Indigenous water histories II: water histories and the cultural politics of water for contemporary Indigenous groups

Abstract

This is the second of two issues of Water History devoted to scholarship exploring water histories as experienced and understood by Indigenous peoples. The first special issue, published in December 2016, underscored the importance of oral histories, interpreted Indigenous perspectives, and, in doing so, revealed the complexity of waterscapes. Featured in the first special issue were water histories connected to: the Nuu Savi or Highland Mixtec peoples of Oaxaca, Mexico (Jimenez Osorio and Posselt Santoyo 2016); the Ojibwe around the Great Lakes of Michigan, U.S. (Gagnon 2016); Indigenous communities from the Harding, Ord, Roper, and Gilbert rivers areas of Western Australia, Northern Territory, and Queensland, Australia (Jackson and Barber 2016); Indigenous communities from the Baucau Viqueque zone of Timor Leste (Palmer 2016); and the northern Arapaho and eastern Shoshone peoples of the Wind River reservation in the inter-mountain West, U.S (Cavazos Cohn et al. 2016). This second special issue extends coverage to additional Indigenous groups and further examines water histories associated with: the Lumbee and Tuscarora Indians of North Carolina, U.S., as researched by William Maxwell; the Andean people of Tabacundo, Ecuador, as researched by Juan Pablo Hidalgo, Rutgerd Boelens, and Jeroen Vos; the Ngai Tahu (Maori) of the Waitaki River basin, South Island, New Zealand, as researched by Gail Tipa and Kyle Nelson; the Puyallup Tribe of the Pacific Northwest, U.S., as researched by Amory Ballantine; and the Yaqui people of Sonora, Mexico, as researched by Raquel Padilla Ramos and Jose Moctezuma Zamarron. While paying close attention to the significance of rivers, swamps, estuaries, irrigation, and other water systems for these Indigenous communities, each of the authors also stress the dynamics of settler colonialism within which conflicts over water arose and Indigenous resistance and re-appropriation took place. In other words, these articles examine the cultural politics of water from a historical perspective.