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Karuk Tribe Aboriginal Territory.
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The watershed has long captured political and scientific imaginations and served as a primary sociospatial unit of water governance and ecosystem restoration. However, uncritically deploying watersheds for
collaborative environmental governance in indigenous territories may inappropriately frame sociocultural,
political-economic, and ecological pro...
Citations
... Ecocultural heritage refers to the biodiversity formed or influenced by human cultural activities within a specific geographic area, along with related cultural expressions and practices [20]. This concept emphasizes the interactive relationship between ecology and culture, revealing the profound connection between natural environments and human cultures [21][22][23]. Strategies for safeguarding ecocultural heritage combine traditional biodiversity conservation-such as species preservation and ecological management-with the protection of cultural heritages, including traditional knowledge, customs, and historical artifacts. By adopting such a comprehensive protection strategy, the sustainability of ecocultural heritage is enhanced, promoting synergy between nature conservation and cultural preservation. ...
This study deeply analyzes the ecocultural heritage of the Tiantai Mountain area in Eastern China, assesses its current status and explores effective mechanisms for its conservation and construction. Employing remote sensing technology, kernel density analysis and Minimum Cumulative Resistance Model, the study comprehensively evaluated the environmental characteristics of the region and its role in historical and modern conservation efforts. The results demonstrate the unique distribution patterns of ecocultural heritage in various conservation zones, such as restoration, controlled construction and core conservation zone. Furthermore, the study highlights the importance of religious beliefs and clan systems in the preservation of traditional knowledge and practices, with significant impacts of local community participation on conservation strategies. This research provides new theoretical and practical support for the implemention of ecocultural heritage conservation and development within religiously significant areas, highlights the need for conservation measures and synergistic strategies between ecological and cultural practices.
... Their efforts disrupt the USFS paradigm that focuses on fuels reduction and revenue by emphasizing continuous relationships and responsibilities at a local scale. Tending basket plants with fire involves disinvestment from settler colonial organization of space, such as logging roads and private property lines, and joins other efforts such as the Indigenous Peoples Burning Network in "democratizing scale" in fire governance (Cardozo 2005, Sarna-Wojcicki et al. 2019: 257, Lincoln-Cook 2018, Marks-Block and Tripp 2021. These efforts meet natural resource management needs without marginalizing Indigenous ways of knowing and anticipate a future where California Indians have control of land tenure and fire governance such that the full ecological, cultural, and spiritual purposes of burning are met (Adlam et al. 2021). ...
Emerging theories of Indigenous environmental justice reframe environmental problems and solutions using Indigenous onto-epistemologies, emphasizing the agency of non-human relations and influence of colonialism. The California Indian Basketweavers’ Association (CIBA) embodies this paradigm in its work to expand access to gathering areas, revitalize cultural burning, and stop pesticide use. Through our different positionalities as CIBA members, California Indian basketweavers, and researchers, we construct a case study of Indigenous environmental justice that articulates environmental stewardship as intrinsically linked with cultural and spiritual practice. Through education, information sharing, relationship building, lobbying, and collective action among its membership and land management agencies, CIBA has expanded basketweavers’ access to safe and successful gathering. By sustaining millennia of tradition, CIBA builds Indigenous sovereignty and shifts California’s land management paradigm toward environmental justice and global survival.
... In this sense, spatial and temporal dynamics animate shifting geographies and processes of territorialisation and de-territorialisation . This political ecology perspective has allowed water governance research to explore the making and unmaking of otherwise taken-for-granted scales and levels -be they the river basin or the nation state (Harris and Alatout, 2010;Sarna-Wojcicki et al., 2019;Swyngedouw, 2007;Vogel, 2012). As Section 3 discussed, inherent to these scalar processes is the furthering or marginalisation of different interests, often in relation to capitalist processes of accumulation, dispossession, and environmental harm or destruction. ...
