Aqueduct, Colonialism, and History

This book is about an aqueduct and colonialism. Aqueducts carry water from one place to another. They have been around for a long time, at least since the seventh century BCE.

My topic is a particular aqueduct, one made of cement and running a little over 150 kilometres in length. This aqueduct carries drinking water from Shoal Lake, which borders the Canadian provinces of Ontario and Manitoba, to the city of Winnipeg, the capital of Manitoba situated near the geographical centre of the North American continent.

The Aqueduct has supplied Winnipeg’s water since 1919, and, with very little fail, it continues to do so. I have drank Shoal Lake water each day of the sixteen years I have lived in this territory; and my children, like generations of Winnipeggers before them, have been raised on Shoal Lake water. The Aqueduct is sometimes called the Shoal Lake Aqueduct, after its source. It is sometimes called the Winnipeg Aqueduct, after the community that funded it, built it, and has benefited from it for almost a century. Here I call it the Aqueduct or the Winnipeg Aqueduct. This is the name that best reminds us which community the Aqueduct has served and continues to serve and sustain in an arrangement that tells us a great deal about how colonialism structures and determines our lives in the most visceral, daily, and consequential of ways.

The story of the Aqueduct is very much about the city of Winnipeg and its location within multiple layers of empire. It is also profoundly about the Anishinaabe communities located at the Aqueduct’s source. There are two main communities: Iskatewizaagegan 39 Independent First Nation, formerly Shoal Lake 39, and Shoal Lake 40 First Nation. For the last century, the Aqueduct has profoundly shaped the histories of both Iskatewizaagegan and Shoal Lake 40.

There are many stories here. In this book I focus on the city of Winnipeg and what its relationship to Shoal Lake 40 tells us about colonialism, and the particular form it has generally taken in twentieth-century Canada, settler colonialism. At its core the story of the Aqueduct is about the exploitation of Indigenous resources in the interest of settler ones. It is also about the ways in which these difficult histories are elided, put aside, and forgotten, and what happens when settler communities are compelled to acknowledge that their lives, their resources, and their relative prosperity have come at the expense, sometimes the very direct expense, of Indigenous peoples. Often this inequality is general, abstract, and easily denied, at least for non-Indigenous peoples. But the case of the Winnipeg Aqueduct makes it direct and tangible. The Aqueduct is Canadian colonialism in scale model and technicolour.1

The history of colonialism is global, and the work that the Aqueduct did and does is replicated throughout North America, the Antipodes, and other places where colonizers have come, reorganized access and rights to lands and resources in legal and extra-legal ways, and stayed. But the central commodity in this episode of settler colonialism is not land, per se, but what I loosely discuss as a resource. The particular resource in focus here is drinking water.

The story of the Winnipeg Aqueduct is a chapter in a global history, but it is still a local and highly particular and material story. It is about cement and muskeg. It is about a railroad, telephone wires, a long highway cut across much of a continent, and a short gravel road that is as yet only partially built. The story of the Aqueduct is about letters sent between Ottawa, Winnipeg, and Cecilia Jeffrey Indian Residential School when it was located east of the Shoal Lake 40 reserve from 1901 to 1929. It is about typhoid and boil water advisories. It is about reserve lands and water bills. The story of the Aqueduct is about vested interests and a bold, ambitious, and by all accounts costly public initiative carried out against great odds during the insurgencies of a World War and a time of radicalism and protest.

The history of the Winnipeg Aqueduct is about the enormous powers Canada’s federal government possessed to make decisions about Indigenous peoples and Indigenous lands. One of those decisions was made in 1915, when the federal government inked the deal to sell key parts of the Shoal Lake 40 Indian Reserve to the Greater Winnipeg Water District (GWWD). The GWWD then built a dyke and a canal that effectively marooned the community of Shoal Lake 40, transforming it into an artificial island.

The story of the Aqueduct documents the reluctance of civic, provincial, and especially federal governments to commit the funding necessary to mitigate some of the most basic and fundamental inequalities that flow directly from this decision. This includes the construction of a twenty-seven-kilometre gravel road that would link Shoal Lake 40 to the TransCanada highway in all seasons and make a locally run water purification plant feasible.

The community of Shoal Lake 40 calls this road Freedom Road. 2015 witnessed a seemingly regular cycle of hope and disappointment, where solid signs of funding and responsibility were followed by outright backtracking or more opaque confusion about the respective financial commitments of federal, provincial, and civic governments. A potential agreement between the federal government, the province of Manitoba, and the city of Winnipeg came to nothing in the spring of 2015 when the federal government of Stephen Harper would only agree to fund design costs. The election of Justin Trudeau’s Liberal Party in October 2015 signalled positive change for Shoal Lake 40, as does the province of Manitoba’s commitment to funding and supporting the process. As of December 2015, it looks like Shoal Lake 40 will get its road, perhaps by 2017.2

But as I write this, the people of Shoal Lake 40 still lack a safe and reliable way to travel outside of their community for much of the year. They cannot get emergency services to their homes. Their basic economic possibilities are frustrated. There is no workable way to remove garbage from the community or to adequately treat sewage. On the long list of cruel ironies, one of the most striking is that Shoal Lake 40 lacks clean drinking water. Shoal Lake 40 has been on a boil water advisory since 1997, almost two decades. In this Shoal Lake 40 is hardly alone. As of August 31, 2015, there were 142 drinking water advisories on First Nations communities across Canada with the exception of British Columbia, and another thirty-five boil water advisories in that province. In the decade between 2004 and 2014, two-thirds of reserves were on a boil water advisory at some point.3 The lack of drinkable water in Indigenous and especially reserve communities stands as a sharp reminder of the striking gaps that exist between these communities and non-Indigenous, notably urban, ones.

That Shoal Lake 40’s status as a community without drinkable water can be tied directly to the building of an aqueduct designed to bring drinkable water to the city of Winnipeg makes this an especially telling example of the ways that settler colonialism has worked. History is about the past, but we research, write, and discuss it in the present. There are countless slogans about the capacity of the past to instruct, to make us better people, and to make a more worthy society. But the past did not exist to teach us a lesson. History has often been leaned on as a repository of inspirational stories, especially of the individual and—with greater effort but perhaps wider broadcast—the nation. Social historians have looked to the past for different points of inspiration, finding stories of collective refusal, or willingness to think otherwise, to disrupt hegemonies that would prefer to pass themselves off as total and seamless.

History can be harrowing. A serious reckoning with the past tends to point us toward the systemic, embedded character of social divisions and inequities, showing us how they are built into the fabric of our pasts and our presents. To discuss the history of the Winnipeg Aqueduct is to engage with the powerful and often totalizing history of colonialism and its disregard for Indigenous lives. This is about our past, but it is also about our present and the precarious place of Indigenous lives within Canada as a whole, Manitoba and Winnipeg in particular. Whatever hope we have must be earned against the heavy weight of this history.

The next chapter provides a short history of Winnipeg and histories of colonialism. Chapter Three discusses the place of water in these histories. The bulk of this book lies in the middle, where Chapter Four offers a detailed and admittedly nerdy discussion of the building of the Aqueduct between 1913 and 1919. Chapter Five concludes by discussing how these histories are remembered or forgotten, and what this tells us about the present, the future, and settler colonialism. In these chapters, this book tries to explain how the Aqueduct got us here, and what this tells us about colonialism’s complicated past and its difficult present.