Hydrocolonial Affects: Suicide and the Somatechnics of Long-term Drinking Water Advisories in First Nations in Canada

Abstract

While most Canadians have access to potable drinking water, those without are overwhelmingly Indigenous people living on reserves, constituting a racialised form of water injustice. Suicide rates for First Nations are also disproportionate to the general population, but lessor known is the relationship of suicide in communities experiencing long-term drinking water advisories. In this paper, drawing on Indigenous feminist conceptualisations of affect, I consider the affective relationship between long-term water advisories, suicide, and hydrocolonialism. I argue that long-term drinking water advisories are a kind of somatechnic that elucidate the hydrocolonial and necropolitical states of exception that threaten and devalue Indigenous life. Under such somatechnics, I work with the analytic of felt theory, to understand the hydrocolonial affects at play in the prevalence of suicide in communities experiencing long-term water advisories. By making felt the necropolitical connections between bodies of water and the bodies of suicidal people, these affects upend dominant claims about suicide, and invite us towards more fulsome structural analyses of suicide, more agentic renderings of suicidal people, and more politically enlivened ways of addressing suicide. Finally, hydrocolonial affects invite consideration of the possibilities of care and resistance for human and older-than-human relations. In summary, this paper theorises the hydrocolonial affects produced by dead and dying water and suicidal people as a profound challenge to the settler colonial state, and an invitation to produce futures committed to liveability.