Water Is Life: Ecologies of Writing and Indigeneity

“Water is Life,” the recent rallying cry of the Standing Rock Sioux opposition to the Dakota Access Pipeline, gestures to the urgency of understanding ecological depredations as an attack on life itself. The idea of “water protectors” (as the activists protesting the construction of an oil pipeline under the Missouri River call themselves) emerges from a specific historical moment in relation to #NoDAPL, but this is an apt way to imagine the work of this special issue more generally as a folding together of ecology, indigeneity, and the role of writing in making visible Indigenous ways of engaging with water.

While water scarcity is a concern for all living beings, its impact tends to be greater for Indigenous communities. Reservations in particular are sites where government and corporate entities expose “residents to dangerous environmental conditions,” including dangers caused by air pollution, water contamination, dangerous working conditions, and weapons testing (Taylor 47). Although these environmental concerns are long-standing, increasing privatization of water resources, paired with the ongoing effects of climate change, have amplified discussions about Indigenous water rights in US media. Communities of color, particularly Indigenous communities, have always borne the brunt of environmental injustice; however, these issues have become more explicit in the Trump era. Both under the leadership of Scott Pruitt and in the wake of his resignation, the Environmental Protection Agency has rolled back environmental protections for protected federal lands, particularly those deemed to be of value for natural resource production. Although the EPA is charged with promoting and restoring the health of tribal lands, it also has the authority to allow “tribal communities and other stakeholders to pursue future beneficial use or reuse of resources for economic, environmental, and traditional purposes” (“Cleaning Up”). Often, these “other stakeholders” are given precedence over tribal lands due to intersecting corporate and governmental interests. Such behavior places Indigenous communities at risk in terms of their health and well-being and threatens their sovereign claims to the land.

In response, Native communities have developed a series of protests and legal challenges to contest corporate and governmental claims to these lands. Many of these debates center on the sovereignty of tribal nations: What authority do tribes have over their rolls, lands, and resources? How do these rights operate within Western power structures? How should they operate? These questions are not answered simply, but they all have a common concern: state and federal laws stifling Indigenous nations for profit and power. This special issue of SAIL examines the way Indigenous writers have focused on water—its use, the laws that regulate its distribution, and its cultural and ecological value both within and outside Indigenous communities—to generate meaningful dialogue about the relationship between colonialism, water rights, and tribal sovereignty.

Varying water laws across the United States force Indigenous communities to structure their arguments within specific legal contexts. In the East, water rights are determined by riparian rights, which permit those whose land abuts a body of water to use and access that water. In the West, water rights are determined by prior appropriation, which grants water rights chronologically based on whoever first put the water to “beneficial use” as determined by state and federal law. In theory, this means that all water in the United States should be the property of Indigenous communities; however, Winters v. United States (1908) complicates this narrative. According to this ruling, Native water rights are determined according to the location and establishment date of reservation lands. Eastern reservations have access to water their federal land abuts, but they do not have exclusive rights or jurisdiction over this water. Western nations are given prior appropriation rights based on the date on which their reservation was established, a decision that significantly disadvantages many Native communities in the West, particularly those using water from the frequently overdrawn Colorado River. Other issues further complicate this framework; for example, non–federally recognized tribes have no legal water rights. Additionally, the Five Tribes—the Cherokee, Chickasaw, Choctaw, Creek, and Seminole—are federally recognized tribes that possess fee lands rather than reservation lands...