“We are the ones that we are waiting for” - Governing Transboundary Waters: Canada, the United States, and Indigenous Communities - page 130

Discussion and conclusion
This chapter has explored the politics of scale of water governance in a post-
colonial context through the analysis of the Coast Salish Gatherings. In this chapter,
I explore how collective rights (treaty and Indigenous) are being “scaled up” from
individual “tribe” or “band” to “Nation”. This rescaling, I suggest, contributes to
the nascent discussions of politics of scale within water governance and comple-
ments other critical scholarship (see, for example, Cohen and McCarthy, 2014;
Norman et al. , 2015). In addition, the chapter responds to a call from political
geographers and borders scholars to look more closely at how power is mobilized
at the site of the border (Paasi, 2002, 2009; Agnew, 2007, 2010; Popescu, 2012).
I argue that including cultural politics in the investigations of borders, environmental
governance, and scale provides greater nuance to understanding water as a socio-
natural hybrid. This call for greater inclusion of cultural politics in transboundary
governance, contributing to earlier insights put forth by critical scholars Don
Mitchell (2000) and Kay Anderson (2007). Applying these insights to the context
of Indigenous water governance provides an important contribution to these
earlier discussions.
This chapter is noteworthy given that the governance structure of the Coast
Salish Gathering presents an apparent contradiction: it is both transnational (as it
spans the Canada-U.S. border) and national (as it represents a singular Coast Salish
Nation). The establishment of the Gatherings thereby serves as a counter-narrative
to a bordered geography by emphasizing the connectedness of their communities,
rather than the differences in national identities. The efforts to employ strategic
essentialism and counter-mapping at the Coast Salish Gatherings are in line with
other documented efforts within political geography to construct or reconstruct
scale that is meaningful to the user (Harris and Hazen, 2006; Cohen and Harris,
2014).
There is a growing movement within Indigenous communities to reclaim
traditional governance processes. As John Waterhouse, director of the Yukon River
Inter-Tribal Watershed Council, who was also participating at the Jamestown
Gathering, aptly noted, “We are the ones that we are waiting for”. This chapter
provides a starting point to evaluate larger issues of efficacy and power in tribal
reorganization across State boundaries. Further research, however, is needed to
continue evaluation of these efforts. Overall, these examples show how the
aggregation of historically connected tribes and bands for the shared benefit of
environmental protection and cultural reunification is a first step in reclaiming space
and reconstructing traditional governance mechanisms.
This chapter marks a deliberate effort to include the cultural politics of the border
in the investigations of transboundary environmental governance. I suggest that
investigating how the administrative structures and physical boundaries of water
governance are both socially constructed and politically mobilized provides for a
more nuanced approach to discussions of transboundary environmental governance.
This approach may also be useful for other studies engaging in issues related to
borders, scale, and natural resource governance, particularly flow resources such