Mobilizing theory - Governing Transboundary Waters: Canada, the United States, and Indigenous Communities - page 33

and animals mutually evolve through reflexive relationships with the surrounding
environment. This place-based model is reflected in contemporary ideologies and
governance frameworks. Stumpff (2010) explores this concept with the connection
between tribal systems and environmental management in the context of the Bison
for Confederated Salish and Kootenai tribes in Western North America. Stumpff
(2010, p. 9) writes:
Tribal systems of land values and landscape-level management differed from
private and public land management as it developed within the framework of
the U.S. Government. The relationship between people, time and the land
was understood through different principles. An important traditional principle
was that the relationships within an ecosystem came from a concept of mutual
evolution - the idea that peoples, species and processes adapted together in
the most useful and efficient ways.
This concept of mutual evolution holds true for many of the Indigenous
communities discussed in this topic, including the Mowachaht/Muchalaht First
Peoples and the Coast Salish First Peoples - where complex dynamics and histories
exist between humans and animals, particularly orcas (Drucker, 1951).
Politics of scale
A growing body of literature supports the argument that a scalar perspective is
crucial for understanding water governance (Swyngedouw, 1999; Harris, 2002;
Sneddon and Fox, 2006; Perreault, 2008; Feitelson and Fischhendler, 2009; Harris
and Alatout, 2010; Norman et al. , 2013). Harris and Alatout (2010) suggest that
more explicitly linking the literature on state and nation-building to water
governance and scale would help strengthen our understanding of the complex
dynamics characterizing the relationship between nature and society (see also Kaiser
and Nikiforova, 2008; Kuus and Agnew, 2008). Further, they insist that attention
to the “iterative process and practices” that seemingly fix scales is critical (Harris
and Alatout, 2010, p. 149). To this end, the geographic literature has begun docu-
menting how performative acts and social movements are facilitating territorial
rescaling (Cohen and Harris, 2014). In this topic, I explore how performative acts
are helping to produce discursive acts of decolonization for the Indigenous groups
in the Salish Sea Basin, Yuquot Basin, Yukon River Basin, and the Great Lakes
Basin.
Seeing scales as constructed and fluid rather than pre-defined and fixed opens
up conceptual space to frame scale as a process. Towards that goal, MacKinnon
(2011, p. 22) has suggested replacing the established concept of politics of scale with
scalar politics , arguing, “it is often not scale per se that is the prime object of conten-
tion, but rather specific processes and institutionalized practices that are themselves
differentially scaled”. Although the focus on process is not necessarily a new idea
(see Jonas, 2006), the need to remain mindful of scalar politics is salient particularly
in management and policy realms where lexicons are often less precise (see, for