The First Nations Water Crisis Through an Affective Lens

This sentiment analysis entails the examination of commonly held colonial opinions and attitudes that further stigmatize Indigenous Peoples. The YouTube video posted by Global News (2021) chosen for this sentiment analysis speaks on the water crisis as experienced by Indigenous Peoples in which the insufficiencies of the infrastructures the government supposedly implements to provide clean drinking water for Indigenous communities is brought to light. This paper explores the negative sentiments/stereotypes found within the video to illustrate how Indigenous communities experience the water crisis and how it is viewed through an affective lens by settler colonialists. An exploration of the Canadian government’s tokenistic rationalization of their current policies that supposedly attempt to deal with and eradicate the water crisis will attempt to provide a counternarrative to the negative sentiments/stereotypes. Two policies that will be explored include the Indian Act, which placed a lot of power and control in the hands of the federal government in the allocation of funding and resources to Indigenous communities. And the policies that require Indigenous Peoples to go through various challenging and problematic hurdles to acquire funding for water treatment plants in their communities.