In 1997, in Southern Manitoba, and as a teenager, my world underwent a shift when the Red River, located 5 miles from my house in Niverville MB overflowed its banks catastrophically and displaced hundreds/thousands of people, including the complete inundation of a nearby town. Though normally a placid, smallish river, this flood (only the most recent in a long history of such floods) showed me the power of water to alter entire landscapes and the lives of the people who live alongside it. It is the periodic inundation of the valley, in fact, that makes the region so agriculturally productive, yet the disruption causes us as a human society to go to extraordinary efforts to contain and control water, to the ultimate detriment of the entire ecosystem since 1997, I certainly think about water - and the Red River specifically - differently.