Editor’s Introduction

Exemplifying Meridians’s mission to bring race and transnationalism into feminist conversation, the pieces in this issue illuminate what is at stake in our quests to grapple with settler colonial and imperialist legacies that flow through us. Like rivers, at times these legacies carry us along, at others they pull us under or require that we gather all our energies to swim against the current, and oftentimes these legacies demand that we remedy and protect them from the toxic wastes of earlier generations. As a group of indigenous midwives at the Dakota Access Pipeline resistance camps cogently explained, water—whether amniotic fluid, drinking water, or rivers and oceans—must be a core aspect of feminist freedom struggles because “we’re all downriver at some point.”¹ From ending forced sterilization or forced pregnancy alike, to naming and preventing obstetric violence to intervening in the blithe disregard for...