This project took me away from my usual areas of research. It played out at a different rate of speed and has been discussed and read in different locations than I am used to. In one way or another most of my work has been concerned with questions of colonization and home, and what that means for non-Indigenous people like me. Writing about the city I live in and the water I drink has made me consider all this anew, and I have done so in conversation with people, institutions, and communities that deserve my thanks.
Jarvis Brownlie, Bruce Erickson, Rick Harp, Esyllt Jones, Christie McLeod, Steve Penfold, Jonathan Peyton, and Jocelyn Thorpe read the manuscript in its entirety and provided engaged, helpful comments. Cuyler Cotton did so twice, and has been a generous and enormously knowledgeable support throughout. Pete Anderson, Sarah Carter, David Tough, Adam Gaudry, Ariel Gordon, Glenn Bergen, Angela Failer, Victoria Freeman, Laura Ishiguro, Tina Loo, Mary Jane McCallum, Karen Sharma, and Ian Mosby responded to me on Twitter, answered emails, and sent me in useful directions.
Archivists Allan Neyedly and Sarah Ramsden provided crucial assistance in locating records, and I am grateful for the permission to publish photographs granted by the Greater Winnipeg Water and Waste Department and the City of Winnipeg Archives. Sharon Redsky provided additional crucial assistance, and I am thankful for permission to publish those photographs from the Shoal Lake 40 First Nation. Archivist Anne Lindsay shared her time and remarkable knowledge with me, and Mary Horodyski also gave me some needed archival nudges. This would have been a very different project had critical resources not been made available online, and I would particularly like to thank Library and Archives Canada for making some Department of Indian Affairs archives accessible online.
I have been buoyed by the fine and knowledgeable support of ARP Books. Kathleen Olmstead, John Samson, Rick Wood, and especially Josina Robb have been critical to the making of this book. Mike Carroll designed the awesome book cover and layout. Michael Yellowwing Kannon took the photographs of present-day Winnipeg.
Peter Ives was the first person in our household to engage questions of Winnipeg’s water and Shoal Lake directly, and I am grateful to have had his conversation and engagement, even when I was a difficult editorial subject. Our kids Nell and Theo got tired of visiting Aqueduct sites in the summer of 2015, but have been good humoured and supportive nonetheless.
Late in the summer of 2015, my father Clay Perry was in failing health, and I went to Vancouver to spend time with him. I told him a lot about the project, about the Indigenous dispossession, about the muskeg, about the surveys, about the difficult histories and the demands on the present they make. Clay died in September and was never able to read the book. I hope that he would have liked it.