppression, and we have to have multifaceted solutions. Right. And so, when I think about when I you know I say cultural work and really I'm really interested in like how do we start addressing healing from a very a place of like, like, holistic from a very holistic place. And I think about, you know, the relationship this you know that water has consciousness water has memory, water is literally operating within our genetic code. It's literally being like, you know, passed down generation to generation. And I think about the, the amount of healing and the type of healing that needs to take place as we move forward. And, and so it's not just about addressing racism. Right, which is incredibly important don't get me wrong like that's the first part we got to start, but we also start addressing how we how what is being done to our waters. I'm thinking about the water that you described by your families, you know, by your family's home. And like what that is doing to literally their genetic memory and their, and their genetic coding and their relationship, you know, I think one thing that racism has been really good at is removing each and every person, you know black indigenous, Latino Pacific under white, like from their humanity, like colonization has been incredibly like good at that and effective at removing us from our relationship. And it has also been very effective at moving us from our relationship, the very sacred relationship that we have to this planet, and to all of that, all of its offerings. That's so poignant what you just said, Roxanne I love that and, and it's so true and you know we really see this in, in the consciousness of water itself where, you know what we do to water we do to ourselves, water is always mirroring and reflecting us back to ourselves. And, you know what, what we do to water is largely water has been colonized, water has been privatized, water is, it's refined and it's treated and it's highly processed. You know, when we drink distilled water or reverse osmosis water or water from a tap. You know this is a process of colonization where instead of as our entire lineage of ancestry for millennia hundreds of thousands of years you know we've been sourcing our blood directly from the blood of Mother Earth and that's a very sacred communion. And there's been in every single indigenous culture there's been ritual and practices and offerings. During that, that process when you go and you gather water from the spring, you make offerings and you make prayers and there's that reverence and devotion and instead what we have now is this very colonized idea of water as an object as a commodity as something that we have easy immediate access to at least if we're privileged enough to live in the global north, because there is, because of this privatization, a very strong global apartheid right now between the global north and the global south people who do and don't have access to water based on their ability to pay for it. In other words people who do and don't have access to life based on their ability to pay for it. Inside we have this relationship where we have the surrogate standings between ourselves and the source. You know we're either paying our government for municipal tap water. Or we are paying a corporation for bottled water. And in each case we're actually paying for our blood because water becomes our blood within five minutes of drinking it within five minutes. Whenever you have this intermediary between yourself and the source. That's a, that's a block between between you and our planet that's a that's a colonization that's that's an imposition, like your relationship with water and with your own blood stream is being occupied in a way, and because we are what we drink when we drink water that has been highly processed, or water that has been sitting in in a tank. We're drinking domesticated water. And I believe that that is consciously or unconsciously who knows but I do think that that is a big part of the, the domestication of human beings, which is something that as we get deeper in touch with our indigeneity we have to recognize that what we do to water we do to ourselves there's no difference between the waters inside of us and the waters outside of us and reclaiming our waters is absolutely a process of decolonization. Thank you. Anyone else any thoughts around that question, or rather that comment I should say. Yeah, yeah, I really, I, I love getting into this piece about condensation and I appreciate you know, what everybody has said, you know, Roxana Isabel, those last comments really made me think about again the Leo, the real Lerma back home and thinking about how my parents were displaced with the industrialization of Mexico. You know, 1994 with NAFTA coming in, and there's a lot of work that looks at you know what these these policies transnational policies capitalist policies have done to people, but we never really think about what it has done the water. The Rio Lerma not only has it been polluted, but then it goes into it suffers from all the consequences that we suffer right so it's like NAFTA and then the war on drugs that released all of this violence on the land. The Rio not only does it carry all of this industrial waste and you know the waste from our, our ranchos from our villages, but it also is a dumping ground now for bodies from the narco war. And it just makes me think of like the orca of hanging on to its, you know, it's, it's dead child. I don't know if that that's the name for it now going back to that human centric right I don't even know the words to talk about other beings. But that's what the river does it carries the bodies of our dead until they're taken away, or someone wants to go clean them because these are all discarded people from the narco wars. And so it's just, you know, with everything that I'm learning from y'all it just keeps getting