Dammed
The Politics of Loss and Survival in Anishinaabe Territory
La description
Luby weaves text, testimony, and experience together, grounding this historical work in the territory of her paternal ancestors, lands she calls home. With evidence drawn from archival material, oral history, and environmental observation, Dammed invites readers to confront Canadian colonialism in the 20th century.
Récompenses
- Winner, Indigenous History Book Prize, Canadian Historical Association 2021
- Winner, Floyd S. Chambers Award for Ontario History, The Champlain Society 2020
- Winner, Governor General's History Award for Excellence in Scholarly Research 2021
- Winner, NiCHE Prize for Best Book in Canadian Environmental History, Canadian Historical Association 2022
- Winner, CLIO History Prize (Ontario), Canadian Historical Association 2021
- Commended, Labriola Center American Indian National Book Award 2020
- Winner, Best Scholarly Book in Canadian History Prize, Canadian Historical Association 2021
Reviews
“The book belies the settler mythology of progress and growth, especially after the Second World War, and the colonial binary of settler expansion/Indigenous victimization. The people [Luby] features in her book demonstrate resilience in the face of challenge, which is a point to be emphasized and extolled.”
- Jean L. Manore
"Luby proves that small dams can have big histories and, in doing so, makes a major contribution to Canadian Indigenous and settler colonial history as well as engaged community research."
- Daniel Macfarlane
"Luby presents the reader with an erudite, but eminently readable, account of the last hundred or so years of human interaction with, and manipulation of, the waterways of Northwestern Ontario… weaving together archival material with Indigenous knowledge and perspectives in an accessible and compelling way."
- Sarah Moar
“A major contribution to the history of development in post-war Canada.”
- Clarence Hatton-Proulx
"Brittany Luby’s Dammed is an important book that pushes the reader to question Canada's nation-building process and to reconcile with the fact that Canada's growth and prosperity were at the expense of Indigenous peoples—with the experience of the Anishinaabeg along the Winnipeg River, and Luby’s home territory, being the example focused upon."
- Chadwick Cowie
"Taking pains to dispel notions of a monolithic First Nations experience, Dammed paints a picture of diverse forms of Canadian Indigenous resistance that long predates unified opposition to the 1969 White Paper, thereby deepening our understandings of First Nations adaptation and resistance to imposed social, political, and environmental change."
- Anna J. Willow
“In Dammed: The Politics of Loss and Survival in Anishinaabe Territory, Luby offers a history, based on archival and oral resources, of the damming and transformation of the Winnipeg River system, all to the detriment of Indigenous people. A history of race, class, gender and labour, Dammed is also a compelling argument for an increased ability to think in systems and to think deeply about how a pathway to reconciliation needs to be bathed in historical reciprocity.”
- Matt Henderson