River Reservation Research Articles

Culturally-sustaining and revitalizing computer science education for Indigenous students

Computer science (CS) teachers are still learning how to enact culturally-sustaining/revitalizing CS education for Indigenous students. In response, elementary teachers on the Wind River Reservation, a professional development provider, researchers, and the Wyoming Department of Education formed a researcher-practitioner collaborative to implement and study the implementation of culturally- sustaining/revitalizing CS lessons using design-based implementation research (DBIR) practices. Researchers collected data via interviews, reflection forms, and observations. Findings indicated that teachers used students’ funds of knowledge to support engagement and expanded lessons to reflect Indigenous priorities of language revitalization and Tribal sovereignty. Creating culturally-sustaining/revitalizing CS education was a collective activity, drawing on interdependence of teachers and students.

Wind River Elementary Computer Science Collaborative: Connecting Computer Science and Indigenous Identities and Knowledges on the Wind River Reservation

Three Northern Arapaho and Eastern Shoshone–serving districts formed a researcher–practitioner partnership with the Wyoming Department of Education, the American Institutes for Research®, and BootUp Professional Development to advance the computer science (CS) education of their elementary students in ways that strengthen their Indigenous identities and knowledges. In this paper, we share experiences from 2019 to 2022 with our curriculum development, professional development (PD), and classroom implementation. The researcher–practitioner partnership developed student and teacher materials to support elementary CS lessons aligned to Wyoming’s CS standards and “Indian Education for All” social studies standards. Indigenous community members served as experts to codesign culturally relevant resources. Teachers explored the curriculum resources during three 4-hour virtual and in-person PD sessions. The sessions were designed to position the teachers as designers of CS projects they eventually implemented in their classrooms. Projects completed by students included simulated interviews with Indigenous heroes and animations of students introducing themselves in their Native languages. Teachers described several positive effects of the Scratch lessons on students, including high engagement, increased confidence, and successful application of several CS concepts. The teachers also provided enthusiastic positive reviews of the ways the CS lessons allowed students to explore their Indigenous identities while preparing to productively use technology in their futures. The Wind River Elementary CS Collaborative is one model for how a researcher–practitioner partnership can utilize diverse forms of expertise, ways of knowing, and Indigenous language to engage in curriculum design, PD, and classroom implementation that supports culturally sustaining CS pedagogies in Indigenous communities.

The Moby Bookmobile: Providing Health Education Materials in Wyoming Indian Country.

The COVID-19 pandemic made it difficult for Native American populations to access health information. Through funding from the Network of The National Library of Medicine Region 4, a community library was able to enhance their native and nonnative health collections for distribution on the Wind River Reservation in Central Wyoming. The book mobile was originally funded by the Wyoming State Library through American Rescue Plan Act of 2021 funding to increase literacy efforts during the pandemic. Materials were distributed at multiple locations throughout the reservation and individuals indicated they appreciated the materials being provided. This program was successful in distributing health information to an underserved priority population within the United States. Hopefully, similar programs would be successful in enhancing health education programs with other priority populations in both the United States and the world.

The Wind River Scribe: Grace Darling Wetherbee Coolidge and Her Teepee Neighbors

Grace Darling Wetherbee Coolidge’s 1917 book Teepee Neighbors is a little-known collection of twenty-nine sketches of Indian life on the Wind River Reservation, Wyoming, where she worked as a missionary from 1902 to 1910. Only recently have Coolidge’s personal papers been made publicly available by the Pioneers Museum in Colorado Springs, Colorado, allowing scholars to investigate the true contours of her life for the first time. These primary source materials shed new light on a woman who—though born to great privilege in New York City—rejected a life of leisure and wealth in favor of a subsistence existence on a remote Indian reservation, devoted to charitable acts. This paper offers the first accurate essay-length biographical treatment of Grace Coolidge. It as well analyzes selections of her Teepee Neighbors as an attempt to generate sympathy among white readers for a colonized people, the Arapaho, and to offer a critique of Euro-American society from the standpoint of the communal Indian values she encountered at Wind River. Coolidge’s project, however, is ultimately hampered by her own ethnocentrism and admitted inability to understand Indian cultures.

