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The book opens with a meeting of elders. Roots of Our Renewal analyzes the historical roots of this transformation, examines how Cherokees are currently dealing with its related obstacles, and discusses the implications for Indian Country and beyond.

“Chocorua's Curse,” Lydia Maria Child's retelling of a White Mountain legend, found its way into middle class Boston homes through its publication in the 1830 gift book, The Token, accompanied by an engraving based on a Thomas Cole painting. Child's short sketch contrasts with typical iterations of the tale—and with the several paintings of the dramatic pyramidal peak by Cole—by its inclusion of homes spaces, a female figure, and a sense of the landscape as a watershed and not merely the iconic mountain peak. In addition, using ideas about household economy, educational transmission, and sympathy, Child prefigures ways of writing about the ecological flow of energy and materials through systems that include human and nonhuman entities. With this reading, the poison intended for a “troublesome” fox is an essential part of the subsequent chain of revenge killings and doubles with the final curse on the waters. Using the trope of sympathetic transmission, I argue that Child anticipates ecological thinking through a gendered lens. Material and emotional energy move through human and nonhuman entities, and mindful consideration can perhaps thwart the disaster caused by the men who, as critics have noted, seem disengaged from larger social systems.

This chapter traces how the Caribbean fisheries were embedded in global Iberian merchant networks that spanned the Atlantic and stretched into the Indian Ocean and beyond, connecting traders, laborers, and religious missionaries from the Americas to Asia. In the first four decades of the Venezuelan pearl-fishing settlements’ existence (their most lucrative ones), residents put forth their vision of an emerging American political economy, one which had a living ecology at its heart. The expertise of Warao, Guaquerí, and Arawak communities profoundly shaped vernacular practices of wealth husbandry along the Pearl Coast. So, too, did the skills of enslaved West Africans and indigenous peoples from around the Caribbean basin, all of whom labored in increasing numbers and various capacities alongside the motley assortment of European who came to settle, trade, and conduct slave-raiding in the region.

In chapter 1, “Before Removal,” I explore pre-Removal Cherokee state-building in the late eighteenth century. I highlight how this anticolonial project simultaneously maintained key elements of Cherokee governance ideals and entailed significant trade-offs that impacted Cherokee relationships with nonhumans and with each other.

I explore the wider implications of this study for global environmental governance and return to a discussion of how political ecology and indigenous studies might be articulated. Throughout the book, I highlight various countermovements that exemplify the dialectics of Cherokee state transformation, or the complex interplay of modes of establishing and maintaining legitimacy. For the Cherokee Nation, state-building has always been a contested process, but it is precisely the engagement of Cherokee communities and community groups that has made the state form successful. Today this engagement is most prominently manifested in the balancing of the resource-and relationship-based approaches to environmental governance. Cherokees have much work ahead of them in this regard due to colonial acts that disrupted Cherokee relationships to the land and led to significant environmental changes. Nonetheless, I hope to demonstrate that in the Cherokee Nation, state structures help create and maintain the political, physical, social, and ideological space for the protection and stewardship of our lands on our own terms and that we all have something to learn by looking closely at this process.

The concluding chapter summarizes the wider theoretical and practical implications of the arguments advanced in the book, in particular with an eye towards understanding the relationship between water and modernity in a variety of geographical contexts. In addition, the implications of the perspectives discussed in the book to grapple with a host of contemporary global water problems are explored. The chapter offers key pointers for a socio-ecological or political-ecological perspective on water and its transformation. Such perspective is vital if the mounting global water problems are to be taken seriously.

First, this chapter explores in greater detail the socio-natural actors that assemble around desalination as the new panacea to deal with Spain’s water conundrum as it enters the new millennium. Desalination becomes the dominant techno-environmental paradigm after 2004. The heterogeneous and highly unstable assemblages that are networked around this socio-technical system are examined. Secondly, the socio-environmental and ecological arguments advanced by each actor are explored. The chapter addresses how desalination shares with the ‘older’ paradigm a concern with water supply (rather than other possible forms of socio-hydraulic management) and with maintaining and re-enforcing Spain’s (and the growing global desalination industry’s) international competitive standing. However, desalination moves the nature of the conflict onto a new terrain by including the sea within the hydro-social circulation process. This ‘enrolling’ of the sea opens up myriad new forms of conflict and struggle. The chapter concludes that, despite the oppositional arguments, these new socio-technical arrangements reproduce the existing hydro-development model rather than signalling a radical new departure.

