The River Is in Us: Fighting Toxics in a Mohawk Community

by Elizabeth Hoover

Winner of the Labriola Center American Indian National Book Award 2017

Mohawk midwife Katsi Cook lives in Akwesasne, an indigenous community in upstate New York that is downwind and downstream from three Superfund sites. For years she witnessed elevated rates of miscarriages, birth defects, and cancer in her town, ultimately drawing connections between environmental contamination and these maladies. When she brought her findings to environmental health researchers, Cook sparked the United States’ first large-scale community-based participatory research project. In The River Is in Us , author Elizabeth Hoover takes us deep into this remarkable community that has partnered with scientists and developed grassroots programs to fight the contamination of its lands and reclaim its health and culture. Through in-depth research into archives, newspapers, and public meetings, as well as numerous interviews with community members and scientists, Hoover shows the exact efforts taken by Akwesasne’s massive research project and the grassroots efforts to preserve the Native culture and lands. She also documents how contaminants have altered tribal life, including changes to the Mohawk fishing culture and the rise of diabetes in Akwesasne. Featuring community members such as farmers, health-care providers, area leaders, and environmental specialists, while rigorously evaluating the efficacy of tribal efforts to preserve its culture and protect its health, The River Is in Us offers important lessons for improving environmental health research and health care, plus detailed insights into the struggles and methods of indigenous groups. This moving, uplifting book is an essential read for anyone interested in Native Americans, social justice, and the pollutants contaminating our food, water, and bodies.

Genres: Environment, Nonfiction, Indigenous, Academic

360 pages, Paperback

Published November 1, 2017

About the author

Elizabeth Hoover is an academic that falsely claimed Mohawk/Mi'kmaq ancestry. She is currently associate professor in the Department of Environmental Science, Policy and Management at UC Berkeley.  Her research focuses on Native American environmental health and food sovereignty movements. Her first book The River is In Us; Fighting Toxins in a Mohawk Community, (University of Minnesota Press, 2017) is an ethnographic exploration of Akwesasne Mohawks’ response to Superfund contamination and environmental health research. Her second book project From ‘Garden Warriors’ to ‘Good Seeds;’ Indigenizing the Local Food Movement (University of Minnesota Press, forthcoming) explores Native American farming and gardening projects around the country: the successes and challenges faced by these organizations, the ways in which participants define and envision concepts like food sovereignty, the importance of heritage seeds, the role of Native chefs in the food sovereignty movement, and convergences between the food sovereignty and anti-pipeline and anti-mining movements. She also co-edited, with Devon Mihesuah, Indigenous Food Sovereignty in the United States: Restoring Cultural Knowledge, Protecting Environments, and Regaining Health (University of Oklahoma Press, 2019). She has published articles about food sovereignty, environmental reproductive justice in Native American communities, the cultural impact of fish advisories on Native communities, tribal citizen science, and health social movements.

Reviews

[JC]

I won’t be rating this book. Hoover recently got cancelled and was removed from a large SSHRC grant after issuing a statement admitting that she has no tribal affiliation or formal evidence of Indigenous ancestry.

This book is on my submitted comps list (and on my department's general comps list), and I finished reading it before the news broke. It’s widely quoted in STS and Indigenous environmental studies literature, including Max Liboiron’s Pollution is Colonialism and Michelle Murphy’s paper on EDCs written with Reena Shadaan.

This book brings together many things that are of interest to me: environmental justice, health studies, Indigenous social action, ‘decolonizing methodologies’, politics of fish, rivers, water, and hydropower, citizen science, and food sovereignty. It’s disheartening though to hear what Hoover did, both institutionally, and to other Indigenous students she supervised. It’s not really my place to comment on these things though so I won’t say more. I am not Indigenous to this continent. Mohawk and Mi'kmaq communities will address these issues how they see fit.

There are lots of Indigenous scholars doing great work in environmental justice, science studies, food sovereignty, and so on, so you don’t really have to read this book if you want that. You can look elsewhere.

[jules revel · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent book examining the experience of Akwesasne. Anyone interested in Native studies, environmental justice, or public health would gain from reading this book. #2booksunder50reviews

[Meg du Bray]

...too bad Elizabeth Hoover is a pretendian...

[Cecilia Shearon]

Originally assigned for my Environmental Policy & Indigeneity class. We read the introduction and two chapters prior to abandonment on the grounds of unethical writing & research.

[Mills College Library]

971.40049 H7895 2017