Woelfle-Erskine Diss Final Embed

Introduction: Multiple valences of watershed collaborationWhere salmon hover on the cusp of extinction, some scientists and people who live alongsalmon-bearing streams seek new collaborations. Agencies, tribes, and watershed councilscommission competing studies to tease out links between human use of land and water, globaloceanic cycles, and the precipitous decline in salmon populations (Sarna-Wojcicki 2014). Tribalresource managers turn to ecological models to validate traditional knowledge in the eyes of statefisheries boards (ICTMN 2014). Scientists enlist commercial fishers and seals fitted with pressureand salinity sensors to study ocean conditions (Ohshima et al. 2013). Hydrologic modelers turn tolong-time ranchers' expert opinions to condition model predictions of where streams dry up (Hines2014). Ranchers import beavers to build dams and raise water tables (Millman 2011). Thesewatershed collaborations begin to transcend boundaries of human institutions, scientist / lay person,and even species.To understand watershed collaborations, it is not enough to discuss what projects scientistsand others pursue in the name of salmon recovery. It is also important to look back at how scientificknowledge shaped earlier U.S. projects to tame rivers and harness their flows of water, power, andfishes for particular political and economic ends. Scientific practices in disciplines of engineering,social science, forestry, geology, and hydrology coevolved with— and indeed were instrumental to—the project of Manifest Destiny.1 Legacies of Manifest Destiny thinking are sedimented intoinfrastructures such as dams and aqueducts and land use conversion to logging, agriculture, andurban development, while the practice of dismissing indigenous and traditional land managementpractices infuses water, forest, and fisheries governance institutions.Now, some bottom-up and collaborative efforts to rehabilitate ravaged land- and waterscapesare turning scientific methods to new uses. These appropriations, hybrids, and reworkings ofscientific practice by Native American tribes, rural communities, and urban environmental groups(among others) are transforming the practice of riverine science, and prompting renegotiations ofwhat kinds of knowledge should inform environmental governance. Some of these newconfigurations ultimately challenge legacies of Manifest Destiny thinking by transforming legaldoctrines, dismantling dams and levees, and inspiring new cultural water use practices.1I am indebted to July Cole for thinking on Manifest Destiny and its legacies in landscapes, infrastructures, hydropolitics, andrelations among humans and other species. In a call for proposals (Cole and Woelfle-Erskine 2014), Cole and I articulated theslegacies thus:“Manifest Destiny is the major phenomenon unleashed on the heels of Lewis and Clark, Wilkes, Gibbons, Stevens, and other U.S.expeditions (e.g. Herndon and Gibbon 1853; Jackson 1978; Stevens 1860; Tyler 1968). This Destiny is generally identified withwestward and outward movement, divine favor, white supremacy, resource exploitation, and insistently policed boundaries. [T]hetendency can be traced at least as far back as Jefferson’s 1803 directives to Lewis and Clark (Jackson 1978). World Bank and IMFpolicies have exported Manifest Destiny’s physical and political/economic infrastructures world-wide (D’Souza 2008; Woelfle-Erskineet al. 2007). Contemporary global military U.S. missions echo frontier settlement patterns: rogue deployment, swarm tactics, andestablishment of corridors.One of Manifest Destiny’s prime characteristics is its assumption of hegemony. Oral histories and folk literatures and suppressedaccounts are rife with narratives of how, under Manifest Destiny, humans have been variously recruited, chased, displaced, imported,abandoned, enslaved, shot, employed, deployed, corralled, rewarded, experimented on, and over-written (Conway 1995; Davis 2002;Scott 1998; Kosek 2006). These manipulations occur at the demand of the logics of U.S. national expansionism and consolidation,and render those logics over-determined and nearly self-perpetuating. Yet, despite the cathedral assurance Manifest Destiny radiates, ithas met continued, vigorous, and multi-faceted resistance from the moment of its inception to the present hour. The first andforemost of Manifest Destiny’s opponents, its fiercest critics and most clairvoyant refuseniks, are Native American and otherindigenous people (Deloria 1988; Howe, TallBear, and Oak Lake Writers’ Society 2006; Mooney 1965; Kimberly TallBear 2013; C.Wilkinson 2006; C. F. Wilkinson 2006; Weir 2009).”