This chapter explores the theoretical framework on which the book is based. Four key theoretical pillars provide the foundation for the narrative structure deployed throughout the book. First, a historical-geographical materialist perspective informs the presentation of the dynamics of socio-ecological transformation and accompanying changing social power geometries. Second, the “matter of matter” is taken seriously. I explore how changing views of what matter is and how matter acts become enrolled in new hydro-social practices. Third, the political-ecological metabolism of nature and the formation of socio-natural constellations are invariable articulated with territorially organized institutional and governmental arrangements. Attention will, therefore, be paid to how territorial scales of management—from local institutions to transnational governance—and social or political networking are made and remade in and through the contentious process that animates how particular socio-ecological configurations are inaugurated, shaped, stabilized, and transformed. Finally, the book is sensitive to the manner in which questions of socio-ecological or environmental justice and equality are articulated with discourses and practices of socio-ecological change.

“Not a drop of water should reach the ocean without paying its obligatory tribute to the earth”, notes a 1912 parliamentary document from the Spanish Cortes. A commentator at the time noted that “Spain would never be rich as longs as its rivers flowed into the sea”. The project of modernization, articulated around the hydraulic nexus, became formulated in Spain after 1898. Indeed Spain’s torturous modernization process after the US-Spanish war of 1898, when Spain lost its last overseas colonies, has been characterized by a continuous reconfiguration of the country’s hydro-social cycle. Whilst throughout the 20^th century, this process focused around engineering the flow of mainland waters, the 21^st century’s techno-natural configuration extends the engineering of Spain’s hydro-landscapes to the Mediterranean waters by means of large scale desalination projects. The chapter considers the contested political-ecological process that marked the transformation of Spain’s hydro-social landscapes during the 20^th century and into the new century. The chapter explores how this emblematic entry guides the narrative of the book through which a wider set of issues related to nature, the environment, modernity and socio-political power are explored.

This chapter focuses on the significant socio-political, environmental and cultural-geographical transformations in democratizing Spain after the end of Fascism. The chapter explores the debate over national water planning that rages between 1975 and 2002 and chronicles the intense struggle over and contestation of the dominant hydraulic water paradigm. While conservatives, engineering specialistsand southern regionalist forces insist on the completion of the national water grid, a series of new actors emerge (regionalists, localists, environmentalists, parts of the progressive movement, European actors) that begin to argue for a radical transformation of the water landscape, one more in line with regionalist, ecological, market-driven and environmental modernization arguments.

In chapter 5, “The Spirit of This Land,” I discuss current attempts by the Cherokee Nation government to deal with the paradoxes of Cherokee state-building. I describe how Principal Chief Chad Smith’s administration made significant attempts to bridge the gap between the central government and Cherokee communities, and the obstacles that arose in the process. Such obstacles were manifested both in the structure of the current Cherokee Nation government and in the process by which the tribal administration sought to carry out its goals.

This chapter focuses on the attempts, during the first decades of the 20^th century, to modernize Spain through the planning and implementation of large-scale hydraulic infrastructures. The chapter explores the dynamics of the early water modernization process by considering the role of the state on the one hand and the visions of the engineering community on the other. Particular attention is paid to the role and contested politics of the effort to establish River Basin Authorities. The chapter argues that during the first decades of the 20^th century, hydraulic modernization failed as a result of both internal political conditions and entrenched power positions of a traditional elite as well as the problematic political-economic of Spain in a context of international liberalization and mounting internal socio-environmental conflict. The chapter concludes by arguing that the particular imaginary of modernity, based around state-led large infrastructural works, the need for an ‘iron surgeon’, a charismatic and authoritarian leader, to implement such national project, and the fear that lack of modernization would lead to social and political disintegration set the scene for the post-civil war Fascist hydro-modern project.

In chapter 3, “The ‘Greening’ of Oklahoma,” I discuss how more recent politics have shaped the Cherokee Nation environment, including fire suppression policies in the 1930s and the development of Oklahoma state tourism. I look in depth at the legacy of the federal allotment policy in relation to the ability of Cherokees to access resources. In this context, I also describe the resurgence of the Cherokee Nation as a political entity and its subsequent development of sophisticated environmental departments.

Chapter 2, “Shaping New Homelands,” explains the transference and development of Cherokee environmental knowledge and practices upon forced relocation to lands west of the Mississippi River and thus how Cherokees came to call them home. Through written and oral histories, I sketch the early environment of the Indian Territory as a human-produced environment that Cherokees not only inherited from previous indigenous peoples but also sustained by continuing management activities like controlled burning. I also discuss how politics shaped the Cherokee Nation environment, including internal debates over land use, the invasion of the railroad companies in the 1860s, and the devastating Allotment Era of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Chapter 4, “Indigenous Ethnobotany,” describes the significance of ethnobotanical knowledge in Cherokee culture in the present day and the traits of this knowledge in the context of Cherokee medicine. I discuss the significance of ethnobotany as a tribal project and how it represents both a tool for cultural revitalization and an object of critique in the context of settler colonialism and the cultural politics of knowledge.