Paper short abstract:

Emerging water stewardship initiatives forming around the Ottawa River in Canada's National Capital Region are explored in this research. The ways that stewardship of the river is constituted by a collective of the human and non-human is considered with a focus on the worlding capacity of water.

Paper long abstract:

Flowing directly behind the political center of Canada, the Ottawa River is the invaluable source of not only potable water for residents of the National Capital Region, but also aesthetic prestige, industrial sustenance and recreational mediation. Situated within un-ceded Algonquin territory, the river divides two provinces and is governed by multiple political bureaucracies, which all take different institutional approaches to stewarding river. Some say the river is healthier than it once was, but emerging Anthropocene threats to the water like microplastics pollution, neocolonial developments transforming sacred First Nations land and low water levels during record breaking summer heat are inspiring new forms of stewardship. Based on recent fieldwork, this paper describes how localized confluences of people, institutions, technologies and non-human entities are configuring new approaches to water stewardship within the Ottawa River watershed. Beginning from the work of the Ottawa Riverkeeper's Riverwatcher monitoring program, I explore how stewardship of the river is also accomplished by First Nations and allied settler colonial activist resistance to condo development on a section of river deemed as sacred by the Algonquin. These initiatives and others form a human ecology that stewards the river, one which includes non-human actors like web-based technologies and the force of the water itself. I will consider how these emerging confluences of water stewardship practices particular to Canada's national capital are representative of the kinds of Earth Stewardship Anthropocene scholars say is necessary to respond to the rapidly changing water worlds we all live in.