deeper and deeper this this need to connect to the land because you're you're right Isabel, you know, me, as we decolonize ourselves, we need to decolonize the water, and to understand that we are both being domesticated, and thinking about, you know, my family, our farm workers in California that's the community that I grew up in I was a farm worker in California, and even then the relationship with the water was such a weird like we're domesticated and you're domesticated and we're being exploited and you're being exploited. Whenever we had water as farm workers, it was either you know we had to put ibuprofen in there to be able to sustain you know sustain ourselves through the workday because of all the pain that it causes to be a farm worker, working or it was dirty water filled with pesticide that we accidentally accidentally got sprayed with, or that we were given you know we were never really that relationship was never really allowed to flourish as it's supposed to like we're both in the land, growing but it's it's all commodified it's all domesticated. So I think you know when we're thinking about these politics of water and the politics of you know like NAFTA foreign policy capitalism. I think that we really need to look at holistically, and I know countries like I believe like Ecuador, some other Latin American countries are really saying like mother earth and nature and other beings are deserving of rights. And so I don't see that that same discussion really coming in into academic pieces, especially since that's kind of the area that I work in. There's really never that dimension of it when we're talking about these you know grander political issues. Yeah, I just wanted wanted to add that to to the discussion and, and thank you all for making me think at such a deeper level. I did just want to jump in with one thing from Milena. And I don't know if you're aware of it but I'm lucky enough to have some Maori friends in New Zealand and in New Zealand. There are several watersheds now that have the same rights as people in terms of being able to take, you know, do have legislation and lawsuits and things like that that recognize their being as equivalent to a human being which I think is a kind of neat thing for me one of the things with water is that when we go deeply into water we can get into a sense of despair. And I think there's a lot of despair right now with the ecological state of the planet and and with the state of where we brought indigenous peoples around around the globe. One of the things at least through my tradition is that there is a lot of hopeful work with water as well and it doesn't have to be complicated. And it's because water carries so much feeling just the simple things of spending time with water stillness and water, watersheds in nature, being aware of the watershed you're in, and even just giving a simple offering of a song or something simple like in your poem, Nicole, of giving the tobacco to the water, and creating that relationship, because it's as we create the relationships that we can find the way to move forward with this healing that has to happen for all of us and it's so important for all of us. And it's in our blood, it's in our all of our ancestral traditions. And we know it, we just, if we open to it. I believe it can help us help show us the way to move out of this terrible place that we've come into through the call colonialization and this domestication and so I just want to make sure that people don't get lost in the despair of water because I know that can happen. And that it also has this hopeful nature and if we can be open to that that it helps lead us to what what our next steps are. Thank you so much for that and I really appreciate it because it was this is leading to my next question and my last question today because I want to leave some time for us for some q&a but Isabel I love what you said about when we work with the water, you know, you know, actually water is always reflecting us back to ourselves, you know, and that reminds me of Dr. Dr. She talks about the mirroring the like water mirrors things and what like our own emotions, you know, and this goes back to the work of Stefan Schwartz and Matsuro Imodo and all of those who've done some some amazing water research that is just out there, and it's kind of known but not known. And so that just goes to show that how the information about the properties of water and its consciousness has been, you know, hidden from us in many ways deliberately so I would say because there is just there's just an amazing power within water so it makes me think about when we work with water, we're awakening something in ourselves so I get my last question for you today is, how are you working with water, you know, we've talked about, you know, but specifically how are you personally working with water if you're willing to share those things with the group that's with us today because when you know we had an ecological grief cafe earlier and a lot of us thank you and for bringing it up. You know, there was the sharing of despair, but if we're working with the water, and we have this potential to actually, you know, awaken water through these practices of interacting with water through singing through sharing through blessing water as what's always been known you know in indigenous and perennial wisdom traditions, so how are you working with it personally if you're willing to share that. That's a beautiful question. Thank you. I want to start by acknowledging a teaching of the Kogi tribe in Columbia because that's a big basis for my personal relationship with water. And they are, they probably have one of the most intact water and and paradigm of teachings around water of the people who are the original people left on earth. And they say that water holds the map of reality, all aspects of reality from our waking life