Drowned Land

In Pushmataha County, Oklahoma, a proposed 1,200-megawatt, closed-loop, pumped storage hydroelectric power plant on the Kiamichi River was again under review by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, and it was again rejected this past February. The move marks only the most recent in a series of corporate bids to transform the river for the sake of power and profit.

If the proposal were to go ahead along the 177-mile river, it would require the construction of large reservoirs to power a series of turbines. The water spills from a higher-elevation reservoir to a lower one, producing electricity, then it’s returned and released again in a cycle. But for the wildlife and the people who call the Kiamichi River home, the effects of this project would spell unequivocal damage.

For Tulsa-based filmmaker and curator Colleen Thurston, whose Choctaw ancestry closely links her to the river and this region of Oklahoma, the urgency of fighting the $3.1 billion hydroelectric project is yet one more hurdle in a centuries-long sequence of events that have indelibly shaped the land, the water, and the lives of the people who rely on the river. The director’s film Drowned Land traces “a generations-long struggle with resource extraction and displacement that began with the Trail of Tears,” says a statement.

The Kiamichi River (pronounce “kuhy-a-mish-ee”) is both setting and protagonist in Drowned Land, which Thurston follows through a narrative shaped by the four seasons. The director squares up to her family history and her Choctaw grandfather’s role in the Army Corps of Engineers helping to design and build dams in Oklahoma, which impacted and displaced numerous people who lived near the transformed bodies of water.

“Drowned Land is a deeply personal exploration of displacement, not just for my tribe but for the land that has long sustained us,” Thurston says in a statement. She continues:

I made this film to reckon with the ongoing history of exploitation in my community and to highlight the power of those determined to protect the land that remains. From a narrative standpoint, I was interested in letting the land and waterways guide a story, centering land and water as main characters. I try to understand stories as being inseparable from the land. It’s an attempt to decolonize not only my storytelling but our approach to the world.

Before automobiles and the immense and evolving network of roads that came with them, waterways were our highways. They often offered the most efficient way of getting from point A to point B, and cultures around the world—and across millennia—fashioned vessels that were all designed to do essentially the same thing: move people and goods. Today, water is viewed more often than not as a resource to be tapped, whether for recreation, development, or power.

As it continues to be today, the Kiamichi River valley was likewise a north-south corridor for the Indigenous people who called the region home long before white colonizers began to seize North America. The predominantly nomadic Caddo culture lived in the area, and hundreds of archaeological sites in Pushmataha County point to highly innovative prehistoric peoples who relied on and employed the river to sustain them, like those who built a kind of weir, or stone chute, that would divert fish and make them easier to catch.

Between 1830 and 1850, the result of the 1830 Indian Removal Act, an estimated 100,000 members of the Cherokee, Seminole, Chickasaw, Muscogee, and Choctaw nations were forcibly moved to what the U.S. deemed Indian Territory, a region west of the Mississippi River that now comprises much of Oklahoma. The Choctaw, whose ancestral homelands cover much of modern-day Alabama, Louisiana, and Mississippi, were the first to be uprooted in 1831.

The upheaval proved disastrous for those forced to make the journey, as disease, exposure, and starvation led to thousands of deaths. Among the Choctaw alone, upwards of one-third of those headed to the Indian Territory perished along the way or shortly thereafter. The name Trail of Tears took hold especially in the late 1830s when the Cherokee Nation, forced to travel in a similar “death march” more than 1,000 miles over rugged terrain with extremely minimal clothing or supplies, suffered terrific losses during the nearly three-month journey.

As Thurston worked on the film and conversed with numerous advocates and protectors, the project naturally evolved into an examination of the cycle of displacement that her tribe has experienced in relation to resource extraction. This takes the shape of “commodification of our ancestral land in Mississippi for the cotton industry and the forced removal on the Trail of Tears to the creation of lakes in Oklahoma that displaced communities yet again, and now, the continued exploitation of the Kiamichi risking residents’ lives, livelihoods, and land,” she says.

Drowned Land is a monument to an endangered way of thinking while being a call to return to a way of thinking that is rooted in carefully tended reciprocity between humans and the land—before it’s too late. The ethos is also connected to intention, slowness, and hyper-locality. Thurston describes how Choctaw community researcher Sandra Stroud and local landowner and water protector Charlotte Robbins would explain that “the solution is not just to win a lawsuit or block a permit because there will always be someone else coming for the river,” Thurston says. “Instead, the most sustainable solution is an entire paradigm shift.”

On August 21 starting at 6 p.m., Bemis Center will screen Drowned Land as part of the programming accompanying From the Great Lakes to the Great Plains: The Visible Currents of Climate Change. The film will then be followed by a conversation between Colleen Thurston and Michael Farrell, who is the co-founder of Platte River Timelapse, a film project that tells the story of the titular river and its intertwined landscapes and communities. ✤

All images courtesy of Colleen Thurston and Drowned Land.