Walks of Resilience and Accountability: LA & Payahuunadü

Walking Water was born from vision received by Kate Bunney in 2012 while walking alongside the Tinnemaha Creek in Payahuunadü. It felt like water was calling. The vision asked us to walk again with water and, after receiving permission from the Big Pine Paiute Tribe, a group of 40 water protectors began a journey in 2015 from Mono Lake. In 3 phases over 3 years, the group arrived in Long Beach in 2017, following the Los Angeles Aqueduct for 550 miles. 

Payahuunadü/Owens Valley is the source water providing Los Angeles with 30% of its water needs. Without Payahuunadü, Los Angeles would not be what it is today. 

The first LA Aqueduct, built in 1913, stretched nearly 250 miles to Payahuunadü (The place where the water always flows). By the 1920s, the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power had taken significant land and water rights from the Nuumü/Newe (Paiute Shoshone) peoples of Payahuunadü, leading to unresolved water rights issues and ongoing conflicts to this day. This has essentially resulted in Payahuunadü being a colony of Los Angeles. The impact on peoples, lands and waters has been devastating. 

From 2015 to 2017, we walked an epic 3 year - 3 phase journey with 40 water protectors, tribal representatives, musicians/artists, and community members from Mono Lake to Los Angeles. Our intention was to walk the relationship from source to end-user, listen to community story along the way, explore our own relationship with water, and bear witness to both the beauty and the grief.  

Together with our partners, The Owens Valley Indian Water Commission, we then began to organize and hold Walks of Resilience and Accountability. These are shorter day walks both in Los Angeles and Payahuunadü. Our intention is to bridge relations between Payahuunadü and Los Angeles, educate LA citizens on where their water comes from, work with elected officials on changing extractive water management methods and to build up a grassroots network of water protectors from both LA and Payahuunadü. Since 2021, we have held a 3 day walk in Payahuunadü and a 3 day walk in Los Angeles every year, Spring and Fall - each time bringing new people to bear witness and form coalitions. 

The polycrisis has heightened the urgency for Los Angeles and surrounding communities to become resilient, particularly regarding water sufficiency. The impacts of severe droughts, earthquakes, year-round fire risks, extreme heat, and flooding underscore the need for local water sources. Understanding the current and historical impacts on the places and peoples from which the water is taken is essential to understand the whole story and finding resilient, collaborative solutions.

With the walks, we hold ourselves accountable to learning, listening, and being a good relative, thereby empowering the voices of those fighting injustices. By actively participating, we foster a deeper understanding and commitment to support the communities affected by water appropriation, ensuring their struggles and stories are heard and respected. These walks also aim to explore Los Angeles’ path to water independence, the impacts on the Paiute and Tongva peoples, and how we can collectively build a resilient LA and support communities everywhere. The greater hope is that  Los Angeles becomes a model for others in becoming accountable and responding appropriately to this climate emergency for future generations.

Our next 3 day walk will be in October 2026 and has a budget of $25,000. A grant from Ma Earth would not only go some way to our budget goal, it will also inspire others to contribute through the matching grant. 

As well as the walks we host and produce a podcast called Talking Water, compile books (Waters Rising and Waters Becoming) and hold dialogue circles for potential collaboration partners. 

Some of the principles and commitments that really inform and shape our work are: 

Water as our relative and guide: This means a sacred, political, cultural and spiritual commitment to placing water at the center of our work and practices. A core practice is listening - listening to the water in us and the waters that bring life. It also means designing the project in ways that inspire abundance, inclusion, equity and justice. 

Walking: The act of walking together allows us to embody the experiences of our landscape by slowing down while still moving. By walking together we also get to witness, to listen and embody other’s experiences. Each of us begins to be part of a dynamic relationship between humans and the world around us, we begin to find our place within the circle. It is one way to embody, show and hopefully inspire our deep care, love and attention to water.

It's about Us: An important element of our work is to be with our own relationship to water, understand where we are extractive, and continue to restore and repair. We understand that as a significant commitment in our work, and don’t ask others to do what we wouldn’t do. 

Part of the community, not the community: Partnership and collaboration is essential, and we work to strengthen our partners through relations of reciprocity and mutual support. We view the current state of the waters and lands as a result of a system that profits from separation, that attempts to disenfranchise communities, and creates a model of scarcity and ‘all or nothing’. As a response, we focus on the strength of the circle, that each of us has an invaluable position and responsibility within that circle, and that none of us can or should do it/be it All. We continually work to center inclusion. Some of the ways are: rotating leadership/facilitation, walking and circling up in different locations, inviting each partner to invite participants, choosing accessible walk paths, integrating Elders and youngers, offering stipends to participate, and offering food at events. We are committed to offering other languages at future events too.  

Small and Nimble: Walking Water is deliberately designed to be small and nimble. This means our budgets are small, our offerings are accessible and replicable, we are able to move at the speed of trust, and have the spaciousness to continually deepen relations. We rely on community to co-create the offerings. We have 1 paid full-time staff member to bring continuity and experience, and many volunteers, advisors, sponsors, stewards and partners. In this way we are able to move like water, respond quickly if necessary, and also stay still when called.  

Success: Our mission is to create spaces through walks, story sharing, and dialogue circles where each of us can restore our relations with water. Our intention is to strengthen community so we can collectively do that work. We don’t believe we will ever complete that mission, as the relationship with water is a dynamic one, and healing is continual. 

Since we began this work in 2012, we could say that participation in our walks has increased hugely, we have consulted on hundreds of walks globally, thousands listen to our podcast, most of our donors are still with us after 14 years and we compile reports after every walk. But, the real success is in the complexity and resilience of the network and communities that have built up, the way participants relation with water has changed just a little, the ways we receive feedback from our partners and change design, the ways our kids know where their water comes from, and the ways the frontline water protectors feel they are not alone. We experience small relational successes everyday, and they strengthen through our continual, steady walk together. 

Local and Global: We are based in California, a place where some of the most extractive water management techniques were born. Those techniques have been adopted, applied and copied throughout the world. The impact has been enormous. We feel it is important to understand and hold close the relationship between the local situation and the global, to understand the impacts and also the huge opportunities we have to change the narrative from extraction to one of respect and honor for water as a life giving force.