Water Stories: A River Harvest

Water Stories is a multidimensional, interdisciplinary project conceived of and produced by Dr. Maureen E. McCluskey and Dr. Tru Leverette Hall in collaboration with key community partners. The larger project of which Water Stories is part—Resilient Ribault (with collaborators St. Johns Riverkeeper and Local Initiatives Support Corporation)—is being designed to expand connections between Jacksonville, Florida’s Ribault River/Moncrief Road residents and nature, to study and restore the environmental and economic assets of the district, and to better memorialize its history and preserve its cemeteries. The river itself serves as both a metaphorical and literal path of connection, communal empowerment, self-sufficiency, and resiliency. Likewise, the area’s cemeteries—historically neglected by the city—exist as both natural spaces and sites of ancestral-communal connection. The interdisciplinary connections among the project collaborators highlight the synergies among oral and public history, ethnography, race, environmental justice, and the arts. The collaborators understand the need for the arts to further environmental justice work and thread together human connections to nature and to each other. This project uses storytelling to gather communities, translate environmental land memory, frame conversations, and foster communal healing and positive connections to nature through shared embodied experience. Oral histories on Ribault River corridor residents’ experiences with the natural world, particularly the river, will be developed into a performance for the community in Spring 2025. Water Stories will demonstrate that the stories we tell (and who has a platform) shape our environmental justice work (and vice versa) and give voice to underheard stories.