We Are Water Protectors

An Ojibwe girl recalls the teachings her grandmother passed down about water as something sacred, alive, and owed protection, and Carole Lindstrom's text ties that inherited knowledge to a specific prophecy the girl has grown up hearing, a warning about a destructive black snake that will one day threaten the land. When she recognizes an oil pipeline being built near her community as exactly that black snake, the girl calls on her own community to resist it, and the book follows her and the people around her standing together against the pipeline's advance, framed explicitly around water's role as something every living thing depends on rather than a resource to be owned by anyone. The book, written directly in response to the 2016 protests against the Dakota Access Pipeline at Standing Rock, includes real material from that movement at its end: notes on the protests themselves, a glossary of terms, and a pledge the book invites young readers to take as water protectors of their own.

Michaela Goade paints the community in watercolor as visibly diverse in age, gender, and background, reflecting the more than five hundred Indigenous nations who took part in the actual Standing Rock protests, and she sets the black snake against harsh red backgrounds that break sharply from the blues, purples, and aquamarines used everywhere else in the book. Ojibwe floral patterns and a recurring turtle motif, referencing Turtle Island as an Indigenous name for North America, run through nearly every spread, giving the book a consistent visual language tying the present day protest directly back to older tradition.