Water itself against settler colonialism: Teresa Shewry, Philip Steer, ‘The Poetics and Ontologies of Fresh Water in Settler Contexts’, ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment, 2025 | settler colonial studies blog

Water itself against settler colonialism: Teresa Shewry, Philip Steer, ‘The Poetics and Ontologies of Fresh Water in Settler Contexts’, ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment, 2025

21Mar25

Excerpt: In mid-twentieth-century Aotearoa/New Zealand, the Pākehā (settler) poet J. R. Hervey encounters a “squat citadel spraying power”—a hydroelectric dam—and finds that it has turned the river into “dumb, disciplined waters” (43). A decade later, the Māori poet Hone Tuwhare (Ngāpuhi) draws on his experiences as a worker on hydroelectric dam projects to also describe their environmental impact as a forcible act of silencing: “Nowhere is there greater fuss/to tear out the river’s tongue” (“Sea” 30). At first glance, the similarity between Hervey and Tuwhare’s portrayals of rivers rendered “dumb” simply attests to the far-flung extent of the modernist belief that hydroelectric infrastructure contributed to civilization’s necessary work of pacifying unruly nature. As Patrick McCully puts it in his history of large dams, aptly titled Silenced Rivers (1996), such infrastructure has come to “symbolize the progress of humanity from a life ruled by nature and superstition to one where nature is ruled by science, and superstition vanquished by rationality” (237). Framed by this binary opposition, literature seems to offer a powerful vehicle through which rivers might speak against the extractivist forces that would seek to silence them. Thus, Paul Kingsnorth aligns his recent poetic response to the “wild and blue, raging and unchanneled” rivers of Patagonia, Songs from the Blue River (2018), with theologian Thomas Berry’s insight that the “modern project” is predicated upon silencing these bodies of water: “We are not talking to the river, we are not listening to the river. We have broken the great conversation” (qtd. in Kingsnorth). Yet such straightforward assertions are complicated by the earlier examples of Hervey and Tuwhare, whose distinct cultural perspectives prompt questions both about the source of a river’s speech and the ability to understand what it might have to say. The matter of riverine voice has surfaced into western consciousness in recent years as a result of various legislative attempts to recognize prior and ongoing Indigenous understandings of rivers as living, ancestral, metaphysical entities.

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