Speaker Bios

LOUISE BENNALLY is a grandmother, mother and clan mother from Black Mesa community of Big Mountain in Northern Arizona and a lifelong activist in environmental issues around water, sacred sites, and mining in the four corners region. She is a farmer, water protector, permaculturist, herbalist, traditional counselor and advisor on different environmental fronts and will share stories and lessons from her work.

_______________________________________________________

REUBEN CRUZ is a Piipaash/Quechan/Mexican poet, educator and writer who was raised along the Gila and Salt Rivers in the Colorado River Basin of central Arizona. Reuben’s poetry, hip-hop music, and writing form strands in water protection, LANDBACK, and cultural revitalization efforts continent-wide. Reuben has been a director, writer, and story consultant on documentaries and videos and provided the soundtrack for PBS’s Crying Earth Rise Up. Reuben is published in Truth Out, Waging Non-Violence, High Times, and self-published poetry books.

_______________________________________________________

LEONA MORGAN is a Diné organizer and educator on nuclear issues since 2007. She is cofounder of Haul No!, a campaign to stop a uranium mine near the Grand Canyon and the Colorado River Basin and the transport of uranium through the Navajo Nation. Leona is pursuing a Master’s of Community and Regional Planning at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque.

_______________________________________________________

WOMAN STANDS SHINING, Pat McCabe, is a mother and grandmother, artist, activist, international speaker, advocate for the sacredness of water all over the world, and conduit for voices of earth and spirit from Diné Nation. Her work describes the journey moving away from the “power over paradigm” and moving toward the thriving life paradigm in ceremony, in writing, in artwork, and in justice for land, water, people and all life. She has worked to protect and restore the Rio Grande River in NM with the environmental organization “Amigos Bravos” and conducts prayer, song, and ceremony with international community.

_______________________________________________________

ABOUT THE WATERS CONNECT US 

All of our precious, finite water sources are connected, from flowing surface streams across Mother Earth to the underground Aquifers below us, to the raindrops falling from the clouds above, all of water is connected. The Waters Connect Us is multi-generational work to protect SacredWater that was inspired by Debra White Plume (Oglala Lakota / Cheyenne) of Owe Aku / Bring Back the Way and a tight-knit group of Indigenous and non-native people committed to environmental and human rights work. We honor those whose footsteps we walk in this water and ancestral lands’ work and are dedicated to strengthening and building solidarity to increase the effectiveness of the many movements to protect lands and waters. We are all connected through water + land + life.