Anyone with a basic understanding of North America’s history knows this is not what happened. The rivers flowed and the grass continued to grow, but the ship brazenly built its success on the oppression of the canoe. Government mandated genocide, both cultural and literal, attempted to rob generations of Indigenous families from their autonomy. Canada’s residential schools (the last of which only closed in the 1990s) were devoted to the dismantling of Indigenous youth’s languages, spirituality, and culture—and were only a small part of the government’s assimilationist agenda. But the word assimilation doesn’t begin to embody the pain inherent to colonialism. It also does nothing to capture the strength of Indigenous peoples who are now reclaiming their spaces, languages, and knowledge.

Today, Canada’s collective dialogue is finally shifting to include reconciliation with Indigenous people. This year, after six years of gathering statements from witnesses and survivors of Canada’s residential school system, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) released 94 calls to action. The calls outline improvements that span across many areas of Canadian society, like child welfare, health, language and culture, media, the legal system, and education. Each of these sectors holds barriers rooted in colonization. And, in many ways, the TRC’s report acts as a guide for the Canadian government to address the chasms left by the residential school system.

In a country with a history of using the education system to oppress Indigenous people, academia has an intrinsic role to play in truth-telling. Given all this, says journalist and award-winning director Candace Maracle, the need for an improved, context-conscious curriculum is evident: “Not just as a Haudenosaunee woman, not just as a journalist, but as a person.”

That’s why the TRC report also addresses modern education, targeting every level of schooling from kindergarten to post-secondary. It’s something that many Indigenous and education activists are currently focusing on, and also grappling with. As these discussions gain traction, post-secondary institutions are newly focused on introducing more Indigenous content into the university curriculum—what’s being called “Indigenization.” But when it comes to translating this term to tangible, systemic action, it’s not so easy to parse out. Indigenization can refer to many things, from to the creation of more Indigenous spaces on campus, to mandatory courses added to universities, to adding more Indigenous context and perspectives into already existing curricula. Regardless of what form it takes, this emergent buzzword carries a connotation of pervasiveness, effortlessly suggesting systemic transformation. At its core, Indigenization is more complicated: these are institutions that, in many ways, are built on a rejection of Indigenous knowledge.

“These institutions and classrooms were never meant to be Indigenized. These spaces were created to not allow my people in,” says Andrea Landry, a 27-year-old University of Saskatchewan professor. Landry is Anishinaabe and comes from Pays Plat First Nation in Ontario. Now, she calls Treaty 6 territory home in Poundmaker Cree Nation, Saskatchewan. She teaches Indigenous studies and political science through on-reserve classes. “I grew up in high schools where being brown was a burden,” says Landry. She went to Vancouver Island University in Nanaimo, B.C. During her undergrad, Landry was involved with international politics. She did work with the United Nations. Idle No More had started. She was travelled to different countries every month. But every time she came back to the classroom, she was confronted with frustrating questions like Teach us about the ’60s scoop? Teach us about residential schools? Why do I always see Indians drunk downtown? “I was always questioning my professors,” says Landry, “and saying, ‘Where is the representation of my people?’”

All of which raises the question: How do you even begin to re-imagine institutions that were never meant to welcome Indigenous people in the first place?

* * *

There are 650,000 Indigenous youth under the age of 25 in Canada. This is the fastest growing segment of the country’s population. Yet, fewer than 10 percent of Indigenous people aged 25–64 have a university degree, according to Universities Canada, an organization which labels itself “the voice of Canadian universities.” Comparatively, 65 percent of non-Indigenous people of the same age category have a university degree—more than triple the amount. The reasons behind this are nuanced, not easily attributed to any single set of causes. Economic barriers, like a lower average income, make it more difficult to attend post-secondary institutions. There is also a sense of disheartening alienation that can come with travelling long distances from communities to universities.

“If we’re saying everyone needs a higher education in this country to be employable, how do we create the space so that everyone can attend? That’s the biggest piece,” says Darren Thomas, a 46-year-old working on his Ph.D. in community psychology at Laurier University. A member of the Seneca Nation, Thomas lives in the Grand River Territory of the Haudenosaunee. He also holds the unexpected title of professional entertainer, as an on-stage comedy hypnotist. Thomas is an easy-going conversationalist, with a relaxed smile that reaches his eyes. “I help people who have experienced trauma laugh,” says Thomas. He’s one of 13 designated role models for the Council of Ontario Universities’ (COU) “Let’s Take Our Futures Further” campaign, which launched in February 2016 and aims to showcase the successes of Aboriginal students in Ontario.

In a time where mainstream media and textbooks all too often cast Indigenous people as victims in their own narratives—or don’t cast them at all—showcasing the successes of Indigenous Canadians is long overdue. This is why initiatives like Future Further are important. “Many Canadians don’t know who we are, don’t understand what our resiliency is,” says Wanda Wuttunee, a professor of Native Studies at University of Manitoba. “You can hear many sad, hard stories. But what do they do with them? Are they resilient and keep going? Or do they sit?” There’s a need to make space, so that the triumphs of Indigenous scholars, thinkers, and creators across Canada can be shared. Narratives of struggle should not be dismissed, but they also shouldn’t stifle ones of success.

When Thomas first attended university in the late 1980s, he says there was a sense of trepidation from his home community surrounding Western education. “Fundamentally, there’s still that fear,” says Thomas, “that Western education is a mind changer.” The phrase “mind changer” comes from a very specific part of Haudenosaunee history, Thomas tells me. In the late 18th century, there was a Seneca prophet by the name of Handsome Lake. He had visions that told him how his people should live. One of the visions warned him of the mind changer, alcohol. Another told him that his people would become lost if they followed the white man. At the time, Thomas brushed off his grandmother’s warnings. “It’s the modern world,” he thought. “They’re not going to treat us this way.”

Now, he laughs gently at his youthful optimism, “Little did I know she was right.”

* * *

A few years ago, Maracle sat in a small living room, in her friend’s downtown Toronto apartment. She was hanging out with some colleagues from her Ryerson graduate program, casually drinking beers. One of her male colleagues turned to her, “I knew some Indians once…” There are enough people around that Maracle was embarrassed. “I knew some Indians once…” That agonizing anecdotal pretext. The man told Maracle they beat-up and robbed a friend of his. Five years later, recounting the story, Maracle laughs the sort of laugh that is fuelled by absurdity more than actual amusement. She’s able to laugh now, but at the time it stung, she says. Back then, part of Maracle rushed to offer an explanation on behalf of the Indigenous strangers. The other educated part, says Maracle, followed up her explanation with clarifications. “There was a part of me that sort of stepped back and said, ‘We’re not all like that and I probably don’t know them,’” she pauses, gently scoffing. “We might be a small population but that doesn’t mean I know every Indian there is and I certainly don’t hang out with robbers.” Maracle lets loose into a spurt of wry laughter. But she knows it’s not funny. These are the attitudes that often permeate classrooms—spaces that can be laden with ignorance and outright hostility.

Landry can speak, lengthily and with eloquence, to institutional hostility. She was the first Indigenous student to take the Master of Community and Social Justice program at University of Windsor. During that process, one experience stands out from the rest. The class was talking about Indigenous people, “because, of course, I brought the topic up,” says Landry, the only Indigenous student in the room. When the conversation shifted to genocide, one of Landry’s older male colleagues made eye-contact with her and said, “It wasn’t genocide, because it only killed thousands of your people.” He laughed. Landry locked eyes with him and just stared. “I remember my whole body got really, really hot. Even my insides and my stomach. Everything was hot.”

She felt instantaneous rage. Toward him, but also toward Canada’s institutions, for allowing him to believe such revisionist history. Her pause was brief and her decision to engage her antagonizer, in what she describes as a history lesson, was a quick one. She knew the numbers—that it was more than thousands. So, she talked about the statistics. She asked him if he knew the basics of Canada’s history of colonization.

Landry says she asks people “like that” questions, to lure their thinking outside of its usual scope. Questions like, What are your understandings of treaties? Or, Where did you learn about the history of the land? Her peer didn’t have any answers. He remained quiet, a contrast to his usual demeanour in class. Landry felt he undermined her because she’s an Indigenous woman. But she also felt he had been trained from a young age, by Canada’s institutions, to think that way.

That night she walked home, her anger propelling her tall frame quickly forward. It was the sort of anger that simmers for weeks. She called her mother and told her she wanted to quit, that she was done with the program. She dreamed of leaving academia and its promises of hostility, to be with her mother. To fish and live off the land. But, despite her disillusionment, she was determined to finish her degree (“Mama didn’t raise no quitter,” she later quips). Time and time again, she was expected to act as a spokesperson for all Indigenous people. Teach us about residential schools. Teach us about the ’60s scoop. Why do I always see Indians drunk downtown? “These kind of questions pick away at your identity,” she says, adding, “It took me six years to get my undergrad.”

* * *

University faculty are the only appendage of the great university body that has the ability to reach out directly and personally to students. They are, as Thomas puts it, “this body of people that drive institutional thinking from the classroom.” For many students, the classroom is the first (or only) place they will learn about Indigenous peoples’ histories—histories that, in elementary school, were given little to no space in textbooks, wedged between terms like “first contact” and “fur-trade.” Unfortunately, when students transition from the public school system to post-secondary institutions, university curriculums, shaped by the perspectives of professors, often manage to maintain the same established, outdated “truths.” Rather than drive institutional thinking out, many professors uphold the institutional status-quo.

