What Is Lost and What Is Gained: A Travelogue of Tours of Hydro-Affected Communities in Northern Manitoba

Abstract

In 2014, Peter Kulchyski and Ramona Neckoway began touring hydro-impacted Ininew communities. This now annual hydro tour is an intense seven-day circuit filled with long drives, boat tours, discussion, revelation, outrage, and—above all—kindness and generosity. Relationships on the hydro tour involve engagement with bush dispositions, with ways of life developed in and through an engagement with the temporalities, spatialities, subjectivities, languages, and knowledges of egalitarian gathering and hunting peoples. In the city, hydroelectricity is taken for granted; it is seen through the possessive, instrumental rationality that underlines people’s roles as workers and citizens. This contrasts with the face-to-face encounters between community- and urban-based activists, artists, and academics that occur during the hydro tours. Those participating may witness Ininew performances and embodied practices that are both culturally specific and fundamentally human. The relationships developed on the hydro tour enact performances of care and vulnerability in which ethical concern responds to festering social wounds. Perceiving vulnerability and responding to it with care is labour, the work of relationship. Distribution of social wealth is unequal, raced, and gendered, yet it can be transformed through caring practice; such transformations require Ininew leadership.