Water governance research is confronted with a messy world that is difficult to make sense of. Mainstream policy approaches tend to simplify and standardise this messiness in ways that obscure complexity, power and politics. As a result, these approaches not only promise more than they can deliver but often end up reproducing unequal and iniquitous governance dynamics. A wealth of critical scholarship has attempted to address these limitations but with little impact. This review takes this dilemma as its central concern. The aim is to understand different ways that water governance scholarship has engaged with the messiness of the world, laying the groundwork for more fruitful dialogue with mainstream approaches. Firstly, the article recounts policy attempts to 'mainstream messiness' at the level of discourse. It notes salient features of these discourses, including integration, combination, and participation. Three sections follow that concern themselves with ways that critical water governance research has engaged with messiness. The first is messiness as 'scalar complexity'. A distinction is made between research that assumes that scales are fixed and pre-given and literature examining the politics and performativity of scale. Next, the review focuses on 'institutional diversity' and strands of literature that do a different job of articulating messy water governance arrangements, including neo-institutionalism, legal pluralism, and critical institutionalism. The third way of engaging with messiness is through the 'multiple meanings and practices' of water users and governance actors. The strands of literature reviewed are culture, values, and beliefs; narratives and discourse; and water ontologies. The penultimate section of the article proposes three broad interdisciplinary approaches that attempt to manage messiness by bringing together scalar complexity, institutional diversity, and multiple meanings and practices. The article concludes by revisiting the dilemma noted above: the failure of much critical water governance research to influence mainstream policy and practice.
... The media branded it a "water war" of "fish vs. farmers". Subsequently, the federal government stopped withholding water from agriculture, resulting in record-high fish kills, costing fishers >$80 million and threatening indigenous cultural continuity and food security (Chaffin et al., 2014;Sarna-Wojcicki et al., 2019). ...
... In 2006, Klamath dam licenses expired and protests from indigenous and environmental groups led the operating company to launch a collaborative process to negotiate conflicting values and decide the river's future (Sarna-Wojcicki et al., 2019). More than 140 stakeholder groups participated to produce the Klamath Basin Restoration Agreement, which includes the removal of some dams and maintenance of higher water levels to satisfy multiple stakeholders' needs and values (Biondini, 2017). ...
... It spans two states, five Indian reservations and the Yurok and Taruk tribal nations, hosts productive spawning grounds for threatened Pacific salmon and is one of the most biodiverse regions in western North America(Mucioki et al., 2021). There are indigenous communities that depend on water from Klamath: the Hoopa, Yurok, and Karuk Tribes, Quartz Valley Indian Reservation, Resighini Rancheria, Shasta Indian Nation and the Klamath Tribes(Sarna-Wojcicki et al., 2019). ...
... Such scholarship provides clear evidence of why freshwater management should not be solely framed through the gaze of scientific knowledge and modernising development. Yet, freshwater management scholars, decision-makers, and practitioners remain far too often situated within the universalising lens of Western ontologies (premised on water/land as property, materialism, individualism, anthropocentrism), wherein matters of water pollution, river management, flooding, and restoration are only situated and assessed through Western ontological and epistemological frameworks Sarna-Wojcicki et al. 2019). In doing so, freshwater governance and management simply become new exercises in colonial modernity (itself the foundation of the multiple ecological crises of the Anthropocene). ...
This book was inadvertently published with incorrect information with reference to The Waikato River Authority on pages 306, 307, 369 and 370. This text has now been revised and updated.
... The governance framework proposed by the Anchor Forest concept involves Tribes and non-Tribal agencies setting priorities together from the beginning. Under most circumstances, the USFS imposes authority and power when making early decisions such as the geographic scale on which a partnership takes place (Sarna-wojcicki et al. 2019). Alternatively, under an Anchor Forest framework, Tribal leadership would guide these decisions from the beginning. ...
In response to the increasing scale of wildfire and forest health challenges in the West, the Intertribal Timber Council, a nonprofit consortium of American Indian Tribes and Alaska Native corporations, proposed creating “Anchor Forests,” where a Tribe would convene neighboring landowners to collectively manage the landscape across property boundaries. This concept has sparked conversation but has not been fully implemented. Amid shifts toward both collaborative decision making and Tribal partnerships on federal forestlands, we asked, “why did the Anchor Forest concept emerge, and what can the field of forest governance learn from its development?” Through qualitative analysis of documents and interviews, we show how Anchor Forests could expand spatial-temporal scales of forest management. We highlight how Tribal leadership could overcome past governance barriers through their sovereign authority and long-term forestry expertise and knowledge. We describe how this concept could function as a tool to enact change within rigid forest-management institutions.
