Student Elizabeth Elliott’s description of this project: “The History of Washunga: Water and Connection to the Land for Kanza People” explores the flooding of Washunga, Oklahoma to create Kaw Lake in the 1970s was created as an assignment for an Indigenous film class at Kansas State. This film examines the location of Kaw lake as a historical, political and economic site of power through archival research of primary and secondary sources. For the video itself, the choices I made with visuals and audio were intentional to identify how I came to understand different questions, connections, and relations. One notable feature is the audio switches between voiceovers for background context, and the audio of a conversation I had with a friend, Margo Losier, to explain and share the different stories I saw within my research. My research started to yield answers about the flooding of Washunga, but as connected to a bigger and broader picture about the loss of multiple communities and related to continued cultural cultivation today. In addition, while this research did not come to a definite conclusion or the complete picture of the story, it does start to recognize how systems of power and the realities of settler colonialism continues to be part of putting together this story within the past, present and future.
