Indigenous voices in water: a conversation long overdue

In the heart of Mexico City, a water management system built by the Aztecs is still functioning today. It cools the city, cleans water, and grows food. In the recent episode of the Waterproof podcast ‘The Indigenous Voice’, four indigenous scientists and educators explain why solutions like this are not relics of the past, but blueprints for the future.

Ancient infrastructure that is still running

In the centre of Mexico City, food is being grown on raised agricultural fields surrounded by shallow canals. The irrigation water is on site. The system cools ambient air temperature by four to five degrees. It provides flood protection, supports biodiversity, and has been doing all of this continuously for around a thousand years. The Chinampas, first developed by the Nahua people and expanded by the Aztecs, were already in place when Europeans arrived, and remain in use today.

For the Waterproof podcast episode ‘The Indigenous Voice’, host Tracy Metz travelled to Stockholm Water Week 2025 last August to speak with four indigenous water experts. Their message is not that modern science should step aside. It is that it should pay closer attention.

Nature as infrastructure

Julia Watson is a landscape architect and the author of Lo-TEK, a field guide documenting indigenous water technologies from around the world. She is the only non-indigenous voice on the episode but has spent her career documenting indigenous technologies in meticulous technical detail.

Watson’s documentations include the living root bridges of the Khasi community in northeastern India – grown, not built, from Ficus trees over decades, in a region with some of the highest rainfall on earth. Bridges that get stronger with age. She also points to Sponge City, the urban water planning model now being replicated across China and beyond, which mimics natural water cycles in precisely the way indigenous communities have managed them for centuries.

What Watson calls Lo-TEK – traditional ecological knowledge – is not a romantic alternative to modern engineering but a body of proven, replicable, often scalable technology.

Invited to the table, not to the conversation

Dr. KaiLei’a Duriano is 24 years old, a marine biologist and oceanographer from Oahu, and a fellow at The Nature Conservancy’s Hawaii chapter. At Stockholm Water Week, she addressed the international water community on indigenous rights and representation in academia. She describes her experience in formal academic settings as one of feeling patronised and tokenised – invited to diversify a table but not genuinely heard at it. Dr. Yolanda López Maldonado, a Maya earth system scientist and founder of Indigenous Science, puts the structural issue plainly: western science does not need to lend credibility to what traditional knowledge holders already know. The knowledge has existed for generations. What is needed is not validation but partnership.

When the law isn’t enough

Anna-Kari Kroik is a Sami educator based in Stockholm. In the episode, she gives her sobering account of the gap between legal recognition and real political power. Sweden has a legal requirement to consult the Sami people before any development on their traditional lands. In practice, she says, the mining companies and the energy sector tend to prevail. Lake Akkajaure has been dammed for hydropower; the water levels are managed for electricity generation, not for the land or the communities who have lived alongside it for generations. Sacred sites are now inaccessible. Old houses have fallen into the water.

Dr. Milika Sobey, a marine scientist and Senior Technical Adviser at GIZ who grew up as part of the indigenous majority in Fiji, offers perhaps the clearest framing of what a genuine partnership between knowledge systems would look like: not western science conferring legitimacy on traditional knowledge, but two bodies of expertise each contributing what the other cannot provide alone.

A question of humility

The one thing all four guests shared, regardless of where they were from, was a deep respect for nature and for water – a relationship that Tracy Metz observes humankind has largely lost in its pursuit of dominion and profit. That is precisely why Partners for Water works to ensure that technological interventions take customary water rights, cultural values, and traditional governance into account. There is, without question, growing attention to indigenous knowledge in water policy. But as Anna-Kari Kroik’s account of the Sami lands makes clear, increased visibility does not yet mean equal political weight. The chinampas of Mexico City are a reminder of what genuine partnership between knowledge systems can look like: infrastructure and ecology not in competition but woven together. The answers have been there all along. The harder part is being humble enough to look.

🎧 ‘The Indigenous Voice’ is an episode of Waterproof, the podcast from Partners for Water. It is hosted by Tracy Metz, the episode features Julia Watson, Dr. Yolanda López Maldonado, Anna-Kari Kroik, Dr. KaiLei’a Duriano, and Dr. Milika Sobey. Listen to the podcast here.