Introduction: Indigenous peoples and the politics of water

Abstract

In recent history, we have seen water assume a distinct and prominent role in Indigenous political formations. Indigenous peoples around the world are increasingly forced to formulate innovative and powerful responses to the contamination, exploitation, and theft of water, even as our efforts are silenced or dismissed by genocidal schemes reproduced through legal, corporate, state, and academic means. The articles in this issue offer multiple perspectives on these pressing issues. They contend that struggles over water figure centrally in concerns about self-determination, sovereignty, nationhood, autonomy, resistance, survival, and futurity. Together, they offer us a language to challenge and resist the violence enacted through and against water, as well as a way to envision and build alternative futures where water is protected and liberated from enclosures imposed by settler colonialism, capitalism, and heteropatriarchy.

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