Settler colonialism has been a useful framework to comparatively analyze violent histories of dispossession across myriad geographies and political contexts. However, one limitation has been its over determination of the relationship between human actors—settlers and Indigenous peoples—at the expense of considering specific impacts of colonization on and with non-human relations and environments. Foregrounding the multiple pathways through which settler colonialism has led to what Kyle Whyte (Citizen Potawatomi Nation) calls “the violent disruption of human relationships to the environment” (2018), I am compelled to share stories of a specific target of colonial domination: water.

The control over water resources, whether to serve settler populations or to force Indigenous submission, is a familiar military tactic. Many Diné are well aware of how the manipulation of water was used as a means to our ancestors’ subjugation during an era known as The Long Walk. Any quick online search will yield results associated with Army Brigadier General Kit Carson, who famously introduced a scorched-earth policy against Diné beginning in the winter of 1863. Under the command of Carson, the U.S. cavalry set fire to crops of peaches, corn, and squash while poisoning any water sources and killing livestock they found in the vicinity of Diné homesteads. Carson’s violent campaign culminated in the surrender of over 8,000 Diné, who were then forcibly marched hundreds of miles to a military concentration camp in New Mexico territory. This traumatic event as well as the location of our peoples’ incarceration is known as Hwééldi, meaning “suffering” in the Diné language. In the utterance of this phrase, encompassing far more than its English translation alone, I cannot help but feel resonances here with the Nakba and its ongoing trauma in Palestine today.

Even before 1948 with the violent events of mass Palestinian displacement and dispossession known as the Nakba, the desire for control over water resources was a central aspect of the Zionist colonial imaginary. Unsurprisingly, these ideals aligned with American desires for water resources in the Indigenous Southwest. In 1939, W. C. Lowdermilk, assistant chief of the U. S. Soil Conservation Service, made a trip to what was then called Mandatory Palestine to study soil erosion. In his report, he characterized the land in ruin due to “nomads out of Arabia” with their “herds of long-eared goats, often called cloven-hoofed locusts” who “unleashed the forces of erosion which for nearly 13 centuries” in comparison with “a great movement underway for the redemption of the Promised Land by Jewish settlers, who have wrought wonders in draining swamps, ridding them of malaria and planting them to thriving orchards and fields . . .” (Lowdermilk 1948). This report foreshadowed the publication of the Lowdermilk Plan in 1944, a proposal to build a canal for hydroelectric power extending from the Mediterranean to the Dead Sea. Large scale water diversion was integral to the settler state-building project in what scholars now call “hydro-hegemony” (Shalalfeh et al. 2017).

Around the same time, the U.S. government was implementing its soil conservation experiment in the name of saving the land from the so-called perils of erosion caused by Diné owned livestock. Under the leadership of John Collier, the Bureau of Indian Affairs instituted a herd reduction program in 1933 that lasted through the mid-1940s. The state-mandated slaughter of thousands of sheep detrimentally altered our ancestors’ relationships with the land, the environment, and each other, including my own family. The justification for this policy? Water infrastructure. The soon-to-be-completed Boulder (Hoover) Dam on the Colorado River worried federal scientists who believed that the structure would be compromised by the accumulation of silt from upstream Diné Bikéyah (how Diné traditionally refer to our homelands, now politically known as the Navajo Nation). The reason for this they surmised was Diné families owning too many sheep. Like Lowdermilk’s utopic vision of the Promised Land, these desert environments were imagined to need settler intervention: its lands made arable and its water diverted. The Hoover Dam was constructed to control the flow of the Colorado River for hydroelectric power and irrigation, benefiting growing cities like Los Angeles and Phoenix. The livestock reduction and the dam’s completion that followed in 1936 were both framed as necessary environmental conservation interventions but were primarily driven by settler economic expansion and Indigenous displacement. Like Hwééldi, the violence of these events is still lamented. Trauma and oral tradition are intergenerational; they bind us together in painful and redemptive ways.

In Diné Bikéyah as well as Palestine, water continues to be a precious resource to be controlled physically such as through built infrastructures or even legally through what geographer Andrew Curley (Diné) terms a form of “colonial enclosure” (2021). Today over 30 percent of Diné households in the Navajo Nation do not have running water while downstream cities enjoy the benefits of piped water and energy infrastructure. Those who do not have running water often rely on unregulated water sources like livestock wells, many of which are contaminated with uranium and other heavy metals due to historic mining in the region. Meanwhile, Gazans have struggled to access clean water even before the current siege. Up to 90 percent of Gaza’s water comes from the Coastal Aquifer Basin; however, most of it is contaminated and most, if not all, of the wastewater treatment and desalination plants have now been destroyed. As of 2024, around 75 percent of Israel’s drinking water is desalinated and originates from the Mediterranean Sea. It has one of the most robust desalination programs in the world. The allure of water infrastructure, today as it was a century ago, continues to fuel the settler colonial imaginary (see Wilson et al. 2021 for an analysis of water insecurity in settler colonial contexts).

And yet, infrastructure can only promise so much in an era of climate change (see Anand et al. 2018). I am moved by Farhana Sultana’s assessment that “climate change lays bare the colonialism of not only of the past but an ongoing coloniality that governs and structures our lives, which are co-constitutive of processes of capitalism, imperialism, and international development.” Thus, I contemplate how can we better articulate and interrogate settler colonialism in all its forms as manifestations of environmental and climate injustice.