Art work © Cara Romero / Courtesy the artist / Metropolitan Museum of Art

The Lakota expression mní wičóni—“water is life”—was heard around the world during the Standing Rock protests. Now it echoes through the American Wing of the Met, thanks to a small but momentous exhibition on view through April 2. Titled “Water Memories,” the show was organized by Patricia Marroquin Norby, the museum’s first curator of Native American art; as a woman of Purépecha heritage, Norby is also its first full-time Indigenous curator. The show traverses six centuries in a scant forty art works and artifacts by both Native and non-Native creators. An exquisite oil of a foamy wave by the American modernist Arthur Dove, from 1929, assumes a mournful edge in the company of a shimmering sculptural installation by the Shinnecock ceramicist Courtney M. Leonard, from 2021, that eulogizes the decimation of the sperm-whale population off Long Island’s East End, where Dove made his painting. Poetry and protest are inseparable in all of the contemporary pieces here, including the Chemehuevi photographer Cara Romero’s oneiric 2015 scene (pictured above) of Pueblo corn dancers reckoning with a collective water memory: the flooding of thousands of acres of tribal land by the construction of the Parker Dam.