God’s Red Son: The Ghost Dance Religion and the Making of Modern America

God’s Red Son: The Ghost Dance Religion and the Making of Modern America

Where the Red-Winged Blackbirds Sing: The Akimel O'odham and Cycles of Agricultural Transformation in the Phoenix Basin by Jennifer Bess

Reviewed by: Where the Red-Winged Blackbirds Sing: The Akimel O'odham and Cycles of Agricultural Transformation in the Phoenix Basin by Jennifer Bess Tom Sheridan Where the Red-Winged Blackbirds Sing: The Akimel O'odham and Cycles of Agricultural Transformation in the Phoenix Basin. By Jennifer Bess. (Louisville: University Press of Colorado, 2021. Pp. 464. Illustrations, notes, bibliography, index.) Detailed and meticulously documented, Jennifer Bess's Where the Red-Winged Blackbirds Sing tells the story of one of the most remarkable sagas in the history of Native North America. The Akimel O'odham have farmed the floodplains of the Salt River and Gila River in central Arizona for [End Page 508] thousands of years. Their ancestors, the Huhugam, constructed the largest irrigation system in pre-Columbian North America, cultivating about 100,000 acres along hundreds of miles of earthen canals. When Spaniards first encountered them in the late 1600s, the Huhugam had dispersed, leaving their platform-mound communities in response to flooding, internal strife, and perhaps even Old World epidemic diseases. But their descendants continued to raise corn, beans, squash, and cotton along the rivers. With their surpluses, the Akimel O'odham (River People) fed the Tohono O'odham, or Desert People, who came to trade and labor in their fields. And when other Piman-speaking peoples to the south were missionized and conquered by the Spaniards, they remained independent, adopting what they wanted from the Europeans, like winter wheat, but keeping them at bay. When U.S. troops and thousands of gold-seekers on the way to California passed through their territory beginning in the 1840s, the Akimel O'odham became the first agricultural entrepreneurs in Arizona history, expanding production to barter and sell to the newcomers. They considered themselves allies of the Anglo Americans, even forming volunteer militia to fight Apaches and Yavapais after federal troops withdrew during the Civil War. Expecting reciprocity, the O'odham saw non-Native settlers divert their irrigation water instead. The Forty Years of Famine from 1871 to 1910) turned the once-verdant Gila into "dry, parched earth" (102). The great strength of Where the Red-Winged Blackbirds Sing is its emphasis on Akimel O'odham resistance and resilience in the face of these ongoing betrayals. Bess employs O'odham creation stories to argue that the O'odham recognized and accepted cycles of expansion and contraction, developing an ideology that embraced change. The O'odham himdag (way of life) emphasized doing, world building, especially the cultivation of the land. During their darkest hours, the O'odham kept pressuring United States authorities to restore their land and water so they could sustain themselves as they had done since time immemorial. In contrast to their non-Native allies, who portrayed them as victims, the O'odham presented themselves as partners and allies who only wanted to sustain themselves as they had in the past. They did not resist agricultural modernization. On the contrary, they contested their marginalization while non-Indigenous farmers modernized around them. The paradox between the progressive ideology of the O'odham and their economic marginalization continued as the hot, dry climate of Arizona attracted government plant breeders experimenting with varieties of Egyptian long-staple cotton. Even though an experimental station was established at Sacaton on the Gila River reservation, inequities in water distribution and technical assistance exacerbated rather than alleviated O'odham poverty. Like the Green Revolution two generations later, advantages [End Page 509] accrued to those with the resources to maximize production. As one Indian agent lamented, "I found nearly all are willing to raise cotton if the water matter could be adjusted" (138). For much of the twentieth century, however, the "water matter" was never resolved. Between 1910 and 1920, the average size of non-Native farms quadrupled from 135 to 581 acres because of the long-staple cotton boom during World War I, while O'odham farms barely climbed from 7 to 12.3 acres. Dawes Act allotments and the lack of water prevented the O'odham from capitalizing on the transformation of Arizona agriculture. Bess recounts their ongoing dispossession, but she also examines their tenacity to recover their land and water and their right to make decisions...

