For over 30 years Karuk artist, poet, singer, dancer, and activist Brian D. Tripp spent almost every morning doing drawing interventions on the daily newspaper while he drank his morning cup of coffee. There are thousands of these drawings, ranging from tiny sketches that he cut out and saved and major page spreads of large intricate drawings. The style and focus of these drawings were varied, but the overriding goal of the project, whether subtle or obvious, was inescapable- each drawing disrupted the ‘newspaper’, an iconic symbol of white colonist hegemony on Turtle Island.

What the Water’s Worth, drawn between 1992 and 1994, prophetically focuses on the desecration and commodification of the waterways of Turtle Island, the importance of water, and the celebration of the resistance and resilience of the waterways and their inhabitants.

In 2022 this series of interventions was bound into an accordion fold structure by master binder Sophia Kramer who has been binding BDT’s work for more than a decade.