After a year of doing his undergraduate at Laurentian, Thomas transferred to Western University. He felt fairly successful at Laurentian—a fact which he attributes mostly to being in an Aboriginal-specific program, surrounding by Aboriginal academics—but he couldn’t stand the cold. Western was closer to his community, but also much harder to navigate as one of the only non-white students on campus. He recalled one professor who handed him back a paper and said: “I don’t know anything about your people, how could I mark this?” The professor continued: “Stop thinking like an Indian.” Thomas quit on the spot. Thomas felt, “really, deeply, spiritually,” like he didn’t belong at Western—that it was not a safe space for him. Years later, he went to Laurier and took night classes to finish his undergraduate. Only then did he feel comfortable again.

University institutions do not change rapidly. Even when Thomas later did his master’s degree at Laurier, which he calls “a rich place to play,” he was asked questions like: Why are you here, then, if you’re always bashing the university? Why are you getting your master’s? “Well, no one asked me if they could come and create this country called Canada,” says Thomas, a rare edge to his voice. He adds that part of his university experience is him playing the game. “I’m getting these advanced credentials, because suddenly, in the eyes of the state, I know more.” Now, he sits with people involved in politics, with institutional power, and discusses issues that are important to him. “I’m just some radical Indian that’s trying to change the world,” he says, “but because I’m doing this, following and playing the game, it’s giving me access.”

There is hope for change. The practice of cluster hiring has taken off in North American post-secondary institutions. This involves hiring new faculty, across various disciplines, for the purpose of a common research objective. As a result of these cluster hires, more Indigenous professors are being hired across Canadian campuses. This is the most direct way to subvert the academic status quo and also the easiest way to avoid the co-opting of Indigenous knowledge in the classroom. In March 2016, the University of Guelph announced it will hire, over the course of the next 18 months, five tenured Indigenous faculty members. To encourage more Indigenous scholars, Guelph also announced the creation of five new graduate awards, worth $30,000 a year, for Ph.D. students and a $15,000 annual award for master’s degree students, as well as a new $45,000 postdoctoral award for an Indigenous researcher.

Another way to shift academic perspective is to create more informed educators. This year, Trent University launched a new five-year Indigenous Bachelor of Education program. It offers entry straight out of high school, or through transfer agreements set up with local community colleges and First Nations run schools. The first three years of the program revolve around Trent courses, then the fourth and fifth are spent in the Indigenous Bachelor of Education program. “The key to education is good teachers. That’s what we are trying to prepare here,” says David Newhouse, a professor of Indigenous studies at Trent University, who has also been chair of the Department of Indigenous studies for 23 years. “We’re guided very much by elders who keep telling us over and over again about the importance of education.”

Whatever guides a university’s hiring practices, the lived experience of whomever is doing the educating should be a significant factor in the decision. Lived-experience carries inherent truth, a truth which resonates and captivates. “You can’t teach something you haven’t experienced in your life,” says Landry, “You can try your best, but the emotional content is gone. And the emotional content is what gets to the core of people when you’re teaching in a classroom.” The wisdom and knowledge of Indigenous elders and scholars, for instance, is the core of Cape Breton University’s new MIKM 2701 course. Each week a different Mi’kmaq elder, knowledge keeper, or scholar co-teaches a lecture in their area of expertise. Unlike the rest of the newly incorporated courses offering Indigenous perspectives, this course is entirely free, accessible via live stream and, later, archived footage online.

“We wanted to create something that was free and was Indigenous-focused and Indigenous-led and could be a way for Cape Breton University to give back,” says Ashlee Cunsolo Willox, an assistant professor at Cape Breton University and one of the creators of the course. “To really take our responsibilities around the truth and reconciliation commission seriously.” This combination of honouring Indigenous systems of thought, while straying outside of academia’s capitalist nature created a result that Willox could not have imagined. Over 12,000 people, across 26 different countries, watched the lectures. Suddenly, people who would otherwise not have had the opportunity to enter a university lecture hall could learn about Mi’kmaq culture. Also, Willox tells me, generations of Mi’kmaq families were watching the lectures together. “A lot of people were indicating, as Indigenous elders, that to see their grandchildren, their children, their great-grandchildren watching it together with pride was healing.”

Landry’s classes also use a basis of traditional knowledge to deliver the content. This past semester, Landry asked her students to interview someone who knew about the land, or the old ways. Many of Landry’s students did interviews with people they had never thought to talk with, or had never made time to talk with, she says. A lot of her students broke down in tears when they were presenting. “I always want students to learn more about where they’re living and where they come from,” she says. “We have to stay true to who we are and where we come from, even through the learning process.” Her lessons touch on colonization, but outside the trauma-laden landscape. Instead, she prefers to encourage discussions of family, healing and the land they are learning on. What does your relationship to the land look like, now? What did your Mushum or Kokum teach you about the land? What was it like for them to grow up in colonial Canada?

Today, says Thomas, is an exciting time for emerging academics, because academia is at a tipping point. But for the system as a whole, the biggest challenge is still figuring out how Indigenous knowledge can fit into education. “How do we take Indigeneity,” he asks, “something that is so rich and lived and beautiful, and put it inside a Western institution?” It is important to understand, he adds, that Indigenous systems of thought and Western, Eurocentric systems of thought work from very different principles and have different ways of interacting with the world. The Western approach, cemented in Canada’s institutions and collective-mentality, is about evolving away from the past, whereas the nature of Indigeneity, says Thomas, is: How did our ancestors understand things?

Yet, if Western and Indigenous knowledge are going to cohabit academia, there has to be some sort of intellectual shift. What needs to happen is not a joining of two halves, but an understanding that Indigenous knowledge is inherently whole. For Landry, the answer is clear: First Nations run schools. Spaces rooted in Indigenous knowledge. Landry’s dream is to open her own school, out on the land, free of colonial academia. She doesn’t want Indigenous knowledge to be seen as an alternative to Western institutions of education. She wants her students to know that their academic and career goals and prioritizing their Indigenous knowledge are not mutually exclusive.

Some of these schools already exist (though in dismally small numbers). Blair Stonechild has been at the First Nations University in Saskatchewan since 1976, back when it wasn’t even called First Nations University. He’s been the department head, dean of academics, and was even the executive director of planning and development. Stonechild describes First Nations University’s approach as holistic, with an emphasis on physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual well-being of the students. For Stonechild, First Nation run schools offer Indigenous students an ideal environment. Whether or not people understand or respect Indigenous systems of thought, he adds, they need to make room for protocols and perspectives: “At least create space for Indigenous culture to have some integrity.”

In a country where a ship is a ship and a canoe is a canoe, it’s important to know where you come from. Indigenous students have to recognize that when they leave the reserve and go to university, they’re just visiting the ship, says Thomas. “At the core of their being they have to know they’re born of that canoe,” he adds. “That the strength and resistance of their Indigeneity will help them flourish.”

“Having a message should be cool,” says Toronto hip-hop artist Rich Kidd on the power of rap. Kidd hosted First Out Here: Indigenous hip-hop, a documentary by Noisey, in which Kidd visited Winnipeg, Regina and Toronto to meet with Indigenous hip-hop artists. Kidd, born to Ghanian parents, says he drew a lot of parallels between Black and Indigenous communities when it comes to the social and political issues both face. “I don’t enter things with expectations,” says Kidd, ” but I knew that anything I would encounter would exceed what I thought just because there’s a lot of history.”

Audio engineer David Strickland was one of the Indigenous artists featured in the film. Strickland, whose clients include Drake and Jamie Foxx,  says he doesn’t like the terms “native or Indigenous hip-hop.” He’s proud of his indigenous culture, but adds that he’s not limited by it because he tries to avoid being pigeonholed. “There are a lot of people who don’t know that we have that quality of artists. We are not all a certain way—so I say, be subjective.”

The film focuses on artists such as Drezus, Winnipeg Boyz, and T-Rhyme all reflect on the issues that surround their culture and community, from missing and murdered aboriginal woman to discussing the challenges they face trying to earn respect and popularize their music outside of the indigenous community. Strickland hopes the film helps shed some light on the artists’ talent, not just the Indigenous struggle. His advice to emerging indigenous hip-hop artists in transcending stereotypes and reaching mainstream success is simply: originality.

“Don’t just talk about the girls and the bling,” says Strickland, “that’s the problem in hip-hop, everyone is trying to cover everybody else, but back in the day we had 20 different flavours.” Kidd is also reminiscent of  mainstream hip-hop—even referring to Tupac as sort of the “Che Guevara of hip-hop” of his time. “There was a point in rap where it was cool to be militant about what you believe,” Kidd adds, “and to stand up for your culture, beliefs and rights – that focus is so far off now.” Kidd believes that those that control mainstream and commercial music aren’t interested in promoting songs with strong messages, largely because they have the power to affect change.

“If we are told that this f**kery is going on day after day,” he says, “then we’re going to want to change it.” Kidd adds that the hip-hop community has the opportunity to watch these issues like “eagles” and to “intercept the path of where our generation is headed by leading them to the right direction and using our voice for positive change.”

The film was screened for the public by the Regent Park Film Festival in April and is available on YouTube through Vice’s sister channel Noisey. 

All photos courtesy Provincial Archives of Alberta

The first image: a small child in striped pyjamas, three years old, peering through the bars of a crib, directly into the lens of the camera. There’s intelligence in her eyes, but no indication of pleasure or recognition. Just a quiet, cautious curiosity. She’s holding a naked, hairless, rubber doll. Behind her, off-kilter on the wall, are two framed drawings, one of a kitten, the other of a girl hugging a rabbit. The scene is a ward in Edmonton’s Charles Camsell Indian Hospital. The year is 1960. The child is Linda McDonald, from the Liard First Nation in the Yukon, recently diagnosed with tuberculosis. The solitude and vulnerability emanating from the photograph are not surprising, given her age and the abruptness of her departure. “My earliest memory is of mom walking with me to the little lake we lived beside,” she tells me, more than five decades later. “She carried me in her arms and she was crying. That is all I remember of mom saying good-bye. I then recall being on a plane with someone.”

