Learning the Language of Water. Indigenous Knowledge for Environmental Justice

Water remembers. Every river carries not only silt and pollutants, but histories of care and violence, kinship and extraction, reverence and neglect. Across Indigenous cultures worldwide, water is understood not as a neutral resource moving through a system, but as a living relation, an ancestor, a legal and ethical presence whose wellbeing is inseparable from our own. Yet modern colonial societies have largely severed these relationships, treating rivers and oceans as commodities to be controlled rather than beings to whom we owe responsibility. At a time of accelerating climate crisis, this epistemic rupture is increasingly lethal—but in the arts, culture, and creativity, we might still find some last-minute ways to reconfigure or repair it.

 Ilustration: Monserrat García Silva

In April 2023, two creative practice academics from Massey University in Aotearoa (New Zealand), Leonel Alvarado and Elspeth Tilley, were awarded a New Zealand Prime Minister’s Group Scholarship to travel with eight theatre students to Latin America. This essay is an attempt to account for some of the profound knowledge we gained during that trip about the ways that revitalising Indigenous environmental knowledges through creative practice might offer alternative ways of understanding water, time, and responsibility that could steer humanity towards ecological justice, cultural repair, and sustainable futures. 

Aotearoa and Colombia share many commonalities, including rich but threatened biodiversity, strong Indigenous cultures, vibrant and socially engaged artistic heritages, and diverse cultural and linguistic landscapes. They also share a future impacted by climate change. Our project’s aim was to work creatively on the common issue of climate response with students and staff at Universidad de Los Andes, as well as collaborators from Distrito Creativo del Bronx, a community partner whose own work explores how art and creativity can heal damage and build restorative connections. Our shared vision centred on the ability of theatre to cross cultural and linguistic boundaries to create mutual understanding. 

Our Massey University students prepared a short play from the global creative environmental movement called Climate Change Theatre Action (https://www.climatechangetheatreaction.com/) before leaving Aotearoa. They chose a work called The Earth’s Blue Heart by Katie Pearl, an Obie-award-winning theatre artist and co-founder of Works on Water, a triennial dedicated to supporting artists who work on, near, and with the world’s waterways. Offering a luminous, immersive exploration of the way that oceans connect us all no matter where we are on the planet, the play also calls for Indigenous sustainability values to be restored to the forefront of climate conversations. There were several Māori students in our group, and they felt that The Earth’s Blue Heart connected with their own values from their Indigenous heritage as well as offering something universal they hoped might resonate across cultures.

Fragment of the play The Earth’s Blue Heart. The lines appear in a scene where characters explore their complex relationship with nature—both celebrating and consuming it—as part of a broader, often lighthearted, public discourse about having a meaningful, active connection with the natural world.

We shared a performance of The Earth’s Blue Heart on arrival as an icebreaker for our Colombian collaborators. The students were right: the performance sparked deep discussion and recognition of profound connections between Māori worldviews, Indigenous Colombian worldviews, and the shared fears and hopes of everyone present about climate change. We began a series of provocative conversations about how water has been both deeply revered and filthily despoiled in both countries, and how we could communicate this paradox in ways that might shift environmental thinking in our audiences. Sparks of collaboration were lit and over the next four weeks we worked together across cultures, histories, and languages to craft a multifaceted collaborative theatre piece of our own, exploring ideas of rivers, water, and sacred relationships to the Earth.

The devising culminated in a shared performance at Universidad de Los Andes in May 2023, called What if the Rivers Could Speak? Theatrically, we explored our two nations’ legacies of violence and dispossession from the imaginative viewpoint of water. We envisaged the Earth as a sacred sovereign space that nobody, whatever the challenges we face in any one group or nation, has the right to exploit. Together, we developed a set of dramatic scenes that called for understanding climate change as a shared problem affecting all life and matter within this space. It was a moving and life-changing experience that none of us will forget.

Massey University students performing The Earth’s Blue Heart in Colombia.

 Elspeth Tilley

One of the epiphanies we had while working in Colombia was that while imagining the future is crucial to motivating change, the place we may need to look for the keys to that future is the past—or rather, the ever-present. By exploring ecological values about water across cultures, we were reminded that for many Indigenous cultures worldwide, time is experienced not as linear but as concurrent or cyclical. Water is endlessly recycled: the water on the planet today is the same water that has existed for billions of years. Every drop moves endlessly through atmosphere, land, oceans, living beings, and solid earth, shifting form, location, and timescale from being locked up as ice for millennia to being evaporated and re-precipitated within a day, but always remaining part of the planetary system. Past, present, and future water coexist: the rain of today is water that has passed through ancestors, landscapes, and nonhuman beings before, and is always on a journey to do so again.

