Water literacy: An ‘other wise’, active and cross-cultural approach to pedagogy, sustainability and human rights

Abstract

Water is life's blood … all life is reciprocal

      Monica Morgan, Yorta Yorta woman

This paper draws on Indigenous Australian relationships with water as evidenced in the particular cross-cultural and cross-literary collaboration ‘Sustainable Futures’1 between the Widjabul/Bundjalung Nations of New South Wales, Australia, and Lismore local government managed water authority, Rous Water. It also references the ecological dialogue with traditional owners put forward by Jessica Weir and the Murray Lower Darling Rivers Indigenous Nations (Victoria). In both cases non-Indigenes from economics and politics, socio-cultural geography as well as local activist citizens have been invited into dialogue, and into particular Indigenous knowledge systems, to co-create water management strategies for Australia's troubled river systems. The motivation behind such cross-cultural dialogue is hope for a meaningful future of sustainability in which human rights and notions of reverence are imbricated.

The current water crisis, as articulated by Maude Barlow (Senior Advisor on Water to the President of The United Nations General Assembly), provides acute provocation for a radical re-thinking of approaches to water. This paper advances ‘other-wise’ notions of literacy, pedagogy, and epistemology to enable such re-thinking. The water crisis questions the legacy that a western lack of reverence for water, borne of narrow history making, means in current times. This inquiry is predicated on a critical need for understanding the greater properties and meanings of water beyond commodification frameworks, towards socio-cultural and spiritual knowledge and notions of reverence. To that end it locates water firstly as its ‘own self’, as part of a ‘sacred geography’ as Deborah Bird Rose suggests, and further as a pedagogical and geographical meeting place between different territories and ontologies.

Acknowledgements

The author is appreciative of personal communication with Uncle Roy C. Gordon of the Widjabul people of northern New South Wales and Anthony Acret from Rous Water, Lismore for their generous tutelage and input. The author also wishes to thank Adrian Atkins, a descendent of the Anawan and Kamilaroi people, and Fiona Probyn-Rapsey for their critical comments and suggested revisions to this paper.

Notes

 1. ‘Sustainable Futures’ is similar in scope to the collaborative project management documented by Jessica Weir (2009) Murray River Country: An Ecological Dialogue with Traditional Owners, and Fresh Water: New Perspectives on Water in Australia, (2007) by Emily Potter et al. that engages Indigenous peoples from the Ngarrindjeri, Yorta Yorta, Taunngerung and Woiwurrung Nations of the Murray Darling River systems.

 2. From Bragg et al. (2007), 14.

 3. Michael Cathcart's Book The Water Dreamers (2009).

 4. Mircea Eliade (1991) Images and Symbols: Studies in Religious Symbolism, p. 151.

 5. See also Karen Bakker's (2010) concomitant work on Canadian ecological and political economy in relation to water in Canada and in developing nations and among First Nations people – Water Security: A Primer http://www.geog.ubc.ca/-bakker/ (accessed July 7, 2011).

 6. Interestingly Barlow (2002) reports that water was only ‘defined as a commodity at the second World Water Forum in The Hague in March 2000’ … Instead of governments rising to the challenge of water reform, they instead paved the way ‘for private corporations to sell water for profit, to the thirsty citizens of the world. So a handful of transnational corporations, backed by the World Bank and the IMF, are now aggressively taking over the management of public water services, dramatically raising the price of water to the local residents and profiting especially from the Third World's desperate search for solutions to its water crisis’ (xiii).

 7. Barlow (2002) invites us to read this as endorsed by governments ‘signing away their control over domestic water supplies to trade agreements, such as, The North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA); its proposed successor, The Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA); and the World Trade Organization (WTO). These global trade institutions effectively give transnational corporations unprecedented access to the fresh water of signatory countries’ (xiii).

 8. The nouns Aboriginal, Indigenous, and First Nation peoples are used interchangeably to represent the traditional owners/custodians of what is now called Australia. Where other Indigenous names are used, they relate to particular Nations and People within Australia, for example, the Widjabul people of the Bundjalung Nation are located in the Northern Rivers Region of Northern New South Wales. While there is a generic Indigenous ontology/Dreaming, individual Nations and tribal groups subscribe to the specificities of their own Creation Stories.

 9. Robert Henson (2006) in Potter and Starr (2009) explains that ‘drought periods in Indonesia, India, South-West Africa, Northern South America and Australia are shaped b the natural cycles of El Niño and La Niña, and it is possible that climate change will alter their oscillation – already the influence of El Niño (which increases the incidence of drought and raises temperatures) has been pronounced over the last 30 years’.

10. Indigenous understandings of Country are somewhat akin to the Great Tradition but encapsulating spiritual agencies. When Country is acknowledged at Australian events or in text, it means that the traditions and epistemology of the first custodians of the land now called Australia are being respectfully recognized as existing – past and present – whereas prior history located the land Australia legally as terra nullius meaning empty of people and owned by no one.

11. See also Bubbles on the Surface: A Place Pedagogy of the Narran Lakes, ARC project Monash University; Margaret Sommerville, Daphne Wallace, Lorina Barker, Badger Bates and Phoenix de Carteret, 2008, for multi-media representations of Indigenous ecological knowledge as it pertains to conservation in the Narran Lakes Terewah area and the U'Alayi, Gamaroi and Paakantji peoples.

12. That is not to say that the western mind has no imagination for the intangible (as evidenced by Mircea Eliade's comments about the Waters – being the fons et origo of all potentialities and the Christian tradition of Baptism by water), but that agents from differing cultural fields experience a sense of connectedness and spirituality differently.

13. His work, however, has been more latterly advanced and echoed by scholars such as Karen Bakker (2009), from Canada and the ongoing work of Maude Barlow and the United Nations General Assembly.