Study Implications
Scholars and practitioners can learn from Anchor Forests as an example of a cross-boundary forest-governance framework that emphasizes long-term investment and relationships to land as exemplified by Tribal forest management. The Anchor Forest concept also provides a structure in which Tribes are leaders and conveners rather than stakeholders or participants. To achieve broad goals of landscape resilience and forest health, governance structures must be deliberately designed to mobilize Tribal knowledge and stewardship practices through uplifting, rather than undermining, Tribal sovereignty. The Anchor Forest concept offers key considerations to serve as a starting place for partnerships to emerge in their own contexts.
... Such scholarship provides clear evidence of why freshwater management should not be solely framed through the gaze of scientific knowledge and modernising development. Yet, freshwater management scholars, decision-makers, and practitioners remain far too often situated within the universalising lens of Western ontologies (premised on water/land as property, materialism, individualism, anthropocentrism), wherein matters of water pollution, river management, flooding, and restoration are only situated and assessed through Western ontological and epistemological frameworks (McLean 2014;Parsons et al. 2019;Sarna-Wojcicki et al. 2019). In doing so, freshwater governance and management simply become new exercises in colonial modernity (itself the foundation of the multiple ecological crises of the Anthropocene). ...
In this concluding chapter, we bring together our earlier analyses of the historical and contemporary waterscapes of the Waipā River (Aotearoa New Zealand) to consider the theory and practice of Indigenous environmental justice. In this chapter, we return to review three key dimensions of environmental justice: distributive, procedural, and recognition. We summarise the efforts of one Māori tribal group (Ngāti Maniapoto) to challenge the knowledge and authority claims of the settler-colonial-state and draw attention to the pluralistic dimensions of Indigenous environmental (in)justice. Furthermore, we highlight that since settler colonialism is not a historic moment but still a ongoing reality for Indigneous peoples living settler societies it is critically important to critically evaluate theorising about and environmental justice movements through a decolonising praxis.
... The conception of the problemshed, which does not start with the assumption that the causes or solutions to problems should be coterminous with watersheds or any other specific scale, provides another alternative (Mollinga et al., 2007;Muller, 2019;Woodhouse and Muller, 2017). In the context of indigenous territories, recent scholarship has proposed alternatives to the watershed scale based on indigenous knowledge and sensitive to culturally specific relationships with land and resources (Sarna-Wojcicki et al., 2019). In short, despite the widespread uptake of the watershed scale, it is not universally accepted as the appropriate local or regional scale for all situations of water quality governance, and there is growing recognition that governance should take place at multiple scales corresponding to different needs and functions (e.g., Muller, 2019). ...
Much recent scholarship has addressed the rise of the watershed as the preferred scale for the governance of water quality. Although the watershed remains widely perceived as an ideal, “natural” scale of freshwater governance, arguments for the merits of alternative scales and multi-scalar approaches are gaining prominence. The Great Lakes Areas of Concern program, managed jointly by the United States and Canada, represents an important case in which the watershed has not prevailed as the default local scale of governance, at least in the 31 Areas of Concern located in the United States or straddling the international border. Based on a review of documents and analysis of a survey and interviews with key actors from local Areas of Concern, we find considerable variation among U.S. states in the designation of Areas of Concern as watersheds and partial watersheds, bank-to-bank watercourse segments, or hybrids of both. This variation depends not only on the differing biophysical conditions at Areas of Concern but also on differences in the latitude that state agencies gave to local stakeholder groups when the geographical extent of each Areas of Concern was designated and negotiated. In several cases, questions about the appropriate scale of the Areas of Concern led to controversy, with implications for subsequent remediation. We contend that understanding the uneven embrace of the watershed as a scale of water governance requires attending not only to specific governance objectives but also to variations in the relationships between local and subnational scales in governance programs.
