Water does not belong to us. We belong to it.
That is the truth at the heart of This Is Only a Small Story — a powerful environmental gothic narrative that refuses to look away from the world we are making, and the world we are destroying. It is a story about water. About nature. About the ancient, sacred knowledge of those who understood, long before the rest of us, that to poison the river is to poison ourselves.
A Walker for the Water
In 2003, an Anishinaabe grandmother named Josephine Mandamin — Biidaasige-ba, She Who Brings the Light — laced up her boots and began to walk. Not for protest. Not for politics. For prayer. She walked the shores of the Great Lakes carrying a copper pail of water, singing as she went, honouring what she called the lifeblood of the Earth.
By the time Josephine Mandamin passed in February 2019, she and the Mother Earth Water Walkers had covered over 25,000 kilometres. She walked because she saw what was coming. She walked because someone had to.
This Is Only a Small Story is born from that spirit — from the radical, tender, ferocious act of bearing witness.
The Gothic of the Earth
Environmental gothic is not a genre for the faint-hearted. It does not offer the comfort of distance — no monster safely confined to a castle, no darkness held neatly at bay. The horror here is the horizon. It is the oil rig on the water. It is the logo of a corporation stamped across the sky where eagles used to fly. It is the slow, grinding erasure of everything that sustained us, dressed up as progress.
Beneath the surface of this story — as beneath the surface of the water — lie bones. The remains of what corporate greed and unchecked extraction leave behind. Skulls in the sediment. Jellyfish drifting through the wreckage. The sacred made toxic.
But there is also resistance. A raven. Spirit wolves at the treeline. An elder who does not flinch.
Indigenous Knowledge and the Long Memory
One of the most urgent threads running through this narrative is the collision between Indigenous knowledge systems and the extractive logic of late capitalism. For generations, Indigenous communities have understood water not as a resource to be owned, traded, or depleted — but as a relative. A living being with rights, with voice, with power.
That knowledge was suppressed. Mocked. Nearly erased. And yet it persists — in the walkers who still walk, in the water protectors who still stand, in the stories that refuse to be silenced.
These themes run deep in my own writing. In The Shadow Keeper: Gothic Haunting Tales from Somerset, I weave Anishinaabe Chippewa mythology with British gothic folklore — exploring the same ancient knowledge systems, the same thin boundaries between the living and the dead, the seen and the unseen.
This Is Only a Small Story. But small stories carry the weight of the world.
Why This Story Matters Now
We are living through a water crisis. Not a future one — a present one. Rivers are dying. Lakes are receding. Communities across the globe are losing access to clean water while corporations extract, bottle, and profit. The gothic is no longer metaphor. It is the news.
This narrative asks us to sit with that discomfort. To feel the weight of what is being lost. And perhaps, in the tradition of Josephine Mandamin, to ask ourselves: what are we willing to carry?
Water is life. This is only a small story. But it needs to be told.
Inspired by Josephine Mandamin — Biidaasige-ba (1942–2019), founder of the Mother Earth Water Walkers movement.