“Big River People”

The Mekong and Columbia Rivers are a world apart. Yet rivers instantiate and manifest critical ecological relations. This paper draws on qualitative interviews, community dialogues, historical documents, and ceremony-based encounters to examine political practices among "big river people'' in the Mekong and Columbia River basins. It interprets participants' narratives and actions as expressions of ontological politics, i.e., contestation of imposed realities and lifeways. Participants link environmental degradation to violations of relational ethics. Across both study groups, elders and knowledge holders describe ecological and cultural loss as forms of ongoing violence enacted through hydropower development, displacement, and resulting erasure of ways of knowing and being. Their testimonies also demonstrate ongoing peace actions: a process of regeneration and reclaiming agency rooted in continuity of spiritual practice, intergenerational teaching, and empathetic recognition of shared river kinship. They assert that effective governance must begin with relational understanding of human-Nature interactions rather than bureaucratic consultation. Cross-basin analysis identifies parallels in research participants' loss, perseverance, situating empathy as a political methodology grounded in reciprocal and co-constitutive human-Nature relations, and development of collaborative networks. River peoples' ontological political work simultaneously points to improved adaptive river governance practices, and their deep ontological contestation of a governance frame of human-Nature relations. Analysis shows how spirituality, ceremony, and a relational frame operate as modes of knowledge production and relational repair that also bridge trans-local struggles for justice

Agency (philosophy) · Corporate governance · Environmental governance · Hydropower · Mekong river · Narrative · Political ecology · Politics · Conservation, Biodiversity, and Resource Management · Environmental and Cultural Studies in Latin America and Beyond · Water Governance and Infrastructure