Arrival at Camsell was no less traumatic: “The bathroom seemed very large. A nurse all in white was taking my clothes off and making me stand in a shower. I think this was my first shower experience. I was crying and she said, ‘shut-up’ and banged my head against the wall of the shower. I remember the smell of the bathroom, the large bars of Ivory soap.” Another of McDonald’s memories of Camsell involves being awakened in the middle of the night by a siren, by shouting and people running, and not knowing what was happening. A head-count on the lawn revealed someone was missing. McDonald recalls a nurse using the scissors to cut the cloth bonds that tied her to the crib and carrying her out where the rest were gathered.

I first heard from her in response to a brochure I distributed at the hearings of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) in Vancouver in September 2013. On the cover was an image of four small girls in dressing-gowns overlaid with the caption: “What Was Going on in Canada’s Indian Hospitals?” Inside, along with a photograph of Camsell, was a description of the link between the racially segregated hospitals for aboriginals and residential schools: the latter serving as farm-teams or recruiting grounds for the former, providing a constant clientele of guinea pigs for forced sterilization, gratuitous drug and surgical experiments, and electric shock treatment—a sure way to destroy the short-term memory of sexual abuse. “I went into the hospital
an Indian girl,” McDonald confides, “and came out a white girl.”

I met her a few months later in Whitehorse. At the time, she was just finishing a six month medical leave from teaching. The person I met was out-going, middle-aged, and very bright. We had a wonderful lunch together and she arranged for me to meet several of her friends who had also been patients at the Camsell. Without those emails and beautifully written memoirs, I would not have guessed there was anything troubling this charming and vivacious person, whose life had been so profoundly affected by her two solitary years peering through crib bars, wearing pyjamas that resembled striped prison garb, and who had returned home “spoiled and thinking our little cabin was dirty and smelled funny.”

Yet, her experience was not unique. Camsell was one of 22 segregated hospitals in Canada, created not so much to help the Indigenous population, as to keep them separate from the white community. Established on racist assumptions, it’s not surprising that these hospitals were poorly staffed and underfunded. While residential schools— with their death-rate of 40-60 percent—are now widely acknowledged as a horrible stage in a slow-motion genocide, the story of the socalled “Indian hospitals” has been largely ignored. And yet, their legacy continues in today’s health care system. Were it not for this ongoing racism and colonial legacy, for instance, Brian Sinclair, a 45-yearold Indigenous man and double-amputee, would not have died in his wheelchair in a Winnipeg emergency room in September 2008 after being left unattended for 34 hours with a kidney infection that could have been treated.

Speaking of the Camsell era, medical researcher and author of Healing Histories, Laurie Meijer Drees offers the understatement of the year when she informs us it’s clear that, in Canada, aboriginals “mattered less.”

Provincial Archives of Alberta

Systemic racism is no stranger to Canada. British Columbia, my home, not only spearheaded the evacuation of thousands of Japanese-Canadians during World War II, but also gave enthusiastic support to the Chinese Head-Tax and the refusal to allow the Komogatu Maru to dock in 1913 in Vancouver harbour, sending it back to Hong Kong with its cargo of Sikhs and their shattered dreams of immigration. B.C. was also quick to follow suit when its neighbour across the Rockies passed the Alberta Sterilization Act in 1929, both provinces paying doctors to perform involuntary surgical procedures, a disproportionate number of them done on Indigenous men, women and girls. The provinces were in tune with the federal government, which turned away the St. Louis and its shipload of Jews fleeing the Holocaust, because someone in the Ottawa bureaucracy thought one Jew too many.

Treaty 7, signed between the Crown and First Nations in Southern Alberta in 1877, came with no promise of medical assistance—not even the standard clause of a medicine chest, which had been included in earlier treaties. Neither did Treaty 8, which covered Northern Alberta, B.C. and part of the NWT. A secondary report by Indian Commissioner David Laird promised that “supplies of medicine would be put in the charge of persons selected by the Government at different points, and would be distributed free to those of the Indians who might require them.” Laird and his contemporaries assured aboriginal signatories that “the government would always be ready to avail itself of any opportunity of affording medical service,” although these promises were not written into the treaty itself. The federal government would pay little attention to the health of aboriginals for decades, eventually downloading the responsibility to the provinces.

Another former Camsell patient, Marilyn Murray-Allison, a Gwich’in woman from the NWT, contacted me to say that both she and her mother had been patients in the early 1950s. Age five-and-a-half, and in constant pain, she could neither sit nor stand. Together with her parents and her sister, she was flown to the hospital, where staff found tuberculosis in her lymph glands; her mother had it in her lung. “It was a very tragic time,” she says. “In a matter of a few hours, our family was separated.”

The separation anxiety, rather than the tuberculosis, almost killed her. Although in the same hospital, mutual contact between family members was disallowed on the assumption that it would be upsetting to both parent and child who were supposed to be immobile and resting. But separation in a strange place, where no one spoke her language, made it worse. “All I remember of those days,” says Murray-Allison, “was the hurt and sadness and crying for my mother and my family. I was dying of heartbreak, not being able to eat and biting my fingernails until they were bleeding.”
Eventually, staff realized she wasn’t improving and put her in a room next to her mother’s. Able to see her mother through a window in the wall that still separated them, she began to heal slowly. More than once, a kind nurse would wrap her frail body in a blanket and sneak her in to cuddle with her mother. Bedridden for so long, she forgot how to walk and had to learn all over again.

Such procedures do not speak well of either the medical knowledge or the psychological insight of doctors and nurses, whom we might expect to know something about the role of emotions in the healing process. In The Camsell Mosaic, a book put together by the hospital’s history committee, Dr. William Barclay acknowledges the severe limitations under which staff worked and the primitive measures taken to treat patients. He describes how, initially, no drugs were available for the treatment of tuberculosis, so total bed rest was prescribed, sometimes including surgical collapse of the lung and plaster casts to fixate the joints, most of these procedures applied in “blind faith.”

Among the many Camsell photos in Meijer Drees’ Healing Histories and in the federal government’s archives, there is one that touches me deeply. It shows 11 children, aged two or three, in white gowns arranged on benches by a nurse wearing a facemask. The two in the front row wear moccasins, another child is missing a shoe and a third is sucking her fingers. Collectively the photograph does not depict a single mood, such as fear or anguish or pleasure—though the children are anything but animated. Yet, knowing how children need the love and affection of parents—and how their health and immune systems can plummet without this special care—the photo sends a shiver down my spine. Many of those toddlers—if they even made it through their hospital ordeal— were not sent home, but shipped off immediately to residential schools, where their chances of survival were sometimes as low as 60 percent.

Relevant to the story of these segregated hospitals is Canada’s long-standing policy not only of ignoring aboriginal wellbeing, but also of deliberately starving Indigenous peoples to force them into white subservience. Many of the great chiefs, including Poundmaker and Big Bear, were brought to their knees as beggars, asking for handouts to save their people. The violence that prompted killings at Frog Lake in 1885 and helped spark the Riel rebellion in the prairies was precipitated by Canada’s high-handedness and failure to fulfil treaty promises, particularly the failure to provide food and medicine after the extermination of the buffalo. As Maureen Lux explains in Medicine That Walks: Disease, Medicine and Canadian Plains Native People, 1880-1940, the starvation of the tribes at Fort Walsh, “was a cynical and deliberate plan to press the government’s advantage and force the Cree from the area and allow the government a free hand in developing the prairie.”

It has taken more than 100 years to dismantle some of the myths about Canada’s Indigenous peoples, including the notion that they are more susceptible to disease than other races. Appalling conditions, rather, were to blame for the high rate of morbidity: hunger, malnutrition, being crammed into tiny reserves, and held captive in residential schools that were often a haven for diseases, sadists, and pedophiles. Continual neglect and abuse resulted in fatalities that, in earlier times, might have been avoided, or at least less widespread, when food, confidence, and solidarity were not in short supply. These exacting measures were approved at the highest level of government. Prime Minister John A. Macdonald made this clear in 1882 when he assured the House, “we cannot allow them to die for want of food,” then added that Commissioner Edgar Dewdney and the Indian agents, as they wer called at the time, “are doing all they can, by refusing food until the Indians are on the verge of starvation, to reduce the expense.”

When Dr. Peter Bryce, chief medical officer of the Department of Immigration, was sent out to study the conditions in prairie residential schools in 1907, he wrote a scathing report about what he witnessed, including overcrowding, malnutrition, and an appallingly high death rate. His report was shelved and his position eliminated. Fifteen years later he would publish the report himself under the title A National Crime. Duncan Campbell Scott, deputy superintendent of what was then called Indian Affairs, dismissed Bryce’s claims, saying in April 1910: “It is readily acknowledged that Indian children lose their natural resistance to illness by habitating so closely in these schools, and that they die at a much higher rate than in their villages. But this alone does not justify a change in the policy of this department, which is geared towards the final solution of our Indian Problem.” On another occasion he added: “It is only necessary to carry out some common sense reforms to remove the imputation that the department is careless of the interests of the children.”

Those promised reforms, of course, did not come. Lux tells us that Chief Long Lodge, whose people had been forcibly removed from Fort Walsh in the Cypress Hills of southern Saskatchewan and were sick from starvation, put the matter bluntly: “I want no government medicine. What I want is medicine that walks. Send three oxen to be killed and give fresh meat to my people and they will get better.” When the aboriginal population—albeit one that was devastated and drastically reduced in numbers—refused to disappear, residential schools and segregated hospitals were the next phase of the “final solution” that Indian Affairs (now Aboriginal Affairs and Northern Development Canada) set in motion.

