Water Remembers: Community Zine-Making and Caring for Sacred Waters

Background and Purpose:

Indigenous water teachings emphasize relationality, responsibility, and the interconnectedness of human and more-than-human worlds. However, dominant research approaches often marginalize these ways of knowing or extract knowledge without sustaining relationships or accountability to community. In response, there is growing attention to community-engaged and creative methods that support more ethical, participatory, and place-based approaches to environmental and climate justice work. Zine-making, a historically activist medium, offers one such approach. As a low-cost, accessible form of storytelling, zines have long been used by marginalized communities to share knowledge, resist dominant narratives, and create spaces for self-representation. Their flexibility and emphasis on maker control make them well-suited for approaches that prioritize community voice, creativity, and non-extractive knowledge sharing.

Methods

A participant-engaged zine-making approach was used to explore Indigenous water stories, teachings, and stewardship practices. Grounded in community-engaged approaches to climate and environmental justice, participants were invited to reflect on their relationships with water and to share knowledge through a collective, take-home medium. Zines are non-commercial booklets that serve as an accessible, do-it-yourself format requiring minimal materials. Participants are provided with paper, scissors, and writing utensils and invited to document stories, memories, teachings, and responsibilities related to water using visual and written expression. The process emphasizes participant autonomy and relational accountability, allowing individuals to determine what to share, how to share it, and what remains private or held within the community. Zine-making is positioned as both a creative and methodological practice that resists extractive forms of knowledge production.

Findings

Zine-making creates space for multi-modal expressions of participants’ relationships with water, including personal narratives, cultural teachings, and visual storytelling. The process supports the sharing of knowledge that may not surface through conventional research methods, particularly knowledge rooted in lived experience, place, and tradition. Participants engage in reflective and dialogic processes, fostering conversations around water, healing, and community-based environmental care. The resulting zines function as both individual and collective artifacts, representing diverse ways of knowing and relating to water while highlighting the importance of community voice in environmental discourse.

Implications

Zine-making offers a flexible, low-cost method for advancing community-engaged and non-extractive approaches to environmental and climate justice work. By shifting control over representation and circulation to participants, this approach challenges traditional research paradigms and centers community authority in knowledge production. The method aligns with Indigenous knowledge systems by valuing story, place, and visual expression, and by supporting relational approaches to learning and sharing. Zines also function as tools for community outreach, enabling participants to share water-related knowledge within their own networks in ways that support awareness and collective action. As a portable and adaptable practice, zine-making can offer participants an ongoing means of storytelling, education, and advocacy grounded in their own contexts and communities.