Indigenous Water Ethics

The water ethics of Indigenous Peoples carry particular weight in considering how ethics motivate water policies and practices. In a very real moral sense, we (the non-indigenous world) owe something to the Indigenous Peoples whose cultures have vanished, and to the Indigenous Peoples whose people and cultures are still here, still functioning, and in many but not all cases, still vibrant. What we owe them was hinted at in the World Commission on Dams report which called for “Requiring the free, prior and informed consent of indigenous and tribal peoples [because this] empowers them at the negotiating table” (WCD 2000:216). Indigenous Peoples are especially liable to be pressured into accepting terms whose implications they do not understand, because of the cultural gulf separating their world from ours. This special consideration in helping indigenous communities understand,

for example, what it will mean if the dam is constructed, and then respecting their right to decide “Yes” or “No” is part of what we “owe” them, but that is only the first step. The second step of what is gradually evolving as an expectation of good practice, is not only helping them understand us and our water policies, but accepting a reciprocal responsibility to learn their views about water, their water ethics. Chief Justice Lance S.G. Finch of the British Columbia Court of Appeal calls this “the duty to learn” (Finch 2012).1 “How can we make space within the legal landscape for Indigenous legal orders? The answer depends, at least in part, on an inversion of the question: a crucial part of this process must be to find space for ourselves, as strangers and newcomers, within the Indigenous legal orders themselves.” It is in this sense that we have an obligation, a duty, to learn how Indigenous Peoples view water and water ecosystems. In order to understand how water policies can support the cultural ethics of Indigenous Peoples, we need to have some understanding of what those ethical principles might be. Indigenous Peoples have much to teach us about water ethics, not only

because they still retain much of their traditional ecological knowledge, though this is extremely important (Suzuki and Knudtson 1992). The other reason that we have so much to learn from the experience and cultures of Indigenous Peoples stems from their position vis-à-vis the dominant societies that define their cultural boundaries. As minority cultures, Indigenous

Peoples are only too aware of their cultural differences, continuously reminded of the role that their cultural and spiritual assumptions, beliefs, values, and ethics play in their perception of and decisions about the natural world, including water. By trying to understand what life looks and feels like to Indigenous Peoples, we can learn something about what it means to bring ethics into the realm of conscious choice. Indigenous Peoples do this on a daily basis. The clash of cultural values can be seen very readily in choices about the

physical design of water systems. In the Mahaweli irrigation project in Sri Lanka, a state-of-the-art USAID-funded main canal was designed with steeply sloped concrete sides, making impossible customary uses such as bathing, laundry, or watering domestic animals. In the Bali Irrigation Improvement Project in Indonesia, funded by the Asian Development Bank, “improvements” were proposed to the traditional notched logs that divide the flow of a small canal into several smaller field channels, with the amount of water in each channel proportional to the size of the area to be irrigated. The project design called for concrete “junction boxes” with the larger canal going in and several small channels coming out. Either system could perform the physical task of dividing a single larger flow into calibrated smaller flows, but the easy transparency of the traditional Balinese solution also provided a way for farmers to visually monitor the proper functioning of the water division (Horst 1996). Both these examples raise a question that is so fundamental to an irriga-

tion project that it is too rarely asked: What is an irrigation canal? Is it a large open channel engineered for optimally conveying water from here to there? Or is it designed to provide a myriad of water benefits to the people living along its path, as well as conveying water to the network of smaller canals downstream? And what is a division structure? Is it a way to divide the flow from the larger canal into specific amounts of flow into two or more smaller canals? Or is it also a way of supporting farmers’ organizational capacities through setting and monitoring which farmers will receive what proportion of the flow? In Bali the division structures also have a spiritual purpose; farmers perform pujas at the division weir for the spirits that protect the water and the crops (Lansing 1996). The water management functions of conveying the irrigation water in canals, and dividing it into the agreed-upon shares for different fields, are expressions of cultural categories or “frames” which signal information about what kind of activity is going on. Is it economic business (the canal as conveyor or water) or domestic business (the canal as supplier of household water and washing) or spiritual business (the canal as a pathway for the water goddess to move into the fields)? For indigenous cultures, the irrigation canal connotes all these meanings

and perhaps more. The meta-frame, the big picture concept, is one of relationship. As humans, we are related to, and have responsibilities for, the water that has been diverted from the river and is flowing to our fields. The

water, in turn, and the spirits of the river and of the canal water, have responsibilities to us, and to the young plants in the fields that the water is on its way to nourish. In traditional indigenous worldviews (as well as in the Western science of ecology!) the world is interconnected; it is not divided into the silos of river management, irrigation management, and agricultural management, or even into the silos of agriculture and religion. The water ethics that we can learn from, that offer a different “take” on

our relationship to the natural world, are found within the normative cultures of Indigenous Peoples everywhere. This is not to deny that individual indigenous persons and even tribal governments (in the United States context) may subscribe to the same values as Western economists. We will discuss, below, the case of the Hopi tribal government’s contract with Peabody Coal to strip-mine sacred tribal lands and impact sacred and scarce water supplies. But the actions of a tribal government do not necessarily represent the views of the tribal members. Indeed, the internal tribal opposition to the position of the tribal government can be seen as evidence that traditional cultural values are still very much alive (Groenfeldt 2006b). The reason that the normative Indigenous cultural worldviews are so

important to a discussion of water ethics is that they bring a different “frame” to the question of “What is water?” Western science concluded long ago that we already know what water is; it is an inert mineral resource which provides a range of benefits which we are busy managing and governing according to a well-worked-out frame of Integrated Water Resources Management! But that is not how most (and perhaps all) indigenous cultures view water. Water, to the indigenous world, is alive and conscious. And even more than being alive, water is part of our extended family of “all our relations.”