During our work in Colombia, we found that Indigenous temporalities enabled us to grasp this, because they understand time as recursive and ongoing, not progressing from past to present to future in a straight line. In Indigenous temporal conceptions, the water cycle is not something that happens and ends but something that is always happening. Rain, rivers, groundwater, oceans, clouds, and ice are recognised as an eternal loop. In many Indigenous knowledge systems, water is not just inert matter moving through that system, but a sentient or relational being. It has a history and a future, not just a physical presence: it is time itself in motion. In these conceptions, because water is alive or relational, its cycle is also ethical: how water moves reflects how humans behave toward land, more‑than‑human beings, and each other. In such temporalities, the consequences of our damaging actions are always with us, not something we can leave behind in the insidious colonial “progress is inevitable and time heals” assumptions that fuel much non-Indigenous climate apathy.

If our damage lives eternally alongside us, though, so do the solutions. Indigenous cultures also hold answers, if we can find a way to hear them over the constant din of colonial thinking. In Aotearoa, there are extensive environmental values and practices to be found in matauranga Maori (Maori knowledge), through which Indigenous groups interpret, experience, and fulfil responsibilities to the environment [see box]. Important Māori values include tikanga (customary practice, values, and protocols), whakapapa (genealogical connections and relationships, including relational ecosystem linkages between human and more-than-human entities), mana whenua (recognized authority in stewardship over land and resources), kaitiakitanga (environmental guardianship), manaakitanga (acts of giving, uplifting, and caring for others including the natural world), whakakotahitanga (consensus, respect for individual differences and participatory inclusion for decision-making), and arohatanga (the notion of care, respect, love, and compassion, including to the more-than-human world) (Awatere & Harmsworth, 2014).


In Aotearoa, these and other Māori values can provide a basis for ethical respect when interacting with water and its associated biodiversity habitats and species, in ways that recognize it as a taonga (treasure) to be protected rather than a resource to be exploited. And they do at times have an impact: for example, Aotearoa was one of the first countries in the world to confer, as a result of Maori proposals during a Te Tiriti o Waitangi settlement in 2017, legal personhood status to a river so that its interests can be represented in mainstream law (Te Awa Tupua, 2017). Indigenous scholar Simone Gabriel (Ngati Raukawa) writes that:
The decision enacted Maori knowledge of the interconnectedness of the natural world with humanity such that to protect one is to protect all, and it is a move that will benefit all New Zealanders.

Yet, in Western cultures, there is often a profound discomfort with the kinds of relational and ethical science found in Indigenous worldviews. Dominant Western cultures have inherited a strong hierarchy of knowledge systems rooted in Enlightenment science in which knowledge is expected to be quantifiable, replicable, written, and universal. Indigenous environmental knowledges are often place‑based, oral, relational, and contextual and, as a result, are frequently mischaracterised as anecdotal rather than empirical, belief rather than evidence, and cultural tradition rather than scientific insight. This framing constitutes epistemic injustice: the systematic devaluing of knowledge because of who produces it and how it is expressed, not because it lacks rigour. This resistance is then reinforced by colonial legacies that deliberately marginalise Indigenous knowledge systems in order to assert continuing control over water, land, and resources. Maori ecologists Meg Parsons and Roa Crease note that deep colonisation permeates all stages of policymaking, not only environmental management, shaping how knowledge, authority, and governance are structured in societies with colonial histories (Parsons & Crease, 2024). Recognising Indigenous environmental knowledges therefore unsettles not only scientific norms but also political authority, ethical responsibility, and dominant narratives of progress, making genuine acceptance challenging within mainstream Western institutions.

As we discovered in Colombia, though, artistic methodologies can help us respond to this resistance in ways that can shift cultural openness to Indigenous knowledges. For example, when addressing climate change, many artists imagine the voices and perspectives of animals, ecosystems, and inanimate materials. Philosopher Fred Evans argues that, to live ethically and sustainably, humanity must shift our modes of connecting and listening such that “the cosmos in its entirety and plurality can also be thought of as voices and participants in the cosmopolitan mind and its artistic expression.” (Evans, 2023). He sees art as crucial to this endeavour because, in creative work, we can imagine and embody the sequence of becomings (becoming-woman, animal, molecular, imperceptible) that Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari (1987) consider conceptually essential to entering a new mode of living with the planet where individuality is no longer primary (tout le monde or becoming-everybody / becoming-everything) and we forge new, respectful, reciprocal relationships of kinship with everything.

Our students from Massey University prepared a short play about the global environmental creative movement.

 Elspeth Tilley

This is difficult for citizens in individualistic, industrialised societies to imagine, but Indigenous artists are leading the way in helping us conceptualise it. For example, Hone Tuwhare (Ngapuhi) was a major Aotearoa poet whose work frequently centred on water, rivers, rain, tides, and the sea as living, speaking, sovereign entities, often intertwining ecological observation with Maori cosmology and political critique (e. g. Tuwhare, 1994). His poems such as “Rain”, “Sea Call”, and “Flood” are set on multiple school curricula and widely discussed for their treatment of water as relational and agentic rather than inert matter. Playwright Miria George (Te Arawa, Ngati Awa, Ngati Kuki ‘Arani) has penned a Water Trilogy that explores water as taonga, political flashpoint, and site of Indigenous sovereignty amid climate crisis, privatisation, and colonisation in Aotearoa and the Pacific (“Final Piece in Water Trilogy Soon to Take Stage,” 2017).And, more recently, in her Climate Change Theatre Action plays, our Massey University colleague Whiti Hereaka (Ngati Tuwharetoa, Te Arawa) has imagined how the very Earth itself might speak, an artistic gesture that honours the mauri of the planet, as understood in Mātauranga Māori. At the same time, the creative form of Hereaka’s art enables her to approach Indigenous knowledge abstractly and obliquely, carefully navigating how such knowledge can be felt indirectly across cultural boundaries while respecting its cultural specificity and integrity.

