Other People's Country : Law, Water and Entitlement in Settler Colonial Sites

Other People’s Country collects together scholars from the fields of anthropology, cultural studies, cultural geography, critical legal studies, and settler colonial studies to reconsider the attempts to make bodies of water ‘lawful’ within settler colonial sites today. Focusing upon case studies from Australia, Aotearoa/New Zealand, New Caledonia and the USA, this book brings new critical insight to the entanglement of settler and Indigenous laws in the governance, ownership and ‘entitlement’ of water. This book was originally published as a special issue of Settler Colonial Studies.

Other People’s Country thinks through the entangled objects of law – legislation, policies, institutions, treaties and so on – that ‘govern’ waters and that make bodies of water ‘lawful’ within settler colonial sites today. Informed by the theoretical interventions of cosmopolitics and political ecology, each opening up new approaches to questions of politics and ‘the political’, the chapters in this book locate these insights within material settler colonial ‘places’ rather than abstract structures of domination. A claim to water – whether by Indigenous peoples or settlers – is not simply a claim to a resource. It is a claim to knowledge and to the constitution of place and therefore, in the terms of Isabelle Stengers, to the continued constitution of the past, present and future of real worlds. Including contributions from the fields of anthropology, cultural studies, cultural geography, critical legal studies, and settler colonial studies, this collection not only engages with issues of law, water and entitlement in different national contexts – including Australia, Aotearoa/New Zealand, New Caledonia and the USA – but also from diverse disciplinary and institutional contexts. This book was originally published as a special issue of Settler Colonial Studies.