Mysteries of the Mountain: Environmental Racism and Political Action in Percival Everett’s Watershed

Year 2009, Issue: 30, 73 - 88, 01.10.2009

Alexa Weik Von Mossner

Abstract

Hydrologist Robert Hawks has escaped to the mountains somewhere north of Denver to get away from the city and from his personal problems with his girlfriend. In the solitude of the wintery landscape the black protagonist of Percival Everett’s 1996 novel Watershed hopes “to fish and think and be alone” 4 . But what was planned as a Thoreauvian wilderness retreat quickly turns into an ecological murder mystery when two FBI agents are found dead in the nearby lake. Almost against his will, Hawks, who regards himself as a disinterested and apolitical scientist, becomes involved in the Plata Indians’ desperate fight for environmental justice—and for their very survival. The mountain, as one of the rebellious Indians puts it, “is dying” 19 , and so will the Plata Indians if they cannot prove what the US government is doing to them. A secret depot of Anthrax and other biological weapons high up on the mountain has begun to leak into the groundwater and the government tries to cover up the fact by diverting a poisoned creek into the nearby reservation of the Plata tribe. This way, it is explained, no white Americans will suffer harm.

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