From the Floodland: Countering Extraction, Remembering Relations in Eeyou Istchee

Abstract:In this article, I attend to two stories from the floodland of Eeyou Istchee/James Bay, where in the mid-2000s the massive infrastructure of Hydro-Québec’s Eastmain-Rupert project flooded a portion of Eeyouch ancestral lands, submerging Eeyouch grave sites and places of meaning and memory. Reading across literature and public art, and engaging with ghosts and other-than-human presences, I analyse two works rooted in Eeyouch territory and this shared event of colonial resource extraction. The novel Ourse bleue (2007) by Cree-Métis writer Virginia Pésémapéo Bordeleau and the large-scale sculpture Iiyiyiu-Iinuu (2008) by Cree artist Tim Whiskeychan conjure place-based connections to the departed that contend with the recent history of Hydro in Eeyou Istchee. Both pieces model a form of storying in the wake that refuses the smooth passage of Hydro over the dead and suggests that these are relationships to nourish in the present.