to our dreaming to the visions and medicine ceremonies, water they don't use the term hologram but I'm going to use the term hologram water is the holographic the whole map of all of it. And so when you affect water you affect all of creation, and anything that is affected in creation affects our water. And if we look at the way we're treating water now. It is worse than our worst enemy you know we would never treat a living being this way as a carrier for toxic chemical weapons and fertilizers and pesticides and plumbing and all of that and I love what Anne was saying about really restoring right relationship, because that has to be the foundation of any of our work moving forward. Not only in the realm of water but also in the realm of activism of ecology of spirituality there's not a single spiritual tradition that doesn't intimately involve water in its ritual practices and its ceremonies as well. And really I think the most effective and impactful thing that we can do is just to establish that recognition and reciprocity of realizing that as you hold your water. It's feeling you as you drink your water. It's tasting you as you look at your water it's observing you, you know every single cluster of water molecules has at least 440,000 panels on it. Every single cluster of molecules and each one of those panels is is responsible for sensing storing transmitting transducing and amplifying frequency in accordance to its level of crystal and structure so if you're dealing with structured water. It literally acts like a crystal. And so it can resonate with our prayers, it can amplify our prayers in a way that bulk or sleepy water isn't quite as capable of so we want to be aware of that. But of course, you know prayers and consciousness is one of the structuring factors that can help bring water more into into its crystalline state. So for my own personal practices really. You know, the Kogi practice of offrendas or offerings. I don't know how I'm sorry that's different. They call it Pagamento. Offrendas is a is the red path that I walk in Teotihuacan and in. Yeah there's lots of names for it they call it Gaspacho in Peru basically every culture has some some practice of making offerings giving some some reverent devotion whether it's a song or some flower petals or you know whatever it might be as long as it comes from the heart. And, and then I also travel around the world to various sacred sites, sacred water bodies to pray with them and learn from them and listen to them. And I carry a vessel of sacred waters that is the mingled waters from all of those sites. And again because of the holographic nature when I pray with that water I know it's affecting the bodies of water that it comes from. And then one of my favorite things. And I'm a nomad I live around the world and around the world. Everywhere I end up running into other water guardians, and they have their little, you know sacred little vessels of water. And so we kind of co mingle the waters together which is a really fun practice and like oh yeah this water came from this spring and this water came from this water temple. I'm actually studying with a water priest here in Bali this is the land of Agama Tirta which is the water religion so they have very rich and complex relationship with water here that that I'm studying now so that's a bit about my my relationship to it and kind of what it's based on. Thank you. I would just say and just very quickly really that every person has the innate ability to relate to their land and their water and that just the simple practice of knowing what watershed you live in, knowing where that water is and acknowledging it's and doing something you know in a regular basis of offering something to it is just a beautiful practice to help attune yourself to that, and anyone can do it, and anyone can do it wherever they live. And we all have that ability to create that relationship. And by creating that relationship we can help change the consciousness and that's, I think kind of our task at this point in the history of the world is to help change that and I don't think it doesn't have to be complicated it can be very simple. Yeah, and I think there's something here to acknowledge to that, you know, we are coming from very privileged positions where we can do water activism, where, you know, we can do, we can we do have the time and the luxury to work with the land upon which we live. And as well you, you travel around the world that's definitely a privileged position and I don't, and I don't know very many people who are have the capacity to do that and I think about places like, you know, and this I believe this relates to Stephanie Keynes comment in my ethnography of water I find water bodies as rivers, lakes, pools, etc. to be crucial to the social organization and meaning of water. Might the panelists talk about these in between forms of elemental water consciousness as as relevant to human water relationships. You know, and I am not going to comment on that but what I, you know, one of the things I do think about is, you know, this goes back to what I was talking about before like, you know, when we have a lot of, you know, in the terms of Carly need eyes water codes, bulk water, you know, like poisoned water. What does that mean for like the, or the sleeping water, what does that mean for the organization of, you know, people like this is I think this is a huge question that Stephanie brings up. How does that those bodies of water, you know, whether they be rivers, or bulk water or whatever, you know, how does that affect the social organization of the places in which we live. So thank you for that question. Would anyone like to comment on that. I think I'm at the risk of dominant. No, go ahead. I just want to make sure Malina and Roxanne are getting enough time to talk because I feel like I need to. This goes back again