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In recent years the US Supreme Court has been the site of intense debates over rights to water: from challenges to the Clean Water Act – and the Environmental Protection Agency mandated to enforce it – to the latest in the long history of disputes among southern and southwestern states (Georgia v. Florida and Texas v. Colorado and New Mexico) concerning the distribution and supply of fresh water. Reflecting the urgency of the water crisis, 2018-2028 has been declared the UN International Decade for Action, “Water for Sustainable Development,” following the International Decade for Action, “Water for Life” (2005-2015). The threat to fresh clean water is intensified by the effects of the climate crisis and by human interventions such as the displacement of waterways to serve expanding cities, the privatization of water supplies (a cause of the tap-water crises in Flint, Michigan and Newark, New Jersey), and industrial pollution (like the leakage of hazardous waste into the floodwater that inundated Houston during Hurricane Harvey and the spillage of toxic coal-ash from Duke Energy sites into major North Carolina rivers in the aftermath of Hurricane Florence). The threat of similar pollution (of the waters of the Great Lakes) is driving opposition to Enbridge Energy Partners' proposed new Line 5 pipeline across the Straits of Mackinac, the same environmental motive that has driven intense opposition to the Dakota Access Pipeline (the #NODAPL movement, 2016-?) – which carries oil from the Bakken oil fields in western North Dakota to the Patoka oil tank farm (also serving the Enbridge, Keystone, and Trunkline pipelines) in southern Illinois. The threat to water of leakage from Line 5 into Lakes Michigan and Huron, from the Dakota Access Pipeline into the Missouri and Mississippi Rivers and Lake Oahe, near the Standing Rock Indian Reservation, have received a great deal of publicity. What has not been clearly highlighted is the profound threat to the existence of Indigenous nations posed by these threats to water: a relevant example is the flooding of significant portions of the Standing Rock and Cheyenne River Reservations by the US Army Corps of Engineers some 50 years ago to create the Oahe Dam and Lake Oahe. This kind of assault on Indigenous territorial, legal, cultural, and spiritual sovereignties continues through such actions as the desecration of burial grounds and other sacred sites, and the US violation of the terms of historic nation-to-nation Treaties.

Water then lies at the center of a complex network of issues that show the US in conflict with sovereign tribal nations as well as internally at the levels of federal and state government. The non-violent #NODAPL protests at Standing Rock were met with intense US military opposition, and subsequently efforts have begun to criminalize popular protests against oil and gas pipelines. Certainly, this conflict puts into question the validity of the US claim to “popular democracy”: peaceful mass activism at Standing Rock and elsewhere is motivated by heightened public awareness and popular mobilization. That is to say, the multi-faceted water crisis provokes powerful means of storytelling that bring aesthetics into relation with activism. From the Facebook check-in at Standing Rock for virtual water protectors to Leslie Marmon Silko's environmental justice epic Almanac of the Dead and Elizabeth LaPensée's recent video game Thunderbird Strike, storytelling is being used to raise consciousness and to “change the narrative” concerning the values of water. This symposium asks how aesthetics are engaged in the interests of social activism, specifically as it relates to the ongoing water crisis in the US and globally.