Scalar politics of Indigenous waterscapes in Navajo Nation and Nepal: Conflict, conservation and development

Abstract

We use case studies of the Diné in the United States of America, and the Musahar people in Nepal, to understand how indigeneity is enacted in relation to the developmental and conservationist impulses of the dominant American and Nepalese states. We mobilize the concept of ‘waterscapes’ as assemblages of practices, technologies, emotions and worldviews, to unpack how geographical scales are produced and contested through symbolic and material practices. We find that the Diné of the Navajo Nation have socially differentiated engagement with the techno-legal assemblages embedded in the US Western water law and the water development infrastructure, e.g. the Glen Canyon Dam, that enables the tourism economy. The Musahar people, much like the Diné, have been excluded from their customary livelihoods as global-scale conservation was enacted in their waterscapes through techno-legal assemblages including the Chitwan National Park and water development and conservation policies for the Narayani River. In both the United States and Nepal, centralized agencies of the US federal government and the Nepali state tend to perpetuate exclusionary geographies of access to water and Indigenous livelihoods in the waterscapes. The national and international scales, at times, violently constrict local-scale Indigenous spaces. But the oppositional symbolic and material practices, of both the Diné and the Musahar, destabilize the dominant ontologies on local waterscapes. This paper demonstrates that across vast distances of history, geography and wealth, indigeneity does not just get repressed or occluded by the dominant state but is instead constantly reimagined and re-enacted in creative ways by the Indigenous People themselves.