Forced sterilizations and drug and surgical experiments happened in many segregated hospitals during the two decades following World War II. Teeth were often removed without freezing and experimental drugs were administered that caused serious harm, or proved fatal. The causes of death were often falsely reported to authorities and loved-ones were not contacted. Sexual abuse was not uncommon, as many testimonies at the hearings of the TRC confirm. One friend told me an orderly raped her at the Nanaimo Indian Hospital while her upper body was encased in an iron lung. Much of the fear that Indigenous people have of doctors and hospitals today derives from the horrendous experiences and racist attitudes encountered in these institutions.

Provincial Archives of Alberta

As I was putting these thoughts together in January 2014, Melinda Bullshields phoned me from her small flat on East 2nd Avenue in Vancouver’s East End to say she’d seen one of my brochures at the TRC. One of 11 siblings from the Blood Reserve in Alberta, about 30 kilometres from the U.S.-Canada border, she’d been a patient at the Camsell from age four to eight. Simply put, it ruined her life. Her voice was strong, urgent, articulate, informing me that being bedridden for so long made her knees small for her size, but she’d still managed to become an athlete. She saw many things at Camsell—every kind of abuse, “I remember the casts, little kids with hips and both legs in a body cast, just a small hole where they could pee,” she says. “At night, the orderlies would be doing things in those holes.”

Four years of hospitalization, followed by residential school, alienated her from family, some of whom she no longer recognized when she returned to the reserve. “They groomed me for solitude,” she says. “I coped with the abuse by dissociation, closing off the emotions, being elsewhere when nasty things happened to me.” This dismal situation continued even back home, where her sisters tormented her for being too English and where the worst abuses learned in residential school and the segregated hospital had become an epidemic.

When we met at a coffee shop on Commercial Drive in Vancouver, Bullshields brought her copy of The Camsell Mosiac to show me her photo on page 211, front row, third from the left—one of 10 tiny, costumed girls, part of the Counterpane Players, wearing a frilly, conical cap, her only photo of herself from that period, a light moment in an otherwise dark period. “I hate both sides,” she says, “so where does that leave me?”

Indeed, where does this leave all of us? As individuals and as a nation, we have a responsibility to rewrite the national narrative, acknowledging our failure to honour the promises and partnership
implied in the treaties and to build a better, stronger, healthier future. We can start by making the records of all 22 segregated hospitals available. Canadians need to know what really happened in these hospitals—the sterilizations and the nutritional, drug, and surgical experiments. We also need to find out what was going on in that special day school on the Goodfish Lake reserve in Alberta where, from 1959–1963, 38 Cree children were isolated, taught nothing, allowed to watch TV all day, and subjected to excessive doses of polio vaccines, known even then to be contaminated with a carcinogen called SV40—a virus originating in the kidneys of the rhesus monkey used as a culture for growing the vaccines.

Camsell would be a good, symbolic place to jump-start the reconciliation and healing process. After serving as a general hospital for the entire population from 1967–1996, it was abandoned because of asbestos contamination. It remained empty for decades, grew increasingly decrepit, and only made the news periodically, when vandals started fires or the building figured in the internet’s latest ghost watch.There was enlightened talk of renovating and turning it into housing for Edmonton’s homeless and low-income population, a large number of whom are First Nations individuals, but the locals objected. Instead, the city sold the building to a developer, who promised to turn it into condos for seniors and yuppies. Now that the asbestos has been removed, the city council could intervene to realize that earlier dream.

Harold Cardinal wrote many years ago in The Unjust Society that equality of health or education services is not enough: “We aren’t starting on equal grounds. Equality of services doesn’t mean a thing to people who are so far behind they can’t even see the starting line. It just means we would remain that far behind. That’s not good enough. We want to catch up. Then we can talk equality.” Cardinal, who was born in High Prairie, Alta. and grew up on the Sucker Creek Cree Reserve, wrote those words in 1969. Some 46 years later, we have still not taken them to heart.

Between 1946-1966, nearly 97 Indigenous patients who did not survive Camsell, including 13 infants, were buried in the cemetery on the grounds of the former Edmonton Indian Residential School, located in nearby St. Albert. Their names are inscribed on marble slabs on four sides of a monument made of round stones set in concrete. On the top of the six-foot-high structure, between the stones, mourners have deposited tiny plastic toys and a small skipping rope. When I visit the site in late April 2015, a cold wind has blown a tiny, black, plastic car onto the paved surface. I pick it up and place it back on top of the monument, wondering about those who left it here.

Before departing, I drive a few hundred metres to the new Poundmaker drug and alcohol addiction centre that now occupies the grounds of the former residential school. A stand of poplars in the distance is festooned with long, brightly coloured cloths. I ask a woman outside having a smoke what they signify.

“They’re prayer flags,” she tells me. “When the wind blows, they flutter and the pain is carried off by the breeze.

Remnants of a clear cut logging operation near Grassy Narrows, Ontario. Photo by Jon Schledewitz.

On a cold December day nine years ago, a group of young people from the Grassy Narrows First Nation lay down in front of a line of logging trucks on a snow-covered road.

Chrissy Swain, now 32, recalls that day at Slant Lake, about an hour north of Kenora, Ontario, which set off what has become Canada’s longest-standing logging blockade. “Back then youth didn’t have a voice,” Swain says. “But people started taking us more seriously when we started the blockade.”

For a long time, Grassy Narrows was accustomed to not being heard. In the 1950s, new hydro dams flooded the low-lying river valleys the First Nation had lived in, driving away the fur-bearing animals and submerging wild rice beds and sacred spiritual sites. In the early 1960s, the Canadian federal government moved the small Grassy Narrows community away from the river to a new location on a small stagnant lake off the highway to Kenora, where Chrissy Swain and her friends grew up. The 1970s brought more devastating news: the nearby Dryden pulp and paper mill was pumping mercury into the water. It eradicated the local fishing industry, leaving the community poor and sick. Hunting and trapping came to replace fishing, but in the 1990s, the provincial government of Mike Harris opened the area to clear-cut logging, which quickly drove out moose and other animals on which the community relied.

Chrissy Swain’s grandfather was one of many people affected by mercury poisoning on the Grassy Narrows and White Dog reserves. Today he shakes uncontrollably and can barely walk. Swain was just 16 when she began to realize things weren’t as they should be in her community and decided to take action. Though Swain would share in spiritual ceremonies, pick wild berries, fish and hunt, she yearned for a traditional Anishinabe life of living off the land. “I lost out on that part of my identity,” she tells me.

Decades of neglect and abuse by two levels of government have left a grim legacy, in the form of joblessness, drug and alcohol abuse, and physical and sexual violence, all of which afflict Grassy Narrows still. But a number of factors have recently come together that offer hope. One of these is a recent legal decision that could protect the land from harmful industry activity that affects aboriginal hunting and trapping. The precedent doesn’t just herald an opportunity to regenerate a devastated natural environment—it has the potential to turn the entire relationship between Canada’s First Nations and federal government upside down.

Years of mercury poisoning and clear-cutting “put them into a corner where they had to take a serious stand on both those issues,” explains Treaty 3 Grand Chief Diane Kelly. Chief Kelly is the leader selected by national assembly to preside over the 140,000-square-kilometre treaty territory encompassing two First Nations in Manitoba and 26 in northwestern Ontario, including Grassy Narrows. She says Grassy Narrows is facing these challenges head on. “The people of Grassy Narrows have been really diligent in standing up for their rights.”

The way Chrissy Swain sees it, standing up for those rights is just part of providing for her children, like any working Canadian mother. She’s been bringing her three kids to demonstrations and blockades since they were babies. Since 2008, Swain has led annual walks to raise awareness about indigenous and environmental justice. The first was over 1,800 kilometres from Grassy Narrows to Toronto, ending in a “Sovereignty Sleepover” at Queen’s Park attended by hundreds of First Nations leaders and activists across Ontario. Her last walk took her to a sun dance in Manitoba. “It was only a 300 kilometre walk,” she says casually.

Over the years the community has used every tactic in the book to stop industrial clear-cut logging: roving blockades of logging roads and highways, boycotts, rallies, speaking tours, and a high-profile court case. In the last few years, this persistence has started to pay off. Forestry giant Abitibi-Bowater surrendered its forestry license in 2008 and large-scale clear-cuts have stopped for now. Domtar (the largest paper producer in North America) and Boise have also committed not to source wood from Grassy Narrows traditional territory. More recently, a major legal victory for the small reserve of 900 residents asserts aboriginal hunting and trapping rights override the Province’s right to resources in the Keewatin Lands, a 50,000 square kilometre area in the Boreal Forest.

Grassy Narrows trappers Joseph Fobister, Andrew Keewatin, and now-deceased Willie Keewatin brought the suit in 1999 to judicial review, leading to a case in the Ontario Superior Court. “It’s quite simple,” explains 55-year-old trapper Joseph Fobister. “My right to hunt and fish are protected by treaty. When clearcut logging happens, it takes away that right.” The judge awarded them legal costs before trial, saying the issue was in the public interest and hadn’t been considered in any previous case.

“We’re not against logging. We’re just against bad logging,” says trapper Fobister. In the ’60s, he says he had good rapport with loggers, often catching rides to his family trap-line with them. Now, “there’s nothing for me to trap.” When he was young, unmarketable trees and debris were left. Today it’s a different story. “Everything is gone when you go there now.”

