Reclaiming Rainmaking from Damming Epistemologies

Abstract

In California Indian epistemologies, water, land, language, and knowledge are intimately connected through ancient cycles of research, ceremony, and kinship. Since creation, ‘atáaxum champúulam//Luiseño medicine people sang for rain, holding ceremonies that kept the riv­ers full, the plants strong, and our people from thirst. Rainmaking in this essay serves as an example of an Indigenous lifeway and practice that was subjected to colonial violence; rainmaking also serves as a more figurative and emblematic example of a central feature of Indigenous epistemologies in which language, land, governance/clan systems, and ceremony are linked together as an embodied practice. Embodied practices and the cluster of concepts connected to them are contrasted throughout this essay with parcels, or aspects of Indigenous lifeways that are rendered as individualized pieces or as mere resources. Indigenous lifeways are rendered as parcels or mere resources through a process of structural epistemic injustice (contributory injustice) that can be referted to as epistemic damming. Through contributory injustice, or epistemic damming, settler colonial legal and academic structures have transformed Indigenous practices by rendering them into parcels, or mere resources, and doling them out piecemeal back to Indigenous communities as a lackluster gesture at justice. This essay (1) provides sorely underdiscussed historical context of the impacts of settler colonialism on Indigenous lifeways and practices, spotlighting the specific manifestations of settler colonial violence in California, (2) shows how Indigenous practices are epistemically dammed, or subjected to structural contributory injustice, highlighting contemporary examples thereof, and (3) briefly gestures at a now-visible roadmap of avenues of Indigenous resistance with hazards such as contributory injustice flagged along the way.