Storytelling Water - Collaborative Water Research with Carcross/Tagish First Nation, Yukon Territory, Canada
This PhD collaborative research is about water. Not bottled water or the chemical formula H2O, but water understood and celebrated within the Tlingit language and culture. By extension it is also a commentary on the dominant vision of water that is both gendered and narrow and now naturalised within global water governance rhetoric. How might a Tlingit relationship with water act as both a counterpoint to this water rhetoric as well as a site of resilience to essentialised readings of water, something that I call “slow activism”? Who gives voice to water in the context of water management and based on which sets of assumptions? Lastly, how do the framings, possession and control of water and its circulations - that flow in and out of bodies and social spaces – undermine or promote particular worldviews? These questions are gaining new and urgent momentum in this epoch of the Anthropocene and the associated choreography and politics of climate change. In the circumpolar north where global warming is providing a welcome catalyst for nations hungry for ‘untapped resources’ these questions are of unprecedented urgency (Fox, 2014).
I propose that a Tlingit worldview has been rendered invisible or excluded from the conversation for various historical and colonial reasons. In the light of the ecological crisis the planet currently faces there are urgent calls for ‘revolution of the mind’, a ‘new consciousness’, a ‘paradigm shift’ and a ‘reconfiguration of western thought’. Eco-critic Heather Sullivan suggests ‘We must expand our spectrum of ideas about agency and our intra-actions with the world and matter around us. Seeing the multi-verse, multi-cultures: these are essential components for this process (or perhaps our best hope)’. I agree. A Tlingit voice has a dialogue with the world on terms that refigures the dominant vision of bodies, flows, fluidity and circulation through its rich and ancient oral tradition in the form of narrative, accounts, oratory and songs.
Deep Geography, Deep Mapping, Deep Imagination, Deep Waters
Tlingit spatial water narratives as alternative baseline readings to the mono-cultural water imaginary:
I organised a Deep Mapping expedition with the Carcross Tagish First Nation on the southern yukon lakes this August/September 2014 as a core element of this PhD. At the intersection of science and storytelling, the proposed Deep Map has its roots in qualitative and quantitative analysis.
Geo-spatial technologies such as remote sensing and Geographical Information Systems (GIS) are rapidly transforming the way the world is monitored, perceived and how cartographic (mapping) practices are conducted. Apart from displaying cartographic or image data, professional GIS provides ever-growing functionality to utilize geo-spatial information for many operational applications of relevance and benefit to modern society. Due to free access and easy practicality, simpler geo-software tools such as Google Maps® and Google Earth® disseminated rapidly to broad public attention and use. GIS is a technological product of a positivist vision of the world. It supports a modernist thinking about spatial information, governed by a quest for transferring precise, measurable, abstract data into mapped, geocoded information. However, it currently doesn’t allow for a more complex understanding of the experiential aspects of the world that includes emotions, values, poetics, and the visible and invisible aspects of the spirit of place(s). In other words it largely fails to consider these alternative forms of knowledge, consequently remains incomplete and doesn’t make use of its full potential.
Participatory GIS (PGIS) goes some way to enhance these limits currently embedded in GIS. At its core, PGIS practice is ‘geared towards community empowerment through measured, demand-driven, user-friendly and integrated applications of geo-spatial technologies. GIS-based maps and spatial analysis become major conduits in the process. A good PGIS practice is embedded into long-lasting spatial decision-making processes, is flexible, adapts to different socio-cultural and bio-physical environments, depends on multidisciplinary facilitation and skills and builds essentially on visual language.’ By so doing it endeavours to include a strong capacity building dimension in its application and is strongly linked to applied qualitative research tools that include for example participatory action research (PPGIS.net).
Deep mapping’ or ‘deep maps’ responds to the recognition that ‘paradigmatic’ knowledge based in scientific thought has been privileged to the detriment of ‘narrative’ knowing located in the construction of experience through narrative (Leonard, 2008). Deep mapping is a form of counter-mapping, or reclaiming the map and the practice of mapping itself. Deep mapping utilises new geo-spatial technologies and associated media to weave together multiple narratives in an attempt to capture experiential/emotional/sensual/metaphorical space. More precisely and drawing on emerging work in this field (Trevor Harris, 2012, 2013, 2014; David Bodenhamer, 2012, 2013) deep mapping is framed as an open-ended conversation, subject to negotiation. It uses multi‐media and multi-layers to allow for these multiple narratives.
