Water is essential to life, but colonial systems have often treated it primarily as a resource that can be controlled, managed, and extracted. In *Keepers of the Water in the Oil Sands Region: Renewing Indigenous Relationships to Water*, Angele Alook challenges this understanding by centering Indigenous relationships with water. Drawing on Indigenous feminist scholarship, her own experiences, and the work of Water Protector Jessie Cardinal, Alook shows that water is not simply a natural resource but a living relation. Protecting water is therefore connected to Indigenous governance, women’s leadership, and responsibilities to Land and future generations.

Alook begins the chapter with a personal experience from a gathering of Elders and Knowledge Keepers in her home community. She arrived expecting to share her own knowledge about colonialism and Indigenous women’s empowerment, but instead found herself learning from the women around her. Elders spoke about gathering water for their families when they were young girls, and these stories helped Alook think differently about what decolonization can mean. The act of collecting water was connected to responsibilities that linked women to their families, communities, ancestors, and future generations. Decolonization, in this sense, involves more than resisting colonial institutions. It also means renewing relationships and responsibilities that colonialism has attempted to disrupt.

These relationships are particularly important within the context of oil sands development in Alberta. Focusing on Treaty 6 and Treaty 8 territories, Alook discusses how resource extraction has affected Indigenous Lands, waters, and communities. Pollution, changes to water quality, and damage to ecosystems are not presented as environmental problems that exist separately from colonialism. Instead, they are connected to longer histories of dispossession and the exclusion of Indigenous Peoples from decisions concerning their territories. Although governments and industries may use the language of consultation, these processes can still prioritize resource development while limiting Indigenous authority over Land and water.

Indigenous feminism is also central to Alook’s analysis. Colonialism did not only dispossess Indigenous Peoples from Land; it also disrupted gender relations and the roles Indigenous women held within their communities. Alook explains that women in many Indigenous Nations have longstanding responsibilities as Keepers of the Water and carry knowledge related to water, ceremony, community, and stewardship. However, Indigenous women continue to be marginalized within many environmental and resource-management decisions. Restoring women’s leadership is therefore not simply about ensuring better representation. It is connected to the renewal of Indigenous governance and the relationships necessary for protecting water.

The experiences of Jessie Cardinal, Executive Director of Keepers of the Water, make these ideas more concrete. Cardinal’s work demonstrates that protecting water involves much more than conventional environmental advocacy. It is also connected to Treaty rights, cultural revitalization, community wellbeing, and responsibilities to future generations. Her experiences show how Indigenous Water Protectors approach environmental issues through relationships and responsibilities rather than viewing water as an isolated resource requiring management. This also challenges the idea that climate or environmental justice can be separated from Indigenous sovereignty.

Ultimately, Alook asks readers to reconsider what it actually means to protect water. Colonial legal frameworks and technical forms of environmental management are limited when they continue to treat water as a resource and Indigenous Peoples primarily as groups to be consulted. Instead, Alook emphasizes Indigenous resurgence, including the renewal of Indigenous laws, governance, ceremony, knowledge, and relationships with Land and water. Centering Indigenous women and Water Protectors changes environmental governance from a question of how water should be managed to one of how relationships and responsibilities to water can be renewed. The chapter shows that protecting water is not only an environmental concern, but also part of a larger process of supporting Indigenous sovereignty, self-determination, and responsibilities to generations yet to come.

This is a English language summary of the chapter "Keepers of the Water in the Oil Sands Region: Renewing Indigenous Relationships to Water," published in the edited volume Tejiendo re-existencias indígenas: Luchas por la defensa del agua y el territorio en México y Canadá. The published version in Spanish can be found here:

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