The Arapaho Way: Continuity and Change on the Wind River Reservation by Sara Wiles

Reviewed by: The Arapaho Way: Continuity and Change on the Wind River Reservation by Sara Wiles Angelica Lawson (bio) The Arapaho Way: Continuity and Change on the Wind River Reservation by Sara Wiles University of Oklahoma, 2019 SARA WILES'S PHOTO-ETHNOGRAPHIC BOOK The Arapaho Way: Continuity and Change on the Wind River Reservation highlights the lives and significant events surrounding twenty-two featured individuals, their extended families, and friends. Following a forward by Jordan Dresser (Arapaho) and a brief introduction, the book is divided into three sections, organized chronologically beginning in the early 1900s and concluding in 2017. After publishing Arapaho Journeys in 2011, Wiles sought to add more personal and historic depth to this second volume of Arapaho ethnography by including more family and historic photographs alongside her own and by placing biographical stories within larger historical contexts such as the boarding school era, the occupation of Alcatraz, and the early days of the American Indian Movement. The layering of family stories, as in the opening section "Connecting Families through Photographs and Oral Histories," adds depth to her photo-ethnography. "Discovering Matilda Spoonhunter" comprises the entire first section; this is an intriguing story accompanied by thirteen black-and-white photos. The narrative examines interactions between two families—Matilda's (Arapaho) and Minnie's (non-Arapaho) during a tenuous time, when homesteading was taking place near the newly created Arapaho reservation. Wiles does not problematize the negative impacts of homesteading in Arapaho territory; instead, she focuses on the friendship between Matilda and Minnie, who became fast friends after saving a child's life together. While the story lacks exegesis, it is lovely in how it highlights "the founding mother of two prominent Arapaho families," Matilda Spoonhunter, who until now had been hidden in the shadows of her more famous brother, Sherman Sage. Matilda's story shines among the photos of generations of her descendants and is one of many examples of fascinating women's stories in this collection. The many biographies of Arapaho women are especially compelling and cover a wide range of topics and time periods beginning with Matilda's story and ending with Nora Oldman's, who along with her husband William C'Hair, participated in the protests at Standing Rock. These stories are a positive [End Page 192] aspect of the collection and cover a wide range of topics. A favorite is Rubena Hernandez's story. With thirty years of flagging experience, Rubena began working on the Seventeen Mile Road project when she was seventy years old. Wiles contextualizes Rubena's biography by telling a story of personal significance to the Arapaho people of the Wind River Reservation—about a project that sought to improve the safety of an extremely dangerous road on the reservation. Wiles adds depth to her photo-ethnographic project by strategically pairing stories. Chapters pair themes of attending high school and college off the reservation, as well as themes of performance and rodeo. The most powerful pairing comes near the end of the collection with chapters about a recently committed hate crime and Arapaho tribal member Ron Howard's efforts to organize a peace march in the aftermath. The chapter explores racist attitudes toward Arapahos and hatred toward homeless Native Americans, in particular. It is followed by a chapter about one of the victims of the crime, James Goggles Jr., who was shot in the head by a non-Indian intent on murdering homeless Native Americans. Goggles was one of two men who were shot and the only survivor. Pairing—essentially layering these stories together—helps to humanize the stereotyped homeless Arapahos derogatorily referred to as "park rangers" (182). Although Wiles shines a light on the deeply entrenched racism surrounding Arapaho communities, she only slightly contextualizes that racism within the larger history of resource extraction, water wars, and other policies and practices that led to the disenfranchisement of Arapahos by neighboring towns. Readers looking for a highly academic or nuanced critique of settler colonialism's impact on this reservation community will not find it here; yet there is value in these very intimate and distinctly Arapaho stories and photos. Wiles states in the introduction that these are photos of friends and people...

