We Are Water Protectors

by Carole Lindstrom, Michaela Goade

In this lyrical picture book, a young Indigenous girl draws on teachings about water’s sacred importance as she prepares to stand against a threatening “black snake,” a symbol of an oil pipeline. Carole Lindstrom’s poetic language and Michaela Goade’s flowing illustrations connect the girl’s determination to collective action, care for other living beings, and Indigenous-led water protection.

Big Idea

Water connects all living things, and protecting it is a shared responsibility. The book centers Indigenous leadership and shows how knowledge, courage, and community can turn concern into action.

Discussion Questions

1.What does the young narrator learn from her grandmother, and how do those teachings influence what she decides to do?
2.Why might Lindstrom describe the pipeline as a black snake? How do Goade’s pictures help us understand that image?
3.Where do the words and illustrations show connections among people, water, plants, and animals? Which connection stands out to you, and why?
4.How does the story move between danger and hope? What changes when the narrator stands with others?
5.What could caring for water look like in our school or community, and whose knowledge would help us choose a useful action?

Lesson Plan

⏱ 50 minutes: introduction and read-aloud, 15 minutes; craft discussion and local connection, 10 minutes; creating and partner revision, 20 minutes; sharing and exit response, 5 minutes.📦 A copy of We Are Water Protectors, large paper, pencils, crayons or colored pencils, chart paper, and an optional photograph or map of a local water source.

Learning Goals

Use details from the words and illustrations to explain the narrator’s motivation and response to the threat.
Explain how repetition, vivid imagery, and page turns affect a listener’s experience.
Identify a connection between clean water and the well-being of people or other living things.
Create and revise a short illustrated sequence with an intentional pause and an original repeated line.
Distinguish the book’s specific Indigenous perspective from the idea that all Indigenous peoples share identical traditions.

Activity Steps

1.Introduce Lindstrom as an Anishinaabe/Métis author and Goade as a Tlingit illustrator. Read the book aloud, including selected back matter, and clarify that the black snake represents an oil pipeline and the threat of pollution; Indigenous peoples and water protectors are part of the present, not only the past.
2.Revisit one flowing passage and one urgent moment. Ask students to notice how word choice, repetition, illustration, and a pause before a page turn change the pace.
3.Identify a local river, lake, stream, wetland, or drinking-water source. Discuss who and what depend on it, then select an achievable care action, such as reducing litter or reporting a leak to an adult.
4.Fold paper into three panels labeled for planning: Connection, Concern, and Care Together. Students draw or write a sequence that establishes water’s importance, introduces a plausible problem, and shows a cooperative response.
5.Have students add an original repeated line, such as “Our stream needs care,” and mark one place to pause. Partners read the foldouts aloud and explain where the pacing feels calm or urgent; students revise one choice.
6.Share the foldouts and select one feasible class action. Close with an exit response explaining how a word, picture, or pause helped communicate the student’s message.

Standards Connections

CCSS ELA RL.K.7 / RL.1.7 / RL.3.7 / RL.5.7: Examine how illustrations relate to the story and contribute to meaning, tone, or beauty, using grade-appropriate expectations.
CCSS ELA RL.1.4 / RL.2.4 / RL.4.4: Explore words, phrases, rhythm, and figurative language that shape meaning and feeling.
CCSS ELA W.K.3 / W.2.3 / W.3.3 / W.5.3: Use drawing, dictation, or writing to develop an appropriately sequenced narrative with relevant details.
CCSS ELA SL.K.1–SL.5.1: Participate in collaborative conversations, listen to others, and build on shared ideas at the applicable grade level.
NGSS 5-ESS3-1: Obtain and combine information about how communities use science ideas to protect Earth’s resources and environment; extend the lesson with reliable local information to address the full performance expectation.

Pace-Write-Read Study with Pace-Write It!

We Are Water Protectors shows that pacing is more than making a story move quickly. Lindstrom’s lyrical narration invites readers to linger over water’s importance, then confront a threat and feel the resolve of a young protector. Goade’s illustrations also control reading time: sweeping water forms encourage the eye to travel, while contrasting images of danger interrupt that movement. Read the book once for meaning before returning to selected spreads to study how words, pictures, and silence work together. In this Pace-Write-Read study, students first notice a craft choice, then try it in a brief original composition, and finally read their work aloud to hear its effect. Younger students can draw, dictate, and perform a repeated line; older students can experiment with sentence length, metaphor, and the placement of a refrain. The aim is not to imitate Indigenous identity, ceremonial language, or cultural imagery, but to learn from these creators’ storytelling choices while respecting the specific perspective and contemporary movements behind the book. Keep craft connected to meaning: a pause can communicate care, a recurring statement can strengthen resolve, and a page turn can move readers from worry toward action. Invite students to explain not just what technique they used, but why that technique helps an audience understand water’s importance.

