Unlocking the Wild in Rivers of Empire: Decolonizing Settler-Colonialist Waters

• In Event: Imperial and Decolonial Waters: Knowledge, Dissent, Climate Justice

Abstract

Freshwater is becoming a highly embattled resource which is threatened by garbage, sewage, and chemical spills, by pesticides, fertilizers, and pharmaceutical residues. Access to freshwater, mostly from rivers, is related to power regimes of class, race, and gender. Not only humans suffer from these colonial, racial, gendered, and capitalist hegemonies but rivers themselves which have been violated and denaturalized in numerous fashions: Rivers have been dredged, dammed, and canaled in ways that have turned living rivers into dead waters; some have been straightjacketed into flowing backwards others been polluted and contaminated with chemicals to an extent that made the water catch fire (Della Marca/Lübken 2001: 16-17). These human acts of “ecological violence” (Oppermann 2023: 41) have “led to changes in the hydrological cycle, the balance of species, and the destruction of ecosystems” (Mauch/Buell 2021: 233) and, moreover, deprive water of its liveliness and vibrancy both as a material element and as a site of artistic imagination.
To preserve fresh water in the future, a new water consciousness is needed which understands water less as resource and more as kin. While for First Nations People land, water, and self form an inseparable entity, for American settler-colonialists it was a resource with no original connection. This is why river studies today call for a decolonization of water knowledge (Marca/Lübken 2001: 18) and for a return to Indigenous ways of learning from water and of using it in sustainable ways. Indigenous knowledges and activisms around the globe are forging a new river consciousness by struggling to re-naturalize rivers to restore both their spiritual and material liveliness. At the same time, Native peoples are fighting not only for their lands but for control over the course, accessibility, and purity of their waters. Settler-colonialist historiography has idolized the settlement of the American continent as the Manifest Destiny of a people pushing an ever-progressing frontier to claim more land at the cost of annihilating Indigenous people and their knowledges and traditions. As Donald Worster has pointed out in Rivers of Empire a focus on rivers instead of land can correct our whole perception of the settlement of the American West which, he argues, is all about the “technological mastery of water” (1985: 11). By turning rivers into dead canals and irrigation ditches, the American West became “a modern hydraulic society, which is to say, a social order based on the intensive, large-scale manipulation of water and its products in an arid setting” (1985: 6-7).
In my presentation, I will analyse literary texts by Indigenous and non-Indigenous authors from Henry David Thoreau to Daphne Marlatt, Lee Maracle and Jeanette Armstrong which decolonize settler-colonialist waters not only in their subject matter but through distinctly water-based means of representation. All of them unlock the inherent qualities of water and return rivers’ wild spirit to our repertoire of poetic images to arrive at a new, decolonized water literacy which acknowledges reciprocity and kinship.

Author

• Caroline Rosenthal