Tradition, Sovereignty, and Conservation: The Controversy Surrounding the Wind River Indian Reservation Game Code

Abstract In December 1983, a highly publicized slaughter of over fifty elk at Wind River Indian Reservation reignited a dispute between the reservation’s resident tribes—the Eastern Shoshone and Northern Arapaho nations—over wildlife management. In response to diminished big game populations, the Eastern Shoshone Tribe had passed hunting regulations in 1980, but the people of the Northern Arapaho Tribe refused to do so, effectively derailing any attempt to manage wildlife at Wind River. After the Bureau of Indian Affairs imposed a game code on the reservation in 1984, the Northern Arapaho Tribe initiated a legal battle that culminated in the 1987 case of Northern Arapahoe Tribe v. Hodel. The court ruled that because the treaty rights of the two tribes overlapped in the area of wildlife management and because research conducted by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service at the request of both tribes had revealed a need for hunting regulations, the U.S. government had the power to impose the Wind River Reservation Game Code. Although the tribes jointly manage wildlife today and big game populations now thrive at Wind River, it is important to examine the controversy that involved conflicting visions of and concerns about cultural traditions, tribal sovereignty, and wildlife conservation principles and practices. Exploring how Eastern Shoshones and Northern Arapahos viewed those subjects differently and how their longstanding rivalry at Wind River shaped this conflict highlights some problems with the simplistic and romanticized concept of the “Ecological Indian.”

Sovereign Schools: How Shoshones and Arapahos Created a High School on the Wind River Reservation by Martha Louise Hipp

Sovereign Schools: How Shoshones and Arapahos Created a High School on the Wind River Reservation by Martha Louise Hipp

Sovereign Schools: How Shoshones and Arapahos Created a High School on the Wind River Reservation

Sovereign Schools: How Shoshones and Arapahos Created a High School on the Wind River Reservation

Eastern Shoshone and Northern Arapaho Traditional Ecological Knowledge (TEK) and Ethnobotany for Wind River Reservation Rangelands

The need to affirm and revitalize cultural knowledge of native plant communities is impera-tive for Indigenous people. This ethnobotanical study documents Traditional Ecological Knowledge (TEK) structured from an Indigenous paradigm by exploring the connection be-tween plants collected in two high-elevation basins and tribal members on the Wind River Indian Reservation (WRIR). We sought to qualitatively understand the plant resources by looking through the lens of Indigenous language and perspectives. Existing names of the ba-sin plants in both the Eastern Shoshone and Northern Arapaho languages were compiled through an ethnobotanical literature review, seven in-person interviews with Eastern Sho-shone and Northern Arapaho tribal members, and attendance at language workshops. We documented 53 Eastern Shoshone and 44 Northern Arapaho plant names, respectively. His-torical impacts of past Federal Indian policy eras have shaped TEK as it currently exists within tribal communities. Both tribes used and had Indigenous names for Northern sweetgrass (Hierochloe hirta ssp. hirta), bitterroot (Lewisia rediviva), junipers (Juniperus ssp.), and bear-berry or Kinnikinnick (Arctostaphylos uva-ursi). The resiliency of TEK is attributed to the perse-verance of Indigenous people continuing to practice and teach traditions. The historical con-text specific to both the Eastern Shoshone and Northern Arapaho tribes and their languages are important for enhancing our current understanding of the ethnobotanical TEK of plants on the WRIR. Recognizing the value of ethnobotanical TEK and incorporating it into natural resource management plans and decisions can bridge diverse perspectives on land use for meaningful collaboration with tribal communities.

Reviving and Reclaiming Our Native Food System: Leadership Experiences of a Research Project's Community Advisory Board

As proud Native community leaders who call the Wind River Reservation home, our battles for sov­ereignty and respect are not just part of a long-ago history. Claiming our self-empowerment and put­ting it to good use on behalf of our entire commu­nity are challenged more often than we care to recount. In the matter of sustainable food security, those of us who agreed to serve as members of the Growing Resilience Community Advisory Board (CAB) were reminded of such events. Our CAB was established in 2016 as an oversight group for community wellbeing for a University of Wyoming (UW)–initiated and National Institutes of Health (NIH)–funded research project on gardening and health. See the press release for this article.

