Sturgeon; Loch Ness monster; haunted by absent bodies; “decolonial dreams” of reciprocal human-fish relationships in Canada:
My hometown of Amiskwaci (Beaver Hills), which is referred to today by its settler-colonial name Edmonton, rests along the mighty North Saskatchewan. The River once ran thick with namewak (the nehiyawewin [Plains Cree, Y dialect] name for sturgeon, plural). Their historical importance is underlined in place-names that celebrate them: the town of Namao north-east of Edmonton, the Sturgeon River, and the historic Namew Avenue that once ran through central Edmonton all celebrate the presence of namewak in our territory’s past. […] Today namewak are an endangered species, and estimates in the year 2000 put the population of adult lake sturgeon in the North Saskatchewan River […] at fewer than 200 mature fish. […] Colonialism and the environmental destruction it heralded in the prairies and subarctic in western Canada has impacted namewak as heavily as it has impacted every other sentient being in Alberta. […]
I began to wonder about fish in the heart of the British colonial Empire. Can they speak? If so, what stories are they telling with their bodies and movements? The Loch Ness Centre and Exhibition in Drumnadrochit in the Scottish Highlands […] teaches curious visitors that the likeliest culprit in Nessie sightings is […] in fact a waylaid sturgeon. […] These titillating tidbits hint at an intrepid ‘monster sturgeon’ lurking within the waters of the great Loch Ness. […] In August 2014, the University of Aberdeen held a ‘Pioneer Day’ to coincide with its celebratory exhibit on Scots migration to Canada, replete with wagon-building activities. In the autumn of 2014, two Indigenous colleagues and I submitted proposals for critical papers on John A. MacDonald to a conference held in Scotland in 2015 that celebrated Canada’s first Prime Minister as the ‘Son of Glasgow, Father of Canada.’ Though the first Prime Minister was an infamous racist who, as James Dachuck details in his 2013 book Clearing the Plains, actively “starved uncooperative Indians onto reserves and into submission,” our papers were conspicuously rejected. […] I tried to vocalize […] the intimate connections between Scotland’s stories and the ruined landscapes and waterways of my homeland, but this discourse was often quickly erased with the wave of an impatient British hand. […] The Ness namew (or namewak – perhaps there is more than one) became my decolonial dream […]. I began to obsess over her (or his?) presence in Scottish waters. Where did she (or he) come from? […] Monsters become slates upon which stories are written. For me, as a ‘foreigner’ living in Scotland, the Loch Ness monster story speaks to the anxieties of, and about, the north. English anxieties about Scotland. European anxieties about ‘sublime’ northern spaces. And the ever present British obsession with ‘the Other.’ […] She is an absent body that fuels a hunger and instaiable desire to locate her, to know her […].
Historical geographer Frank Tough demonstrates that fish are absent from most understandings of prairie history and prairie/subarctic colonialism in Canada. Liza Piper demonstrates that lakes are broadly overlooked, in favour of rivers, in freshwater historical studies […]. Small prairie lakes like my beloved Baptiste Lake rarely figure in ethnographic or historical studies of my home […]. As Piper argues, this is because lakes function as conceptual ‘spaces, not places’ in the Western imagination. In his extensive work on subarctic Indigenous fisheries and commercial fisheries in the late 19th and early 20th centuries in northern Manitoba, Tough illustrates the integral role of fish in supporting Indigenous peoples. […] The State allowed commcercial fisheries to decimate fish stocks, rendering Indigenous communities dependent on the State. The Fish Body – both the individual body of a singular fish (’the corpse’ […]) and the cumulative body of all fish – in inland territories like the one I grew up in is still largely an absent one in the collective imagination. […] Fish, though one of the most important food sources in central Alberta, Treaty Six territory for millenia, are not part of our collective imagination as prairie citizens. […]
What if we looked to fish bodies and fish stories to re-inscribe a reciprocal and rooted relationships to the land and water? What if we used what scholar Dwayne Donald (Paspaschase Cree) calls our ‘ethical relationality’ to image ourselves as people with reciprocal duties to fish and other constituents of our shared worlds. […]
Whatever else happens once we start the vicious cycle of dispossession and erasure? Can it ever be broken? I believe it can. And I strongly suspect it will be the absent bodies of those we have harmed, human and non-human, who will compel us to break the cycle with the stories they carry back to us, which haunt us, through their disappearance and loss.
Zoe Todd (Metis). “Decolonial Dreams: Unsettling the academy through namewak.” The New [New] Corpse, edited by Caroline Picard. 2015.
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