Short abstract

This paper explores the application of Elder Albert Marshall's concept of 'two eyed seeing' as a strategy for navigating decolonial gestures in knowledge politics, with a focus on different aspects of 'waste' relating to water (as a resource) and different forms of knowledge.

Long abstract

Drought and data centre construction have refocused attention on the politics of water in ways that highlight the potential and complexity of decolonial knowledge practices such as ‘Two Eyed Seeing’ or Etuaptmumk (Reid et al, 2021). This knowledge heuristic highlights the importance of rendering indigenous and non-indigenous knowings and beings epistemically equivalent. Water politics and knowledge politics illustrate and challenge these approaches. In a paradigm shaped by colonial ideas of water as a resource, water becomes recast as scarce, valuable and a site of struggle - including around data centre construction . At the same time, other 'ways of seeing' position rivers as living, rights-bearing entities and floods as necessary and natural phenomena.

Not 'wasting' water provides a lever for opponents of data centres, but also evokes a longer colonial history. The prevention of waste casts water as a resource and parsimony as a core value, evident in flood prevention schemes that seek to capture water while also reducing risk. This singular view can also therefore 'waste' the embodied understanding of how to live with and among floods. At the same time, seeking to always include marginalised knowledge can fail to account for politics of silence and restraint that are also part of indigenous knowledge practice, challenging colonial conceptions of waste.

This talk explores conceptions of waste and knowledge through stories of two rivers in the dry plains of North America, the Red River of the North and the Old Man River.