Settler Colonialism and Rural Environmental Injustice: Water Inequality on the Navajo Nation*

Abstract

Environmental justice research highlights the distinct processes generating environmental problems in rural places. Rural communities of color suffer the dual disadvantage of spatial and racial marginalization, yet we know little about the role of race and racism within rural environmental inequality formation. This study draws on theories of settler colonialism and rural environmental justice to investigate the historical formation of water inequality in the American Southwest. In 1962, Congress authorized two water projects to divide the San Juan River between the Navajo Nation and New Mexico. The Navajo Indian Irrigation project (NIIP) would develop family farms on the Navajo Nation, while the San Juan-Chama Project (SJCP) diverted water into the Rio Grande Basin for urban use. While New Mexico's project was completed ahead of schedule in 1973, the NIIP has yet to be finished today, almost six decades later. Using archival material, government documents, and secondary accounts, this study examines racial meanings in the years leading up to NIIP approval. Findings reveal that settler officials used the NIIP as a mechanism to appropriate Native resources. I show how racial projects within NIIP negotiations contributed to colonial domination by diminishing the political sovereignty of the Navajo Nation.

Translating food sovereignty: cultivating justice in an age of transnational governance Translating food sovereignty: cultivating justice in an age of transnational governance , by Matthew C. Canfield, Palo Alto, Stanford University Press, 2022, 280 pp., US$26.00, ISBN: 978-1503631304

“…Translating food sovereignty: cultivating justice in an age of transnational governance, by Matthew C. Canfield, Palo Alto, Stanford University Press, 2022, 280 pp., US$26.00, ISBN: 978-1503631304 In my experience, through personal encounters with Indigenous communities in the USA, it is striking how harvests of indigenous crops have become ever-more difficult to maintain due to climate warming and lack of water access, a trend confirmed by Bray (2021). It is also clear how health problems associated with the unavailability and/or unaffordability of nutrition have put a massive strain on these communities' already limited health and other social services.…”

An agenda for Australian rural sociology: Troubling the white middle-class farming woman

“…Australian rural social research is not produced in isolation. It is part of a much larger body of rural scholarship in which class has fallen off the agenda (Bryant and Pini, 2009; Phillips, 2016) and racial inequality is eschewed (Bray, 2020; Panelli et al, 2009). What is of concern to this article, however, is that the white settler woman, as the normative feminine subject position in Australian rural studies, is germane to Moreton-Robinson’s (2020a: viii) critique of the centrality of the ‘white middle-class woman’ constituted by and of colonialism, as enunciated in her authoritative work, Talkin’ Up to the White Woman .…”

Dams and tribal land loss in the United States

“…Land dispossession is a foundation of settler colonialism, the process by which the societies, economies, and relationships to the land and water of Native Nations 4 are replaced by those of settlers and their descendants [6,7]. Land has always been central to Indigenous lifeways, and its dispossession has threatened health and well-being by displacing tribes from their traditional homelands and/or eroding the quantity and quality of land and water over which they have sovereignty [4,8,9]. Land loss has severed ties to family, community, culture, and ancestors; disrupted relations with the natural world; undermined food and water security; and deprived tribes of the resources with which to lead healthy lives, pursue economic activities, and generate wealth [8,10,11].…”