Introduction - Governing Transboundary Waters: Canada, the United States, and Indigenous Communities - page 18

Looking at the mechanisms in place to manage water, I was also surprised to
see how much work, and how much ongoing collaboration, it took to get people
who are part of distinct political systems to work together. This experience, made
me start questioning, how are we to govern resources that span political borders
when our institutions and frameworks are so bound within a nation-state
framework?
This question became central to my dissertation work at the University of British
Columbia, where I continued my work on transborder water governance. For my
research, I set out to understand the wider trends of the rescaling of transnational
water governance along the Canada-U.S. border.
I was surprised to see that the “rise of the local” was often celebrated in
environmental governance literature; and more often than not, participation was
conflated with decision-making capacity. From my previous work relating to local,
transborder groups, such as the Abbotsford-Sumas Aquifer, I had come to know
that these groups were certainly engaged in environmental governance activities,
but I was not convinced that it was linked to increased capacity or decision-making
capability. I was also surprised to see how little discussion was focused on the colonial
histories of the border itself; that the border had different histories according to
your worldview. The border was largely treated as apolitical and ahistorical in much
of the transboundary literature and discussions. So my work sought to bring the
border (and the act of bordering) more to the front of the conversation. This was
particularly salient for the Indigenous communities whose traditional territories
span the international border.
I therefore set out to do a few things with my research: first, to document (and
quantify) the rescaling of water governance mechanisms along the Canada-U.S.
border, through a survey of supranational, national, regional, and local governance
mechanisms over a 100-year period (something I was surprised to see had not been
done before ) 11 a nd second, to look at the social construction of borders and the
impact of colonial constructs (border-making) on transborder water governance,
which was important, particularly - but not solely - in a postcolonial context . 12
But what really helped me to bring nuance to these questions and to start looking
at the issues of transborder water governance was the combination of my graduate
experience and my work with Coast Salish communities. After completing my
master's degree, I was invited to teach Environmental Studies courses at Northwest
Indian College, a tribal college that serves more than one hundred tribes and bands
across Canada and the United States. The majority of the students reside within
Coast Salish territory, however, the students represent a diverse range of Indigenous
communities throughout North America.
Northwest Indian College is located on Lummi Nation (between Bellingham,
Washington, and Vancouver, British Columbia), and the traditional territory of
the host tribe spans the Canada-U.S. border (part of the Coast Salish cultural group,
which plays centrally in my work). I maintained my teaching position while in
graduate school, thus grounding me in multiple boundaries. I lived in the U.S.,
worked in Lummi Nation, and went to school in Canada. I transected multiple