A History of the Settler-Colonial Freshwater Impure-Ment: Water Pollution and the Creation of Multiple Environmental Injustices Along the Waipaˉ River

Abstract

AbstractIn this chapter, we outline the history of water pollution in Aotearoa New Zealand’s Waipā River and its tributaries and demonstrate how environmental injustices can accumulate slowly over time. We highlight how Indigenous (Māori) and non-Indigenous (Pākehā) peoples held fundamentally different understandings of what constituted contaminated or clean water based on their different ontologies and epistemologies. We highlight how Māori people and their tikanga (laws) and mātauranga (knowledge) were excluded from settler-state water management planning processes for the majority of the twentieth century. Since 1991 new legislation (Resource Management Act) allows for Māori to participate in decision-making, however Māori values and knowledge continues to be marginalised, and Māori concerns about water pollution remain unaddressed. Accordingly, in the Waipā River environmental injustice continues to accumulate.