The American West is drying up and the crisis didn’t start with climate change. It started with a lie.

For 170 years, the Federal government diverted rivers, built dams, and constructed an elaborate system of canals all on water that was never theirs to take. That water was guaranteed by treaty to Indigenous nations, whose rivers were drained and blocked to fuel the growth of cities and industries across the West. The treaties were broken. The rivers were broken. Now, the artificial system built on that theft is beginning to break too.

But something remarkable is happening.

On the Klamath in California. On the Missouri in the Dakotas. On the Mississippi in Minnesota. Indigenous-led movements are rising up to reclaim what was never surrendered and in doing so, they show us a way through the crisis ahead.

WATER WARS tells the story: 170 years of history; the sabotage of Tribes’ ability to subsist; the mounting pressures of drought and climate change; and the Indigenous uprisings that are rewriting the future of water in America.

This is not a story you’ll see on the evening news. It’s a story that will change how you see our water, our landscape, and our country.

Water Wars was filmed over ten years from 2015 to 2025 along the Klamath, Missouri and upper Mississippi Rivers. The extended narrative of a series aloows us the ability to tell a story, and to reveal a national system of exploitation that is no longer sustainable. The ticking clock of climate change, the political instability in Washington DC, and the profound impact of corporate money on how we make decisions has driven our society into a corner. The battle to protect or profit from our remaining natural resources has us flirting with extinction.

But, while the dominant society seems either oblivious or paralyzed with confusion, one group of people appears pivotal: Native Americans.

The stories from Standing Rock and the Klamath reveal what resistance strategies work, what fell short, and what challenges that we all should understand in order to confront the depth of the problems we all face.

Your participation will help us complete this important series that will help illuminate what we now experience, and the road ahead..

Please help support the GoFundMe campaign. And please contact us with any comments or ideas. www.WaterWarsFilm.com .

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