Scalar politics of Indigenous waterscapes in Navajo Nation and Nepal: Conflict, conservation and development

Daanish Mustafa,Gyan Nyaupane,Krishna Shrestha,Vanessa Vandever,Christine Buzinde,Dol Raj Thanet

doi:10.1177/25148486211007853

Abstract

We use case studies of the Diné in the United States of America, and the Musahar people in Nepal, to understand how indigeneity is enacted in relation to the developmental and conservationist impulses of the dominant American and Nepalese states. We mobilize the concept of ‘waterscapes’ as assemblages of practices, technologies, emotions and worldviews, to unpack how geographical scales are produced and contested through symbolic and material practices. We find that the Diné of the Navajo Nation have socially differentiated engagement with the techno-legal assemblages embedded in the US Western water law and the water development infrastructure, e.g. the Glen Canyon Dam, that enables the tourism economy. The Musahar people, much like the Diné, have been excluded from their customary livelihoods as global-scale conservation was enacted in their waterscapes through techno-legal assemblages including the Chitwan National Park and water development and conservation policies for the Narayani River. In both the United States and Nepal, centralized agencies of the US federal government and the Nepali state tend to perpetuate exclusionary geographies of access to water and Indigenous livelihoods in the waterscapes. The national and international scales, at times, violently constrict local-scale Indigenous spaces. But the oppositional symbolic and material practices, of both the Diné and the Musahar, destabilize the dominant ontologies on local waterscapes. This paper demonstrates that across vast distances of history, geography and wealth, indigeneity does not just get repressed or occluded by the dominant state but is instead constantly reimagined and re-enacted in creative ways by the Indigenous People themselves.

Highlights

Indigeneity across the Global North and SouthIndigenous Peoples and indigeneity have come to occupy an expanded discursive space in conversations around questions of human environment relations
We argue that scalar politics that produce local, national and global spaces of conservation, development, water resources and life spaces are central to understanding Indigenous waterscapes
We propose that those visions and their ontological assumptions are mediated by certain scalar politics of producing Indigenous and national spaces

Summary

Introduction

Indigenous Peoples and indigeneity have come to occupy an expanded discursive space in conversations around questions of human environment relations. We too argue that the U.S and Nepali states see water instrumentally as a ‘resource’ into the service of certain (modern, in the sense of ‘Western’) ontologies of human–environment relations and visions of development and conservation We propose that those visions and their ontological assumptions are mediated by certain scalar politics of producing Indigenous and national spaces. Mustafa and Tillotson (2019), for example, demonstrate how the Jordanian state, through its water development policies, produced the nation-state scale historically and contemporaneously They argue that while dams and canals in the past were deemed essential to territorializing the Jordanian state in a geographically contiguous topographic sense, contemporaneously, the state’s hydro-territorialization impulse is manifest more in a spatially networked topological register linking subnational waterscapes with non-contiguous urban and international water users and markets. This paper points to how the interactions with the national to global, developmental and conservationist enterprises in the US and Nepal are differentiated within the Dine and Musahar societies, and how scalar politics elucidate the contours of those power laden waterscapes

Method and context

Findings

Conclusion