Black and White Water: Cross-Cultural Colour-Coding of the Life-Blood of the Earth-Body

Abstract

Wetlands — swamps, marshes, mires, morasses, bogs, lagoons, sloughs, shallow lakes and estuaries, and so on — have been seen in patriarchal western culture as places of darkness, disease and death, horror and the uncanny, melancholy and the monstrous, in short, as dead black waters (see Giblett, 1996a). This chapter rejects this perception and proposes seeing them in indigenous cultural terms as living waters. Instead of seeing wetlands and other such water bodies as black waters linked to death, this chapter proposes seeing them as blood red concurrent with both life and death. The profusion of hyphens in the subtitle to the chapter I see as emblematic of a dialogue between cultures (indigenous and settler) and of a bridge for crossing boundaries between categories. The title, on the other hand, naturally (or culturally) comes from cultural constructions of ethnicity, but also of water. Just as whites have coded, and valued, white as good and pure, so they (we) have coded black as bad and impure. These codifications and valuations apply as much to water and waters as to people.