Trans Joy and Indigenous Resistance on the River: A Conversation with Cleo Wölfle Hazard

In this conversation with scholar, activist, artist and scientist Cleo Wölfle Hazard, we consider river justice in the context of ecologies shaped by (impermanent, but ongoing) settler-colonialism. Dr. Wölfle Hazard discusses his 2022 text Underflows: Queer Trans Ecologies and River Justice (University of Washington, 2022) and his work with sovereign Native nations on river restoration projects as we think about how the living body of a river is far more than simply its surface flow. We also consider the sometimes-overlooked resonances between queer and trans people and water as we look towards a world of just relations. Ultimately, this conversation explores how Dr. Wölfle Hazard engages artistic performance, scientific inquiry, and river restoration to envision and enact queertrans thriving.

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Interview Highlights

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

M Hamilton Wilson: The title of your 2022 book is Underflows: Queer Trans Ecologies and River Justice. And my question is, what does river justice look like? What does river injustice look like?

Cleo Wölfle Hazard I think about it as rivers being persons, or beings that have their own animacy, their own liveliness, their own desire, and their own relations. Personhood is a term that has been used productively, not only by scholars, but also by activists—particularly Indigenous activists.

I do see justice extending beyond a Western, legal framework, to this kind of sovereign right-to-be. And a river’s right-to-be includes its riverness, its floods, its droughts, its spreading out and contracting, its being the home and the medium through which fishes, bugs, birds, elk and all these other creatures are swimming in or walking through, walking along, all the plants growing on the banks. I see the river as the orchestrator of all these relations.

I think of the river as being connected to the clouds. It rains and snows, and that water eventually reaches the river and connects it to the oceans. But Western settlers in the US and all over the world have constrained the rivers in ways that impede those flows and impede that dynamism.

Justice for rivers is a question of whether we can, within our human actions, be more relational. Sometimes this means removing actual constraints, like levees or dams, and sometimes this means policies, like not taking so much groundwater or restoring the material habitat.

It is about seeing the river not just as a line on a map or as the water that is currently visible in the channel, but seeing the river as this emergent property of all those flows of water, nutrients, animals and plants. From a scientific perspective, it’s the dynamism of the river that creates conditions for other species to thrive. By regulating rivers and constricting both their physical bodies and temporal variation, we’ve reduced the conditions of possibility for so many other creatures and for ourselves—especially for cultural resources.

So, justice for the river means putting ourselves in less of a relation of control and more of a relation of partnership.

Ellie Kincaid: Do you think there’s something about queer and transness and the outdoors that go together particularly well? Are there any unique challenges in that relationship?

CWH: In the book, I talk about this is in terms of my own evolution as a queer and trans field scientist.

In my undergrad in geology in Montana, you get to go to field camp—out in these gender-separated barracks for two weeks. As far as I knew, I was the only queer or trans person there, and I was pretty early in my transition. I didn’t think I was going to feel comfortable, and I didn’t go. And I always kind of regretted it.

As a queer and trans person, I gravitated toward more solo activities, partly because my fieldwork involves swimming in cold streams wearing a wetsuit.

I know a lot of trans people, including students that I’ve had, have felt like they can’t really do fieldwork because there’s pretty virulent anti-trans sentiment, sometimes explicitly from our project partners or landowners whose land we’re trying to access. And I feel like this has only become more heightened in recent years.

On the positive side, for me personally, the outdoors—and rivers in particular—have been this place of refuge. Human gender does not matter or even register to fish or beaver or willow tree. In my own body evolution journey as transmasc person, I had this desire to swim topless and feel the water on my skin. These very tangible, body memories of belonging sustained me through difficulties.

I found gay or queer beaches as sites trans people could occupy and be welcome and having feelings of animality—of being like another mammal, of lounging in the sand like the seals. I’ve wanted people to feel like they get to be in water. So much of being in water is gendered, as far as your bathing suit and the changing room and things like that.

I guess that collective joy is part of the world that I really want to be in, and I try to make it happen as much as possible.

MHW: It seems like restoration, for you, is not looking backwards and trying to restore a previous state as much as it’s trying to restore liveliness and relationship in the future. How would you respond to that?

