Emanuel, Ryan E. (2024) On the swamp: fighting for Indigenous environmental justice. University of North Carolina Press. ISBN 9781469678313 (hardcover), 9781469678320 (paperback), 978146967833-7(ebook). From $12.99 USD)
(URL: https://uncpress.org/book/9781469678320/on-the-swamp/ )
Jeremy Schmidt
School of Geography, Queen Mary University of London, UK
To cite this review: Schmidt, J. (2024). Review of “On the swamp: fighting for Indigenous environmental justice”, University of North Carolina Press 2024, by Ryan E. Emanuel, Water Alternatives, https://www.water-alternatives.org/index.php/boh/item/379-lumbee
The Lumbee River is a blackwater stream that flows through eastern North Carolina in ribbons the colour of steeped tea. The colouring arises from the water’s natural relations to land. Those relations are also central to the Indigenous Lumbee people; so central that the Lumbee “often call themselves People of the Dark Water” (p7). The story of the Lumbee and their fight for environmental justice is not complete without understanding their relations to lands and waters that Ryan Emanuel details in this powerful and erudite book.
On the Swamp breathes a combination of historical, place-based, and scientific wisdom through its pages. Its exacting measurements—of water quality, colonial water impacts, and contemporary inequalities—stand astride the relations to water that Indigenous peoples have made and remade under oppressive conditions of settler colonialism. Across chapters that detail historical struggles, explain how Indigenous empowerment can be wrought from colonial attempts at erasure, and which anchor Indigenous efforts to reconnect and repair relations to the Lumbee river, Emanuel details the significance of water’s presence, relations, and sudden appearances.
The argument of the book is critical and constructive. It is critical in multiple, necessary senses that build on Indigenous scholarship, such as the work of Vine Deloria, to confront settler colonial oppression in the United States. Emanuel dedicates a chapter to rethinking ‘land acknowledgments,’ which can often become rote rehearsals of past Indigenous presence that perpetuate erasure of contemporary relations, demands, and injustices. Alongside its ever-present critical perspective Emanuel makes a constructive argument that, through the opening chapters especially, politically positions the Lumbee relations to water and territory through time. The ways, for instance, that the region was mapped historically and the ways colonial reports and their many biases are often what remain of complicated stories of dispossession. The arguments are direct and forthright, but there is also a subtlety to how Emanuel seeks to educate readers not only in the broad strokes of Indigenous scholarship but also in the specificities of kinship relations built with and through the Lumbee River. There is a recurring metaphor of the region as a ‘crazy quilt’—a patchwork drawn from seemingly unrelated items and which together hold relations together. That quilt is physical and social: blackwater streams, floodplain forests, and sandy uplands mix with homes and gardens, farms, schools, communities, and the multiple ways that Lumbee have maintained their identities and relations.
Through its middle chapters Emanuel’s writing combines his hydrological expertise with thick descriptions of landscapes and relations to provide incisive accounts of social and physical relationships. A chapter on pipelines for surging natural gas extraction, for instance, ties the region into larger debates over property ownership and Indigenous land rights. A chapter on industrial farming gathers together a regulatory critique of non-point pollutants and the effects of water-borne effluents on downstream ecologies and communities. A chapter on water infrastructure shows how ditches and canals that shunt water out of headwater regions exacerbate flooding downstream; climate change magnifies the issue when more intense rainfall arrives. Throughout, vignettes from fieldwork combine with accounts of community meetings and scientific reports such that the best advice I can offer is for people to read the book; if you are a teacher, assign it. Every one of these chapters is a searching examination that is in one sense full of respect for the power of water and in another sense a well-justified indictment of the extractive relationships that have come to characterise oppressive relationships to it. Those relations are not in the past, and neither are the injustices.
The final chapters of the book reflect on what it looks like for the Lumbee to forge collective and communal relations to water today. It is here that Emanuel also explains the title of the book. To be “on the swamp” is to “be in the neighborhood or around the community…[t]he phrase is a reminder about the powerful connections that Lumbee people have to these communities. Our communities orient us; they are stars in the verdant and water firmament that we call home” (p189). These chapters, too, take readers on journeys with water and with those seeking to restore relationships to landscapes and territories in ways consistent with Lumbee self-determination and in solidarity with other Indigenous peoples. Emanuel is forthright in his conclusions, and it is refreshing to see a book so trenchant in its critical examination include a full chapter of recommendations. Those recommendations are hard won, and while they are directly relevant to the concerns that animate the Lumbee fight for Indigenous environmental justice they will resonate more widely with those also fighting the kinds of extractive relations that his work powerfully confronts.
