Landcentrism
Tiara R. Na’puti’s decolonial critique of landcentricism is especially useful for attending to the specificities of water politics without collapsing them easily into “land politics.” Given that dispossession of Indigenous land is justified by terra nullius[1] or “made natural, logical, or invisible in settler societies,” settler pursuits of water are perhaps even less acknowledged.[2] Na’puti explains that settler discourses not only render Indigenous land as private (settler) property, but render space and time itself (and thus scholarship) as oriented around land—not water or people. By contrast, she writes, Chamoru archipelagic rhetoric renders locations with ocean, land, and people intertwined.[3]
Contemporary conversations about water in the arid West could benefit by extending Naputi’s insights inland, attending to settler life as established and critically dependent upon stolen Indigenous inland waters—that is, rivers, creeks, springs, and aquifers. If land is valuable to settlers primarily for agriculture (because unlike other extractive “development,” agriculture is crucial to settler permanence and a basis for other forms of material extraction for economic production), then the problem for settlers in the arid American West is that excessive agriculture—proper settler colonization and “civilizing”—is impossible without radical control and redistribution of water sources. As Tuck and Yang explain: “[The settler] can only make his identity as a settler by making the land produce, and produce excessively, because ‘civilization’ is defined as production in excess of the "natural" world (i.e. in excess of the sustainable production already present in the Indigenous world).”[4]
In more practical everyday discourse, I think the concept landcentrism can expand the conditions of possibility for water politics in the West. Access to water always delimits excessive colonial production, making the colonial project especially fragile in arid landscapes that require large scale redistribution of water. With landcentrism in mind, I suggest we deploy terms that can shift political attention to how settler colonial institutions rely on water infrastructure. Something like the language of “lynchpin” or “inflection point” could be helpful. For example: water infrastructure is the lynchpin of the colonial project in the arid West, given that over forty million settlers rely on the Colorado river. Restructuring this lynchpin, then, could significantly shift the distribution of material resources in the colonized landscape.
[1] For a detailed explanation of terra nullius: Ashley Noel Mack and Tiara R. Na’puti, “‘Our Bodies Are Not Terra Nullius’: Building a Decolonial Feminist Resistance to Gendered Violence,” Women’s Studies in Communication 42, no. 3 (2019): 347–70, https://doi.org/10.1080/07491409.2019.1637803.
[2] Rowe and Tuck, “Settler Colonialism and Cultural Studies: Ongoing Settlement, Cultural Production, and Resistance,” 3.
[3] Tiara R. Na’puti, “Archipelagic Rhetoric: Remapping the Marianas and Challenging Militarization from ‘A Stirring Place,’” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 16, no. 1 (January 2, 2019): 4–25.
[4] Tuck and Yang, p. 6. Also part of reason sc needs excess labor.
