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Dammed: The Politics of Loss and Survival in Anishinaabe Territory
" The Politics of Loss and Survival in Anishinaabe Territory" 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.
256 pages, Paperback
Published October 9, 2020
7 people are currently reading
169 people want to read
About the author
Brittany Luby
7 books10 followersBrittany Luby (Anishinaabe-kwe, atik totem) is an Assistant Professor in the Department of History at the University of Guelph. Raised in the lands of Treaty 3, she is the many-greats granddaughter of Chief Kawitaskung, an Anishinaabe leader who signed the North-West Angle Treaty of 1873. Her family originates from Niisaachewan Anishinaabe Nation formerly known as Dalles First Nation (Ochiichagwe’Babigo’Ining Ojibway Nation). She specializes in Anishinaabe-settler relations in what is now known as northwestern Ontario.
Brittany seeks to stimulate public discussion of Indigenous issues through her work. She now lives on Territories cared for under the Dish with One Spoon Covenant.
Brittany seeks to stimulate public discussion of Indigenous issues through her work. She now lives on Territories cared for under the Dish with One Spoon Covenant.
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Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews
June 8, 2022
Historians often paint Canada’s postwar period as an era of increased prosperity and wealth and one in which the Canadian government took great steps to intervene on behalf of citizens, particularly the rural and poor, to improve their lives through an expanding welfare state. Luby challenges this conception by arguing that settler colonialism, specifically hydroelectric development, impacted Anishinaabe in the Treaty 3 region of Ontario and Canada’s postwar affluence was divided along racialized lines. Throughout the book she highlights how Anishinaabe resisted, adapted, or cooperated with these changes, allowing for cultural perseveration. These acts of resistance did not include large organizational strategies and therefore have been ignored in the historiography. For example, selling blueberries in the warmer months to cultivate cash savings or shifting verbal complaints to written complaints demonstrate a few of the adaptive strategies employed by Anishinaabe and highlight the resistive actions taken in the pre-White Paper era. She argues that the building of the Whitedog Falls Generating Station after the Second World brought the greatest degree of damage to Anishinaabe ways of living, with the accumulation of pollutants, including mercury, and the creation of hypoxic water that killed off fish such as sturgeon that were essential to Anishinaabe culture and survival. As such, Luby also reveals how the economic standing of Indigenous peoples did not evenly improve after the amendment to the Indian Act in 1951 which provided some autonomy as historians have previously argued.
May 22, 2023
4.5 stars. A very important book in my field of research written by an Anishinaabeg historian who I’ve heard such great things about. The person I’ve been seeing for the past few months was a student of Luby’s at Guelph and says that Luby was her favourite professor there and was likely the most caring of all the history professors she ever had. The students in the environmental history course I took last year are all big fans of this book by Luby. It’s always so nice to hear that your intellectual heroes are also just great human beings.
This book is about the impacts of hydroelectric dam construction on the Indigenous nations who lived around Lake of the Woods, its role in dispossession of Anishinaabe from their lands and the toll it took on their livelihoods, but also the forms of resistance they engaged in, their struggles of survival and maintaining a connection to their land and water.
My own research is on long-19th century watermills in Ontario, and while this book is largely focused on the 20th century, the Norman Dam (Luby’s focus) was actually completed at the end of the 19th century, so it very much overlaps with my own period of interest. And as Luby points out in the preface, Lake of the Woods was actually the central gathering point of Anishinaabeg life, whereas areas like Tkaranto were in fact peripheral areas of the Anishinaabeg homeland. Therefore, my regional area was a culturally and geographically marginal area to this Indigenous nation and was in some sense connected to what went on along the Winnipeg River. This challenges a lot of the approaches of Marxist world systems theories and their focuses of cores and peripheries, and how extraction functions. Of course the cores and peripheries they are most interested in are the ones of empires, and how extraction of peripheries concentrate wealth in the imperial cores (Toronto was the center for HEPCO, later HydroOne). However, Luby reminds us we should ask whose core and whose periphery are we talking about? And she shows how the core of the Anishinaabeg nation was environmentally destroyed and energy from it was extracted for the benefit of imperial cores of Anglo-settler power.