Element	How to notice or teach it in the novel
Pacing	Track how the reading experience shifts from reflection on water to the black snake’s threat and collective determination. Ask students where they would slow down or speak more firmly, supporting each choice with words or pictures.
Plot	Map the narrative movement: teachings establish water’s importance, danger threatens it, and the narrator commits to protection with others. Discuss why the ending emphasizes continuing responsibility rather than showing pollution permanently solved.
Prosody	Read a short passage twice with different phrasing, emphasis, and pauses. Have students explain which reading better communicates the narrator’s care or resolve without using a stereotyped or invented Indigenous accent.
Word	Study the weight of the words “water,” “medicine,” “snake,” and “protectors.” Ask how replacing one with a more ordinary word would change the feeling or meaning.
Concept	Explore the book’s central idea that water sustains and connects life rather than serving merely as a useful object. Students can trace one pictured connection among water, people, animals, and plants.
Voice & Worldview	Notice how the narrator speaks from relationships with family, community, water, and other living beings. Present this as the perspective expressed by this book, not a single worldview shared identically by all Indigenous peoples.
Point of View	Identify the first-person narration and notice movement between individual and collective language. Discuss how hearing from the young protector differs from hearing an outside observer describe her.
Setting & Place	Examine how water, land, and living beings establish a place of relationship and responsibility. Use the back matter to connect the story to real Indigenous-led movements without treating the illustrations as a precise map of one location.
Original Characters	Describe the young narrator through her learning, choices, and determination rather than an invented name or backstory. For students’ own stories, build a distinct character by choosing something they care about and an action they will take.
Dialogue	Notice how the narrator conveys her grandmother’s teachings within a largely lyrical telling rather than a conversation-heavy scene. Compare that approach with an original two-line exchange students might write about caring for a stream.
Details	Invite students to select one visual detail that reinforces dependence on water and explain its contribution. Distinguish details actually present on the page from information students infer or know from elsewhere.
Descriptions	Compare language and images associated with life-giving water with those associated with the threatening snake. Ask how contrasting descriptions create emotional movement without a lengthy explanation.
Firsts	Study the opening’s presentation of water as foundational to life. Ask what readers learn first and how that choice makes the later threat matter.
Immediacy & Engagement	Notice how a young first-person speaker makes a large environmental issue feel personal and immediate. Ask which moment makes students feel closest to her concern or determination.
Story Scenes, Summaries & Structures	Separate broad statements about water and responsibility from pictured moments of gathering and resistance. Discuss how this lyrical structure differs from a story that narrates every event in chronological detail.
Tension / Suspense / Surprise	Examine how the black snake introduces danger into a world already shown to be precious. The central tension concerns protecting interconnected life, not simply defeating a frightening animal.
Flashback, Flash-Forward, Cliffhanger	Treat references to the grandmother’s teachings as remembered knowledge, rather than assuming a fully staged flashback. Discuss how anticipated harm creates concern about the future without requiring a conventional cliffhanger.
Page Turns and Chapter Breaks	This picture book uses page turns, not chapters, to divide the experience. Pause before a selected turn, invite a prediction from the visible words and images, and then discuss what the next spread adds.
Pace & Creativity	Have students try presenting the same water-care message as one flowing sentence and as three brief statements. Compare the effects with the book’s movement between lyrical reflection and firm resolve.
Play	Invite playful experimentation with drawn water lines and the spacing of original words. Keep the play focused on artistic choices rather than reenacting ceremonies or turning Indigenous resistance into a pretend battle.
Performance	Use a shared reading in which students join an identified recurring passage while the teacher reads the surrounding text. Practice conveying solidarity through clear phrasing rather than shouting throughout.
Personality	Ask what makes the narrator seem caring, courageous, and persistent. Connect each description to something she says, does, or is shown doing.
Humor	Notice that humor is not a central pacing tool in this serious, hopeful book. Discuss how beauty, affection, and togetherness offer emotional contrast without making the threat into a joke.
Pause	Allow quiet viewing time after a spread that emphasizes water’s beauty or the threat against it. Ask how silence changes what students notice and feel.
Poetry / Poetic Devices	Examine the black snake as a metaphor for a pipeline and consider how poetic language gives water significance beyond its everyday uses. Help students distinguish symbolic meaning from a claim that actual snakes are villains.
Repetition	Locate the recurring declaration of standing together against the threat. Discuss how its return builds continuity and determination, then have students invent their own brief refrain.
Rhythm	Listen for how phrases flow or land firmly when read aloud. Students can tap gently at phrase endings to compare a reflective passage with a declaration of resolve, without imposing a rigid beat.
Punctuation	Inspect the actual punctuation in a selected passage and use it to guide phrasing. Compare those grammatical pauses with additional pauses suggested by line breaks, pictures, or page turns.
Questions	Even when the narration makes declarations, readers may wonder how the water will be protected and who will help. Collect those reader-generated questions and distinguish them from questions explicitly printed in the book.
Compare-Contrast	Compare the organic movement and color of water imagery with the dark, threatening snake imagery. Ask how these differences help readers understand what is at stake.
Objects	Focus on the pipeline represented as a snake: a human-built object becomes an emotionally powerful image. Contrast that symbolism with water’s presentation as a sustaining presence and relationship.
Threes	Use a three-part planning lens—connection, threat, response—to help students organize their own work. Explain that this is a classroom scaffold, not a claim that every passage in the book follows a rule of three.
Lists	Notice how naming or picturing multiple forms of life expands the importance of protecting water. Invite students to create a short, locally accurate list of beings that depend on their chosen water source.
White Space & Negative Space	Look for open or less-detailed areas around text and figures, including spaces filled with color rather than literal white. Discuss how these areas give the eye somewhere to rest within richly painted spreads.
Art & Graphics	Trace how Goade’s watercolor shapes, color contrasts, and flowing compositions carry meaning alongside Lindstrom’s words. Ask students what an illustration contributes that the text does not explicitly state.
Interactives & Gamification	The book is not a game; use a cooperative noticing challenge to find examples of connection, threat, and resolve. Avoid awarding points for pretending to defeat the snake or reenact real protests.
Placement	Examine where text sits in relation to faces, water, and the threatening form on a selected spread. Ask how placement directs the reader’s gaze and affects when a phrase is encountered.
Form	Discuss how the lyrical picture-book form combines a child’s narrative with a collective call to care for water. Read the back matter separately to show how contextual information complements, but differs from, the poetic story.
Dummy	Make a miniature folded-paper book to test where connection, danger, and response appear. Move a sentence or image to another panel and read again to hear how the new placement changes pacing.
Passion	Notice how the narrator’s love for water and community gives her determination purpose. Invite students to express a genuine local concern through specific details and a practical action rather than a vague slogan.

