Decolonising streams: a confluence of Indigenous and western sciences

Abstract

Storm water is not a hydrological process. It is a concept developed in a specific place/space, according to specific ways of being and valuing water. We know this because other ways of perceiving water exist absent of a similar construct. Water science is an integral element required for successful human collaborative living, including art, music, governance and economic systems, the sacred, housing and food. During the ongoing colonial age (~1600 - current), the water science and management practices and associated ways of being and valuing of what this dissertation calls western science, have increasingly dominated the global waterscape. One consequence of the human-centred exploitive values cocooned in western science is the global colonisation of urban streams. The prevalence of physically obdurate storm water systems and associated relational obduracy of the storm water concept and predictably resultant urban stream syndrome starkly outlines an example of stream colonisation. The problem is that storm water systems significantly modify hydrological systems and the systems dependent on them while generating what is regarded as waste water. Efforts over decades to develop solutions within the western science framework have not significantly ameliorated storm water impacts on urban streams, or its being perceived as waste water. The transformational capacity of using Indigenous water science and frameworks and methods in urban water management and subsequent decolonisation of urban streams is examined through a storm water focus. This dissertation argues each science's ontological and axiological underpinnings allowed one worldview to construct 'storm water' while discouraging the other from any such notion. This research demonstrates employing Indigenous scientific frameworks and methods; that is those water sciences developed with the stream and hydrological conditions in which they were used, could transform contemporary urban water management including stream rehabilitation the imported scientific worldview appears unable to achieve. This research found that using even high-level Indigenous sciences frameworks and methods (i.e., not at the detail of an individual Indigenous science) strongly influenced the nature of the water research questions asked and how they were addressed, field work options and overall research approach. An influence primarily due to the inclusion of Indigenous ways of being and valuing that gird the associated scientific frameworks and methods. Consequently, this research contributes to a small but growing body of academic material examining the (re)application of Indigenous sciences to urban streams, and urban water management broadly. Urban streams could flourish with Indigenous water sciences custodianship, improving more than stream health and water quality outcomes. The confluence of Indigenous and western water sciences', this research represents contributes to urban streams decolonisation efforts.