ABSTRACT
This chapter presents the concept of “fringe natures” as an alternative to settler colonial land/water imaginaries. It is anchored in the story of Semá:th X_ó:tsa, the Sto:lo name for a water body of great seasonal variation, in the Fraser Valley of BC, Canada. While a century of colonial rule transformed it into an ostensibly controlled agricultural prairie, catastrophic flooding in November 2021 brought the return of Semá:th X_ó:tsa in its lake form. The first section of this chapter describes these transformations and argues for an understanding of settler colonialism as itself a mode of water governance. The second section outlines an anticolonial, feminist-queer-trans theoretical framework that can offer an alternative land/water imaginary. This begins with a hydrofeminist understanding of bodies of water as porous and changeable, then augments this with queer trans ecological theories that propose water bodies as curious about boundaries, rather than rigidly opposed to them. Through this feminist-queer-trans imaginary, the chapter proposes an understanding of water bodies like Semá:th X_ó:tsa as “fringe natures.” In a time of increasing climate instability, “fringe natures” are figured as part of an expanded littoral zone, where anticolonial, feminist, and queer-trans modes of watery being might flourish.
