What boundary? What whale? Whose responsibility? - Governing Transboundary Waters: Canada, the United States, and Indigenous Communities - page 167

Analyzing the discourses created around Luna sheds light on the complex power
dynamics and value systems embedded in the bounding of space and the ideologies
associated with transboundary governance practices. Thus, in this chapter, I explore
the following interrelated questions:

• How are managers - who are fixed to national standards, protocols, and rules

- able to transcend bounded spaces? Relatedly, how possible is it for resource
managers to transcend boundaries of human-animal transmogrification?

• Who holds the power to decide what, and whose, interpretation of the natural

world should be taken up as policy?

• Ultimately, whose perspective is naturalized and privileged as the “rightful”

voice, which translates to the “rightful place”?

In grappling with these questions, I argue that greater attention to power dynamics
and embedded belief systems is essential - and often undervalued - in current
environmental management practices and decision-making processes.
To help tease out power dynamics in belief systems, scholars such as Whatmore
(2002) suggest viewing “nature” and “society” as a hybrid relationship. That is,
the relationship is reflexive, with each mutually constituting the other and influ-
encing each other at different times and spaces. Other scholars take this a step
further and try to move away from an anthropocentric framing, by inserting a
“posthumanist” perspective into the concept of hybridity (see Haraway, 2008; Lulka,
2009; Sundberg, 2011; Collard, 2012). For example, Lulka (2009, p. 378) proposes
a “thick hybridity” which commonly occurs outside the “direct purview of
society”. Lulka suggests that, rather than reifying nature, thick hybridity provides
an impetus for people to embrace this uncertainty. Similarly, Collard (2012)
explores this hybrid relationship between nature and society by discussing “the
entanglements” between animal and human, while Haraway (2008) calls the
relationship “queer messmates”.
This chapter contributes to these discussions through the intriguing, and complex
case of a juvenile whale that was simultaneously “lost” and “found” and between
multiple borders. This fleshy being - who meant many different things to differ-
ent people - provides an opportunity to think critically about how worldviews
are ascribed onto and built into management practices. This case complicates issues
around transboundary water governance management by providing an opportunity
to explore how concepts of hybridity materialize and interface with management
practices.
To help in this analysis, I engage in three sets of geographic literature: border
studies, animal geographies, and Indigenous studies. Bringing these literature sets
into conversation with each other helps to untangle belief systems (and power
systems) that are often implicit within governance systems, particularly when these
systems transcend multiple borders.
Engaging with this literature also affords a widening interpretation of “borders”
from jurisdictional (managing units) to include forms of being (i.e. animal-human
transmogrification) and epistemological. As such, this chapter contributes to the