Farzad Forouhar
Despite the different narratives in Indigenous creation stories, what they all have in common is water, which has an essential part in creation. Many Indigenous creation myths assert that the world was covered by water and many of them share the common narrative that animals or people brought some elements of Earth to the surface. These elements accumulated and became the Earth. Accordingly, water is an ancestor to the Indigenous people of Northern America. In this sense, water, as an ancestor, became something that they shared roots with and had a familial relationship and a sense of kinship. Indigenous stories of creation indicate a deeply embedded correlation between Indigenous people and their environment and nature. For instance, the Winnemem Wintu creation story tells of the relationship between Nur (the Salmon) and the Winnemem in which the Salmon gave them their voice, and in return, they promised to always speak for them. This story is a beautiful metaphor that indicates Indigenous people see themselves as the stewards of their environment, land, and water. It indicates the Indigenous people were aware of their reciprocal affiliation and their symbiotic relationship with their environment, nature, and the earth and all its inhabitants. They acknowledged that their well-being, existence, and fulfillment of themselves and their environment depend on mutual respect and understanding.
Such a delicate and substantial understating of nature, along with the Indigenous people’s subsistence livelihood, helped this land to thrive for more than 10,000 years until European settlers arrived. In the context of settler colonialism, which manifests itself in terms of land alteration and alters the relations between – and associated with – land to favor white settlers, Indigenous subsistence rights, customary uses of land, and their particular landscapes have been disenfranchised, undermined, and eliminated.
Settler colonialism is a form of colonialism that seeks to replace the original population of the colonized territory with a new society of settlers. Settler colonialism is an ongoing process that works through erasure, elimination, and replacement of Indigenous cultures and communities. Settlers have to establish their sovereignty in a new environment, so they need to create imagined communities. To develop such imagined communities, they need to erase the history and eliminate the culture (social, political, and economic elements) of Indigenous communities and Indigenous land dispossession and erasure. Settlers also initiate a process of racial formation through genocide, forced assimilation, and land dispossession because the land is their primary objective.
As noted earlier, the main objective of settler colonialism is land, but water fits into this equation because land and water, along with nature and the environment, are not just the vital sources of all material wealth but also the potent ideological resources for the settlers to establish and justify their sovereignty and obscure the realities and atrocities of settler colonialism. In this context, water becomes a vehicle of colonization in which the state, through the use of water and implication of water rights, justifies its hegemony and alienates, subjectifies, and subjugates the Indigenous people.
Water is a vital part of Indigenous identities and lives and an essential part of their water-dependent ecosystems and cultures. The view in which humans and the environment (any natural and environmental elements) are part of an extended ecological family with shared roots and origins creates a sense of kinship and familiality that embraces all elements of an ecosystem and a structure that comprises total interconnectedness between space, place, land, water, and people. This sense of familiality and ancestral relationship with water creates a cyclical relationship between the Indigenous people and their world. A world that, as Dr. Kyle Powys Whyte, an Indigenous philosopher and climate/environmental justice scholar, asserts, consists of the “complex interrelations of human health, storytelling, gendered and intergenerational relationships, cultural and ceremonial life, the intimacy of human relations with plants, animals and entities (e.g., water), and the moral responsibilities that come with family, clan, and band memberships.” Whyte believes “spiritual relationships with non-humans, the cultivation of places as sacred (or not), and social rules that commit people to help one another and repair fraught relationships motivate us to see ourselves as bound to a covenant of reciprocity.”
The notion of kinship to water is a reminder of the symbiotic and reciprocal relationship of the Indigenous people with their environment. This form of kinship involves and requires familial responsibility to the world around and establishes interpersonal and interactive terms of engagement across all species and environments. Thus, water becomes the centerpiece of the kinship between people, environment and landscape, and a key element in producing an environmental identity that links to Indigenous people’s individual, clan, and racial/ethnic identity.
There are possibilities of decolonization beyond reconciliation, which could help Indigenous communities be considered normal populace with customary rights rather than special rights, which is an unpalatable notion invented by settler constituencies. Decolonization focuses explicitly on countering the colonial and post-colonial devaluation of Indigenous identities, knowledge, traditions, and ways of living. Decolonization could occur externally and internally. The external aspect of decolonization is about challenging the dominant narratives produced by the settler state as prominent assumptions and validating and authorizing alternative narratives. The internal part relies on individuals and focuses on decolonizing our minds which requires us to obtain a different view. Such processes of decolonization help to alter dominant narratives and create alternative narratives and discourses. In this sense, water becomes a vehicle for decolonization.
The fluidity of water contrasts with the solidity of the dominant and hegemonic context of settler colonialism that surrounds nature, the environment, and all their related entities. Indigenous people are water-based people, and they share the same fluidity with water, which contrasts with the solidity of marginalization and subjugation embedded in settler colonialism. At the same time, the material struggle of decolonization acquires fluidity as an agent and uses water as a vehicle of decolonization. The fluidity of water and its life-giving agency helps to create a vibrant struggle for decolonization of mind and body along with land and customary rights and lifeways. Water gives life to humans and non-humans and connects us to everything. We must always remind ourselves that Water is our Ancestor. Water is Life!
Farzad Forouhar works for the Wiyot Tribe in Eureka, California. Farzad moved from Iran to the United States in 2014 and since then has been residing in Eureka, CA. Farzad holds a B.A. degree in Political Science with an emphasis on Global Politics and Environmental Politics with a minor in Journalism from Humboldt State University.