(UN)MAKING WATER
PANEL 5
(UN)MAKING WATER
Monday, 4 July 2022
11:45 am - 13:15 pm
Location: ROOM 101
Panel Speakers
Stephen Turner
Alexander Arroyo
Kiran Sunar & Ryan Stillwagon
Moderated by: Oli Acevedo
Lines in the Sand
stephen turner
A shoreline is begged by the demarcation of the “foreshore” in Aotearoa New Zealand, whose “legal” foreclosure in 2004 ensured sovereign Māori land has been at least twice taken. How did this line of “national” property get drawn? Off-shore drawing (Barclay) takes in ship “sight-lines” as well as drawing and mapping technologies, enabled by the ideology of “free” passage (Grotius) in native seas (Salesa) and the “time” of its measure. The circumnavigation of the globe and associated circumscription of peoples meant that properties of place became the “property” of outside viewers. If James Cook’s first voyage set the template, with naturalist and future Royal Society President Joseph Banks on board, the 1783 expedition ordered by Charles III to “New Grenada” (Northwestern South America), which involved botanists, geographers and painters, established a Linnaeus-inspired “school of drawing” that set the aesthetic terms of a taxonomical programme (Rodríguez Castro). Alexander van Humboldt’s visit to Bogotá would result in his explicitly universalist Cosmos, resulting in the linguistic tradition of known plants being “discovered” by Western carto-taxonomists, and “housed” in the herbarium. On Cook’s part, “drawing up” Aoteaora enabled him to return to England with “New Zealand,” an object of knowledge pre-figured for settler invasion (Te Punga Sullivan). In Aotearoa, sovereign Māori songlines (Binney) of descent (whakapapa) articulate an expansive shore, the ocean swell and currents that embody knowledge of past movements and possible futures. The “pictured” land of the foreigner’s view today dissolves in shifting sands.
Stephen Turner teaches in the Media and Culture Programme at the University of Amsterdam. His publications address settler colonialism in Indigenous contexts, writing and digital technologies, as well as painting, photography and film, and critical university studies. He has co-edited a book with Tim Neale on the sovereignty of First (Indigenous) law and environment, and is currently working with Sean Sturm on a book about the university and dissent.
Charts & Labor: Unangax Seacraft and the Making of Hydrographic Bodies in Unangam Tanangin, c. 1867/2017
Alexander Arroyo
Sketched into the corners of the first imperial maps representing *Unangam Tanangin*-- more commonly, now, the Aleutian Islands-- are the uncannny figures of the Unangax (Aleut) *iqyax*: a skin-on-frame seacraft sealed by a paddler sheathed in a gut parka. Drawn and described as if a single being by mystified European sailors, priests and naturalists, the form and performance of the *iqyax* and their Unangax paddlers enthralled an inchoate oceanic imaginary of empire groping for a transpolar passage and, later, rumored otter and fur seal rookeries key to the northern transpacific economy. The *iqyax*-- called "baidarka" (little boat) by Russian colonizers-- would become fulcrum for the racialization of ecological knowledge and labor, by turns touristic fetish and techno-scientific curio for colonizers seeking to unlock its deeply-designed sympathy with untamed Bering and Pacific waters; living and laboring vessel for exploiting the marine fur fishery; and instrument for the production and mediation of hydrographic "intelligence" ported between occupying imperial states-- essential to the signing of the 1867 Treaty of Cession between Russian and the United States. Most recently, the study and building of *iqyax* has become a complex site for Unangax practices of repair, care, and cultivation of sovereignty against continuing appropriation (seen most spectacularly in the adoption of its uniquely bifurcated bow for container ships and supertankers). Working with (and against) archival and museum collections alongside contemporary survey materials, fieldwork, and collaborations with a group of Alaska Native and settler scholars and builders, this project thinks with the *iqyax* as it indexes historical "waves of knowing" (Ingersoll 2016) *Unangam Tanangin* within and beyond the ever-foreshortened horizons of empire
Alexander Arroyo is a critical geographer and environmental designer based at the University of Chicago, where he is Affiliated Faculty with the Committee on Geographical Sciences, Senior Research Associate in Global Political Ecology and Associate Director of the Urban Theory Lab. Arroyo’s work broadly explores relations between the environmental geographies, infrastructural formations, and spatial imaginaries of American empire. At present, he focuses on the conjuncture of those relations with alternative oceanic worldings rooted in Unangax (Aleut) seacraft, logisticality and anti-imperialist movements across transpacific color lines, and the geopolitical ecology of kelp forests. Arroyo’s first book, Ecologies of Power (MIT Press 2016, co-authored with Pierre Bélanger), investigates the logistical landscapes of U.S. militarism beyond the battlefield. Arroyo holds degrees in Geography (PhD, UC Berkeley), Landscape Architecture (MLA, Harvard Graduate School of Design), Philosophy, and Human Rights (BA, Columbia University).
“All rivers run into the sea, the sea is never full”:
waterways two ways: ocean as a frontier for food security & rivers as methods otherwise
Kiran Sunar & Ryan Stillwagon
An emerging, accelerating discussion now envisions oceans as frontiers for global food security and salvation for billions of humans (Costello et al. 2020). Yet histories of colonial waterway disciplining portend otherwise (Talbot 2011). How can we draw on the river–its networks of extraction, irrigation, and forced displacement–as a meaningful archive for considering aqueous futures? This paper provides us space to explore our two modes of interconnected research: the possibility of rivers as method, and food provisioning, inequities, and their intrinsic relationship with waterways. We start our thinking from rivers as feeders and agricultural providers and explore the river multi-directionally as a method of interrogation, channeling and pulsing alongside the ocean as an archive. These river histories flow into present day oceans, challenging notions of the sea as an equitable terrain for food security and conceal important power dynamics of food sovereignty. By looking at rivers alongside oceans we deepen our investments in queer spatialities, and possibilities otherwise.
Kiran Sunar (They/Them) is a UBC Liu Scholar, a guest Doctoral Fellow at the Max Weber Kolleg for Advanced Social and Cultural Studies, and a PhD Candidate in the Department of Asian Studies at the University of British Columbia. Their PhD project attends to questions of gender, sexuality, and religion in Punjabi literature in the early modern to colonial period. They have work forthcoming in Punjab Sounds: Affect, Technology and the Aural across Region and Nation.
Ryan Stillwagon (He/They) is a UBC Public Scholar and PhD Candidate in the Department of Sociology at the University of British Columbia. Their dissertation explores queer food security in Canada. They have published work on queer placemaking and sexual health in the Journal of Indigenous HIV Research, City & Community, The Conversation, Contexts, and JMIR Public Health and Surveillance.