Authors:Melanie Yazzie, Cutcha Risling Baldy Pages: 1 - 18 Abstract: In recent history, we have seen water assume a distinct and prominent role in Indigenous political formations. Indigenous peoples around the world are increasingly forced to formulate innovative and powerful responses to the contamination, exploitation, and theft of water, even as our efforts are silenced or dismissed by genocidal schemes reproduced through legal, corporate, state, and academic means. The articles in this issue offer multiple perspectives on these pressing issues. They contend that struggles over water figure centrally in concerns about self-determination, sovereignty, nationhood, autonomy, resistance, survival, and futurity. Together, they offer us a language to challenge and resist the violence enacted through and against water, as well as a way to envision and build alternative futures where water is protected and liberated from enclosures imposed by settler colonialism, capitalism, and heteropatriarchy. PubDate: 2018-08-31 Issue No:Vol. 7, No. 1 (2018)
Authors:Rosemary Georgeson, Jessica Hallenbeck Pages: 20 - 38 Abstract: This paper traces the changing relationship between family, water, and fish through the lives of five generations of Indigenous women. We reveal the ways that Indigenous women’s connections have transformed and persisted despite generations of omissions and erasures. We juxtapose interviews, academic research, and the settler colonial archive with the lived experiences and histories that exceed it. Weaving together what we know of the lives of Rosemary’s great great grandmother Sar-Augh-Ta-Naogh (Sophie) and great grandmother Tlahoholt (Emma) with stories of water and fish from their territories, we ask how settler colonial commissions, archives, and urban policies have sought, and failed, to control and erase Indigenous women’s relationships to water, land, and family. Crucially, this article draws on stories that have been passed down to Rosemary and knowledge that she has accumulated through her lifetime working as a commercial fisherman. These stories about water and where people were from, why they left, or why they never went back—and how they continue to be connected to each other while being disconnected from place—are at the center of this article. Re-presencing Indigenous women and these connections raises essential questions about Indigenous resurgence in a context of settler colonial control, scarcity, and disappearance, emphasizing the importance of ancestral reconnection to Indigenous futurities. PubDate: 2018-08-30 Issue No:Vol. 7, No. 1 (2018)
Authors:Charles Sepulveda Pages: 40 - 58 Abstract: This essay evaluates the conditions of the desecrated Santa Ana River in southern California, historicizes its destruction, assesses what is being done to clean it up, and provides tradition as theory to offer an approach to a solution that re-centers a Native view of land. The essay provides a tribal specific, Acjachemen and Tongva, understanding of lands and waters in contradiction to the Western dynamic of submission central to the dual logic of heteropatriarchy and environmental dispossession. It also provides a historical analysis of the monjerio and traces the colonial logic of domesticating Native women. The Santa Ana River is the largest riparian ecosystem in southern California. The river has been domesticated and desecrated through channelizing and entombing sections in concrete. This essay theorizes that the Western understanding of nature separated from humans produced the heteropatriarchal system the Spanish brought with them to California. This structure was meant to naturalize patriarchy and have Indians submit to the nuclear family arrangement. These logics continue into the present, in contrast to Indigenous traditional ways of life that accepted plural partnerships, and various sexual orientations. It also attempted to disconnect California Mission Indians from their creation stories and the sacredness of water. Kuuyam, the Tongva word for guests, is offered as a decolonial possibility based on culture and tradition in which settler relations to land can be reformed and settler colonialism can eventually be abolished. PubDate: 2018-08-30 Issue No:Vol. 7, No. 1 (2018)
Authors:Zoe Todd Pages: 60 - 75 Abstract: This piece explores how human-fish relations in a) Paulatuuq, NWT in arctic Canada and b) amiskwaciwâskahikan (Edmonton, Alberta, Canada) in Treaty Six Territory act as a ‘micro-site’ where Indigenous peoples have negotiated, and continue to negotiate, concurrent and often contradictory ‘sameness and difference’ vis-à-vis the State and its ideologies about lands, waters and the more-than-human in order to assert and mobilize imperatives of reciprocity, care and tenderness towards fish as more-than-human beings. I put forth a theory of fish ‘refraction’ and dispersion, which is a process through which Indigenous peoples in Paulatuuq and amiskwaciwâskahikan bend and disperse state laws and norms through local relations to fish and waters. Exploring the ways that humans and fish alike work to navigate the complexities and paradoxes of colonialism in Alberta and the Northwest Territories in the past and present, I theorize a fishy and watery form of refraction of state laws, imperatives and colonial paradigms by Indigenous peoples in Canada. In a time of rapid fish decline across the country --which some argued is tied to the global realities of the Sixth Mass Extinction Event-- I argue for the urgency and necessity of centering human-fish relations, alongside other fleshy engagements, in contemporary and future political struggles. PubDate: 2018-08-31 Issue No:Vol. 7, No. 1 (2018)
