Inter-epistemic and creative collaborations for water: Indigenous Peoples’ water justice across three territories

• Distributive, recognitional, procedural, and restorative dimensions of water justice are shaped by relationality. • Creative, intercultural, and inter-epistemic collaborations are mechanisms through which Indigenous water justice is enacted. • A new framework for ethical co-visioning of water futures is proposed to support relational and sustainable water governance. Indigenous Peoples’ conceptualisations of water justice challenge dominant paradigms in water governance by foregrounding relational, spiritual, and place-based understandings of water. Rather than framing water as a resource to be allocated or managed, many Indigenous communities view water as a living entity with inherent rights and a central role in sustaining interconnected life systems. This article examines how Indigenous Peoples’ conceptualisations of water justice differ from Western approaches, which often prioritise individual rights and utility. Through case studies of First Nations and Alaska Tribes in the Yukon River, the Awajún in the Chiriaco River, and the Sámi in the Deatnu River, the paper illustrates both the resilience of Indigenous Peoples’ ontologies and the tensions that arise when colonial or state-led projects and policies override Indigenous Peoples’ sovereignty and knowledge systems. Drawing on these cases, a framework for ethical co-visioning of water futures is presented, outlining principles, practices, and policy spaces that support sustainable water governance. Achieving water security requires not only recognition of Indigenous Peoples’ governance systems, legal traditions, and cosmologies, but also their full inclusion in decision-making processes to collectively overcome the ‘crisis of imagination’ hindering innovative policy responses. This article contributes to the growing recognition that water security cannot be achieved through material provision alone but must also attend to ethical, cultural, and relational dimensions of water.