In our devising for What if the Rivers Could Speak?, we physically became water, roared as water, lamented as water, evaporated as water, and rained our bodies back down upon the stage. We became the bloated dead bodies of murdered farmers floating down Colombian waterways during the decades of armed conflict. We became the brown toxic sludge of agricultural runoff choking the rivers of Aotearoa. Some of us became the concrete blocks of dams, some of us the water pushing, infuriated, against that concrete. Some of us embodied the fish unable to swim upstream to their ancestral breeding grounds. Some of us performed the grief of people fishing uselessly upstream where a meal for their family could no longer be caught. All of us used creative techniques of extrospection to try to imagine ourselves into the consciousness of water and what it might hope and dream for, to build empathy for the more-than-human world into our writing of fictional dialogue and imagined scenes. All of us learned through the participatory, artistic methodologies more about how Indigenous ontologies actually feel than we had ever understood before. All of us altered our relationships to water. And all of us came to understand that the rivers are already speaking; it is just that we have not yet learned their language.
These are the kinds of creative manoeuvres that can transform cultures, that is, can shift the architecture of meaning that shapes how people relate to water, land, each other, and power. When cultural frameworks change, the world they organise can change with them: policies, laws, ethical duties, and everyday behaviours have a chance to reorganise around the new understanding. As the world-first full legal personhood recognition of the Whanganui River demonstrates, when Indigenous ecological worldviews gain recognition, rivers can be granted legal personhood; when extractive worldviews dominate our culture, the same river will remain a “resource.”

ALL OF US CAME TO UNDERSTAND THAT THE RIVERS ARE ALREADY SPEAKING; IT IS JUST THAT WE HAVE NOT YET LEARNED THEIR LANGUAGE

Hereaka confirms that she has seen changes in environmental understanding over the time she’s been writing ecofiction advocating for Indigenous environmental values:
 In part, this is because the wider cultural landscape has also changed significantly. Hereaka notes that there are now many more Maori writers accepted into the “canon:”
Of course, as Indigenous legal scholar Rebecca Tsosie (Yaqui) argues, traditional environmental knowledges should not need to wait for cultural shifts in popularity, or external mainstream “recognition” as having legal standing, because they are already grounded in ancient legal frameworks that organise the natural world and establish enduring moral obligations for human conduct. “Some Indigenous Nations, such as the Dine, call this the ‘fundamental law’ because it doesn’t change, and because there is a moral duty that accompanies human interaction with the environment.” (Tsosie, 2025). Fundamental law combines long‑accumulated environmental knowledge with embedded ethical responsibilities that require humans to relate to land, water, and food as sacred relations that enable our collective survival, rather than commodities. Within this worldview, elements of the natural world already possess personhood, for example, “wild salmon are considered ‘other than human’ persons for many Indigenous peoples in Alaska and the Pacific Northwest” (Tsosie, 2025). This personhood is not metaphorical. It reflects a worldview in which salmon willingly offer themselves to humans under conditions of respect, restraint, and care, and where humans have enduring responsibilities in return. However, Tsosie confirms, such already extant ecological moral and legal systems are often invisible or unrecognised within mainstream governance structures. What we learned from our collaborative creative work about water is that art is one of the ways they can become, and are already becoming, visible.

Our students from Massey University prepared a short play about the global environmental creative movement.

 Elspeth Tilley

Recognising Indigenous environmental knowledges might help not only with halting the damage but with dealing with our grief for what has already been lost. Gabriel argues that ritual responses to ecological loss, such as holding funerals for streams or wetlands, may help us challenge human‑centred ideas about grief by expanding who and what is considered mournable. Reconnecting with such practices, which have historically existed across all cultures, could reframe rivers, forests, and animals as beings with intrinsic value or personhood. Formally mourning for habitat and species loss would also function as a form of ethical reckoning, acknowledging human responsibility for ecological harm and prompting reflection on how people might live differently in the face of ecological grief. She writes that “To hold a funeral for a glacier or a species challenges anthropocentric assumptions about grief, expanding our circle of moral concern” (Gabriel, 2026). In this way, because ecological grief is often entwined with guilt, “Mourning becomes a form of moral reckoning—a way of asking not only what we have lost, but how we might now live differently.” This was certainly our experience in Colombia, as we used our creative work to collectively mourn what had been done to our rivers on two different sides of the planet yet also forged solidarity in our common determination to do better.

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