Fluid Decolonial Futures: Water as a Life, Ocean Citizenship and Seascape Relationality

Abstract

ABSTRACT Interrogating the settler-colonial governmentality of natural resource extraction lies at the heart of this article while centering relationships to water and emergent forms of ocean citizenship. This article articulates a seascape epistemology that conceives of water as a life force, not a resource, and offers a non-extractive way to conceptualize ocean citizenship. From an environmental justice orientation, this article responds to the following question: how can we move from an extractive treatment of the ocean to a relational approach? Fusing environmental political thought and decolonial futures, this article examines how seascape epistemologies turn away from landlocked property-centric territorial geographies and engage with more embodied, fluid, storied, and vibrant ways of being, knowing, and sensing the world. Informed by interpretive methods, political ethnography, and community-engagement, this article demonstrates how seascape epistemologies across archipelagos in Kanaka Maoli (Native Hawaiian) and Coast Salish (Canadian) territories challenge the foundational underpinnings of extractivist settler-colonial governmentality.