“Sitting Dong on de River Stone”: Black Women’s Environmental Activism through Articulation, and Action

• In Event: Women's Environmental activism

Description for Program

This paper takes a multi-disciplinary approach to examine the contributions of Black Women historically to Environmental Conservation, Preservation, and Resistance to Ecological Destruction, in the Caribbean during the first half of the twentieth century. The focus here will be on water and the environment. To illustrate the intentionality of Women's Environmental Activism, this study examines two cases in the History of Trinidad and Tobago, The Water Riot of 1903 and the Caura Dam Project forty years later. The paper also examines alongside these two historical events, other sites of women’s voice (folklore, oral tradition, and literature) to argue, not only for their awareness of the interdependence between human and ecological wellbeing, but also for their conscious, concerted, and consistent attempts to teach and transmit through generations the importance of environmental respect and protection, and to temper the impact of ecological destruction at the micro and macro levels.

Author

• Kathleen Elizabeth Phillips Lewis, Spelman College