Abstract
First Nation communities in Canada are disproportionately plagued by undrinkable water and insufficient household sanitation. In addition, water resource management in First Nation communities has long been a technocratic and scientific mission controlled by state-led authorities. There has been limited engagement of First Nations in decision-making around water management and water governance. As such, problems associated with access to drinkable water and household sanitation are commonly positioned as hydrological or environmental problems (flood or drought) to be fixed by technical and engineering solutions. This apolitical reading has been criticized for not addressing the root cause of the First Nation water problem, but instead, of reproducing it. In this paper, an approach using political ecology will tease out key factors contributing to the current water problem in many First Nation communities. Using case study research set in source water protection planning, this paper explains how persistent colonial practices of the state continue to reproduce undrinkable water and insufficient household sanitation. Solutions to this ‘water problem’ require greater attention to First Nations water governance capacity and structures.
Highlights
First Nation communities in Canada are disproportionately plagued by undrinkable water and insufficient household sanitation
Inclusion, and discourses of environmental change are used to facilitate dispossession of land and resources from Indigenous peoples in the Global North as in the South [46]. In response to this call to turn the political ecology analysis back on ourselves, we report on multiple case studies from the Canadian Prairie region
In the section that follows we provide an overview of colonial water governance in Canada as context to better understand First Nation engagement in water management decision-making today
Summary
First Nation communities in Canada are disproportionately plagued by undrinkable water and insufficient household sanitation. Problems associated with access to drinkable water and household sanitation are commonly positioned as hydrological or environmental problems (flood or drought) to be fixed by technical and engineering solutions This apolitical reading has been criticized for not addressing the root cause of the First Nation water problem, but instead, of reproducing it. Using case study research set in source water protection planning, this paper explains how persistent colonial practices of the state continue to reproduce undrinkable water and insufficient household sanitation. Solutions to this ‘water problem’ require greater attention to First Nations water governance capacity and structures. From a human health perspective, the number of water-borne infections in First Nations communities is an alarming 26 times higher than the Canadian national average [5,7]
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