Reviewed by: Dammed: The Politics of Loss and Survival in Anishinaabe Territory by Brittany Luby Daniel Macfarlane Luby, Brittany – Dammed: The Politics of Loss and Survival in Anishinaabe Territory. Winnipeg: University of Manitoba Press, 2020. 256 p. Brittany Luby’s Dammed is a fine-grained, intimate, and highly readable analysis of the impact of hydroelectric development on Anishinaabe communities in the Lake of the Woods–Winnipeg River watershed. Luby unpacks the ways that the costs of governmental infrastructure projects were disproportionately borne by those who lived in Treaty 3 territory—the Dalles 38C Indian Reserve, specifically— while the benefits flowed elsewhere. Power dams such as Norman and Whitedog Falls threatened the traditional lifeways of the Anishinabeg—fish, blueberries, ice roads, manomin (wild rice)—which were formally criminalized or informally circumscribed. But they were not passive victims, and Dammed foregrounds their adaptation and resistance strategies. Luby blends oral history and archival research with firsthand experience, including a process that the author calls “presence-ing” (p. 14). She rejects full objectivity as an “academic construction” borne of a Western worldview. A helpful “Note on Sources” is included at the end of the book. Luby clearly reverses the centre/periphery dyad: from the perspective of government officials in Toronto and Ottawa, the Lake of the Woods watershed was the periphery; in the Anishinaabe worldview, this basin was the centre. Early on, Dammed establishes the processes that led to the creation of Treaty 3 reserves. For a confluence of reasons, and in distinction to other parts of Ontario, the First Nations there were initially able to mostly hold onto and maintain control over their water resources. But this was short-lived. After the growth of hydropower and rise of Ontario Hydro, First Nations water resources in the Lake of the Woods basin were recast by the state as outside of the borders and jurisdiction of the reserves. The author reveals ways that Anishinabeg resisted, including relocation, and “maintained competing definitions of space—particularly their interconnectedness with water” (p. 38). Luby gets into the ways that dams affected ice road mobility in the early twentieth century. Experiential knowledge about the reliability of ice routes was changed by water control infrastructure, while the inability to rely on these roads in the same way had various ripple effects for local subsistence strategies. Chapter 2 [End Page 668] shows how the people who actually inhabited the Lake of the Woods basin were cut out of governmental decision-making about the basin. For example, the only “nations” the International Joint Commission recognized were Canada and the United States. The related discussion of material awareness, seasonality, multi-sensory evidence, and spatial knowledge is illuminating. Dammed then turns to Ontario Hydro (also known as the Hydro-Electric Power Commission of Ontario, or HEPCO). The Whitedog Falls Generating Station, opened after the Second World War, flooded out manomin. Luby compares the ways HEPCO negotiated water control and compensation with an industrial mill, which was much different than the way it consulted—or did not consult—the local Indigenous communities. The second half of the book looks at the latter half of the twentieth century. Labour, employment, health, and varying responses to economic and food insecurity are major themes. For the affected Anishinabeg, taking employment at the generating stations or allied industries undermined traditional subsistence activities and the attendant cultural patterns, yoking them instead to the rhythms of wages and market capitalism. But given the lack of employment activities in the area, this type of local employment allowed the possibility of staying on the reserve year-round; HEPCO was reluctant to hire those from the reserves on a permanent basis, however. In a further irony, participation in dam construction further changed river conditions and, in turn, socio-economic conditions on the reserves. Traditional subsistence practices, such as harvesting manomin, had been hurt by dams as far back as the First World War. But the larger post-1945 power dams had more severe impacts, since manomin is very sensitive to water level fluctuations. Chapter 5 delves into changing water quality, waste, and pollution. The blasting of the Dalles Rapids in the 1950s, as part of the Whitedog Falls Generating Station, changed both water...
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Feb 6, 2021
David R Hodge + 4
Open Access