Pipelines, Mines, and Dams: Indigenous Literary Water Ecologies and the Fight for a Sustainable Future

The vital spirit of water links human cultures, stories, and families to our nonhuman animal relations. In his 2006 world water study When the Rivers Run Dry, Fred Pearce states, "Most of the world's population currently lives where there is a history of guaranteed water. That is not by chance. Humans require reliable and predictable water in order to flourish. Modern, highly engineered methods of exploiting water often test reliability to the limit. Now climate change is undermining the predictability, too" (127). All life requires water, not only for survival, but also for the maintenance of a healthy ecological balance. Vine Deloria, Jr. (Standing Rock Sioux) notes that

knowing the sets of relationships between the various plants and animals enables one to predict what kinds of species will be present in a healthy environment, and so failure to locate a species in a particular location will alert people about the condition of the place.

(qtd. in Vaughan-Lee 56)

Modern economic activities alter ecosystems worldwide, removing key species from niches occupied from time well before human presence on Earth. This tragic loss of life diminishes not only the world in which we live, but also our literature.

Water is so essential to existence that one might think we would better care for it. Yet, the history of colonialism in North America and much of the world, still ongoing for Indigenous peoples everywhere, speaks differently. From overpopulation to over-appropriation, Euroamericans have plundered the natural wealth of the Americas, valuing short-term profit over sustainable futures, a continuing mistake. Seen through the lens of Western economics, a growing population simultaneously brings wealth and domestication, taming a perceived wilderness into something more amenable to human management. Few ventures project this mad adherence to the invisible hand of the market more than dams, mines, and pipelines, further examples of the expansion of the settler colonial project. All three seek a false mastery over nature, enriching a small portion of the population while simultaneously doing grievous ecological damage to natural systems, many of which developed a delicate homeostasis over eons. Recent proposals for an expansion across traditional indigenous lands of dams along Manitoba's Nelson River, a tributary of Lake Winnipeg, pipelines through the Great Bear Rainforest, and, of course, the Keystone XL and Dakota Access pipelines foreground the prematurity of claims of a postcolonial Present. Rather than accept these developments as inevitable, indigenous writers have risen to the call, and indeed have been at their oppositional work since well before these present crises.

Since their proposals, the Keystone XL and Dakota Access pipelines have been a source of controversy for several reasons, not the least of which are their routes, which cross through the current homelands of First Nations in Canada and Native American tribes in the United States. Without approval of these independent nations, the pipelines are blatant treaty violations. Indigenous tribes in both countries along the route, activist organizations such as Idle No More, and environmental groups have all attempted to fight these projects, collectively and individually. The dangers seem clear. Tar sands oil ranks among the dirtiest of fuels, due to the energy required to extricate the oil from shale as well as the work necessary to expose it: between 2000 and 2013, for example, 26 million hectares of boreal forest were cleared (Petersen, Sizer, Lee), doing grievous ecological damage to wildlife, from mammals such as endangered woodland caribou, grey wolves, and black bears to fish and migratory birds, not to mention the traditional culture of parts of the Cree Nation. Burning this fuel could result in "game over" (McKibben) for efforts to keep climate change in check, preventing atmospheric carbon from rising above the 440ppm level climate scientists tell us will lead to the worst future changes.

The danger to waterways may be a more immediate central concern; as the Center for Biological Diversity states:

Keystone XL would transport dirty tar sands oil 1700 miles across six states and hundreds of water bodies, posing an unacceptable risk for spills. An existing pipeline, Keystone 7, has already leaked 14...