The watershed has long captured political and scientific imaginations and served as a primary sociospatial unit of water governance and ecosystem restoration. However, uncritically deploying watersheds for
collaborative environmental governance in indigenous territories may inappropriately frame sociocultural,
political-economic, and ecological processes, and overlook questions related to power and scale. We analyse how
members of the Karuk Tribe’s Department of Natural Resources have leveraged and critiqued collaborative
watershed governance initiatives to push for 'ecocultural revitalisation' – the linked processes of ecosystem repair
and cultural revitalisation – in Karuk Aboriginal Territory in the Klamath River Basin. We argue for decentring
watersheds in relation to other socio-spatial formations that are generated through indigenous-led processes and
grounded in indigenous knowledge and values. We explore two scalar frameworks – firesheds and foodsheds –
that are emerging as alternatives to the watershed for collaborative natural resources management, and consider
their implications for Karuk ecocultural revitalisation. We attempt to bring watersheds, firesheds, and foodsheds
together through an ecocultural approach to scale in which water is one among many cultural and natural
resources that are interconnected and managed across multiple socio-spatial formations and temporal ranges.
We emphasise 'decolonising scale' to foreground indigenous knowledge and to support indigenous sovereignty
and self-determination