to thinking about my life in the Central Valley in California, an entire environment that was completely colonized and repurpose for this mass agricultural production. And so, you know, the wetlands, the savannas that were there, all of that water was forced into these canals. The dams were built they submerged entire indigenous villages in these dams and so it has completely changed the landscape of the Central Valley. And so it does completely, you know, our entire towns, all of these are organized around these massive mega projects. And there is no relationship expected between the people and the water or the land there. And we have, you know, the Central Valley has a history of bringing in braceros that's how my grandpa came to California first as basically indentured servants, guest workers that they're called. And so they're just brought dumped there and then taken back and if you escaped and when and did your life that's cool but that usually you were shipped back you were not expected to develop any type of relationship. And it's, it's, I'm not trying to say either that the folks that were brought had those relationships before because thinking about my family to through the colonization of our, you know, of Mexico. That relationship was also lost. So it's like people being brought to places already with the lost knowledge. And so, you know, it's another layer to have to break through. But that's, that's the first thing I think about just the way that, you know, going back to that language of domestication again, you bring people that are already been domesticated into a, you know, an environment that has been domesticated. Those relationships are really hard to build and like I mentioned before, you know, in our small community Houston, California really small. I think we're like 11,000 at our peak when I was growing up of population. We never had a pool we never had any type of, you know, way to get to lakes or to the ocean that was, you know, crossing crossing the mountains. And that was not accessible to poor folks to farm workers so that we've always had that disconnection. But that's that's what I think about just the complete alienation that we have when we're brought from other places uprooted from other places and not allow to lay real roots where we're always made felt like we don't belong. This creates another difficulty for people to connect and go back to, to those ancestral ways of being. Yeah, yeah. And Malina you also made me think of how just if you know if that's when that happens, you know, when like there's just kind of this extraction of water through agricultural processes extra, you know, I'm just thinking about, you know, someone can afford to pay their utility bill, you know, their water is shut off, you know, I've, I know I've had close friends that you know that that's happened to my family, you know, these are huge issues about depriving people of food that is just so innate, you know, so crucial and so vital to living and so it just makes me think about how we relate to not just water how that's related to and just the industrialized food system. How that's related to just kind of, I mean so many other parts I mean I could literally go on and on about this this is completely something that absorbs part of my own consciousness. So I just wanted to just open that up there and just say I know we have a few more minutes and if you have questions please send them on their way but just open it up to, perhaps, you know, we can talk about a little bit how this is really about like the privatization and the destruction of water or the disrespect of water is really related to the deadening of our consciousness. So, you know, I'm just going to throw that out there and just invite you to comment on that. Dr. Zach Bush has a quote that I really appreciate he says that you can't have a spiritual experience when you're dehydrated you can't have an awareness of yourself as a spiritually conscious coherent being when your water is incoherent. And that's true on a collective level as well, that, you know, when we pollute water, or when we displace water or when water is domesticated when it's put through pressurized pipes when it goes at right angles when it's stagnant for too long which is unnatural it's not it's a natural state of water, then it loses its cohesion and all of the molecules become independent instead of connected in cultures of crystal and formations they become the bonds are breaking apart and forming billions of times per second. And we see that mirrored on a collective level as well that we're becoming increasingly disconnected from one another disconnected from the planet disconnected from our consciousness. And, you know, again, water is always the body of consciousness when consciousness wants to incarnate in physical form it incarnates as the body of water. And I think, you know, we even see that on a cellular level and on a molecular level, you know, if you look at the cell cytoplasm, you know your cell is 70 70% water your body is 70% water the earth is 70% water our solar system is actually 70% water and we always see this this layering this mirroring. And if you look at a cell cytoplasm of someone who is sick, whether that sickness is genetically manifesting as cancer or AIDS or what have you. We see a disconnection in the cohesion of the molecular structure of their bio waters. So yeah, I absolutely think that, you know, we are bodies of water. And everybody of water is also a person and we are so intimately and integrally connected in those ways that our consciousness is always reflected in in the quality of our waters on the planet and within ourselves. Thank you. Any other comments. And I see there's a question here as well. You know, I am Cheryl, I'm going to, I wonder if Cheryl can be transferred to being a panelist, because I would like for Cheryl to. This is about