Reflections on an ethnographic project with elementary educators on the Wind River Reservation: A cautionary tale

AbstractIn this article, I analyze the successes and challenges of the first year of a four‐year applied anthropology project conducted on Wyoming's Wind River Reservation intended to help mostly white educators of Arapaho children who develop culturally relevant classroom pedagogy. Educators of Arapaho children have expressed concerns that student achievement is low, but also that the curriculum is largely disconnected from student backgrounds and experiences. Following deficit models, non‐Indian educators have historically cast American Indian schooling to reflect the norms and expectations constructed by the white dominant group. In contrast, in this study teachers were taught anthropological methods to conduct fieldwork in the households of children they taught. Teachers successfully documented historically accumulated and culturally developed bodies of knowledge and skills essential for household or individual functioning and well‐being. Teacher's ethnographic research fostered trust between school and families, and bridged communities to classrooms. On the other hand, pedagogical paradigms remained largely aligned with preexisting schooled programs, culturally relevant pedagogy existing as an add‐on but not inextricably embedded within the curriculum.

Growing intergenerational resilience for Indigenous food sovereignty through home gardening.

As a community-based participatory research project designed to promote health and wellbeing, Growing Resilience supports home gardens for 96 primarily Eastern Shoshone and Northern Arapaho families in the Wind River Reservation, located in Wyoming. Through analysis of data from two years of qualitative fieldwork, including stories told by 53 gardeners and members of the project’s community advisory board in talking circles and through our novel sovereign storytelling method, we investigated if and how these participants employ relationships, knowledge, and practices across generations through home gardening. We find that participants describe home gardening within present, past, future, and cross-generational frames, rooted in family relationships and knowledge shared across generations. Our analysis of these themes suggests that gardening provides families a means to transmit resilience across generations or, as we call it here, intergenerational resilience. We conclude by discussing intergenerational resilience as a culturally specific mechanism of social-ecological community resilience that may be particularly relevant in Indigenous movements for food sovereignty.

Environmental Sustainability Approaches Adopted for Anhsin Bridge Construction of Ankeng Metro System in New Taipei City in Taiwan

The Ankeng Light Rail Metro System (ALRMS) is a Design-Build (DB) construction project located in New Taipei City. The Anhsin Bridge (AB) is one of the major parts of ALRMS. The original concept from the client, the Department of Rapid Transit Systems (DRTS), New Taipei City Government, was to design Anhsin Bridge as a steel arch bridge, which inevitably would require construction of some piers in the river reservation zone. Also, a temporary access bridge would be necessary during the erection of the steel frame. All these would pose a harmful situation for the river flow. Considering environmental sustainability, the contractor proposed a sustainable construction method, the unbalanced cable-stayed design with truss frames (UBCSTF), to build the Anhsin Bridge. Without constructing piers in the river reservation zone, the pylon of the Anhsin Bridge was laid on a 5.5m thickness foundation supported by 42 2m-diameter bored piles. A friendly environmental achievement was made by adopting UBCSTF. In this paper, the authors will share the rare construction experiences with the Anhsin Bridge construction, and present the detailed design concept, construction, and environmental sustainability achievements in this project.

The Work Arts and Crafts Do

This essay forms part of a suite of papers focused on work and belonging on the Wind River Reservation. This essay attempts to interrogate multiple meanings attached to work, by Native people and non-Indians, and across multiple work environments.

