In her novel Solar Storms (1995) Chickasaw novelist and poet Linda Hogan foresees what political geographers today refer to as waterscapes, that is, water-based environments where a multiplicity of human and other-than-human forces interact with each other producing diverse forms of signification. This essay examines Indigenous experiences of water, geography, and social activism as they intersect in Hogan's waterscape narrative. I ground my analysis of this visionary novel in recent geographical studies that look at waterscapes from the perspective of cultural politics and which criticize rationalist conceptions of water that reduce it to the sole function of human commodity. Challenging such a reductionist view, Western and non-Western political geographers have begun to take into account traditional environmental knowledge (TEK), local ecologies, and historically rooted, alternative social practices to argue that water environments produce meaning through the ways human and other-than-human beings experience them, and this includes beings such as the earth or water. In this article I contend that such a view is the epistemological backbone sustaining Hogan's Solar Storms. While the potential swirling action of water as a form of environmental and spiritual power is strongly highlighted, I also
This is an interview with Zapotec video maker Juan Jose Garcia, president of the award‐winning media organization Ojo de Agua Comunicacion, in Oaxaca, Mexico. He presents a brief history of native video in Mexico and discusses issues such as indigenous video production and circulation, thematic content, communal practices, relation to indigenous communities, funding, and current projects of his group.
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