Decolonising Waters: Asian-Indigenous Collaborative Hydropolitics

What does it mean for migrants to inhabit land and drink water that are haunted by colonial ghosts? Despite shared marginalization in relation to whiteness, diasporic and indigenous people register different political and ecological engagements, with migrants often presumed to be inheritors of the capitalist property system dispossessing indigenous worldviews. This paper takes a decolonial approach to recent diasporic writing that interrogates migrant complicity in colonial norms to undermine settler-capitalist resource imaginaries. Indian North American writer Kazim Ali’s memoir Northern Light (2021) presents an attempt at Asian-indigenous collaborative water ecology. Ali couples an immigrant’s quest for place with reflection on his family’s involvement in a hydroelectric dam on the Nelson River that has incurred much deluge and displacement to water ecosystems and Cross Lake Crees in Canada. Interweaving cultural memories with water’s eco-materiality, the book can be seen as remapping terrestrial categories of land, place, and belonging with watery relations of fluidity, remembering, and community in order to counteract colonial hydropower and amnesia. Migrant literature like Ali’s, I suggest, pinpoints the importance of materialist and embedded knowledge to cross-racial environmentalism and decolonial modes of learning with.