Water Justice for All
Today is World Water Day and today we can take for granted that we have clean drinking water – unless you don’t. Our strong multi-cultural country continues a great injustice of not having safe drinking water on many reserves. Despite the Liberal government’s pledge to ensure that all Canadians have access to safe water a record number of First Nations reserves still struggle without water. You can read more about that here or here. The University of Saskatchewan houses the Global Institute for Water Security – a multi-disciplinary freshwater research and you can watch films through Let’s Talk About Water or follow the Women and Water series.
We made this simple art project to celebrate World Water Day and highlight the river that runs through Saskatoon. We mixed up some blues, a little green and white to make a sparkly clean South Saskatchewan River. You could make a rounded lake shore, ocean or whatever body of water inspires you.
We drew a canoe shape on a flattened toilet paper roll, cut it out and then glued it together. We used clips to hold it in place while it dried. Then we used a pencil to draw lines to represent the birch bark canoes that many First Nations used for travel.
Last we painted some paper grey, and after it dried we drew smoothly rounded river rock shapes and cut them out. We wrote words about water, and water justice on the stones and then scattered them along the riverbanks. You don’t see many river stones here in Saskatoon but the place I’m from is called “lake with rocks all around”.
We thought we captured the moving water, the history of the First Nations that travelled the South Saskatchewan River, and included words of hope we wrote on the rocks. I’ll leave you with a quote I love from ‘A River Runs Through It’ by Norman Maclean:
“Eventually, all things merge into one, and a river runs through it. The river was cut by the world's great flood and runs over rocks from the basement of time. On some of the rocks are timeless raindrops. Under the rocks are the words, and some of the words are theirs.”
Don’t forget that some of the words are yours too and you get to choose how to use them, who to support, and how we can all use our words to flow towards one another.