Disrupting Infrastructures of Colonial Hydro-Modernity: Lepcha and Dakelh Struggles against Temporal and Territorial Displacements

Abstract

To be Indigenous within the modern nation-state is to live with a profound sense of territorial and temporal displacement. Colonial legal regimes situate indigeneity as a condition of temporal stasis, perpetuating the logic of territorial dispossession and erasure. Drawing on research in India and Canada, we focus on Indigenous experiences to theorize the relationship between colonial legal regimes, territory, temporality, and infrastructure. In the Indigenous territories of the Lepchas in the Indian Himalaya and the Dakelh in British Columbia, Canada, hydropower infrastructure effected displacements of Indigenous space-times and sovereignty. Although Indigenous peoples continue to assert legal claims challenging these massive infrastructural projects, colonial legal regimes normalize the often violent imposition of the space-times of state and capitalist development. The Dakelh have challenged the enduring impacts of a 1950s river diversion project; however, Canadian courts legitimized historic displacements, delimiting constitutional protections to current existing Dakelh rights. For the Lepchas, a recent infrastructural boom in the Indian Himalaya is threatening special constitutional provisions upholding tribal customary laws, raising concern among younger Lepchas over the future of their ancestral lands. Despite these threats, we demonstrate how Lepcha and Dakelh relations to time and territory exceed colonial containments. They call into question how the colonial present normalizes historic and ongoing displacements and demand responsibility for the past to craft alternative futures.