Paper short abstract:

Interacting with Water as an entity, resource, and threat produces different interpretations of knowledge globally. Differences between Indigenous and Western ontologies can both hinder and support knowledge production depending on the power structures that control access to and care for such sites.

Paper long abstract:

The materiality of Water in militarized areas such as the fishponds of Hawai’i, the Flint River in Michigan, and other heavily polluted sites of knowledge, leads us to critically engage with how relationships to Water dictate our ontologies. Relationships with Water can affect the way it is viewed causing it to become an entity, resource, or threat. Commodification is one primary way Water is conceptualized: how it can be objectified, used, and fetishized. This understanding of Water is co-produced with settler colonization and empire expansion. These constructions limit what types of knowledge can be produced and how Water is made to be a site of knowledge. Drawing from Applied Anthropology, Ethnic Studies, and Decolonial Science and Technology Studies, we analyze approaches to Water as a site of knowledge from both colonial and Indigenous lenses. Indigenous epistemologies are frequently in direct opposition with Western epistemologies and speak to Oceanic ontological constructions of Water beyond it being a static molecule or site. This presentation will think through Indigenous epistemologies of Water as a mobile site of knowledge and knowledge production. Analysis through the oppositional utilizations of Water via US militarism and tourism to further empire building demonstrate that these two projects are not only inextricably linked but also depend on Water as a site of learning. Anchored through Water, this presentation offers discussions to escape this ontological reaffirming of empire while simultaneously looking towards Indigenous futurities that attempt to respond to pressing questions of ecological catastrophe and colonial violence.