Luby’s first chapter traces the various ways settler colonialism was already affecting Anishinaabeg peoples before the Norman Dam. She mentions how the construction of smaller dams from 1887-1893 were affecting the flow of water from Lake of the Woods into the Winnipeg River, and the changing water levels were damaging important ice road infrastructure that the Anishinaabe maintained and used to move around their lands. After the Norman Dam was constructed around 1898 or 1899, even settlers were angry about the way it was transforming the environment and Luby mentions one attempt to blow it up with dynamite. Many drownings happened around the dam reservoir, both humans and animals. For example, thousands of muskrats drowned, which significantly impacted Anishinaabeg traplines on which they depended for food. Their berry foraging groundss and manomin (wild rice) stands were damaged by floods caused by the dam. So much of their food base was wiped out by this dam’s construction, and they had to quickly adapt to survive.
Luby’s second and third chapters tell the story of industrialists coming into their area both because the colonial state began selling timber rights and because of the development of hydroelectric power stations. One of the big actors during this time was HEPCO (now Hydro One) and Luby offers a telling quote by one of their former executives:
“Sam Horton, the former vice-president of Ontario Hydro, told former Chief Allan Luby (Ogemah) in 1992 that “we were too busy building a country to think about the Aboriginal people living on the land [that] we would be affecting.””
And another HEPCO employee said: “ “All you guys [Anishinabeg] just have to fuck off and that’s it—no more.”
The Anishinaabe launched numerous complaints against HEPCO regarding the damages that they were encountering and the impacts it was having on them, all of which were dismissed through various types of excuses.
Luby’s fourth chapter describes the various ways Anishinaabe attempted to adapt to these circumstances, some finding employment at with HEPCO driving trucks or, most commonly, felling trees. This reminds me of a story in Joy Parr’s book Sensing Changes, were families who tended and helped expand timber stands on their farmlands were displaced by the construction of a NATO military base in the maritimes, and some of the local residents were employed to apply agent orange to the vegetation to carve out paths for military tank exercises. To have to economically depend on a company that is constructing something that is directly destroying your land, its hunting grounds, berry patches, wild rice stands, and fish — it’s heartbreaking and infuriating and fucking awful. Settler tourists in the area loved hearing about fish and nature from Indigenous tour guides:
“Many able-bodied Anishinaabe men accepted seasonal jobs as fishing guides for American and Canadian tourists. Indeed, Captain Frank Edwards, the Indian Agent of the Kenora and Savanne Agencies from 1920 to 1948, identified guiding as a “main occupation” among his wards.”
“Anishinaabe visibility in the guiding business was tied to market demand. Edwards claimed that few entrepreneurs wanted to hire Anishinaabe labourers, but tourists demanded that they do so: “Most camps prefer to hire white men, although the Tourists like to have Indian guides.”8 Consumer preferences even led some camps—such as the CPR’s Devil’s Gap camp near Rat Portage Indian Reserve—to hire “Indians almost exclusively for this purpose.”9”
“Although visitors demanded access to Indigenous knowledge of nearby fishing grounds, seasonal demands for Anishinaabe labour did little to counter discriminatory hiring practices year-round (or within the tourism industry itself). Anishinaabe labourers were siloed into guiding jobs that ended with the tourist season. Seasonal pay created an incentive for Anishinaabe labourers to seek contracts in other industries. For this reason, some Anishinaabe families saw the arrival of HEPCO as an opportunity to earn year-round pay.”
A stable job would allow Anishinaabe to stay on their reserve and keep a connection to their land, something they valued highly.
However the dam continued to attract industry that unloaded enormous amounts of waste into their water threatening fish which the Anishinaabe depended upon for their livelihoods. Large quantities of sewage, industrial waste, cellulose and sawmill refuse, and chemicals began affecting Anishinaabe health and food security.
In her final chapter, Luby talks about the way this particularly affected Anishinaabeg mothers. The dam and created significant methyl-mercury problems (which is caused by certain microorganisms that feed on submerged vegetation) and this can quickly accumulate up the food chain of aquatic life. The mercury levels in the fish started posing problems for those who ate it, but also for babies who drank breast milk.