Pace-Write It!

20-minute Pace-Write-Read task: “A Page Turn for Water.” Minutes 0–4—Revisit one spread about water’s importance and one showing the black snake’s threat; identify a contrast and a recurring declaration. Clarify that the snake symbolizes a pipeline, not an actual animal to fear. Minutes 4–6—Model a four-page folded-paper dummy: page 1, a local water connection; page 2, a plausible problem; page 3, a collective care action; page 4, a hopeful commitment. Put the problem before a page turn so the response arrives afterward. Minutes 6–13—Students draw and write their own miniature book, adding an original repeated line on pages 1 and 4 and marking one intentional pause. K–1 students may dictate or use labeled drawings; grades 2–5 can vary sentence length and add a specific sensory detail. Minutes 13–18—Partners read their books aloud, honoring the page turns; listeners name where they felt concern and where they heard resolve. Each writer revises one word, pause, or placement. Minutes 18–20—Share two examples and complete the reflection, “My page turn or pause helps readers ___.” Materials: folded paper, pencils, and crayons; this is a condensed alternative to the longer classroom activity.

Classroom Activities

Our Water, Our Responsibility

Students create a three-panel water-protection foldout that moves from connection to concern to collective care. Inspired by the book’s flowing artwork and recurring commitment to protection, they combine original words and pictures to show why a local water source matters and propose one realistic way to care for it. Students learn from the book’s Indigenous perspective without copying cultural designs or pretending to represent an Indigenous nation.

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