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

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.

Community Development for Bote in Chitwan National Park, Nepal: A Political Ecology of Development Logic of Erasure

“…Over time, political ecology has also employed discourse analysis, since forms of knowledge are circulated in the form of discourse as a form of power that is legitimated by the state structures [63]. Robbins [64] highlights five dominant narratives in political ecology about conservation and development practices, which can be found combined in studies adopting a political ecology (and sometimes postcolonial) focus on conservation and nature relative to indigenous groups in Nepal [22,44,[65][66][67][68][69]. In the table below (Table 1) we name the narratives, their meaning and application to the current case study.…”

“…All five narratives invest in current discussions of community development and conservation in Nepal and tell stories about how recurring current conflicts reveal the 'hegemonic power of the nature conservation discourse as it influences the management of the Park and its buffer zone' [68] as a way of controlling indigenous groups alongside direct state power. Such narratives, however, do not directly address the postcolonial critique of privileged forms of knowledge that contribute to conflict (but see [69]). For this, the articulation and 'just appreciation' of moral ecologies must be employed (e.g., [30]).…”

Hydro-heritage for healing? Examining the gendered experience of water in post-conflict Swat, Pakistan

“…That register is predicated upon an ontological sleight of hand similar to (and related to) focusing only on an objectified chemical identity for water, one with little real material or social relevance. As water is imbricated in the social and ecological fabric of life, a relational understanding of it must go beyond its molecular structure to understand it in relation to its socio-ecological interactions with humans and non-humans (Mustafa et al, 2021;Walsh, 2018).…”

“…While the waterscape literature has been attentive to the political economic, and technological relations actuated through water (e.g. see Karpouzoglou and Vij, 2017;Loftus and Lumsden, 2008;Mustafa et al, 2021), Acharya (2015) goes a step further, and describes waterscapes as assemblages of practices, technologies, emotions and world viewsa veritable repository of symbolic and material practices, a mode of being in which water is a vital part. The attention to the emotional and symbolic aspect of waterscapes inevitably invites us back to contemplate the symbols, and also affects and other presubjective, precognitive knowledges, enacted through water.…”

“…After all, what is a symbol without affect? Mustafa et al (2021) document the affective and symbolic meaning of Indigenous waterscapes among the Indigenous Diné and Musahar people in the United States and Nepal, respectively, premised upon non-Western ontologies of person and environment. Gladfelter (2022) on the other hand describe how irrigation development in Nepal leads to the marginalization of local people's worlds of meaning/being in the Tarai region of Nepal.…”