Dr. Andrew Curley

Governing water insecurity: navigating indigenous water rights and regulatory politics in settler colonial states

Indigenous peoples experience water insecurity disproportionately compared to other populations. This article illustrates how jurisdictional and regulatory injustices, combined with political and economic asymmetries advanced by settler colonial states, reproduce water insecurity for Indigenous communities in Canada and the United States. The authors also show how Indigenous peoples are pushing back through state and non-state strategies, revitalizing Indigenous knowledge and governance systems to assert water rights.

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Indigenous Youth and Decolonial Futures: Energy and Environmentalism among the Dine in the Navajo Nation and the Lepchas of Sikkim, India

This article examines how Diné and Lepcha youth articulate decolonial futures that diverge from large-scale infrastructure development models. Rather than advocating for dams or power plants, Indigenous youth imagine energy and environmental futures rooted in their own territories and values. Their activism is framed as “youthful decolonial futurity,” a politics that centers community control, ancestral stewardship, and intergenerational decision-making.

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Infrastructures as colonial beachheads: The Central Arizona Project and the taking of Navajo resources

This article argues that colonialism is advanced through the development of national infrastructures, which arrive in some places while being withheld in others. By examining the Central Arizona Project, it highlights how infrastructure planning across space and time established conditions for dispossession and marginalization of Navajo resources. The study shows how physical, legal, and political systems converge to reinforce colonial control through infrastructure development.

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