Dammed: The Politics of Loss and Survival in Anishinaabe Territory

by Brittany Luby

Overview

WINNER Best Scholarly Book in Canadian History Prize, Canadian Historical Association (2021)

WINNER Indigenous History Book Prize, Canadian Historical Association (2021)

WINNER Floyd S. Chambers Award for Ontario History, The Champlain Society (2020)

WINNER CLIO History Prize (Ontario), Canadian Historical Association (2021)

WINNER Governor General's History Award for Excellence in Scholarly Research (2021)

WINNER NiCHE Prize for Best Book in Canadian Environmental History, Canadian Historical Association (2022)

COMMENDED Labriola Center American Indian National Book Award (2020)

Dammed explores Canada’s hydroelectric boom in the Lake of the Woods area. It complicates narratives of increasing affluence in postwar Canada, revealing that the inverse was true for Indigenous communities along the Winnipeg River.

Dammed makes clear that hydroelectric generating stations were designed to serve settler populations. Governments and developers excluded the Anishinabeg from planning and operations and failed to consider how power production might influence the health and economy of their communities. By so doing, Canada and Ontario thwarted a future that aligned with the terms of treaty, a future in which both settlers and the Anishinabeg might thrive in shared territories.

The same hydroelectric development that powered settler communities flooded manomin fields, washed away roads, and compromised fish populations. Anishinaabe families responded creatively to manage the government-sanctioned environmental change and survive the resulting economic loss. Luby reveals these responses to dam development, inviting readers to consider how resistance might be expressed by individuals and families, and across gendered and generational lines.

Luby weaves text, testimony, and experience together, grounding this historical work in the territory of her paternal ancestors, lands she calls home. With evidence drawn from archival material, oral history, and environmental observation, Dammed invites readers to confront Canadian colonialism in the twentieth century.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780887558757
Publisher:	University of Manitoba Press
Publication date:	10/09/2020
Series:	Critical Studies in Native History , #21
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
File size:	8 MB

About the Author

Brittany Luby is an award-winning historian at the University of Guelph. Her writing—both academic and creative—is intended to draw attention to social inequities in what is now known as Canada and to empower readers to envision alternate futures.

Table of Contents

Introduction: Looking Out from Anishinaabe Territory Ch. 1 By Water We Inhabit This Place Ch. 2 Rising River, Receding Access Ch. 3 Power Lost and Power Gained Ch. 4 Labouring to Keep the Reserve Alive Ch. 5 Waste Accumulation in a Changed River Ch. 6 Mother Work and Managing Environmental Change Conclusion: So That Our Next Generation Will Know

What People are Saying About This

Adele Perry

“Dammed is thoughtful, deeply researched, and urgent. Utilizing the tools of Indigenous Studies, environmental history, and women’s history and drawing on oral and written archives, Luby gives us a nuanced and supple analysis of Annishnaabe history in an eventful, and often very difficult, hundred years in Northwestern Ontario."

Editorial Reviews

In Dammed: The Politics of Loss and Survival in Anishinaabe Territory, Luby offers a history, based on archival and oral resources, of the damming and transformation of the Winnipeg River system, all to the detriment of Indigenous people. A history of race, class, gender and labour, Dammed is also a compelling argument for an increased ability to think in systems and to think deeply about how a pathway to reconciliation needs to be bathed in historical reciprocity.”

Winnipeg Free Press - Matt Henderson

"Luby presents the reader with an erudite, but eminently readable, account of the last hundred or so years of human interaction with, and manipulation of, the waterways of Northwestern Ontario… weaving together archival material with Indigenous knowledge and perspectives in an accessible and compelling way."

EVENT Magazine - Sarah Moar

A major contribution to the history of development in post-war Canada.

Cahiers de géographie du Québec - Clarence Hatton-Proulx

The book belies the settler mythology of progress and growth, especially after the Second World War, and the colonial binary of settler expansion/Indigenous victimization. The people [Luby] features in her book demonstrate resilience in the face of challenge, which is a point to be emphasized and extolled.

Canadian Historical Review - Jean L. Manore

"Taking pains to dispel notions of a monolithic First Nations experience, Dammed paints a picture of diverse forms of Canadian Indigenous resistance that long predates unified opposition to the 1969 White Paper, thereby deepening our understandings of First Nations adaptation and resistance to imposed social, political, and environmental change."⁠

Native American and Indigenous Studies Journal - Anna J. Willow

"Luby proves that small dams can have big histories and, in doing so, makes a major contribution to Canadian Indigenous and settler colonial history as well as engaged community research."

Daniel Macfarlane

"Brittany Luby’s Dammed is an important book that pushes the reader to question Canada's nation-building process and to reconcile with the fact that Canada's growth and prosperity were at the expense of Indigenous peoples—with the experience of the Anishinaabeg along the Winnipeg River, and Luby’s home territory, being the example focused upon."

Journal of Australian, Canadian, and Aotearoa New Zealand Studies - Chadwick Cowie