This work-in-progress focuses on histories of the allotment, damming, and management of the Colorado River alongside the Mojave poet Natalie Diaz’s Postcolonial Love Poem (2020). I contend that the archives of the Colorado River Compact and the Hoover Dam conceptualize the river as a violent resource to be controlled through inter-state cooperation and infrastructure. They also illuminate how, nearly a century later, Diaz responds to the river as a site of political and environmental contestation by confronting the limits of the English language and engaging with the Colorado River as ontologically entangled with Mojave bodies. The chapter closes by addressing the twenty-six-year drought threatening the Colorado River today and the global movement advocating the “rights of nature.” they argue that centering Indigenous ontologies while working with water in sites of industrial degradation is critical to manifesting climate resilience that is rooted in anti-colonial environmental justice.