After years of waiting, the reserve finally got the chance to present its evidence in nearly eight months of hearings. On August 16, 2011 Justice Mary-Anne Sanderson ruled in favour of Grassy Narrows in a lengthy 300-page judgment. Ontario cannot infringe on aboriginal rights to hunt and trap enshrined in the Treaty 3 agreement signed in 1873 with the federal government, the judge said.

Joseph Fobister was choking back tears when he heard the news. “My first thought was ‘justice at last.’ It’s been a long 10 years waiting for something to happen,” he tells me following a press conference at Queen’s Park. Grassy Narrows Band Council Chief Simon Fobister is also elated: “This time the Indians won.”

A protest by members of the Grassy Narrows First Nation. Photo by Jon Schledewitz.

Trapping isn’t the only concern over clear-cut logging. Research suggests clear-cut logging practices can increase mercury levels in the soil. This past September Chief Fobister led a Grassy Narrows delegation to Japan to raise awareness about the health effects of mercury. Mercury poisoning, called Minamata disease, was named after the Japanese city where the first case was observed, after chemical company Chisso dumped waste water into the local bay. While on a trip to Japan, Chief Fobister screened the film The Scars of Mercury, a documentary about the findings of Japanese doctor Masazumi Harada, a leading specialist in mercury poisoning. Harada has been closely studying the situation in Grassy Narrows since the ’70s. In 2010, following his fifth visit to the reserve, Dr. Harada reported the impacts of mercury poisoning are worse now, despite mercury levels having decreased. Today pregnant women are still passing this mercury to to their fetuses and babies are being born already suffering Minamata disease.

When I visited Grassy Narrows in 2006, clan mother Judy Da Silva drove me in the back of her pickup truck out to a clear-cut where she picked wild herbs and berries and hunted and trapped as a kid. A large expanse of dust and baby evergreen saplings now stands where the old mixed forest used to. Da Silva, a tireless activist, could often be found sitting near the fire at the Slant Lake blockade, while her children skipped rocks on the lake or explored the bush behind the log cabins. Now her daughter Taina, 17, is taking up the cause, giving a public talk for the first time at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education while visiting Toronto this past summer. It’s the steadfast commitment of clan mothers like Judy Da Silva that continues to inspire the next generation of activists today.

“They have given a really strong foundation that has resulted in what we see today in this decision,” says Clayton Thomas-Muller. A tar sands campaigner with the Indigenous Environmental Network, Thomas-Muller grew up as a Mathais Colomb Cree in Winnipeg, joining the Native Youth Movement at 17 where he began working with Grassy Narrows.

Thomas-Muller says the case of Grassy Narrows represents a sophisticated new strategy: a collaboration between environmental and economic justice movements, NGOs, and indigenous solidarity groups across North America, using a variety of tactics, including civil disobedience, education campaigning, and legal challenges. “What Grassy [Narrows] represents is one of those catalyst moments in our contemporary history between Indian and white relations in this country.”

“Not only was it a decision for the people of Grassy, but it was a victory for all First Nations across Canada,” he says. Resource extraction industries have disproportionately affected the health and livelihoods of First Nations communities across the country. Whether it is the tar sands in Alberta that Thomas-Muller is now focused on fighting, or the mining, hydroelectric, or timber industries, native communities are on the front lines almost everywhere in Canada. Changing the calculus of how First Nations can control what industry can do on their lands is huge.

Robert Janes, the lawyer representing Grassy Narrows trappers, agrees that the decision has pretty big implications for First Nations across Canada. “This case doesn’t just apply to logging. It indirectly applies to all major resource development that could interfere with their treaty rights.” That includes mining, hydroelectric dams, transmission lines, and more. People in Grassy Narrows are hoping the court ruling will be a spark that ignites change across Ontario, says Janes, like the 1970s decision over hydro that led to the James Bay and Northern Quebec Agreement being signed with the Cree nation and the Quebec and federal governments.

“The courts have become more and more direct and prescriptive in their decisions because they too are becoming frustrated that the governments aren’t following certain court decisions,” says Russell Diabo, a First Nations policy consultant who has worked closely with the Algonquins of Barriere Lake in Quebec. “If that trend continues I think it’s going to become harder for the executive branches of the government to ignore.”

Forest near Grassy Narrows First Nation adjacent to a clear cut site. Photo by Jon Schledewitz.

The Ontario Ministry of Natural Resources has appealed the case to the Ontario Court of Appeal and Robert Janes says that the case will likely be appealed all the way to the Supreme Court of Canada. This could drag out the issue for another five years. Janes believes that the government wants to preserve the status quo with regards to logging, but the likelihood of reaching a negotiated solution, the desired outcome for Grassy Narrows, will depend on the newly elected provincial government.

After a long legacy of government decisions that negatively affected the community, including residential schools, hydro flooding, mercury poisoning, relocation, and now the destruction of their forests from clear-cut logging, it’s easy to see why people in Grassy Narrows are taking a wait-and-see approach.

Andrew Keewatin, who initiated the legal case over a decade ago, is also skeptical. “It will be interesting to see if they’ll honour the decision now,” he says. “Most likely they’ll try to find a way around it.” Keewatin, known as “Shoon” in Grassy Narrows, teaches traditional practices to the reserve’s young people, such as building log cabins, snowshoe making, fishing, and trapping. “Trapping is no longer a means of livelihood for people on the reserve. It’s more of a favourite pastime,” he says. Life on welfare has taught trappers to limit their activity to the reserve, he explains. But he is looking towards the future. He notes that the Trappers Council is looking into ways of selling furs directly to tourists and that some businesses in South Korea have shown some interest in buying their otter furs.

How will this court ruling affect people on the front lines in Grassy Narrows? “We’re still going to be here,” says Swain, insisting the blockade will persist even after the ruling. “I’m still going to stand up for my children,” she says. “I’m teaching them, too, so that after I go they can use their voice.” What does she think about the court ruling? “It’s not a victory yet,” says Swain, explaining it’s a step forward, but there’s still a lot more work to do.

As the logging blockade enters its 10th year, Grassy Narrows First Nation is continuing to assert its sovereignty. This fall, the activists started issuing a toll on the blockaded logging road—many Americans visit the Lake of the Woods area, a popular tourist camping destination, driving past the log cabins and wig-wams at the blockade. When it comes to plans for the future, Swain isn’t short of them. She suggests that instead of the government issuing licences to campers on their lands, Grassy Narrows could set up their own camps. She also hopes they could someday take over jurisdiction from the Ministry of Natural Resources, regulating poaching and other activities on their land to create their own jobs. She says change is slow, but she sees it happening. “We’re trying to take back everything that was taken from us.”

Fort Chipewyan residents are increasingly afraid to consume the fish pulled from Lake Athabasca.

Canada’s oil sands are the largest and most environmentally destructive industrial project in the world. So far, oil sands development has eliminated 602 square kilometers of Boreal forest and emits 29.5 million tonnes of greenhouse gasses annually. The process involves strip-mining bitumen, a tar-like, sandy earth also known as “tar sands,” then processing it into various petroleum products. This process produces 1.8 billion litres of liquid toxic waste every day, which is stored in man-made “tailings ponds.” These ponds currently hold enough toxic waste to fill 2.2 million Olympic-sized swimming pools.

The First Nations community of Fort Chipewyan is located 300 kilometres downstream from the oil sands. In 2006, Fort Chipewyan’s family physician, Dr. John O’Connor, reported that alarmingly high rates of rare and aggressive cancers were killing local residents. As of 2010, band elders reported that cancer had become the leading cause of death in the community. Fear and grief consume Fort Chipewyan as fishermen are finding tumour-laden fish in Lake Athabasca and residents continue to lose their friends and family to cancer.

The Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers continues to tell Canada and the world that there are no lasting impacts upon human health or the environment from the oil sands. Conflicting statements from CAPP, the Government of Alberta, scientists, environmentalists, non-governmental organizations and First Nations people have led to widespread public confusion over the true effects of the operation. Meanwhile, the people of Fort Chipewyan continue to die. Those who survive are afraid to consume the moose, fish and water that have sustained their families for generations.

Pollution from tailings ponds.

Tailings ponds line both sides of the Athabasca River near the oil sands—their toxic contents held back by man-made sand dikes that are hundreds of feet tall. A 2008 study by Environmental Defence showed that the tailings ponds were leaking 11 million litres of liquid into the surrounding environment every day. The Athabasca River runs past the oil sands, through Lake Athabasca, past several indigenous communities including Fort Chipewyan, and eventually empties into the Arctic Ocean.

Cherie Wanderingspirit worries about her children's health.

The abandoned Holy Angels Residential School in Fort Chipewyan.

Young people in Fort Chipewyan are increasingly disconnected from their traditional culture.

Like many Fort Chipewyan parents, Cherie Wanderingspirit (above) is worried about her children’s health. Today’s younger generations in Fort Chipewyan not only face the threat of cancer, but also live with the social trauma passed down to them by family members who lived at Fort Chipewyan’s Holy Angels Residential School (above) which closed in 1974. The torture and sexual abuse endured by the aboriginal children who attended the school have left lasting wounds upon the social and cultural fabric of Fort Chipewyan. Substance abuse, sexual assault, depression, and suicide are ongoing problems within the community. As a result, young people here are largely disconnected from their traditional First Nations culture. Rather than leaning to hunt, fish and trap, the youth (above) are often more interested in video games and urban fashion.

A willow branch marks the passage from Lake Athabasca into the Athabasca Delta.

Other than working in the oil sands, commercial fishing is one of the last ways to make a living in Fort Chipewyan.

Lake Athabasca fish being smoked.

Fish that can't be sold are thrown to the sled dogs.

