Introduction - Governing Transboundary Waters: Canada, the United States, and Indigenous Communities - page 15

having access to healthcare - something that my host family did not have - made
me acutely aware of asymmetries and power dynamics, even in my weakened state.
Academically, it also made me understand that environmental issues cannot be
separated from health issues - something that carries through my work today. I
saw this on my daily walk into the city. Walking from the rural outskirts into the
heart of the city, I witnessed different forms of poverty along the way. I also saw
this on my trek deep into the Himalayas and my fieldwork in the remote Terai -
where the bucolic poverty, on the surface, looked a lot more palatable than the
poverty I had witnessed in the densely populated Kathmandu.
After Nepal, I was left with more questions than answers. I was also left with
the unshakeable desire to be part of the solution that would address some of the
environmental and social issues that I had just experienced. With this new fire, I
spent my summer volunteering as an adult literacy instructor in inner-city Chicago,
and my free-time in my senior year at Colby College teaching adult literacy in
rural Maine - both experiences bringing the consequences of poverty much closer
to home.
So, when it was time to graduate and many of my friends were applying for
jobs on Wall Street, I applied to the Peace Corps. This experience, not surprisingly,
deepened my interest in equity, justice, and the environment.
I served as a Peace Corps volunteer in Northern Malawi, along the rift valley
of southern Africa. It was my time in Malawi that helped me to start thinking
critically about borders - seeing them as active constructs, rather than passive
delineations. In Africa, the history of border-making is so raw and so clearly linked
to colonial processes and resource extraction, you can't help but think about their
history; that African countries were delineated through processes of colonization,
and that the current geopolitical borders do not follow language groups or clan
groups. Examples of how gifts of land were given to royalty - such as Mt.
Kilimanjaro - seemed unbelievable, but the stories of power were all right there
on the map. The lines on the map, for the first time, started coming to life -
representing stories of power struggles, victims and victors, haves and have-nots,
colonizers and colonized. I witnessed the ongoing struggles related to access to
land and cultural fragmentation in postcolonial Africa.
Working as an educator with the Department of Parks and Wildlife further
entrenched my interests in borders - borders of a different kind. One of the parks
that I worked in, Nyika National Park (which means “where the water comes
from”), straddles the northern border of Malawi and the southern border of
Zambia. I spent many hours walking along the lines of the park - one foot in
Malawi, one in Zambia - seeing zebras, elands, hyenas, and elephants walking
between these geopolitical spaces. This imagery was my first rub with the concept
of “nature knows no boundaries” - a concept that I see now is not entirely true,
thanks to a rich body of geographic literature on the matter (e.g., Fall, 2005; Agnew,
2007; Budds, 2008).
But, coming in and out of the national park, passing through the big arches
welcoming guests into a National Wilderness Area, made me think about issues
of power, privilege, borders, and historical legacies. On one side of the park, it is