CWH: In the material sense, I do think about how the settler colonial project in the Western US has been a failed attempt to control things like fire and flood. I think about how that happened and what the effects were.

I also experience my work on the land. We make an action, and the world responds. And if we can be alive to that, it’s very fulfilling; it’s very sustaining. You open up a side channel, and the next time it rains, it’s full of fish. We’re taking all these measurements and doing all the science to try to understand fish. (Man, if I could just interview the fish, we could save ourselves so much time.) But then also, if you can observe social systems from an ecology standpoint, sometimes you can understand what would create the future that we want to have.

I think a lot of the work that we need to do is making space for belonging and collaboration—not only with other people, but with the species and elementals of the more-than-human world.

MHW: I want to ask about queertrans futurity and the just ecological futures that we opened with. I’m inspired by Tina Campt, who writes about black feminist futurity and “living the future now.” She asks us to “remain committed to the political necessity of what will have had to happen” in the now in order for the future on the horizon to be brought into being. You mentioned the intensification of fascist policies and increasing extractivism on the land. What will have had to happen in the now in order for a queertrans future to exist?

CWH: I think that many, many, many people need to stand up for trans people and stand up for immigrants and Indigenous people.

This is a very existential moment, and trans people are always the sentinels of what’s going to happen to everyone else. We need to survive and take care of each other and find joy along the river. Everyone else really needs to stand up and assert why we matter and think about how to defend us.

What’s happening right now in Minneapolis and all over the country—people saying this is how we are going to stand up and defend our immigrant neighbors—that hasn’t happened for trans people yet.

We’ll see what comes to pass. Regardless, we’re not gonna go anywhere. We know how to take care of each other. And I think that finding those opportunities for solidarity can happen sometimes more easily in these times of intense adversity.

Part of my project has been to trace those lines of solidarity among queer and Indigenous people, the politics of ways of making kin beyond bloodlines. All of those things need to happen.

On the natural resources management side, the whole federal infrastructure of land management is being dismantled in a way that has really severe impacts. I think this is a deliberate strategy by the administration to make the Forest Service fail, and then sell off those lands to the private sector. There is an opportunity, though, for those lands to go back to the Karuk tribe and for the tribe to lead rather than co-manage.

It’s a moment of upheaval, and we don’t know what’s going to happen, but standing up for trans people and #LandBack are good first steps.

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Featured image: A river bar on the Salmon River that has been buried and disconnected by gold mining. Photo by Cleo Wölfle-Hazard.

Cleo Wöelfle Hazard is an activist, artist, and and feminist science studies scholar. His research focuses on ecological and social dimensions of human relations to rivers and their more-than-human inhabitants, and on how queer trans feminist thought can transfigure ecological science as it’s used by Indigenous and non-Native practitioners in fire and river management. He is the Habitat Restoration Program Manager for the Karuk Tribe Department of Natural Resources. He co-produced a musical about water politics and salmon migration, The Gold Fish, or, Straight Flushes for the Manifestly Destined(2012) and the short film The Gold Fish Casino(2017). His latest book is Underflows: Queer trans ecology and river justice (University of Washington, 2022). Contact.

Ellie Kincaid is a Ph.D. student in English Literary Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Their research in queer and trans ecologies considers the relationships between queer/trans people and the outdoors, especially in the context of endurance efforts and the so-called wilderness. Ellie is a co-founding member of the Trans Naturecultures Collective, an editor at Edge Effects, and holds a B.A. from Davidson College in North Carolina and a M.A. from UW-Madison. Contact.

M Hamilton Wilson is a researcher and artist; a dissertator in the department of Art History at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and a 2025 graduate of the Studio Art MFA program at UW in the performance and time-based media area. Hamilton earned their BA in Art History with minors in Sculpture and Intermedia and Appalachian Studies from Berea College, in Berea, Kentucky in 2021. Hamilton’s research focuses on trans methods in ecological art practices, on land-relations in capitalist ruins. They are a co-founder of the Borghesi-Mellon workshops project Trans NatureCultures. Contact.