A young willow branch (above) stuck into the mud by a boater, marks the deepest passage from Lake Athabasca into the Athabasca Delta. Fort Chipewyan’s band elders are concerned that water being taken from the Athabasca River to process bitumen into oil is contributing to declining water levels. Tar sands processing requires almost four barrels of water for every barrel of crude produced; Alberta Energy projects production will reach 3 million barrels of oil per day by 2018. Aside from employment in the oil sands, commercial fishing is one of Fort Chipewyan’s last viable means of making a living. Over the last five years, more and more fish with golf-ball-sized tumours, double tails, and other abnormalities have been caught in Lake Athabasca by commercial fishermen. In 2010, fishermen in Fort Chipewyan were unable to sell any fish commercially due to growing concerns over contamination from pollution, according to Lionel Lepine, the traditional environmental knowledge coordinator for the Athabasca Chipewyan First Nation. Most of the fish caught during 2010 were smoked  or thrown to sled dogs.

Band elder Wilfred Marcel lost his daughter to cancer in 2003. She was 30 years old.

After more than forty years of chiefs and band elders complaining about the effects of pollution from the oil sands and tailings ponds, it took the publicly stated opinion of Dr. John O’Connor and independent environmental assessments by Dr. David Schindler and Dr. Kevin Timoney to finally draw media and public attention to Fort Chipewyan’s health and environmental concerns. The chief and council of Fort Chipewyan have called upon the Canadian government for an independent public health inquiry for over a decade. In that time, hundreds of Fort Chipewyan’s residents have died of unexplained cancers. Band elder Wilfred Marcel (above) lost his daughter Stephanie to cancer in 2003. She was 30 years old.

The cemetery in Fort Chipewyan. Hundreds of residents have died of unexplained cancers.

Protesters at Barriere Lake turned away election officers from the Indian Affairs Department in July. Photo courtesy Defenders of the Land.

The path forward, if the futures of First Nations and the rest of Canada are to reconcile, begins with two steps. Repeal the Indian Act, and abolish the department that delivers it. Bluntly put, the legislation that governs how status Indians are treated—and defines who holds that status—was racist and wrong in its conception 135 years ago, and has been in its implementation ever since.

Adopted explicitly for the purpose of assimilating Indians and eliminating “the Indian problem,” the devastation wrought against First Nations is today undeniable. Moreover, the social disharmony and economic cost to Canada as a whole remain ongoing challenges of this legacy. Change is desperately needed, but as that change will mold the future relationship between First Nations and Canada, it is essential that we get it right this time. And getting it right won’t be easy.

In a speech at July’s Assembly of First Nations, National Chief Shawn A-in-chut Atleo rekindled a debate that has been going on for quite some time over how to replace the Indian Act and the department that delivers it. When the Government of Canada floated the notion of repealing the Act in its infamous 1969 White Paper, it was surprised by a strong and effective negative response from the very people who suffered most from the legislation. Trudeau and his Indian Affairs Minister, Jean Chrétien, thought that simply wiping out any differentiation between Indians and other Canadians would bring equality and be welcomed by everyone. But for First Nations, that approach to the repeal of the Act and abolition of the department is incomplete.

As First Nations leader Harold Cardinal said at the time:

We do not want the Indian Act retained because it is a good piece of legislation. It isn’t. It is discriminatory from start to finish … but we would rather continue to live in bondage under the inequitable Indian Act than surrender our sacred rights. Any time the government wants to honour its obligations to us we are more than ready to devise new Indian legislation.

Therein lies the debate. Formal equality—undifferentiated treatment under the law— has the appeal of simplicity and superficial fairness. That’s why some people support repeal today: They like the idea of ending “special rights.” But equality under the law starting today means that the inequity enforced since before Canada was a country remains unaddressed. In particular, the laws under which everyone would theoretically be equal were created by and for those who have perpetrated that inequity, without regard to the rights and interests of First Nations. This approach simply continues the policy of assimilation.

What National Chief Atleo and others are proposing is something more complex and nuanced than wiping out all historic and legal distinctions in one fell swoop. They are suggesting that the rights First Nations hold in law—treaty and aboriginal rights recognized both under international law and under section 35 of the Constitution Act of 1982—be respected. From this perspective, upholding legal difference is, in fact, essential to equality. The failure to respect historic legal rights and interests would only continue the injustice.

Atleo is also suggesting that a responsible and methodical approach be taken toward the ultimate objective of repeal and abolition. This includes rapidly increasing the number of completed self-government agreements and accelerating the conclusion of the claims processes, vesting responsibility and accountability with First Nations governments and facilitating economic, social and political progress. On the bureaucratic side, it means creating two entities in the federal government to replace the 34 that currently administer aboriginal programs and services. One would occupy itself with the intergovernmental relationship between Canada and First Nations, establishing the foundation for reconciliation of the rights and interests of all. The other entity would continue in a diminishing role as service provider for those First Nation communities that continue to move toward selfgovernance, carefully winding down the traditionally paternalistic role played by the federal bureaucracy in Indian country.

This proposal is neither radical nor new. It is consistent with recommendations in a 1983 submission from a House of Commons committee known as the Penner Report and the report of the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples released in 1996. Unfortunately, whether for practical or ideological reasons, no government has been willing to act on the idea until now. Interestingly, this proposal was part of the aboriginal issues platform of the New Democratic Party in the most recent federal election, but it is not popular within the Harper government. In response to the National Chief’s speech, a spokesperson for Minister John Duncan of Aboriginal Affairs and Northern Development Canada dismissively responded, “Our government is strongly committed to addressing challenges within the Indian Act” (emphasis added).

Ironically, in June of 2009, Prime Minister Harper apologized for Canada’s residential schools policy by saying, “Today, we recognize that this policy of assimilation was wrong, has caused great harm, and has no place in our country.” But more than two years later, his government insists on retaining the central vehicle for assimilation—the Indian Act itself—albeit with some tinkering around the edges. It wants to keep the department as it is, as though having renamed it from “Indian and Northern Affairs Canada” to “Aboriginal Affairs and Northern Development Canada” resolved the dysfunction there. In short, the Prime Minister either misunderstood the lessons he claimed to have learned in his apology, or he never really meant what he said.

Throughout the history of this country, government after government has pursued only one policy toward First Nations — assimilation — and it hasn’t worked. It hasn’t accomplished assimilation as its proponents wanted, and it certainly hasn’t worked for First Nations. At a time when First Nations are ready to identify both an alternative vision and a way to get there, it is up to all Canadians to reject failure, show respect for First Nations and finally set the country down the path of reconciliation.

Getting it right won’t be easy, but it is worth the trouble.

Daniel Wilson is a freelance writer and consultant on human rights and aboriginal policy. He is a former diplomat and advisor to the Assembly of First Nations.

The 2009 inaugural class of Dechinta Bush University. Photo courtesy Dechinta.

Back in the 1960s, a group of high-minded northern and southern Canadians had a collective revelation: if the North ever wanted to succeed, it desperately needed a university. Toronto-based lawyer and retired Air Force general Richard Rohmer spearheaded the idea, first lobbying locals and politicians, and later penning a draft for a bricks-and-mortar institution. While the resulting plan led to the creation of colleges in all three territories, 50 years later all that is left of the University of Northern Canada is a couple of failed proposals, a worsening brain drain to the south, and an acute need for higher education and trained professionals in a booming region.

Dechinta Bush University Centre for Research and Learning is looking to change all that. Its goal: to provide a post-secondary liberal arts education to northerners at home. Founded in 2009, the aboriginal-run centre offers five courses in a 12-week semester, combining academic standards with indigenous knowledge to offer a comprehensive look at northern politics and land preservation.

“Living off the land and the land-based approaches are really integral to all the courses we deliver,” says Kyla Kakfwi Scott, program manager for Dechinta. In learning and using land-based practices, she adds, students come to understand the material being taught through the academic portions of the course.

Subjects covered include the history of self-determination of the Dene First Nations, decolonization practices, writing and communications, environmental sustainability, and community health, with undergraduate credit granted through the University of Alberta. Each course is taught by academics from the north and south and cultural experts, such as resident elders and guest lecturers.

Each term, up to 25 students, aboriginal and non-aboriginal, northerners and southerners, recent high school graduates to retirees, kick off courses by spending five weeks at home working through assigned readings. After that, they travel by plane to Blachford Lake Lodge, located about 220 kilometres east of Yellowknife, NWT, where classes are held outdoors. While not a degree-granting institution, the bush university is expanding to host one master’s and one PhD student per year who want to do research based out of the Dechinta program, with the goal of having their own masters programming down the road.

“The North has a lot of really interesting insight and expertise to offer, not just to its own residents but to people from around the world,” says Kakfwi Scott. “But for northern people the idea of being able to stay close to home and learn about the things that you’re dealing with every day and have that be recognized as being valuable and teachable at home would be phenomenal.”

An imminent court case could be an important step toward enshrining environmental rights in Canada's constitution. Original Creative Commons photo by Flickr user EuroMagic.

Over the last 40 years, 90 countries have amended their constitutions to include the right to a healthy environment. Portugal was the first in 1976, and since then scores have followed, from Argentina to Zambia. But not Canada.

What we have is the 1999 Canadian Environmental Protection Act. Under that law, polluters found in violation can be fined up to $1 million a day, sentenced to three years in jail, or both. Unfortunately, CEPA’s overall efficacy is dubious. Consider environmental lawyer and author David R. Boyd’s comparison: fines levied under CEPA from 1988 to 2005 totalled $2,224,302; in 2009, the Toronto Public Library collected $2,685,067 in overdue book fines. “It is absolutely vital for us in the years ahead to amend our constitution to reflect the right to a healthy environment,” says Boyd. Doing so prompts many notable environmental improvements and, better yet, allows people to hold governments accountable—that’s key considering who most often suffers environmental burdens.

