Water is Life

In March 2021, we took a family day trip to see Christi Belcourt's exhibit Uprising: The Power of Mother Earth at the McMichael Gallery. Along with her paintings, Christi exhibited work in collaboration with Issac Murdock as part of their Onaman Collective, which is where the Water if Life image above comes from.

Christi is an award winning Métis visual artist with a unique painting style that mimics indigenous beadwork. She is also a water protector and indigenous activist. Her teachings about Métis spirituality, land values and plant medicine are an inspiration to us.

As you may know, we use our 3Rs - relationships, regeneration and resilience - as guideposts for tending this land, with the ultimate focus on water. The current and future vision for this land is designed around the goal of capturing, sinking and storing water with the knowledge that Water is Life. Water is Sacred. We are Water Protectors.

It was a poignant time of year to see Christi and Isaac's powerful message around the sacredness of water. The wetlands are full with spring water and alive with spring peepers, salamanders, tadpoles and the like; grassland birds are singing their hearts out and geese and ducks are flirting with different nest sites. A spring chorus of life.

Within days of seeing the exhibit, we were also reminded of the systemic abuse of water in the last century. Without warning, the wetland at the front of the farm went almost completely dry with a deep wound in the bottom - a sink hole from blown out remnant agricultural tile.

Tiles, which are artificial “arteries” that were historically made of clay and now of black plastic tubing, are installed under the soil on farm land to drain the water and make field work more accessible in the spring. The idea of tile draining is wholly un-ecological. Not only does it remove scared, life-giving water from land, it dumps this water at high volume and high speed into water ways - producing egregious soil erosion and water pollution. As Water Protectors, we love breaking tile and liberating the flow of water and life.

This front wetland was our first restoration project ca. 2015, and we thought we had broken all of the old tile. But, tile is pervasive and some obviously remained; the plastic finally broke and created a drain out the bottom of the pond.

Stunned, we gently placed stranded frog eggs and salamanders into the remaining water, and strained to hear the peepers that evening. In the days following, Drake patched the sink hole so that the pond re-filled to around half capacity. The spring chorus is back (the ducks and geese are not), but the patch is precarious and the wound remains.

While this event was a sobering reminder to the scale of work that it takes to heal the land, it also re-affirmed our role as visitors on this land: We are Water Protectors. Drake is pondering the options for permanently restoring the wetland - most of which involves thousands of dollars in excavator fees. When there is a will, there is a way?