naming and I'd like for her to pronounce the name. The next here is please comment on renaming bodies of water back to their indigenous names. We did that in Minneapolis from Lake Calhoun. So I'm going to ask you to say it because I don't know how to say it and I think this is a huge important, you know, naming is so important and we don't know the names, many of us don't know the names of our, you know, the land upon which we lived and so forth. I'm going to turn it over to you, Cheryl, to say that. Yeah. Sorry about my adequate lighting here. Lake Calhoun was named for John Calhoun, which was such a reprehensible person in the history of America and Minneapolis has big problems with race relations and he did a lot to try to create genocide for the native people. There was sort of a movement that we should do something about this horrible name for a lake if we wanted to respect the indigenous people. And a local church, one that I happened to belong to the Universalist Church wanted to make it turn it back to an indigenous name and found a Lakota family who knew the indigenous name. And then we had to learn how to be allies and get out of the way and not have the white people take it over. So there was a lot of learning and bridge building as it became went back to being Bede Makaska. And then that was like, Oh, fine, rename the lake. And then you had to rename the road. And then people had to get new addresses. And people had to reshape their thinking about what they were now in relation to. And so it's had an interesting set of ongoing effects. And I started to think about when this one I heard the story of the orc. What is the name, you know, has this kind of cascade. And I was wondering if anyone else had experiences with renaming bodies of water and how that might have shifted relationships. There's certainly much more awareness now in my area of the terrible things that have been done to the local indigenous people and a lot more talking to the massacre and the hangings and what we owe them and all of that. So Minneapolis has a lot to be doing something about so. But it was a first step and it's kind of been gone on. So anybody have comments, please. Not on your panel but can I say something Nicole. I had a question that actually I just think dovetails nicely with Cheryl's and so I thought I would just add it to her as quickly and then allow the panel to riff on this. One of the people that we were going to try to get onto this panel was an individual named Chad Myers who is about actually introduced me to. And he has a, you, many of you folks have used the word watershed, the term watershed several times and Chad says, you know, you don't live in Portland, Oregon, you don't live in a red district or blue district you don't live. All these names that we come up with to, to, to solidify these human constructs of power negotiations. There's a colonizing of the mind that happens when we name things and it also sets up an expectations of relationship, and of ownership and of power, and to, to, we're going through redistricting now in Oregon where the other government gets together and redraws boundaries and calls certain things, certain things for the purposes of allocation of funds and for voting registrations and for all these other sorts of things and that the, the reason these things are named the way they're named is because it facilitates the the what am I trying to say the lionizing the status quo it allows power and it allows goods and services to be moved in ways that continue to rape the earth and to diminish its vitality. And Chad says is you live in a watershed. Right. And so where if you go outside and look at the land because you can't talk about water without talking about land and if you look at the land and look at it in terms of this land is structured in a way that water moves through it in particular and we don't want to look at the land in terms of how we move goods and services through it and we want to look at the land in terms of the way water moves through it and when we do, when we do that are naming conventions start to change and then our consciousness starts to change and so I just just wanted to add that as a caveat or an anecdote and then just see if the panelists can maybe riff on that as well. Well, my, my Marie friend from New Zealand always introduces himself that I, my, my river is a talkie and my mountain is the mountain is not key and so it's like, this is, this is where I'm from, I'm from this watershed and this mountain. So, I think, like you said the naming of everything in America is all about colonization and so by naming something that was claimed and taken. And so yes, I think naming has some impact. And it doesn't bring back the indigenous people, it doesn't, it doesn't, you know, suddenly make everything okay, but it certainly helps a little bit of maybe our colonizing consciousness in terms of how we think of the land, belonging to us. My only other thought just in general on this panel is that I think we're, we're at a point where we can't sustain what we're doing. So, one way or another, it's not going to continue. We can either consciously change it or it will change because the earth has its own consciousness, and the earth will continue. That's just, that's my perspective is that we, we can change and we can make this a cooperative and and and something of an alliance. We can be allies to our watersheds to our waters. But if we don't change these unsustainable practices won't be able to continue. And the earth will take its own course with it. So that's, that's all I have to say, that's what I have to say. Thank you. Any other thoughts about naming I, you know, I, you know, I absolutely agree I just want to leave space to, for anyone else to kind of discuss or reflect on the naming piece, because it's so you know it's so innate it's so intrinsic to colonization as well. So that's just something that we do need to keep in mind and I loved that Cheryl brought that up so thank you. Right. I guess to the naming but I also caution because we are in a really interesting period of a lot of symbolism. That doesn't mean any material changes or transformations for the people who have been impacted. And so I just, I'm all about you know let's let's do that. But if it's not tied to something tangible or material or reparations or giving back of that it doesn't mean anything. It doesn't go beyond just symbolism. You know, and so I've just been seeing a lot of that lately where folks are just like, Okay, we'll rename the schools will really we're going to rename the streets and I'm just like okay and what about like what else. So I just caution about like just being very clear about intentions and purpose. And, and who are you working with to do this work, because I feel like a lot of non non indigenous people to the areas, you know, because a lot of us like that we're all indigenous to someplace where we're talking specifically about the places that we are now guests on. What does your relationship look like. Yeah. Thank you. And I we have a, how we are over time and I want us to just honor your time. And Andrew do we, I, you know, I just want to check in and ask about, you know, answering the last two questions, you know, do we have time for that. We have it scheduled started interrupting the call we have a scheduled actually till 445 and so we have about 10 minutes left and I think we have time to get to these last two questions they seem great would you like me to add those people, or you want to ask the questions. Yeah, I can read the questions and I just want to acknowledge Roxana thank you so much for for saying that you know name, you know there is something to naming and, but there's a lot of naming running around without real action. You know, so that's, that's huge. But loose says here, the post humanist conceptualizations of a strida ne minus and forgive me if I'm but during the name here on non human phenomenology has enabled me to think about the exploitation of bodies. But here I think here's the here's the core here that has enabled me to think about the exploitation of bodies of water as an analogous process of the patriarchal domination over the feminine bodies. So, from your standpoint, what are what are the implications of these reflections on feminine to feminism so do any of you have thoughts on that. And thank you for your question. I guess I've always looked at water is having a feminine quality to it and so and being divine feminine. And so, as well as land, land and water. And so that sort of masculine patriarchal domination of land, I think is very much tied to masculine patriarchal domination of female humans as well. So I definitely see the connection. And I'll, and I'll jump in here and say, you know, the I mean it's, it's a real it's really interesting to think about that, you know, there's this there's this kind of constant discussion of, you know, if we tie water and, you know, this kind of connection to the feminine body we run the risk of being a centralist or thinking that they were these essential qualities running through, but, but at the same time, you know, we have both of these in ourselves and I think part of what has taken us through patriarchal structures through the process of colonialism we deny the fact that, you know, we have both masculine and feminine energies running through ourselves. That's part of the planet, you know that's part of who we are and to basically cut ourselves off from these streams, we are basically disconnecting and dismembering parts of ourselves. I'm loose if you're not familiar with the work of Sylvia, you know, I would absolutely recommend that you read her work, you might be already and I, but for those of you who are interested in that, in that conversation, absolutely. She does some wonderful work on the disconnect you know how how capitalism profits off of the subjugation of women and violence towards women and violence and so violence towards women is also connected to violence towards the land and vice versa. So that's there she has some powerful work there. I'd also just like to add that you can't really separate women's rights issues from water rights issues, at least in a global humanitarian context, because the role of women in most societies has been as as the stewards of water you know women are the ones who go and collect and carry the water even if that means they're walking many miles to collect from a dirty stream. And what we're seeing with global desertification and the increase in drought is a direct correlation to an increase in domestic violence against women in those areas, because if they come home without water. In a lot of cases, you know, it results in domestic violence and that's something that Mod Barlow speaks about in her book, one of her books, all of her books are amazing. But yeah when you when you improve the life of water, you improve the lives of women and vice versa. So, very, very integrally connected. And just to build on that that was something that I was thinking about to the, the, you know, feminized labor, what we think about women traditionally doing right getting the water carrying the water. And also thinking about when we exploit water, who are the ones that are doing the exploitation is usually men right and so it takes me back to like man camps, and building the pipelines, and how the fight to defend water is simultaneously against having hordes of men coming into a territory to just, you know, rape and pillage the land and women and the people. So I think that there is a really strong connection there. But again, you know, it's so it's the connection might seem obvious to us that are already kind of, we're already aware of it right. You know the grander public I feel like there's just waste, there's just so many layers there to dig through to find those connections that it really does require like really nuanced discussions that like break down all of these connections and that's something that you know public education doesn't do it does the opposite right and muddies all of this. So we don't see those connections. That's the first thing that I thought when I when I read the question to is just, yes, are, it's such a strong word but the rape of women and the rape of the water is, you know, it goes hand in hand. Thank you. And I'm going to read Stephanie King's conundrum. It's described as a conundrum. Lake agassiz in Manitoba is named after a racist scientist and should be changed, but Lake agassiz came before humans were in North America. Can't retrieve an indigenous name. What kind of process might this rename what kind of process might this renaming process look like. Interesting question. So what could we envision for that I'm wondering. You know, going back, it goes back to like having a conversation and being in relationship with the indigenous peoples of that land. We can make an assumption that they that's their prior that that's a priority of theirs that they want to rename is like a lake that wasn't there before. But I think it really, you know, one not making any assumptions about what they what the original caretakers of stewards of lands want, or what their hopes for their dreams are and connecting with them and seeing if that's something that they want to work on. Maybe like, you know, maybe that's not their priority right now and their priorities feeding people. And that's where we need to be allies in. But I, I just, I, I just am very hesitant about saying go for it when there's actual real conversation and real relationships that need to be had to be able to move that type of work forward. Yeah. Yeah. And, you know, for me, I, and I really appreciate what you're saying. I mean, I, when I walk in the woods, you know, I get into this real, you know, contemplative state, you know, and I, and I, you know, I, it's very interesting because I hear, you know, I start to hear things, you know, and you know, like, you know, certain sounds and certain like what feels like what sounds like voices and fundament for me, you know, that's, that's the world, the plants and our ancestors talking back to us and me and you know, perhaps, if we actually do more of this, we'll learn what they want to be called, as opposed to just us deciding on what the names are, because of its, you know, the, you know, the fashion to do so now, we're deciding on behalf of all of our relations to, you know, change the name but what, what do they want to be called is a really important part of the work I do. So, so that's, you know, I, you know, I don't have an answer to this to this conundrum, I can only speak from my experiences on this. Any other comments, I have one more thing I'd like to share. And it's on a slide but I'd like to open it up for any final comments from the panelists. I just want to say thank you and so much respects to everyone on the panel. It's been, I've learned so much from each of you. Thank you all for being here I really am so grateful that you were willing to do this and to take the time out to, to share your experiences to be vulnerable and talk about what you don't know and talk about that, you know, it's, it's part of a ongoing learning process. We have a lot of work to do in terms of working on ourselves that practice of like decolonization taking off all the layers of imperialism and the violence done to all of us, you know, and I think we're going through this really interesting initiation process with the pandemic, but I do want to leave with something that I come back to and this is an offering I give to water when I am on my, on my morning walks, or when I go by the stream. And this part of the how to nationality Thanksgiving address, and, and I'll just read it. Thank you all for being here. We give thanks to all the waters of the world for quenching our thirst and providing us with strength. Water is life. We know it's power in many forms. Water falls and rain, miss and streams, rivers and oceans with one mind. We send greetings and thanks to the spirit of water. And our minds are one. So thank you all very much. Thank you for being here. And thank you. Thank you all so much. This was absolutely a wonderful panel exceeded my expectations and my expectations were quite high. I learned from water about this oneness thing and move beyond the symbolic and into the essential. I learned so much from each of you, something Malina said that really stuck with me about who waters for and who gets access to it. I've lived around the country and around the world myself but one of the spaces I spent a good deal of time was in south central Los Angeles and I met a lot of young folks there when I lived there who were people of color who lived maybe a mile and a half from the beach and had never seen the ocean. Never and the reason they had never seen the ocean is because they were afraid of police presence from trying to get there. They were afraid of rival games that existed between themselves in the ocean and most heartbreaking they didn't believe that the space was for them. It was a very clear understanding of who the beach in Southern California was for and who it wasn't for and who had assumed access to it and who didn't and so one of the things that this panel is reminding me that is it's I'm getting choked up even saying is that his water is for everyone and we are for it and I thank all of you for reminding us of that in your various ways. Thank you to a very moving panel. Thank you. Thank you, Nicole and Andy to for bringing us together. Thank you. And panelists if you would just stick around for a moment after we stop recording, but thank you all so much for being here.