I'm Adeli Mone, and this is The Slowdown.

I am often amazed by how the history of humanity is tied to the history of rivers.

How many cities are built along the riverways because it offered a way of commerce and transportation.

And how many rivers have become demarcations of territory, sites of war and conquest.

This is my side of the river, and that's yours.

What a concept.

As if anyone could own a river or even a river bank.

I lived in New Mexico for a brief time.

I'd walk along the Rio Grande every day, and it was hard to be near that steady, powerful

river and not think of my ancestors who had crossed it.

It was hard to think about the painful legacy of death for those who attempted to cross it

and never lived to see the farther shore.

It's not the river's fault, is it?

The river never decided to be a border, never woke up one day, and decided it was

owned.

Rivers also remind us of how we are connected, that what happens upstream happens downstream,

and what happens in the river will flow to the ocean, with all the creeks and watersheds

and tributaries weaving and baining through land, somehow, instead of honoring them, bowing

down to them, we have used them for our needs and turned them into sites of violence.

Today's poem is about how the history of us is also the history of rivers.

The beginning of the beginning by Fruan T. Wang.

Who decides where a river starts?

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