Water moves on, past, through, and around the jurisdictional borders of the Northern Cheyenne Indian Reservation located in southeastern Montana. Different actors, settlers, arrivants, Indigenous, and Cheyenne peoples, have within and outside the Reservation attempted to relate to or to contain water legally, cartographically, materially, and in oral (hi)stories. In this session, I will overview my current dissertation research and Indigenous research methodologies I have employed. I examine the ways in which the Northern Cheyenne Nation has defined water and its contaminants legally and ontologically, sometimes overlapping and in contradistinction, as central to the Northern Cheyenne Nation’s own and federally-imposed definitions of sovereignty and nationhood. In “Research is Ceremony,” Shawn Wilson writes “the shared aspect of an Indigenous ontology and epistemology is relationality.” A choice in research topic, methods and forms of analyses are where relational accountability is put into practice; research is ceremony when it is by and for Indigenous people in that it brings relationships together. As a Cheyenne anthropologist “studying” my own people, I include Indigenous methodologies as I consider why I have chosen what it is that I research, the questions I have, and the ways I have been trained to and will proceed to research.