Simply put, there is a stark contrast between working from ‘inside’ a landscape (the experiential-based approaches) to working from an abstracted ‘outside’ experience of landscape, (such as those gained from maps, aerial photographs or computer-based approaches) (Gillings, 2012). Drawing from interdisciplinary fields such as indigenous philosophy, psychoanalysis, anthropology and deep geography, deep mapping utilises a ‘metaphoric attitude’, where the dominant and now standardised binaries of truth and fiction, sacred and profane, individual and collective are challenged. ‘Metaphor is about bridges – connecting the conscious and unconscious, the abstract with the concrete. Metaphor can link ‘paradigmatic’ and ‘narrative’ ways of knowing. It is an expansive and inclusive way of knowing, making meaning by connection and not differentiation’(Siegleman, 1990 in Leonard, 2008). Deep mapping is therefore a dynamic exploration of spatial narratives whose deepest signature is fluidity, circulation and flow.
With an emphasis on fluidity and flow, deep mapping is particular competent to chart deep hydrological (quality, flow, depth, composition, pollution) characteristics, mythical, experiential and metaphorical relationships with water. Deep mapping combines highly structured, mathematically precise cartographic exercises with more subjective and discursive mapping methods (Gregory-Guider, 2005). It is a key approach and method to an exploration of the rich, layered ‘aqua-faces’ of the southern lakes region through an inland Tlingit/Tagish cosmology. Ultimately an evolving goal of deep mapping is to show how the innovative and critical use of spatial technologies (GIS) can serve to generate and nurture new ways of exploring the sensory and perceptual qualities of waterscapes/landscapes (past and present).
‘Deep Mapping’ (taking the pulse of) the headwaters of the Yukon River with Carcross/Tagish First Nation
“When our ancient people talked about water, what the western world calls H20, they would say Haa daséigu a tóo yéi yatee: Our Life is in the water [...] Our breath is in the water” (Tlingit Elder, David Katzeek/Kingeisti)
“A dark fluidity at the roots of our nature rebels against the security of terra firma...” (Nick Land, 1992)
“Terracentrism” refers to the bias of modern thought that thinks in terms of land based rather than water based histories. As a highly sustainable alternative to this imaginary, indigenous water/ice oral histories of the circumpolar north - water histories rooted in storytelling - offer critical and deeply significant approaches to understandings of and relationships with water.
In the Tlingit language, water is héen. Héen is a fundamental tenet in Tlingit cosmology and a highly resilient counter-story to gendered, narrow and essentialised readings of ‘modern’ water. In this epoch of the Anthropocene and the associated choreography and politics of climate change, a Tlingit voice deepens and enriches global debates on relationships with water through the lenses of water ethics, water management, and water governance.
Deep Mapping is in its infancy, but has the potential, informed by Participatory Geographical Information Systems (PGIS), to create a remarkable space for seemingly incommensurable water knowledges to be articulated. This space is seductive. It promises fluidity where there are no sharp divisions between imaginative, theoretical and empirical discourses but rather a space characterised by ferality – a shapeshifting, fluid, feral space. Deep mapping further invites a re-evaluation of the complexity of geo-cultural entanglements – in this particular instance, a Tlingit indigenous relationship with water and water bodies at the headwaters of the Yukon River. It is therefore at the core of geophilosophy’s agenda to re-interrogate (and perhaps re-imagine) the relationship between philosophy, consciousness and the earth (Harlan Morehouse, 2013).
The primary method was a ten day ‘deep water mapping’ expedition in August 2014. Supported by the Yukon River Inter-Tribal Watershed Council and the CTFN government Land Use Team the expedition captured a quantitative water signature with analysis of water pH, temperature, dissolved oxygen, dissolved nutrients and conductivity as well as flow meter measurements at established lake monitoring sites. This was back-grounded with remote sensing USGS Landsat thermal imagery maps for lake surface temperature, bathymetric charts and lake level data. Qualitative readings of the southern lakes with CTFN community wove together palimpsests that included but were not limited to CTFN oral histories and traditional ecological knowledge, Tlingit/Tagish place names, storytelling, interviews with Elders, photography and documentary narratives. Showcased on a Google Earth platform, these aqua-faces of the southern Yukon lakes are emerging more like verbs than nouns and more process than product. Something I have begun to understand and call ‘narrative ecologies’.
This PhD project therefore traces, tracks and takes the pulse of the inter-penetrating qualitative expressions and quantitative signatures of CTFN’s traditional territorial waters. This collaborative water research with the inland Tlingit/Tagish and self-governing Carcross/Tagish First Nation (CTFN), is to provide a framework to develop legislation for a living CTFN Water Act rooted in Tlingit indigenous philosophy. This would set a precedent in Canadian law making. Potentially to be worked on by CTFN selected lawyers to make it congruent with Canadian Water Law.