Damage control
Activist removes graffiti he says sends the wrong message
A few days after the protest ended on US 64 west over installation of a water pipeline, someone spray painted the words “WATER IS LIFE” on a wall along Kit Carson Road in downtown Taos. Local activist Buck Johnston, who in 2019 was arrested for climbing atop a water well drilling rig at the same site of the Feb. 21-24 protest, was offended that someone would take the words used as a philosophical rallying point for water protection activists as vandalism.
“I’ve been part of the water movement for a while,” he said as he chipped ice from along the bottom of the wall in preparation for painting over the words. “Someone decided to come and spray ‘water is life’ over here, right on the main thoroughfare on Kit Carson Road. We started getting some complaints yesterday morning (March 1) and someone sent me a picture and I thought ‘Oh my god, that’s horrible” … It’s ugly and it backtracks. It takes us backwards in the movement. Makes us look bad and loses community support.”
Johnston said in a video posted to Facebook about the graffiti on Tuesday morning (March 2) that he doesn’t like being called a “water protector,” but rather a “warrior for the people.” He said he prefers to keep his activism focused on helping people get water and food, and to protect their livelihoods. It is from that foundation he said he took it upon himself to remove the graffiti.
“We all need to look out for each other, and someone vandalizing someone’s private property, that doesn’t help the water,” he told the Taos News Tuesday morning (March 2). It doesn’t help the cause. It doesn’t educate anyone. And, really, what we need to be doing is educating the people, showing them a better way to be. You can’t force these ideas on people that ‘water is life,’ you can’t engrain that into their heads unless you show them [saying] let’s use the water, let’s use the acequias, use the land.”
He said local activists who object to the ways the Abeyta Water Rights Settlement is being implemented, which sparked the recent protest, have “put way too much work into this movement to have someone just come and just discredit it like this. So, we’re here to do damage control.”
Later on Tuesday, Johnston said an unidentified man told him he was planning to use a product call “Goof Off Graffiti Remover” and a pressure washer to remove the spray painted words before he did any painting. Johnston said he gave him his card “and told him if it didn’t come off we would be happy to come back and repaint the whole front of the building.”