Rescaling water governance - Governing Transboundary Waters: Canada, the United States, and Indigenous Communities - page 100

particularly those within the IJC - that federal involvement in the watershed council
helps to create a transborder watershed community by providing infrastructure and
increased capacity to work at an international scale. Conversely, others suggest that
the federal involvement may actually subvert attempts to create a regional watershed
identity by reifying or “hardening” borders by their presence.
Whether the creation (and support) of a binational watershed council fosters a
new (borderless) geographic imagination for the council members or, more broadly,
“softens the border” to the wider watershed community is unknown. Although
it may be too early to predict the impacts of the IJC International Watersheds
Initiative on the transboundary watershed communities, reflecting on the previous
case studies may offer some insight.
Social construction of hydrological borders?
An essential consideration of the possibilities of “softening” or “blurring” the nation-
state borders is the actors' drive for coordination. This follows the earlier discussion
that political borders are not passive, unproblematic backdrops that neatly bound
national identities and peoples (Paasi, 1999; Anderson, 1996; Newman, 2006).
Rather, viewing contemporary political borders as active sites provides great insight
into political processes and power relations and helps open up wider questions
regarding identity, citizenship, and nationalism (Anderson, 1996; Fall, 2005).
For the Coast Salish communities discussed in Chapters 5 and 6, the Great Lakes
Ojibwa communities discussed in Chapter 7, and the Yukon River Inter-Tribal
Council discussed in Chapter 3, the drive for (transborder) coordination runs
deep. I argue that enactment of the Coast Salish Gathering and the Yukon River
Inter-Tribal Council serve as counter-narratives to bordered geographies by
emphasizing the connectedness of the Indigenous communities rather than reifying
divisions through entrenched national identities. Not only are the Council members
compelled to address growing environmental issues facing their community, they
also attempt to reconnect a cultural continuum that spans and pre-dates the
Canada-U.S. border. Creating a fully-functioning (transboundary) governance
structure that helps rectify a degraded physical environment will, in turn, help
preserve a traditional way of life, not only in terms of stewardship of marine
ecosystems, but by re-establishing - and celebrating - the cultural connections of
their communities. Here, the Councils' establishment not only serve as instruments
to foster binational exchange of information, but also as a way to reconnect with
ancestors and families. Thus, creating a binational governance structure is part of
a wider goal of reconnecting communities and traditions. Because of the depth of
this project (historically, culturally, politically), the efforts put forth by Councils
to treat the transboundary watersheds as a unified political-cultural space may likely
contribute to a wide acceptance of the “blurred” borders in the geographic imagin-
ations of its supporters.
For the IJC's International Watersheds Initiative, the drive to cooperate at a
binational level, will likely be region-dependent. Even where the IJC establishes