Every June, canoe families gather to travel along the Spokane and Columbia Rivers in a journey that is far more than just a paddle. It’s a living act of remembrance, resistance, and renewal. The Tribal Canoe Journeys bring families and allies together on the water to reclaim traditions, strengthen community, and honor the salmon who once filled these rivers. And I am deeply honored to participate alongside my friends and community members, and to help carry stories, songs, and traditions forward.
This week, I paddled down the Spokane River with people I love, people who have taught me what it truly means to care for land and water. I grew up on the Spokane Indian Reservation as a white person always a guest on the land. As a kid, I didn’t understand the community's grief and what it meant for the community to go without salmon in the river. I didn’t understand how colonization took not only the fish, but ceremony, language, and generations of health and cultural wealth.
Now, I paddle not as a tourist or observer, but as someone accountable to the people and river who raised me. I paddle to help bring the salmon home, to support the culture that was violently disrupted, and to repair the relationships that were broken. Broken not just by dams and industry, but by silence, and by systems that taught us not to see the whole story.
The River Carries More Than Water
As we moved with the current, we followed historical trade routes and the memory of large salmon runs. But these waters are not just carrying fish or paddlers; they carry struggle and survival, intergenerational trauma and intergenerational love.
The river remembers. It remembers the people who lived in relationship with it for thousands of years and the violence that disrupted that bond. It holds memory of abundance and joy, but also of slaughter, land theft, and the trauma of boarding schools along its banks. When we paddle today, we are not just moving through water. We are moving through memory.
Environmental justice, to me, is about holding all of that at once. It’s about knowing that when we fight to protect the river, we are also fighting for Indigenous sovereignty, for clean water, for future generations, and for the dignity of all people who live downstream.
It’s not enough to talk about "nature" in isolation. The river is not separate from the people. Just as the river carries the layered history of those who’ve lived and struggled along its banks, each of us carry complex identities shaped by culture, queerness, ancestry, and resistance, reminding us that justice for the land must include justice for all who belong to it.
Pride Means Protection
This journey always overlaps with Pride Month, and as I prepare to celebrate pride, I find myself thinking about how deeply connected these movements really are. Pride began as a riot, a refusal to accept state violence, led in large part by Black and brown queer and trans people who had nothing left to lose. In that same spirit, environmental justice calls us to be bold. To challenge the systems that harm us. To build alternatives rooted in love, safety, and interdependence.
Too often queer people, especially people of color, are pushed to the margins, even in progressive spaces. But the truth is: queer and trans folks are already on the frontlines of environmental harm. They are also leading efforts to create more just, sustainable futures. Including them, us, is not an act of charity; it’s an act of truth.
And if intersectionality teaches us anything, it’s that our struggles are bound together. Just as queerness and environmental justice are linked, so too are the fights for migrant rights and Indigenous sovereignty. Justice cannot be siloed when the systems that harm us are so deeply connected.
No Borders on Stolen Land
While we paddled, we received news of the protests happening in Spokane to oppose ICE deportations and demand justice for immigrant communities. Even from the river, the power of that message carried.
The violence of ICE is not separate from environmental harm. It is another way communities are made vulnerable, displaced, and silenced. These are not distant issues. They are local. They are happening in the same cities where we organize for clean water, where we fight for salmon, where we try to build a future rooted in care.
Migration is natural. Just like salmon return to their spawning grounds, people move to survive, to care for family, to seek safety. But instead of welcome, they are met with fences, jails, and surveillance. The climate crisis is already making many places unlivable. It will force more people to move. And still, our government responds not with compassion, but with punishment.
Environmental justice must include migrant justice. We cannot separate the right to clean water from the right to live free from fear.
Our rivers don’t know borders. Neither should our solidarity.
We’re All Connected
Being a water protector means defending the whole web of life. Not just the river’s flow, but the people and cultures that have always protected it. For me, that includes showing up as a settler in deep relationships with Indigenous friends and mentors. It includes recognizing my queerness as both a personal truth and a political call to build a better world. And it includes standing with migrants, with unhoused people, with every community pushed to the margins, because they are also at the heart of this fight.
This year’s canoe journey is a reminder that we have everything we need: each other, songs, language, and our river. When we move together in the water, we move in prayer, in protest, and in possibility. Let us keep paddling. Let us keep rising. Let us keep showing up, not just for the river, but for everyone and everything that flows with it.
Because the river needs all of us. And we need each other.
From the canoe, from the protest line, from the water’s edge, I offer this in solidarity. May our movements be as powerful as the currents we protect.