Naming Home Kazim Ali (bio) Click for larger view View full resolution From 1975 to 1979, my family lived in Jenpeg, north of Lake Winnipeg, in Manitoba, Canada. Manitoba Hydro had built the town for its employees to live in during the construction of the Jenpeg Generating Station, which spans the Nelson River and provides electricity to the province. I was around four when we moved there after my father took a position with Manitoba Hydro, and seven when we left. In March 2016, the Indigenous community of Pimicikamak, upon whose land the dam is built, declared a state of emergency. In the two months before, six young people in the community had died by suicide, with one hundred forty attempts in the preceding two weeks. Now, after more than forty years, I've returned north, at the invitation of the Pimicikamak government, to discover what happened in the intervening years. [End Page 19] When I say Jenpeg, I mean the old town, but when the Pimicikamak people say Jenpeg, they mean the actual dam site on the river, and the dormitory next to it where all the workers live now. This slight shift is disconcerting to me, because even if the town doesn't exist anymore, it still exists in my memory, through the shadows of the long decades between me and the boy who lived there. I find myself sad that not only might the town be really gone, but even the name I knew for it has been reassigned to another place. As the story goes that I always heard in my childhood, the town was named for two women, Jenny and Peggy, who worked in the Winnipeg-based procurement and supplies offices of Manitoba Hydro. It's morning, early in my trip, and I've asked to visit the site of the old company town. Jackson Osborne, one of the elders who has been sharing stories with me about the building of the dam and its impact on the lake's ecosystem, has asked if he can come along on the drive. My childhood romanticism, my undefined longing for some place to think of as home, will be tempered by the presence of another, but I agree. Darrell Settee, the emergency rescue coordinator for the Pimicikamak government, whom I met the day before, is going to drive us, because he has a pickup truck, which will be better than a car on the rough dirt roads between Cross Lake and Jenpeg. There was no way the child Kazim could ever have known that Darrell and Jackson lived not far away when I lived here in the north, so I am happy they are accompanying me back. When Darrell arrives, we drive to the NorthMart grocery store to pick up some water and provisions, since we won't back until late in the afternoon. It's funny that the produce in the grocery store—strawberries, blueberries—is all labeled watsonville, ca. These are the same berries I buy at home. Like me, they have traveled a long way to get here. When I lived here with my family, and there was no road between the two towns, it was only possible to fly in to Cross Lake, and many parts of the community needed improvements in infrastructure. Part of the Northern Flood Agreement, the treaty the province signed in 1977 in order to build the dam, was a commitment to build a causeway across the place where the Nelson River flows through the two arms of Cross Lake, connecting the main town with the northern portion of the reserve, which was cut off due to flooding as a result of the dam. The causeway was eventually built—after three separate appeals and further litigation—but it is now in need of repair, and its design took into account only normal cars and smaller trucks. According to Darrell, depending on the season and the water levels, school buses that cross it sometimes must pause at one end, have the students exit and follow the bus on foot, then reboard. The NFA also contained a provision to fund another bridge across the Nelson River, called by the Pimicikamak Kichi...