Take Sarnia, home of the Aamjiwnaang First Nation. Canada’s first oil refinery opened there around 1871. Today, Sarnia is home to 40 percent of Canada’s petrochemical industrial operations. Within 25 kilometres of the Aamjiwnaang reserve, there are more than 60 industrial facilities, about 46 of them on the Canadian side of the border. Among these are three of the top 10 air polluters in Ontario. In 2005, these facilities emitted almost 132,000 tonnes of air pollutants.

“If people had a constitutional right to live in a healthy environment,” says Boyd, “a government or court would have stood up and said it is unjust to continue piling pollution onto these people.” Instead, in 2010, two members of Sarnia’s Aamjiwnaang First Nation launched a lawsuit against Ontario’s Ministry of the Environment; the case goes to court next year. The two members of the Aamjiwnaang assert that by permitting a recent 25 percent increase in production at a Suncor refinery, the government has violated Section 7 of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms: the right to life, liberty and the security of the person. Lawyers also cite a violation of equality rights under Section 15 of the Charter, saying the Aamjiwnaang bear a disproportionate environmental burden.

However, according to Ecojustice lawyer Justin Duncan, who is arguing the case, if the constitutional right to a healthy environment already existed, “we would be arguing about the amount of pollution and comparing that to existing laws.” In other words, without an explicit constitutional right, it takes judicial gymnastics to justify environmental protection. Responsibilities also remain ambiguous, Duncan adds, making it difficult to enforce regulations or respond to modern environmental challenges. Talk about murky waters.

Lots more great things to read this issue, including Will Braun‘s cover story on the coming boom in new hydroelectric projects in Canada. Hydro providers will invest billions in new dams in the coming decade, but energy experts, environmentalists, and aboriginal groups are skeptical of hydro’s green reputation—especially since much of this new electricity infrastructure is being built to satisfy the insatiable appetite of the U.S. power grid. On Marshall McLuhan’s 100th birthday, David Hayes offers a short history of the iconic media theorist’s rise, beginning with a curious Globe and Mail reporter’s 1963 profile. And we mark the 10th anniversary of the invasion of Afghanistan with a special roundtable discussion between Amir Attaran, John Duncan, and Graeme Smith.

Plenty more, of course: Katie Hyslop introduces us to Dechinta Bush University, the culmination of the 50-year dream of a university by and for the North; Katherine Laidlaw talks to the activists who are trying to cut sky-high smoking rates in Nunavut with a new public awareness campaign; Jason Tushinski investigates the “Suspicious Incident Reporting System,” a snitch line for CSIS and the RCMP that has privacy and civil rights experts concerned; Kaitlin Fontana spends eight hours watching Sun News Network so you don’t have to; Daniel Wilson argues for the abolition of the Indian Act; and Jackie Wong profiles photographer Roberta Holden, whose impressionistic images of the arctic capture the changing moods of the landscape.

Plus: Paul McLaughlin interviews Canada’s Nieman Journalism Fellow, David Skok; Teresa Goff on the constitutional right to a healthy environment; Joe Rayment on the rebirth of the company town; Lauren McKeon on Canada’s nudity laws throughout history; Graham F. Scott on the Tories’ tough-on-crime stance; Brigitte Noël on non-hormonal birth control; Heather Stilwell sends a postcard from newly independent Southern Sudan; Stephen Sharpe on origami and papercraft artist Drew Nelson; Navneet Alang on Big Brother in the age of the smartphone; Christina Palassio on Book Madam & Associates; and reviews of Kristyn Dunnion‘s The Dirt Chronicles, Hal Niedzviecki‘s Look Down, This is Where it Must Have Happened, Sam Cheuk‘s Love Figures, and Rebecca Rosenblum‘s The Big Dream.

With new fiction by Pasha Malla, and new poetry by Elena E. Johnson and Carolyn Smart.

Canada is a nation of wild, legendary rivers. The Mackenzie, the Fraser, the Churchill, and dozens more all empty into our national identity. They flow through our landscape, history, and imagination. They are vital to any history textbook, Group of Seven exhibit, or gift-shop postcard rack.

Canada is also a nation of river-tamers. We revere our waterways—but we also dam them. Trudeau canoed the epic Nahanni and two years later presided over the opening of the mammoth Churchill Falls hydroelectric dam in Labrador. We are, as the Canadian Hydropower Association says, a “hydro superpower.” Almost 60 percent of our electricity supply comes from dams—compared to just 16 percent globally—and only China squeezes more electricity out of its rivers than we do.

The heyday of big dam construction in Canada began around the late 1950s. What followed was an exhibition of progress in the raw. Surveyors and bulldozers headed to the frontier. Mighty men tamed mighty rivers. Engineering prowess replaced natural grandeur.

As rock was blasted and cement poured, legacies were forged, both geographical and political. In Manitoba, the two largest rivers and three of the five largest lakes were dramatically re-engineered. In Quebec, 571 dams and control structures have altered the flow of 74 rivers.

The construction phase lasted through the ’80s, then slowed, even though the country’s hydro potential had only been half tapped. Now, after two decades of limited construction—with the exception of Hydro-Québec, which kept on building—the dam-builders are rumbling to life again.

In the next 10 to 15 years, Canadian utilities will spend $55 to $70 billion on new hydroelectric projects. This would add 14,500 megawatts to Canada’s existing 71,000 megawatts of hydroelectric capacity. Most new projects are in Quebec (4,570 MW), B.C. (3,341 MW), Labrador (3,074 MW), and Manitoba (2,380 MW). The largest of these, Labrador’s 2,250 MW Gull Island project, will produce as much power as 750 train locomotives.

The extent and cost of construction will vary over time, but one thing is certain: the push for more hydro is on.

Most of these projects are driven in large part by the prospect of exporting power to the U.S. American interest in hydropower is linked, in part, to its low cost and its low greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. In this context, the push for more hydro is also a push by the industry to position its product as an answer to climate change.

Jacob Irving heads the Canadian Hydropower Association, which represents the interests of the hydro industry. He says hydropower is “a very strong climate change solution,” because it can displace the use of coal and natural gas to generate electricity. The argument is simple and compelling: use more hydropower, use less fossil fuel. The industry especially touts exports of hydro to the U.S., where 600 coal-fired plants produce 45 percent of the nation’s electricity, with another 24 percent fuelled by natural gas. The CHA says hydro exports already reduce continental emissions by half a million tons a year. They want that number to grow.

Given the dire climate prognosis—emissions in Canada, the U.S., and everywhere else are well above levels in 1990, the year used as a benchmark in the Kyoto Accord—the urgency of reducing fossil-fuel consumption is great. Perhaps Canada’s wild rivers, if harnessed, can be our gift to a warming world. Maybe a concrete edifice nestled in a river valley is just as quintessentially Canadian as a lone paddler on a pristine river.

This presents a have-your-cake-and-eat-it-too scenario for Canadian utilities. They can build more dams—obviously still a cornerstone of the corporate culture—cash in on lucrative exports, and enjoy eco-hero status. But is damming more of our rivers an optimal strategy for addressing climate change?

Despite the virtues of hydro power, dams can only reduce emissions indirectly. Their climate value hinges in part on the extent to which they substitute for fossilfuel-fired generation, as opposed to displacing nuclear, wind, or other sources. Though displacement is hard to prove, Irving reasons that “were we not to be sending that electricity down to the United States, the next most logical source of generation to meet their load requirements would generally be natural gas and/or coal.” The U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) actually predicts that over the next 25 years, 11 percent of new generation in the U.S. will be coal-fired and 60 percent natural gas (which is roughly half as bad as coal in terms of emissions).

In Canada, most new hydro projects are located in provinces with minimal fossil-fuel-fired generation, so limited displacement will happen here. Exceptions are Ontario, Labrador (where 102 MW will be displaced), Nova Scotia (which will import from Labrador), and possibly Saskatchewan, which could use hydro from Manitoba.

While the fossil-fuel displacement argument has obvious merit, it also has weaknesses. Utilities can argue that hydro exports help save the planet, but critics can say these exports just keep the most wasteful society on earth air-conditioned and recharged. They can say that hydro exports just feed an addiction with more and more cheap power, every kilowatt of which reduces the imperative to curb consumption. The basic argument is that reducing demand must be the obvious and dominant priority in energy policy, rather than endlessly ramping up supply.

Government agencies predict electricity demand in Canada will grow almost 10 percent between now and 2020, and in the U.S. by approximately 30 percent between now and 2035. Ralph Torrie says we can and must go in the opposite direction. “We could double the efficiency with which we use fuel and electricity in Canada,” he says. If you want to see how it’s done, he adds, “just take a vacation to Europe.” Torrie, whose energy expertise is internationally recognized, serves as managing director of the Vancouver-based Trottier Energy Futures Project. In contrast to Irving, who accepts that demand for electricity will grow, Torrie advocates a “new way of thinking about the energy future.”

“There is no demand for electricity,” he says. “Nobody wants a kilowatt hour in their living room.” We want the services that electricity can provide, and we must “focus on how we can best meet the underlying needs for amenity with less rather than more fuel and electricity.” That, he says, is the only hope for “anything we might call a sustainable energy future.”

“We waste half the hydro we produce,” says John Bennett, who heads the Sierra Club of Canada. The solution to climate change is “to use less energy,” he says. “That’s where the major investment should be.”

