Is the Colorado Alive? Rediscovering River Consciousness in the American West
By Bob Hembree
"Ko au te awa, ko te awa ko au" —Whanganui River proverb
("I am the river, the river is me")
The Question Carved in Stone
The question arrives like morning light on red sandstone, but it has been carved there for millennia. Is a river alive? Robert Macfarlane poses it as revelation, but here where the Colorado runs—or used to run, or remembers running—the question echoes through eleven thousand years of ceremony-songs and chalk-dust prayers, through dreams older than the Ancestral Puebloans who left their handprints in Glen Canyon's drowned alcoves.
Stand at any overlook in the Colorado Basin and you witness three conversations simultaneously: the river speaking to stone in a language of erosion and deposition, the Indigenous peoples who never forgot how to listen, and the industrial civilization that systematically trained itself not to hear.
The question is ancient. What is new—urgent—is our collective amnesia regarding the answer.
The Grammar of Drowning
At Glen Canyon Overlook, Georgie Pongyesva's voice carries across wind-carved emptiness where Lake Powell once lapped against drowned canyon walls. She speaks of Pumpkin Springs, how it "used to be a sacred spring, a bone-healing spring for wildlife." Used to be. The grammar tells the story: the water levels don't reach anymore, the spring doesn't wash itself, contamination has taken hold.
Listen to who holds agency in her syntax. The spring possesses healing capacity. The river carries the ability to cleanse. The water levels choose not to reach. Even poisoned, even severed from its source of renewal, the spring remains a who rather than a what—a being capable of relationship, response, reciprocal care.
But something has gone wrong with our ability to hear this grammar. We have become, in Eduardo Kohn's precise terminology, "soul blind."
The Concrete Liturgy of Forgetting
Soul blindness: the inability to perceive other beings as anything more than objects available for use. In the Colorado Basin, this condition has been institutionalized, codified into law, poured into concrete that rises 710 feet above the riverbed like a monument to our systematic deafness.
The 1922 Colorado River Compact speaks a different language entirely. "Acre-feet." "Beneficial use." "Water rights." "Upper basin states" and "lower basin states." Nowhere in its bureaucratic liturgy does the compact acknowledge the river as an entity with standing, with memory, with anything resembling what the Hopi call himu—life-force, breath, the animating principle that moves through all beings.
This linguistic transformation was not accidental. The men who authored the compact—and they were all men, all white, all representatives of what Vine Deloria Jr. would later call "the conquest mentality"—could no more see the Colorado as alive than they could recognize the nineteen tribal nations whose water relationships they were severing as fully sovereign. Soul blindness, it turns out, rarely travels alone.
The Archaeology of Interrupted Conversation
Glen Canyon Dam closes like a concrete period mid-sentence, interrupting conversations between water and stone that began in the Pleistocene. When its gates sealed in 1963, they didn't just impound water—they severed relationships, flooding sacred sites that had been pilgrimage destinations for countless generations, submerging the archaeology of human-river intimacy beneath what would become Lake Powell's recreational surface.
But drowning is not the same as dying. As Pongyesva has discovered during her recent expeditions to Cataract Canyon, the places that were submerged have been waiting, holding their breath like stones. "I've never been to a place that had been underwater for that long," she recalls. "It was weird. The things that dwell there had left."
Yet she adds something else—a note of faith in the river's capacity for self-restoration: "I'm praying that it's going to come back. I want to go see the plants. I want to see what the canyon is. Because I know nature will take it back, and it will restore itself."
Nature will take it back. In Pongyesva's understanding, the natural world possesses agency, intention, and the capacity for reclamation. This is not metaphor but recognition of how the world actually works when human control falters.
The River's Rebellion
Lake Powell squats at thirty-three percent capacity now, its bathtub ring of bleached stone marking the retreat of what was always an artificial lake. As the water recedes, it reveals landscapes that have been holding their stories in darkness for sixty years. Cultural sites emerge like words on a page written in an ancient script—pictographs and pottery sherds, granaries and grinding stones, the material vocabulary of peoples who knew how to live as if rivers were relatives.
The river is speaking again, asserting its own agency despite every human attempt at control. The dropping water levels represent not just climatic shift but the Colorado's refusal to be entirely contained, its insistence on returning to older patterns, older relationships, older ways of being itself.
This is what Indigenous peoples have always known about water: it has a mind of its own.
Women's Water Wisdom
There is something profound about the fact that Pongyesva, a Hopi woman, has become one of the most articulate voices for transformed water relationships in the Colorado Basin. Traditional water management in many Indigenous societies has often been women's work—not because water was considered unimportant, but because its care required the kind of intimate, daily attention that women were understood to provide across generations.
"For Hopi, it's very taboo for a woman to go on that journey down there," Pongyesva explains about her river expeditions. "But I do it to try and do this work." Her willingness to cross cultural boundaries while maintaining deep respect for protocols embodies a kind of bridge-building that may be essential for healing our relationships with water.
She speaks of "twisting the rope and coming together"—a methodology for braiding Indigenous knowledge with contemporary science, traditional ceremony with modern technology, in service of relationships that can endure. The metaphor is tactile, domestic, grounded in the physical work of making strong connections from diverse strands.
The Syntax of Kinship
"We still think about the ants and the pollinators and the birds and all the things up the food chain, the animals as our relatives and as a part of us," Pongyesva explains. "Because without them, we won't be here. The plants are our relatives."
