Northern Light: Power, Land, and the Memory of Water
193
Northern Light: Power, Land, and the Memory of Water
193eBook
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Overview
The child of South Asian migrants, Kazim Ali was born in London, lived as a child in the cities and small towns of Manitoba, and made a life in the United States. As a man passing through disparate homes, he has never felt he belonged to a place. And yet, one day, the celebrated poet and essayist finds himself thinking of the boreal forests and lush waterways of Jenpeg, a community thrown up around the building of a hydroelectric dam on the Nelson River, where he once lived for several years as a child. Does the town still exist, he wonders? Is the dam still operational?
When Ali goes searching, however, he finds not news of Jenpeg, but of the local Pimicikamak community. Facing environmental destruction and broken promises from the Canadian government, they have evicted Manitoba’s electric utility from the dam on Cross Lake. In a place where water is an integral part of social and cultural life, the community demands accountability for the harm that the utility has caused.
Troubled, Ali returns north, looking to understand his place in this story and eager to listen. Over the course of a week, he participates in community life, speaks with Elders and community members, and learns about the politics of the dam from Chief Cathy Merrick. He drinks tea with activists, eats corned beef hash with the Chief, and learns about the history of the dam, built on land that was never ceded, and Jenpeg, a town that now exists mostly in his memory. In building relationships with his former neighbors, Ali explores questions of land and power, and in remembering a lost connection to this place, finally finds a home he might belong to.
Praise for Northern Light
An Outside Magazine Favorite Book of 2021
A Book Riot Best Book of 2021
A Shelf Awareness Best Book of 2021
“Ali’s gift as a writer is the way he is able to present his story in a way that brings attention to the myriad issues facing Indigenous communities, from oil pipelines in the Dakotas to border walls running through Kumeyaay land.” —San Diego Union-Tribune
“A world traveler, not always by choice, ponders the meaning and location of home. . . . A graceful, elegant account even when reporting on the hard truths of a little-known corner of the world.” —Kirkus Reviews
“[Ali’s] experiences are relayed in sensitive, crystalline prose, documenting how Cross Lake residents are working to reinvent their town and rebuild their traditional beliefs, language, and relationships with the natural world. . . . Though these topics are complex, they are untangled in an elegant manner.” —Foreword Reviews (starred review)
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781571317124 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Milkweed Editions |
| Publication date: | 06/10/2022 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 193 |
| Sales rank: | 280,930 |
| File size: | 5 MB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
The actual Jenpeg Generating Station is a place I remember only a little bit, having visited the structure while it was under construction and when the river was flowing freely through. This dam was a joint project between the Canadian government and the government of the USSR and is one of very few examples of Soviet technology and engineering still in active use in North America. Growing up, we knew Russian families who lived in Jenpeg, and two Russian boys were in my class at school. The Russians all lived on Fifth Street next to one another, and it was rumored that a representative of the Soviet government was living in Jenpeg with them to keep an eye on everything. One of the older Russian gentlemen resembled my paternal grandfather, and so to help assuage my little sister’s homesickness for the family he would often come to our trailer and play with her, pretending to be him. She would call him “Ava,” which is what we called our grandfather. I am not sure she ever realized that the old Russian gentleman wasn’t our grandfather, even though that grandfather also came to visit the family while we lived there.
I gave Lee Roy Muswaggon a phone call. “So you want to come back to Cross Lake?” he asked me, sounding a little skeptical, I thought.
“Well, I’m not sure if ‘back’ is right, because in all the years I was growing up in Jenpeg, I never came to Cross Lake.”
“Is that right?” he asked slowly. He sounded distracted to me, as if he was engaged in another task while speaking with me.
I started getting nervous. “Well, you know my mom and her friends used to drive over the lake in winter to shop, buy moccasins and gloves and that kind of thing.”
There was a pause on the other end of the line. Lee Roy was shifting papers around, saying something to someone. “So why do you want to come back now?” he asked.
I wasn’t sure if his apparent wariness was because he didn’t trust me, or how much Chief Merrick had told him.