In her conclusion, Luby points out a story that is often missing from post-war Canadian history, which is the widening gap between Canadian settlers and First Nations in the decades after WW2. Prosperity that came from large hydroelectric projects like the ones around Lake of the Woods made certain people prosperous, but it also contributed to environmental destruction most acutely felt by Indigenous nations and had significant impacts on their health and food security.
post script: Grassy Narrows is mentioned quite a number of times in this book as they are located around this area. I've had a chance to meet people from that nation a few times and spend time with them over food, on the streets during demonstrations, or at the Ontario Science Center. To know Grassy youth who have lost their mothers, uncles, little sisters to mercury poisoning makes me really angry and sad. And to think these kids have to do so much work, speaking at rallies and actions, when they should just be living lives that kids are supposed to be living, not having to grieve over so much death in their life and continued government inaction and failed promises regarding mercury care centers for the elderly on their territory still suffering from the legacy of mercury poisoning.
This book is about the impacts of hydroelectric dam construction on the Indigenous nations who lived around Lake of the Woods, its role in dispossession of Anishinaabe from their lands and the toll it took on their livelihoods, but also the forms of resistance they engaged in, their struggles of survival and maintaining a connection to their land and water.
My own research is on long-19th century watermills in Ontario, and while this book is largely focused on the 20th century, the Norman Dam (Luby’s focus) was actually completed at the end of the 19th century, so it very much overlaps with my own period of interest. And as Luby points out in the preface, Lake of the Woods was actually the central gathering point of Anishinaabeg life, whereas areas like Tkaranto were in fact peripheral areas of the Anishinaabeg homeland. Therefore, my regional area was a culturally and geographically marginal area to this Indigenous nation and was in some sense connected to what went on along the Winnipeg River. This challenges a lot of the approaches of Marxist world systems theories and their focuses of cores and peripheries, and how extraction functions. Of course the cores and peripheries they are most interested in are the ones of empires, and how extraction of peripheries concentrate wealth in the imperial cores (Toronto was the center for HEPCO, later HydroOne). However, Luby reminds us we should ask whose core and whose periphery are we talking about? And she shows how the core of the Anishinaabeg nation was environmentally destroyed and energy from it was extracted for the benefit of imperial cores of Anglo-settler power.
Luby’s first chapter traces the various ways settler colonialism was already affecting Anishinaabeg peoples before the Norman Dam. She mentions how the construction of smaller dams from 1887-1893 were affecting the flow of water from Lake of the Woods into the Winnipeg River, and the changing water levels were damaging important ice road infrastructure that the Anishinaabe maintained and used to move around their lands. After the Norman Dam was constructed around 1898 or 1899, even settlers were angry about the way it was transforming the environment and Luby mentions one attempt to blow it up with dynamite. Many drownings happened around the dam reservoir, both humans and animals. For example, thousands of muskrats drowned, which significantly impacted Anishinaabeg traplines on which they depended for food. Their berry foraging groundss and manomin (wild rice) stands were damaged by floods caused by the dam. So much of their food base was wiped out by this dam’s construction, and they had to quickly adapt to survive.
Luby’s second and third chapters tell the story of industrialists coming into their area both because the colonial state began selling timber rights and because of the development of hydroelectric power stations. One of the big actors during this time was HEPCO (now Hydro One) and Luby offers a telling quote by one of their former executives:
“Sam Horton, the former vice-president of Ontario Hydro, told former Chief Allan Luby (Ogemah) in 1992 that “we were too busy building a country to think about the Aboriginal people living on the land [that] we would be affecting.””
And another HEPCO employee said: “ “All you guys [Anishinabeg] just have to fuck off and that’s it—no more.”
The Anishinaabe launched numerous complaints against HEPCO regarding the damages that they were encountering and the impacts it was having on them, all of which were dismissed through various types of excuses.