My dissertation investigates how watershed collaborations transform scientific practices,environmental subjectivities, and trans-species alliances, using Salmon Creek (Sonoma Co., CA) as acase. From the outset, I sought to undertake research as a collaborative process, bringing togetherlocal residents, agency representatives, grassroots groups, independent scientists, and tribalrepresentatives. By drawing the diverse ‘partial perspectives’ informed by their different situatedknowledges (Haraway 1988) into a lively composite, I hoped to develop a set of research questionsthat addressed dynamic interactions among salmon, water, and land use, livelihood, and politics, andto develop collaborative methods that brought together different scientific, indigenous, and localknowledge to address questions of social and ecological concern to collaborative members. Thisapproach produced many different kinds of knowledge, only some of which can be wrangled intothe confines of an academic dissertation, even an interdisciplinary one. These findings—on factorsthat influence juvenile salmonid over-summer survival in intermittently-flowing streams, on bottomup methods for investigating household water use practices in the face of scarcity and a desire forinterspecies reciprocity, and on incipient notions of groundwater and streams as interspeciescommons—comprise the bulk of the dissertation. In this introduction, I reflect on social andscientific implications of my collaborative approach. But first, let me bring a few different meaningsof "watershed" and "collaboration" into play.Headwaters and new tributaries in watershed collaborationsSeveral scholars trace the emergence of U.S. watershed partnerships back to the influence ofGary Snyder and Mattole River hippies, whose grassroots scientific and ‘place-making’ projectsinspired federal initiatives to fund "friends of the creeks" groups in the 1990s (Woolley, McGinnis,and Kellner 2002). These citizen groups often formed to seek funding or technical assistance fromfederal, state or local agencies, or to organize volunteer labor for stream monitoring andrehabilitation projects. Watershed restoration efforts were characterized by formal or informalcollaborations between citizens, scientists, and regulatory agencies united in their desire to improvehydro-ecological conditions on degraded rivers (Palmer 2009). Groups such as the MattoleRestoration Council in northern California formed citizen science brigades to monitor water qualityand count the number of salmon and steelhead that spawned and reared in the watershed, and oftenused the data to challenge forest management and water diversion policies (House 2000). As federalfunds and the possibility of decision-making influence flowed to watershed councils during the1990s and 2000s, some attracted local ranchers, tribes, and timber corporations and in many casesplayed out old conflicts and power dynamics (Woolley, McGinnis, and Kellner 2002; Ferreyra, deLoë, and Kreutzwiser 2008). Still other watershed groups dissolved once funds ran out, or werecaptured by particular interest groups fundamentally opposed to restoring flow regimes orrecovering threatened habitats, leading some to question implicit notions of community inwatershed governance, the practicality of discursive democracy as a decision making process, and thepotential for such participatory processes to entrench existing power dynamics within a community(Ferreyra, de Loë, and Kreutzwiser 2008; Saravanan, McDonald, and Mollinga 2009; Smith 2008).Another kind of watershed collaboration—intertribal fisheries management councils that workto regulate and increase salmon runs—formed after the 1974 Boldt decision affirmed NativeAmerican tribes the right to participate in fisheries management with equal standing to states(Cassidy and Dale 1988, 65–69). The Nisqually Tribe, for example, formed a natural resourcesdivision that brought together elders' traditional knowledge of plants and animals with scientificresearch into ecological conditions, and used this knowledge to challenge harvest limits in statefisheries' agencies management plans (Wilkinson 2006).

Still earlier forms of watershed collaborations predate Manifest Destiny. Inter-tribal strategiesfor monitoring and sharing salmon runs along the Klamath (and other) rivers mobilized empiricalobservation of ecological dynamics to set harvest limits and the timing of the First Salmonceremony, which influenced how many salmon passed upstream before the harvest began (King,Thomas for Klamath River Intertribal Fish and Water Commission 2004). Traditional watermanagement institutions—such as the acéquia system adapted to the Colorado Plateau by Spanishsettlers and Pueblos, and the Andean Cómision de Regantes—combined sharing of riverine resourcesthat varied from year to year with a political governance role (Vera Delgado and Zwarteveen 2008;Rivera 1998). Rather than being examples of vanished cultural practices, these governance structurescontinue to pose a material and political challenge to the hegemony of centralized scientificmanagement, not least because they assert that governance processes must account for multiple usesof water and rivers.I would like to extend the idea of watershed collaborations still further, by bringing in otherspecies — beavers, salmon, redwood trees—into entangled and symbiotic relations with humanswho manage waterscapes. In this view, through a process of engaging in stream monitoring orrearing salmon eggs in sluice boxes, humans recognize (to borrow Donna Haraway's phrase), that"the partners do not precede their relating; all that is, is the fruit of becoming with"(Haraway 2008,17). Such collaborations may not involve government agencies or non-governmental institutions, yetstill often reshape material-semiotic configurations "from below" as they discursively affect humanpractices of using water, stone, soils, plants, and animals. Or sometimes, concepts of humans ascollaborators with other species, as situated within a reciprocal web of becoming, may filter intopolicy discourses or political debates.Alternatively, hydro-ecological concepts such as the natural flow regime (Poff et al. 1997) canbe imagined as arising from a collaboration or integration of all of the climate, geology, plants, andanimals in a place, and further shaped by human diversion of ground and surface waters. This viewmakes a break from modernist binaries of passive nature /

“Manifest Destiny is the major phenomenon unleashed on the heels of Lewis and Clark, Wilkes, Gibbons, Stevens, and other U.S. . environmental subjectivities, and trans-species alliances, using Salmon Creek (Sonoma Co., CA) as a case. From the outset, I sought to undertake research as a collaborative process, bringing together