Date of Award
2025
Document Type
Honors Thesis (Open Access)
Department
Colby College. History Dept.
Advisor(s)
Danae Jacobson
Abstract
Indigenous water sovereignty has long been a contested problem within the continent of Turtle Island. In 2016, the Lakota Nation globalized the message Water is Life through their movement against the Dakota Access Pipeline, an oil infrastructure that would put one of the continent’s largest watersheds at risk. The revolutionary fervor of the Water is Life movement travelled all the way to the Penobscot Nation in the Dawnland, a place we now call Maine. In an adjacent vein to the Lakota, the Penobscot people have spent the 21st century addressing damming projects and rampant pollution from the 1900s in a slew of court cases. For both the Penobscot and Lakota people, the many water injustices they are fighting against in the present have roots in the 19th and 20th centuries as the US nation-state dammed, polluted, and took control of vital water bodies in the name of profit. Indeed, economic maximization was the driving force behind much of the US’s dealings with these two Indigenous nations, and the continued commodification of water and land was representative of a larger conceptual difference between the US and the Penobscot and Lakota. In my research, I call for a shift in the way the US nation-state addresses its water systems—a shift from inanimate to animate, from commodified thing to being. Through a case study of the Penobscot and Lakota Nations, two unique fights for water sovereignty give light to intersecting ideas of water as mortal, in need of reverence and protection.
Keywords
Animacy, Dams, Pollution, Missouri River, Penobscot River, Water Justice
Recommended Citation
Stringer, Moya S., "Mortal Rivers: A Case Study Analysis of Indigenous Water Sovereignty within the Penobscot and Lakota Nations, 19th Century to Present" (2025). Honors Theses. Paper 1494.https://digitalcommons.colby.edu/honorstheses/1494