Luby’s fourth chapter describes the various ways Anishinaabe attempted to adapt to these circumstances, some finding employment at with HEPCO driving trucks or, most commonly, felling trees. This reminds me of a story in Joy Parr’s book Sensing Changes, were families who tended and helped expand timber stands on their farmlands were displaced by the construction of a NATO military base in the maritimes, and some of the local residents were employed to apply agent orange to the vegetation to carve out paths for military tank exercises. To have to economically depend on a company that is constructing something that is directly destroying your land, its hunting grounds, berry patches, wild rice stands, and fish — it’s heartbreaking and infuriating and fucking awful. Settler tourists in the area loved hearing about fish and nature from Indigenous tour guides:
“Many able-bodied Anishinaabe men accepted seasonal jobs as fishing guides for American and Canadian tourists. Indeed, Captain Frank Edwards, the Indian Agent of the Kenora and Savanne Agencies from 1920 to 1948, identified guiding as a “main occupation” among his wards.”
“Anishinaabe visibility in the guiding business was tied to market demand. Edwards claimed that few entrepreneurs wanted to hire Anishinaabe labourers, but tourists demanded that they do so: “Most camps prefer to hire white men, although the Tourists like to have Indian guides.”8 Consumer preferences even led some camps—such as the CPR’s Devil’s Gap camp near Rat Portage Indian Reserve—to hire “Indians almost exclusively for this purpose.”9”
“Although visitors demanded access to Indigenous knowledge of nearby fishing grounds, seasonal demands for Anishinaabe labour did little to counter discriminatory hiring practices year-round (or within the tourism industry itself). Anishinaabe labourers were siloed into guiding jobs that ended with the tourist season. Seasonal pay created an incentive for Anishinaabe labourers to seek contracts in other industries. For this reason, some Anishinaabe families saw the arrival of HEPCO as an opportunity to earn year-round pay.”
A stable job would allow Anishinaabe to stay on their reserve and keep a connection to their land, something they valued highly.
However the dam continued to attract industry that unloaded enormous amounts of waste into their water threatening fish which the Anishinaabe depended upon for their livelihoods. Large quantities of sewage, industrial waste, cellulose and sawmill refuse, and chemicals began affecting Anishinaabe health and food security.
In her final chapter, Luby talks about the way this particularly affected Anishinaabeg mothers. The dam and created significant methyl-mercury problems (which is caused by certain microorganisms that feed on submerged vegetation) and this can quickly accumulate up the food chain of aquatic life. The mercury levels in the fish started posing problems for those who ate it, but also for babies who drank breast milk.
In her conclusion, Luby points out a story that is often missing from post-war Canadian history, which is the widening gap between Canadian settlers and First Nations in the decades after WW2. Prosperity that came from large hydroelectric projects like the ones around Lake of the Woods made certain people prosperous, but it also contributed to environmental destruction most acutely felt by Indigenous nations and had significant impacts on their health and food security.
post script: Grassy Narrows is mentioned quite a number of times in this book as they are located around this area. I've had a chance to meet people from that nation a few times and spend time with them over food, on the streets during demonstrations, or at the Ontario Science Center. To know Grassy youth who have lost their mothers, uncles, little sisters to mercury poisoning makes me really angry and sad. And to think these kids have to do so much work, speaking at rallies and actions, when they should just be living lives that kids are supposed to be living, not having to grieve over so much death in their life and continued government inaction and failed promises regarding mercury care centers for the elderly on their territory still suffering from the legacy of mercury poisoning.
March 21, 2022
interesting but kinda dense
November 5, 2025
Luby ends this book with a powerful question: “whose lands are being inundated for my convenience?”
An incredible piece of scholarship on the devastating effects of the hydroelectric industry on the lifeways and homelands of the Anishinaabe people.
An incredible piece of scholarship on the devastating effects of the hydroelectric industry on the lifeways and homelands of the Anishinaabe people.
November 9, 2023
The book was eye-opening for a foreigner interested in Ontario and the Anishinaabe people. Scholar interested in Canadian history, energy history, and environmental history might want to take a look. My only asterisk is with the style, not because its unreadable but because I can see the author struggling to balance the oral history and facts.
March 25, 2024
This was such an important book for me to read, having grown up and still connected to Kenora (went to high school with the author). I see my settler family history in a whole different light and this book has sparked so many conversations with family and friends. Miigwech, Brittany Luby!
December 19, 2021
Good and important history of people and place
crushed by colonialist and capitalist forces
crushed by colonialist and capitalist forces
July 15, 2023
Extremely thorough academic work. Horribly clunky as an audiobook.
Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews