She sings to the water, she talks to the water and it is her friend. Layla Staats is Mohawk, a member of the Turtle clan, from the Six Nations of the Grand River. She didn’t learn her language growing up as an intergenerational survivor of residential schools. She first understood the extent of the intergenerational issues when she worked at the Woodland Cultural Centre, at the site of the Mohawk Institute, the longest running residential school in Canada. One elder she interviewed talked about how he was never told he was loved and she realized that residential schools limited her own family’s capacity to communicate love and she realized it wasn’t her or her mom’s fault and it wasn’t about her value.

“My biggest connection was always the water,” she recalls, thinking of how her grandpa dug four giant ponds on his land that he would walk each day. He would encourage her to go for the water to figure things out and how he would tell her “one day water is going to be worth its weight in gold. You need to study the water.” Years later, Staats released the documentary Boil Alert, where she went to First Nations communities to document their water insecurities and boiled water advisories.

“I sat at their kitchen tables, I lived in their communities, I shared their stories. It was a life changing experience for me.”

‘I know that every person that watches that film, they can't unsee those things. I was really, really happy to bring that,” Staats asserts. “The water has just been this guiding force always, even when I question myself or I doubt myself, I'm not native enough, or I don't know enough, I go to the water and I'm enough. I'm sitting with the water, I sing for the water, and this is where I'm here. This is who I am. It's just such an amazing feeling,” she continues. She’s been working with the schools to bring that connection and relationship to them, too.

The first documentary Staats made she got a grant for $5000 to make a piece of art about water for $5000. She bought a camera with the money and made all the music, did all the filming and editing herself. She put the film out and called it Blood and Water. It was 20 minutes long and she didn’t anticipate anyone would watch it. “I didn't think it would matter. It was just kind of for me, I wanted to put my story in, in some kind of form that, it was there for my kids or whatever,” she explains, then shares how thousands of schools and thousands of people saw it. This reinforced that you don’t need to be a professional with a camera crew and professional gear with a big budget or a lot of training, you just need a story and an iphone and you can make a difference.

In her next documentary, Boil Alert, Staats thought she would be like a microphone, amplifying stories from reserve to reserve. “But every single reserve I went to there was like a piece of me, like a part of me, it was like healing and growing and hurting. It was so powerful for me to do it, to learn it on hand, right there in the moment,” she recounts.

“We're natural storytellers. We have that story inside of us, and it's just our way.”

Her advice for Indigenous students who have to leave home to expand their horizons is, “Go to the water, find the water where you are and sit with it. Introduce yourself.” Staats has a practice every time she goes somewhere new she introduces herself to the water everywhere she goes. “We go talk to it. We say hello, we sing our water song for it, and we give that honor and gratitude. So that's the friend you always have. They are with you always, and the trees, they are your family.,” she confides, describing her family’s ritual.

If Staats could share a message with her younger self it would be, “You are enough as you are right now, everything is as it should be. There's a reason for where you are right now. I know we want to change everything and want to fix everything, and want to heal everything, but just sit with where you are right now and understand that it's supposed to be like that. There's a reason, and there's a lesson, and there's an opportunity for you to grow. You just just be okay with who you are right now, and honour it and acknowledge, ‘Yes, I am enough.’”

When it comes to taking care of her wellbeing, Staats looks to her opening prayer. She heard it at a conference and knew how important it was to spend time acknowledging one's connection to the living world and to spend time in gratitude. She worked with an elder to develop a three minute video version of it and they gave it away to anyone who asked. Every day she starts her day with that prayer and she feels her connection to nature and everything around her grow.

In keeping with that, Staats talks about taking care of her wellbeing in terms of “getting those opportunities to just acknowledge and put in specific routines into your life that allow you to take that space for connection, for relationship, and knowing that the trees, they hear you, the water hears you, it's been proven by science.”

She sings to the water, she talks to the water and for Layla Staats, it is more than her friend, it’s her biggest connection and the topic of two documentaries. Her grandfather urged her to go to the water to figure things out, to study it and she’s done that and more. She may not have a lot of training or fancy equipment but she has a story inside her and passion for the water that’s bursting to be shared.

Thanks to Alison Tedford Seaweed for authoring this article.