Abstract
This article examines the colonization of Michi Saagiig Nishnaabeg territory by the Trent Severn Waterway. By examining legal bracketing as a process within Canadian common law alongside prevailing Nishnaabeg philosophy and legal thought, I consider how the construction of a canal system connecting Lake Ontario to Georgian Bay disrupted practices integral to Nishnaabeg law. I offer up the concept of shoreline law as a way to understand particular place-based relationships that Mississaugas hold with water and land and other beings with which they share territory. In particular, I show how colonial domination of Nishnaabeg territory resulted in a gendered dispossession of land that continues to have reverberations throughout Nishnaabeg political systems today. Shoreline law offers up a way to rethink international relations by showing the importance of multiple relationships within the shared space of the shoreline.
Highlights
This article examines the colonization of Michi Saagiig Nishnaabeg territory by the Trent Severn Waterway
Library and Archives Canada, Department of Railways and Canals, Correspondence with the Department of Indian Affairs, Mississaugas of Mud Lake Claim, Record Group 43, Vol 1554, File 7435. This passage captures the heavy reliance upon bracketing by colonial officials to evade responsibility for the slow violence enacted on Nishnaabeg bodies and land by the construction of the Trent Severn Waterway (TSW)
Despite the attempts of settler men to overwrite place-based Nishnaabeg relationality within colonial laws, stories, and the physical imposition of dams on our waters, shoreline law lives on when we evoke it through stories and practices
Summary
The territory that the TSW spans is primarily Anishinaabe territory. In some places it is Haudenosaunee territory, and in yet other parts it is considered shared territory between the two nations. Library and Archives Canada, Department of Railways and Canals, Correspondence with the Department of Indian Affairs, Mississaugas of Mud Lake Claim, Record Group 43, Vol 1554, File 7435 This passage captures the heavy reliance upon bracketing by colonial officials to evade responsibility for the slow violence enacted on Nishnaabeg bodies and land by the construction of the TSW. I look deeper into the meaning of this relationship between beavers and humans, using a historical story recorded by William Jones and interpreted by Heidi Stark about the woman who married a beaver This story captures Nishnaabeg attitudes toward treaty relations that inform my understanding of the history taught to me by Doug Williams with respect to Treaty 20 and our ongoing lived reality in the territory. It is these two treaty relationships that I take up
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