Here is grammar that recognizes kinship networks extending far beyond the human. Rivers become relations rather than resources. Springs transform from amenities to ancestors. The entire hydrological cycle reveals itself as a vast extended family, each element connected to and responsible for the well-being of the others.
This relational understanding carries profound implications for water governance. Instead of asking how to better manage resources, we might inquire: How do we restore proper relationship with our water relatives? Instead of seeking technological solutions to scarcity, we might ask: What does the river need from us to heal?
Legal Animacy
When New Zealand granted legal personhood to the Whanganui River in 2017, it wasn't implementing exotic legal theory—it was recognizing in law what the Māori people had always known in their bones. Rivers are ancestors. Ko au te awa, ko te awa ko au—I am the river, the river is me.
For Indigenous peoples of the Colorado Basin, this "revolutionary" legal development feels more like catching up than breaking new ground. As Pongyesva observes, "Science is just catching up with traditional ecological knowledge." The same might be said of Western law: it is slowly, tentatively learning to see what Indigenous legal systems never forgot.
The current renegotiation of Colorado River management provides unprecedented opportunity to move beyond the soul blindness embedded in the 1922 Compact. For the first time, tribal nations are demanding—and beginning to receive—meaningful seats at the negotiating table. Their participation represents more than political inclusion; it offers the possibility of fundamentally different approaches to water governance, ones based on relationship rather than extraction, reciprocity rather than domination.
The Healing of Springs
Springs: those liminal places where underground rivers emerge into daylight, where the earth's hidden circulatory system becomes visible, touchable, drinkable. They have always held special significance in Indigenous water cultures—understood as breathing places for the water beings, sacred sites where humans can enter a direct relationship with the life-giving forces that sustain existence.
Pongyesva's work with spring restoration provides a microcosm of what broader water healing might look like. When springs are restored—cleared of debris, protected from contamination, returned to their natural flow patterns—they become sites of renewed relationship between human and more-than-human communities. The restoration work is both practical and ceremonial, addressing immediate ecological needs while reestablishing cultural protocols that maintain human-water reciprocity across generations.
This is healing work that must happen throughout the Colorado Basin: not just the restoration of springs, but the restoration of our capacity to see springs as places worthy of care rather than simply as water sources to be captured and controlled.
The River Remembers
The Colorado remembers. In its seasonal rhythms, in the way it carves new channels when human engineering tries to constrain it, in its retreat from artificial reservoirs, the river demonstrates that it retains knowledge of its own proper relationship to the landscapes it nourishes.
What we call "natural disasters"—floods, droughts, the failure of human water infrastructure—might be better understood as the river's attempts to teach us that our approaches to relationships have gone astray. The river remembers the time before dams, when its seasonal floods deposited fertile silt across vast floodplains, when its spring snowmelt fed wetlands that supported millions of migratory birds, when its underground connections sustained springs and seeps throughout the desert Southwest.
This memory is not nostalgic but instructional, offering guidance for redesigning human communities to work with rather than against the river's own intelligence.
Learning to Listen Again
"It's our greatest teacher," Pongyesva says of the natural world. "We have just forgotten how to listen."
The forgetting has been systematic, embedded in educational systems that teach children to see nature as a collection of resources rather than a community of relations. But the capacity to listen remains, dormant like desert seeds waiting for rain.
What would it mean to reactivate this capacity on a scale large enough to transform our relationship with the Colorado? It would require, first, acknowledging that our current approach has failed. The century-long experiment in controlling the Colorado through massive infrastructure has produced a system in permanent crisis, lurching from shortage to shortage, emergency to emergency.
Second, it would require humility. Indigenous peoples of the Colorado Basin maintained sustainable water relationships for thousands of years before European arrival. Their knowledge systems were not primitive approximations of scientific understanding but sophisticated technologies for maintaining long-term reciprocal relationships with hydrological systems.
Third, it would require expanding our legal and political imagination to include the river itself as a party to negotiations about its future. This is what Macfarlane's question ultimately points toward: not just recognition that rivers are alive, but transformation of our institutions to reflect that recognition.
Ancient Futures
Standing at Glen Canyon Overlook now, watching bleached stone emerge from the receding lake like time-lapse geological revelation, the land teaches us that what we thought permanent—the great blue recreational lake, the assured water supply for exponentially growing cities—was always temporary, always contingent on the river's willingness to cooperate with human dreams of control.
But the revelation cuts both ways. If the infrastructures of domination are temporary, so too might be our soul blindness. The capacity to see rivers as relatives, to enter a reciprocal relationship with water beings, to organize human communities around principles of sustainability rather than extraction—these capacities remain available. They are written into the landscape itself, encoded in traditional knowledge of Indigenous peoples, emerging in the work of scientists and legal scholars learning to think beyond purely human concerns.
The Colorado is alive. It has been alive for millions of years, long before human consciousness emerged to contemplate its flowing, long before human law developed categories for recognizing its rights. It will be alive long after our current forms of civilization have transformed into something more humble, more reciprocal, more attuned to the patient intelligence of water moving across stone.
The question is not whether the river is alive. The question is whether we will remember how to live as if it is.
In pre-dawn darkness, before light touches red canyon walls, the river moves as it has always moved—carrying snowmelt toward the sea, carrying stories between stones, carrying the future in its current toward whatever relationships await downstream. Listen: it is still teaching. We need only remember how to learn.