Praying for water

This is Elizabeth Cuanas during the sacred performance of traditional indigenous Mexican dances held in Portland in solidarity with the water protectors at Standing Rock, North Dakota, on Sunday, September 25. While I was taking herbal cold remedies and drinking pitchers of water on September 27, I spent many hours processing the photos from Sunday. My position is that this photo, which is among several hundred I spent the day crafting on September 27, is an image I made on that day, even though the shutter button was pressed two days before.

I realize this stretches the terms of engagement of Blipfoto, and I am grateful that currently we have a little leeway about what we post and when we post it.

I feel this photograph reflects the reverence, the dignity, and the prayerful attitude of the Aztec danzas. What is happening in the USA and Canada is that the worldwide hunger for fossil fuels is overpowering indigenous people’s awareness of the need to protect water supplies from pollution that results from broken pipelines, from fracking and drilling, and from what their grandmothers call “the rape of our Mother Earth.” As the grandmothers have pointed out, poor people cannot afford to buy bottled water. It is the poor who are most threatened in this moment by the destruction of our water supplies, but ultimately even the rich will not be able to buy their way out of the water crisis. We all need water. I learned today that Canada’s Prime Minister, inspiring though he is in many ways, has also capitulated to the fossil fuel people. Not good.