Political ecology of emotion and sacred space: The Winnemem Wintu struggles with California water policy

Western water policy in the United States has favored urban and agricultural development over American Indians' needs, demonstrating little understanding of, or concern for, the affective ecologies of landscapes. Using a qualitative approach focusing on in-depth interviews of members of the Winnemem Wintu tribe in California, we uncover how culturally hegemonic meanings of natural resources and landscapes privilege the water needs of modern development and deny the importance of Indigenous emotional connections to sacred places by limiting access to and protection of ancestral territories. Ninety percent of Winnemem ancestral lands along the McCloud River were flooded in 1945 when the Shasta Dam was completed for the federal Central Valley Project. In 2000, the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation began investigating a proposal to raise Shasta Dam to increase surface water storage capacity for agricultural production. This proposal would destroy remaining Winnemem sacred spaces that offer deep emotional connections crucial to maintaining their cultural identity and ancestral memories. This paper presents a political ecology of emotion perspective to examine the emotional geographies associated with sacred spaces within ancestral landscapes and related struggles against hegemonic approaches to resource management. We argue that an investigation of sacred spaces reveals intimate links between emotion, memory, and identity and exposes the devastating consequence of institutional approaches to land development that favor meanings and practices of the dominant culture and political structure.