Authors:Eleanor Hayman, Colleen James, Mark Wedge Pages: 77 - 92 Abstract: The Tlingit and Tagish First Nation peoples of the circumpolar north celebrate a rich, sophisticated, 9,000 year old storytelling culture. The Tlingit and Tagish consider themselves “part of the land, part of the water,” within which is the recognition and respect for the sentience of glaciers, rivers, lakes, trees, salmon and other animals. This paper focuses on glaciers within the context of the Anthropocene and other colonial terracentric histories maintained by the dominant mono-cultural imaginary. How might thinking with glaciers, powerful agents in the forging of human and more-than-human identities, work to address new types of climate change realities' Looking at decolonizing realities through place-name and counter-mapping work with Carcross/Tagish First Nation, we showcase and question the rhetoric of the Anthropocene. We suggest that the “slow activism” and “narrative ecologies” embedded within Tlingit and Tagish glacial narratives have the ability to disrupt increasingly entrenched notions and narrow definitions of the Anthropocene(s) that continue to reproduce this mono-cultural imaginary. PubDate: 2018-08-31 Issue No:Vol. 7, No. 1 (2018)
Authors:Shaun A. Stevenson Pages: 94 - 113 Abstract: With Mohawk artist Alan Michelson’s 2005 video art installation Two Row II as a site of analysis, I interrogate the potential for decolonized relationships between two distinct cultures, interconnected through their relationships to a seemingly shared body of water as it cuts across territories that have been historically and contemporarily contested. Drawing on the concept of the “hydrosocial,” I begin by considering the ethical potential of water, as well as its circumscription under current Canadian land rights policies. I then explore the intersubjective hydrosocial relations that structure community engagement along the Grand River. I ask if focusing on water, its ability to both act, and be acted upon, how it both produces and is produced through social relations, allows for a rethought ethical and political paradigm based in theories of action and responsibility that cross human and non-human divides' How can water work as an ethical framework in ways that decolonize water politics, and illustrate a more nuanced and adequately relational environmental ethic that might shape the manner in which land rights issues unfold and are understood' Ultimately, I look to the potential to cultivate a decolonized ecological sensibility grounded in the ethical and political capacity of water in relation to Indigenous land rights issues within the settler-colonial context of Canada. PubDate: 2018-09-01 Issue No:Vol. 7, No. 1 (2018)
Authors:Elizabeth LaPensée Pages: 115 - 130 Abstract: Digital games can uniquely express Indigenous teachings by merging design, code, art, and sound. Inspired by Anishinaabe grandmothers leading ceremonial walks known as Nibi Walks, Honour Water (http://www.honourwater.com/) is a singing game that aims to bring awareness to threats to the waters and offer pathways to healing through song. The game was developed with game company Pinnguaq and welcomes people from all over to sing with good intentions for the waters. The hope is to pass on songs through gameplay that encourages comfort with singing and learning Anishinaabemowin. Songs were gifted by Sharon M. Day and the Oshkii Giizhik Singers. Sharon M. Day, who is Bois Forte Band of Ojibwe and one of the founders of the Indigenous Peoples Task Force, has been a leading voice using singing to revitalize the waters. The Oshkii Giizhik Singers, a community of Anishinaabekwe who gather at Fond du Lac reservation, contribute to the healing for singers, communities, and the waters. Water teachings are infused in art and writing by Anishinaabe and Métis game designer, artist, and writer Elizabeth LaPensée. From development to distribution, Honour Water draws on Indigenous ways of knowing to reinforce Anishinaabeg teachings with hope for healing the water. PubDate: 2018-09-01 Issue No:Vol. 7, No. 1 (2018)
