“decolonize”

I notice at least three contemporary usages of “decolonization” relevant to water in the arid American West.

The first usage renders decolonization as a process within the post-Westphalian system of nation states. In this process, “to decolonize” may as well stand in for “to develop” nation states that need assistance from already developed states. This use ignores the ongoing presence of colonial relations. In turn, this use is sponsored by settler colonial states and can be read like other colonial progress narratives, which justify white colonial dominance and ongoing control of global resources. This lukewarm discourse of “decolonization” takes place in lockstep with global structural adjustment programs in which the Global South is “helped” and “opened up” by the Global North, so its peoples can become more “productive” consumers and producers in the global capitalist economy. Indigenous peoples stridently resisted this usage of decolonization in the 1970s, write Carey and Silverstein, resulting in the 1975 UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (a document opposed by the settler states of Canada, US, New Zealand, and Australia).[1]

A second usage of decolonization takes it to be a metaphor for challenging hegemonic discourses and social relations of all kinds. With this usage, “decolonize your mind” can thus be used to refer to critical anti-racist, queer, or feminist pedagogies. The problem of this usage, write Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang, is that decontextualizing decolonization makes it seem like all sorts of intellectual projects may be marked as “decolonizing” when they are not actually related to the undoing of settlement.[2]

A third usage of decolonization is forwarded by Tuck and Yang, who write that decolonization “specifically requires the repatriation of Indigenous land and life.”[3] This definition of decolonization as not a metaphor sharply contrasts with discourses that attempt to decontextualize the work of decolonization. This sharper usage of decolonization has clear material aims that are crucial we not forget: “Breaking the settler colonial triad, in direct terms, means repatriating land to sovereign Native tribes and nations, abolition of slavery in its contemporary forms, and the dismantling of the imperial metropole.”[4] (see frame: Settler Colonialism). Coulthard crucially explains that this definition does not ignore other vectors of power, but it always keeps the colonial relation in sight as the place where other relations converge. He writes: 

The colonial relation should not be understood as a primary locus or “base” from which these other forms of oppression flow, but rather as the inherited background field within which market, racist, patriarchal, and state relations converge to facilitate a certain power effect—in our case, the reproduction of hierarchical social relations that facilitate the dispossession of our lands and self-determining capacities.[5]

My suggestion for “decolonization” in water politics is to resist using this word casually at all costs. In the first distorted and coopted sense of the term, “water decolonization” could literally mean the construction of new dams on Indigenous land in order to “save” them from themselves and “help” them create a more “productive global economy.” It is my suggestion that if we use the term “water colonization,” we clearly demarcate it to mean a material restructuring of resources that is accountable to Indigenous futurity, not settler futurity. We must then ask: How can we pursue this sense of water decolonization without reinvesting in the settler nation state? Given the entangled positions of the settler-native-slave triad, the term requires careful considerations of what “water colonization” means for Black and otherwise marginalized bodies who have been deprived of access to water but nonetheless granted settler status. Especially, for settler environmental scholars, it’s crucial that our decolonial environmental discourses “unsettle,” not rescue, our own settler futures with water (see frame: Settler Colonial Environmentalism).

[1] Carey and Silverstein, “Thinking with and beyond Settler Colonial Studies: New Histories after the Postcolonial,” 7.

[2] “Decolonize (a verb) and decolonization (a noun) cannot easily be grafted onto pre-existing discourses/frameworks, even if they are critical, even if they are anti-racist, even if they are justice frameworks,” they write. Tuck and Yang, 3. 

[3] Tuck and Yang, “Decolonization Is Not a Metaphor,” 21.

[4] Tuck and Yang, 31.

[5] Glen Sean Coulthard, Red Skin, White Masks: Rejecting the Colonial Politics of Recognition, Book, Whole (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014), 15, https://doi.org/10.5749/j.ctt9qh3cv.