Congratulations to Dr. Isabella Huberman, Assistant Professor of French, for receiving a SSHRC Insight Development Grant for her research project titled Powerlines: Re-storying Hydro Power in Quebec Through Indigenous Narrative Arts.
The poem The First Rapids of the La Grande (The Way I Knew Them Years Ago) by Margaret Sam-Cromarty on the glass of the Upichiwin Belvedere. LG-1 Dam in the background. Photo by Isabella Huberman.
“This project aims to better understand Indigenous critiques of extractivism in Quebec.”
About the research project:
This project explores how Indigenous narrative arts are “re-storying” hydro development in Quebec, where water is intertwined with the nation-building project and where hydropower still symbolizes Quebec sovereignty, as it has since the Quiet Revolution. Powerlines aims to unravel this prevailing discourse, to better understand Indigenous critiques of extractivism in Quebec and to explore how creative works enact poetic forms of resurgence of intimate land-based relationality in the wake of transformation of land and water.
I analyze cultural production of writers and artists across different periods and regions of Quebec, working in English and French, along with bilingual publications in Indigenous languages. Through this multidisciplinary and multilingual approach, I aim to uncover and explore connections across Indigenous narrative arts in Quebec, focusing on the ways these creative works document, represent, contest and reimagine hydropower.
From Eeyou lifewriting about the first phase of the James Bay project in the 1970s, to community commemoration during the renewed phase of hydro development in James Bay in the early 2000s, to Innu poetry and oral testimony about the Romaine River damming in the 2010s, to non-human damming as forms of land defense in Anishnaabe theatre – the cultural production of Indigenous storytellers offers a crucial and timely intervention into collective understandings of energy, water and relationality. By mobilizing literary and visual analysis alongside archival research, this project foregrounds Indigenous stories that challenge hydro’s status as “green, clean energy.”