Authors:Jane Griffith Pages: 132 - 157 Abstract: The Bureau of Reclamation, a federal agency within the Department of the Interior, is responsible for diverting, delivering, and storing water in the Western U.S. It controls hydroelectric dams and irrigation projects that require Indigenous lands and waterways to operate; it is further a settler colonial institution in that its projects enable non-Indigenous settlement. The Bureau of Reclamation published a monthly magazine as a public-facing form of professional communication for nearly 80 years to narrate diversions of Indigenous water. A typical issue included updates on engineering feats, Reclamation construction, transcriptions of political speeches, legal decisions on water, practical instruction for farmers, and black-and-white photographs of water. It was not enough to use dams and reservoirs to control water; the Bureau of Reclamation had to narrate it, too. This form of professional communication reveals how hydroelectric dams are built with more than engineering equipment—their tools also include narratives, language, rhetoric, and image that recast Indigenous waterways for settler audiences. This paper identifies the settler colonial narratives this archival magazine employed from 1924-1942—a particularly intense time of damming—and then juxtaposes the magazine with contemporary Indigenous literature about dams to undermine the Bureau's recasting of water for white settlers. PubDate: 2018-09-01 Issue No:Vol. 7, No. 1 (2018)
Authors:Michelle Daigle Pages: 159 - 172 Abstract: In this paper, I center Indigenous water governance at the nexus of extractive capitalist development, water contamination and dispossession, and Indigenous self-determination. I do so by focusing on colonial capitalist legacies and continuities that are unfolding on Mushkegowuk lands of what is otherwise known as the Treaty 9 territory in northern Ontario, Canada. Through a spatial analysis, I trace contemporary forms of water dispossession through mining extraction to the larger colonial-capitalist objectives of the original signing of the James Bay, or Treaty 9, agreement. I argue that the colonial capitalist dispossession of water, through the seizing of land and interconnected waterways, and through the accumulation of pollution and contamination, is inextricably linked to larger structural objectives of securing access to Mushkegowuk lands for capitalist accumulation, while simultaneously dispossessing Mushkegowuk peoples of the sources of their political and legal orders. I end by discussing how Mushkegowuk peoples are resurging against settler colonial and capitalist regimes by regenerating their water relations, and how water itself cultivates a particularly spatial form of resurgence that regenerates Indigenous kinship relations and governance practices. PubDate: 2018-09-01 Issue No:Vol. 7, No. 1 (2018)
Authors:Beth Rose Middleton-Manning, Morning Star Gali, Darcie Houck Pages: 174 - 198 Abstract: In the context of historic and ongoing California Indian resistance to displacement at the headwaters of California’s immense State Water Project and federal Central Valley Project, we foreground Native land histories to unsettle the logic and perceived permanence of contemporary neocolonial water institutions. Centering California Indian voices on the histories and futures of the headwaters, we disrupt the imperial narrative of these waters and lands as American territories needing development and conservation, replacing it with the reality of these sites as Native Californian lands requiring restitution, protection, and recognition. Beginning with an overview of the history that led to the development of quasi-public projects on Native lands, we offer three case studies of Indigenous resistance and re-framing: the Winnemem Wintu struggle to stop the proposed raise of Shasta Dam; the Maidu Summit’s work to regain ownership of former Pacific Gas & Electric company lands established within their homeland; and the Pit River Tribe’s decades-long struggle to protect the sacred Medicine Lake Highlands from government-approved corporate exploitation of geothermal resources. Holding the Headwaters directly challenges embedded injustices in natural resource policymaking and offers alternative visions for a future that addresses historic injustices and centers California Indian relationships to place. PubDate: 2018-09-01 Issue No:Vol. 7, No. 1 (2018)
Authors:Angel M. Hinzo Pages: 200 - 214 Abstract: The Missouri River and its tributaries have been a source of sustenance, a method of transport, and a vital part of many Indigenous societies long before the arrival of colonizers. This river continues to play a vital role in the contemporary lives of many Native American people. In this essay, I consider the impacts of colonizing philosophies regarding land ownership and cases in the last half century where Native American communities challenged the settler state to maintain treaty rights and advocate for the health of the Missouri River. I focus on the work of water protectors challenging the Keystone XL and Dakota Access pipelines in the 21st century, United States v. Winnebago Tribe of Nebraska, and the Omaha Tribe of Nebraska’s defense of Blackbird Bend to expand on the historical legacy of Native people advocating to maintain treaty rights along the Missouri River. These cases illustrate how Native American communities push back against the settler state in courtrooms and through grassroots activism to defend their sovereignty, and the difficulties of maintaining legal rights in a settler state. PubDate: 2018-09-01 Issue No:Vol. 7, No. 1 (2018)
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