EXPLORING VALIDITY OF CULTURALLY-RELEVANT DEMENTIA EDUCATION MATERIALS FOR THE WIND RIVER RESERVATION

AbstractThe number of aging American Indian and Alaska Native (AI/AN) individuals is increasing, and due to an increase in the longevity among AI/AN populations, an increase in the incidence of dementia can be expected. The Indian Health Service, as well as local stakeholders, have identified a need for culturally-relevant dementia education materials for AI/AN elders, family members, and caregivers. An iterative focus-group approach was initially used to inform the creation of such materials with representatives from the Wind River Reservation. Using data derived from the focus groups, the Ten Early Signs and Symptoms of Alzheimer’s Disease were adapted for the people of the Wind River Reservation. To test the validity of the culturally-relevant dementia education materials, 40 AI/AN participants were asked to match the recently developed visual images and verbal messages with the original signs and symptoms. Results showed that participants were able to match the adapted and original verbal messages 44%-80% of the time, depending on the message. Participants matched the adapted image with the original verbal message correctly 6.66–68.9% of the time. These results provide important feedback regarding face validity of these new education materials. Images with low matching scores were reviewed and targeted for improvement. Images with high matching scores were examined for key elements contributing to high scores. These results and process are a unique contribution to an area of growing emphasis as culturally-relevant education materials could contribute to increased health knowledge in a rapidly aging, diverse population in the U.S. and abroad.

Sustainable Climate Change Adaptation in Indian Country

Abstract Much of the academic literature and policy discussions about sustainable development and climate change adaptation focus on poor and developing nations, yet many tribal communities inside the United States include marginalized peoples and developing nations who face structural barriers to effectively adapt to climate change. There is a need to critically examine diverse climate change risks for indigenous peoples in the United States and the many structural barriers that limit their ability to adapt to climate change. This paper uses a sustainable climate adaptation framework to outline the context and the relationships of power and authority, along with different ways of knowing and meaning, to illustrate the underpinnings of some tribes’ barriers to sustainable climate adaptation. The background of those structural barriers for tribes is traced, and then the case of water rights and management at the Wind River Reservation in Wyoming is used to illustrate the interplay of policy, culture, climate, justice, and limits to adaptation. Included is a discussion about how the rulings of the Big Horn general stream adjudication have hindered tribal climate change adaptation by limiting the quantity of tribal reserved water rights, tying those rights to the sole purposes of agriculture, which undermines social and cultural connections to the land and water, and failing to recognizing tribal rights to groundwater. Future climate projections suggest increasing temperatures, and changes in the amount and timing of snowpack, along with receding glaciers, all of which impact water availability downstream. Therefore, building capacity to take control of land and water resources and preparing for climate change and drought at Wind River Reservation is of critical importance.

Surviving Wounded Knee: The Lakotas and the Politics of Memory

This book offers a new perspective on a familiar, tragic event. We “know” about the massacre at Wounded Knee in 1890. The event has been seared into our consciousness by nineteenth-century photographs of frozen bodies lying in the snow and by twentieth-century rituals of mourning and regret. We also “know” that the story of the massacre has shifted over time. Initially considered a “victory” over “crazed” ghost dancers—earning twenty soldiers the Medal of Honor—the massacre is now a symbol of cruelty and a rallying point for Native American activists. How did this transformation occur? David W. Grua explains. The protagonists of Grua's tale are the people who were left behind after the Seventh Cavalry returned to its barracks: wounded survivors, orphaned children, and grieving relatives. Beginning from the moment the shooting stopped, and led by two fearless Lakota men—Joseph Horn Cloud (who lost his parents and two siblings on the killing fields) and his brother Dewey Beard, a survivor—hundreds of people at the Pine Ridge Reservation (where the massacre occurred) and Cheyenne River Reservation (the home of most victims) pressed their version of events on government officials and the American public. The survivors swore out affidavits, filed petitions, lobbied the Indian Office, and enlisted the help of sympathetic journalists and scholars. In 1903 the group erected their own monument at Wounded Knee, an obelisk covered with the names of those killed. (After Horn Cloud's father's name was inscribed, “the peacemaker died here innocent.”) The survivors ultimately won a congressional hearing on a proposed compensation bill, but their effort fell short in Congress and the courts. The military's stone wall of opposition and the public's indifference could not be overcome. Nevertheless, the survivors changed the nation's mind.

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

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.