... However, there are examples where managers and decision makers intentionally incorporated the values of indigenous people into their resource monitoring and management decisions (Donatuto, Grossman, Konovsky, Grossman, & Campbell, 2014;Satterfield, Gregory, Klain, Roberts, & Chan, 2013;Tipa & Teirney, 2006). Yet, further development of tools that assess intangible values or measure the CES associated with plants and animals could help resource managers to take a more inclusive approach (Sarna-Wojcicki et al., 2019). ...
... Revising conservation strategies in the context of dynamic environmental settings invites consideration of cultural expressions in the management of plant and animal resources (Sarna-Wojcicki et al., 2019). In some cases, comanaging culturally important natural resources with AIAN could improve conservation practices and sustainable resource management (Alexander et al., 2011;Lake & Long, 2014;Norgaard, 2005;Norton-Smith et al., 2016;Verschuuren, 2006;Voggesser, Lynn, Daigle, Lake, & Ranco, 2013) or introduce innovative management approaches for culturally significant species (Berkes, 2009;Donatuto et al., 2014;Dudley, Higgins-Zogib, & Mansourian, 2009). ...
Cultural expressions of American Indian and Alaska Natives reflect the relationship between American Indian and Alaska Natives and the plant and animal species present in an area. Different forces that modify that relationship and influence those expressions can potentially shape American Indian and Alaska Natives cultural heritage and even compromise their cultural identity. Herein, we propose seven modalities to illustrate how American Indian and Alaska Natives cultural expressions may respond to changes in environmental settings that alter the relationship between plant and animal assemblages, and Native peoples. Each modality provides insight into the vulnerability, resilience, and adaptive capacity of American Indian and Alaska Natives cultural expressions to changes in environmental settings. Future research may delve deeper into these modalities and help identify appropriate methods for managing culturally important resources. More culturally sensitive management approaches may strengthen conservation practices and safeguard the cultural legacy of indigenous groups.
... Anthropological methods demonstrate how customary cultural formulations of fresh waters' meanings and values have increasingly risen to challenge normative convictions of water governance, most recently in an era of neoliberal economic globalization and resource extraction (Boelens, Getches, & Guerva-Gill, 2010;Hayman, James, Wedge, & Katzeek, 2017;Orlove & Caton, 2010). Ethicists and social geographers point out that fresh waters foreground intersectional issues in ways that both reveal and shape discourses about water justice, as for example when water supply is experienced as a burden for already-vulnerable or dispossessed populations through systems and infrastructures that manifest established hierarchies of power based on race, class, gender, and more (Michigan Civil Rights Commission, 2017;Mitra & Rao, 2019;Ranganathan, 2016;Santa Cruz Declaration, 2014;Sarna-Wojcicki, et al., 2019;Sultana, 2018). The regimes by which waters are valued generate embodied consequences, which are often (and importantly) viewed through justice lenses. ...
In an era increasingly focused on the question of how to value fresh water, this essay argues that questions of value cannot be parsed apart from the multiple ontologies that undergird those value judgments. Returning to Nelson's observation that water exists “in a metaphysical blindspot,” this essay describes what chastened metaphysics have to do with fresh waters' pluralities and depicts three apertures by which contemporary water discourses delineate fresh waters' values: economic theory and neoliberal market practice, paradigms of liberal governance, and cultural‐religious multiplicities. In the latter, fresh waters' life‐giving properties tend to be accorded central respect in ways that often exceed the ontological understandings and moral possibilities preferred by western liberal discourses in an era that has been decisively shaped by scientific, hydraulic/extractive modernity and rational planning. Parsing the ways that selected cultural‐religious formulations align with or challenge dominant governance paradigms, this essay argues that decolonial ways of proceeding are necessary if value discourse and ethical action are to be substantially oriented toward the inclusive, long‐term flourishing of human and other bodies of waters. The final section summarizes these claims and underscores necessary warnings.
This article is categorized under:
• Human Water > Value of Water
• Human Water > Water as Imagined and Represented
• Human Water > Methods