Torrie says large hydro is environmentally preferable to many forms of energy supply, but still, reducing demand can achieve the same thing at a lower cost, and without the decade-long turnaround time for planning and construction. He views conservation as a resource. “There’s almost always a kilowatt of electricity that can be saved for a smaller cost than building the ability to generate a new kilowatt.” Plus, the resource gets bigger with every new innovation in efficiency. As Torrie puts it, “The size of the resource goes up every time somebody has a bright idea.”

Cutting electricity demand by half would include a range of technologies, including LED lighting, sensor-driven smart controls that reduce daytime lighting in buildings, and continued improvements to virtually every device that uses electricity.

But even if we as a continent cut our energy use by half, we still need some energy—and should not a maximum amount of that come from low-emission hydro? Can’t conservation and new hydro be dual priorities?

According to energy consultant Phillipe Dunsky, total spending on efficiency and conservation programs in Canada is only about $1 billion per year. Despite that, Jacob Irving says, “energy conservation has to be forefront of all decisions.” Then he adds a caveat: “There’s a lot of analysis that says energy consumption will grow, and so we need to be ready for that.” Whether demand shrinks or expands, the simple prohydro argument—more hydro equals less fossil fuel— still stands.

But for Tony Maas, who works for the Canadian branch of the World Wildlife Fund, it’s not that simple. He says new hydro projects must be part of an overarching plan for “net reduction in GHG emissions.” He cites Ontario’s Green Energy Act as an example of a plan that commits to overall GHG reduction.

But, as John Bennett points out, “we don’t have a North American plan to reduce emissions,” so new hydro projects “can’t be part of that plan.” The EIA predicts that without policy change, coal use as well as GHG emissions from electricity generation, will continue to increase over the next 25 years. Bennett says building more dams to meet increasing demand is like doubling the fuel efficiency of cars so that people can drive twice as much.

In a release this April, Hydro-Québec, Canada’s largest generator and exporter of hydropower, said, “The major environmental challenge facing North America is to replace coal to generate power and oil used in transportation.” While climate change may be the “major” environmental challenge of the day, it is not the only one. Just because hydro dams do not have highly visible carbon-spewing smoke stacks does not necessarily make them environmentally friendly. Behind the question of whether dams are a climate solution lies a more fundamental question: is hydro actually clean, as utilities and governments regularly assert?

Jacob Irving says, “When people refer to [hydro] as clean, it’s in the context of air emissions.” But rarely is this specified. The categorical use of the term by utilities, without caveat or qualification, is misleading. Tony Maas says he gets “nervous” when hydro is called clean because “it almost implies there are no impacts.” But dams harm the environment. A dam is not an environmental improvement or solution for a watershed.

One of the main impacts is the disruption of the natural “flow regime” in a waterway. Maas says the natural fluctuations in water levels are the “master variable in organizing a river ecosystem,” giving key “cues” to other species. Thus, a WWF report says, “Dams destroy the ecology of river systems by changing the volume, quality, and timing of water flows downstream.” The evidence of this is visible in dammed Canadian rivers, as it is in the hundreds of millions of dollars paid to mitigate and compensate for damages caused by dams. Manitoba Hydro alone has spent over $700 million to address damages from its “clean” hydro projects.

The WWF takes a more nuanced approach. It says some hydro projects can be built without unacceptable harm, but its 2011 global energy plan still “severely restrict[s] future growth of hydro power to reflect the need for an evolution that respects existing ecosystems and human rights.”

Similarly, a 2011 report about Canada’s boreal forests by the Pew Environment Group considers both pros and cons of hydro. In a section about hydro called “How Green Is It?”, the report says:

Although [hydro dams] are comparatively low carbon emitters in comparison to many conventional energy sources, hydropower projects have resulted in significant impacts to wildlife habitat, ecological processes and aboriginal communities.

In a later section, the report states:

While it is clear that allowing our societies to be powered by carbon fuels is not sustainable, this does not mean that alternative or renewable energy sources can simply be viewed as having no cost whatsoever.

The report, entitled “A Forest of Blue,” does not offer a simple verdict. Rather, it says, “We must understand as many of the implications and complexities of the issues as possible.” The candour and openness to complexity demonstrated in the report are exactly what is needed in the assessment of any climate-change strategy.

In keeping with the Pew report’s frank and thorough nature, it also discusses the role Aboriginal peoples play in hydro development. This is an essential part of any discussion of hydropower in Canada since virtually all hydro projects occupy lands to which First Nations have rights. In the past, Aboriginal people vehemently (and mostly unsuccessfully) opposed major dams. That has changed: in some cases Aboriginal opposition has succeeded. The $5 billion, 1,250 MW Slave River project in Alberta has been “deferred” after project proponents were unable to reach a deal with Smith’s Landing First Nation last year.

The proposed Site C Dam, a 1,100 MW, $7.9 billion project planned for the Peace River in B.C., faces resolute opposition from four First Nations in the area. But the outcome of that David-and-Goliath battle will not be know for some time.

Elsewhere, opposition has given way to participation—David and Goliath have become allies. Most recently, members of the Innu Nation in Labrador voted in June to allow the massive Lower Churchill River projects—Muskrat Falls (824 MW) and Gull Island (2,250 MW)—to proceed. In exchange, the 2,800 Innu receive $5 million per year to assist with their process costs during and prior to construction, up to $400 million in contracts during construction, and share of project profits thereafter (5 percent of “After Debt Net Cashflow”).

The broad Tshash Petapen (New Dawn) Agreement, in which these provisions are contained, also includes an agreement in principle on land claims and $2 million a year as compensation for damages related to the existing Upper Churchill Falls dam.

Meanwhile, the Inuit (distinct from the Innu), who are concerned about downstream impacts in their territory, say they have been largely left out of the process.

In Quebec, the James Bay Cree receive over $100 million a year in hydro, forestry, and mining royalties as a result of the 2002 Peace of the Braves agreement. In it they consented to the Eastmain-1-A/Sarcelle/Rupert Project (918 MW) while securing the permanent abandonment of the Nottaway-Broadback-Rupert project, which would have flooded 6,000 square kilometres.

First Nations near proposed dam sites in Manitoba have been offered lump-sum compensation packages, along with the opportunity to invest in projects. For instance, the Nisichawayasihk Cree Nation, with its 4,500 members, will be entitled to a third of the profits of the nearly completed Wuskwatim Dam if they can come up with a third of the $1.3 billion cost of the dam. They also benefit from $60 million of employment training.

In June, four other First Nations joined Manitoba Hydro in announcing the start of construction on the 695 MW, $5.6 billion Keeyask dam. Like Nisichawayasihk, they will be offered the chance to invest in the dam, as well as employment opportunities.

What’s clear in all these cases is that Canadian utilities cannot ignore Aboriginal demands. “We can stop development,” says Ovide Mercredi, former National Chief of the Assembly of First Nations and the recently retired Chief of the Misipawistik Cree Nation in northern Manitoba. His community sits right next to the 479 MW Grand Rapids Dam, which floods 115,700 hectares. In reference to the water flowing through that dam, Mercredi’s message to the province is simple: “That’s not your water, it belongs to our people and we want a share of that money.” The dam’s 50-year provincial licence expires in 2015 and Mercredi wants licence renewal to be contingent on public acknowledgement of the harm, increased mitigation of damages, and a revenue-sharing agreement. In part, the message is that if utilities do not deal with Aboriginal concerns now, they will have to later.

Whether First Nations are defiant or eager for new dams to power their economic future, the broader environmental questions remain. While Aboriginal influence has led to a reduction in the size of dams and increased environmental mitigation, and First Nations consent improves the general ethical perception of a project, there is still no tidy way to pour thousands of tons of cement into a river.

No matter who is involved, the merit of the case for hydro as a climate solution can be tested by the assumptions it rests on. These assumptions are that hydro is clean; that demand for electricity will grow; and that the primary alternative to more hydro is fossil-fuel generation. Are these solutions part of the solution or the problem?

Ultimately, the solution to climate change, as well as to watershed health, may never be found unless we move past these assumptions and replace them with better, more accurate premises.

First, dams are not green or clean in themselves. To disrupt the flow of a river and blaze a transmission corridor through kilometres of forest is, in itself, bad for the biosphere. To solve one environmental problem (global warming) with another (pouring hundreds of thousands of tonnes of cement in a free-flowing river) is counterintuitive. That said, desperate circumstances may require desperate measures.

Second, energy demand can and must be substantially reduced. The logical outcome of letting demand increase indefinitely and meeting that demand with ever more hydro and other renewables is to have every river dammed, the landscape saturated with wind and solar farms, and consumption still increasing. The ultimate, unavoidable solution is to use less energy. This must be the dominant priority.

Finally, dams do not reduce GHG emissions per se. They increase energy supply. Apart from a demonstrated continental commitment to dramatically reduce emissions (and energy demand), the case for hydro as a climate solution is, for the industry, a rather convenient truth. Hydropower can’t be part of the climate-change solution if there is no solution.

Climate change is one of humanity’s greatest challenges, and to address it we may need to conjure greater creativity than just reviving electricity generation megaprojects conceived of decades ago. Dan McDermott of the Sierra Club’s Ontario Chapters says, “The age of big dams is over.” According to him, hydro proponents “have their heads turned backwards attempting to mortgage the future to maintain the past.”

The large hydro projects currently in the works were envisioned before global warming concerned anyone, in an era summed up by former Manitoba premier Duff Roblin when he rose in the legislature in 1966 and prophesied a grandiose future for hydropower, saying, “We can have our cake, we can eat it and we can make a bigger cake, and sell part of that.”

Though hydro prospects are framed differently now, dam proponents still appear to share Roblin’s belief in limitless, consequence-free development. Now the question of whether taming more of our iconic rivers will help the climate becomes a question of whether Roblin was right.