“Well, I grew up in Jenpeg,” I said, “and my father was one of the engineers on the dam, but I never really knew what happened there. I want to see for myself the environmental damage, and learn about the social and economic impact of the dam on Cross Lake.”
Lee Roy was silent. I took it not as skepticism now, but rather a conversational pattern I would come to know better in the coming weeks—silence as an invitation, silence as interest.
“You know,” I said then, “I’ve visited Israel, I’ve been to the West Bank. I spent a lot of time learning about the issues that face the Palestinian people who live in the countryside and the villages—the ways the occupation has impacted them in their daily lives, impacted their families.”
“Is that right?” Lee Roy asked again, with more interest I thought.
“Well, their traditional agricultural techniques rely on desert-sustainable water practices, but most of the Israeli settlements in the West Bank are placed directly on top of the main aquifers, which they pipe back into treatment centers in Israel, so the Palestinians have to buy back the water, and their allotment is not always sufficient.”
Lee Roy was silent. Not uninterested, I realized then, but listening.
“I want to visit Jenpeg,” I said. “I mean the old town site, yes, but I need to know about Cross Lake as well. I don’t think I can understand my childhood until I know what happened in your community.”
I wasn’t sure if I was explaining myself well enough. I’m not sure I myself knew the reasons for my trip well enough to explain them to him.
“All right,” said Lee Roy then, somehow convinced by my clumsy entrée. “Can you come on Saturday evening? I want to invite you to take part in a sweat lodge ceremony. After you go through that, we will show you everything there is to show you here and answer all of your questions.”
“A sweat lodge?” I asked, a little surprised.
“It’s one of our most sacred rituals,” he said. “We want to make sure you know this isn’t about political power or money for us; it’s about the soil, the rocks, the river. They are our mother, and our life doesn’t feel right without her. We want to share with you something of what we are, first. Then we can talk to you about the treaties, about the dam.”
I hung up with Lee Roy, newly uneasy. What was I getting myself into? I had some strange, nostalgic idea about going back to the town of my childhood, trooping through the forest on whatever access road I could find, and then maybe writing some dizzy remembrance about the trees and the water. And now I had agreed to be a part of some kind of ceremony in a community I barely knew. Would I being going there as a poet or as a journalist? An ethnographer or scholar or memoirist? Or just a lonely person who wants to look at a place he once thought of as home? I hardly knew.
I was acutely aware that each of those roles has its own array of ethical considerations, and I felt prepared for none of them. But nonetheless I knew I had to go.
*
Just before leaving for Manitoba I went to the Mass Poetry Festival in Salem, Massachusetts. I spent three days there among poets and writers, understanding who I was and what I was supposed to do. I remembered a time twenty years earlier when I’d been at the Dodge Poetry Festival in New Jersey. Three friends from graduate school had driven out with me from New York City and we were all staying in a motel room together down the road from the festival. The day I remember most clearly from that time, I was attending a panel on the responsibility of poets to engage political affairs. The three poets on the panel were Yusef Komunyakaa, Anne Waldman, and Nellie Wong. Komunyakaa claimed that artists ought to have no political agenda or goal in their work but bring all of their sensibilities to bear on the writing. Certainly, as the author of some of the finest poetry relating to American military involvement in Vietnam, this approach had yielded great artistic achievement on his part. Wong expressed the view that political and social reality come first and foremost and are an integral part of the writer’s life; in her case, the organizing and political actions she was involved in had become the subjects of her work. Anne Waldman said what I thought to be the most interesting thing, which was that artistic practice is itself political action. She argued that the making of art could effect real and lasting social change in the lived world. The thought comforts and unsettles at once.
Twenty years later, on the last day of the festival in Salem, I stopped at one of the tables in the book fair where a young woman was folding tiny origami cranes. She aimed to fold a thousand throughout the festival and invited people to sit with her and learn how to fold cranes that were then collected in trays for people to take home. I chose an orange crane and put it in the pocket of my jacket. That night, at the hotel, I called my friend Layli Long Soldier and told her about my upcoming trip to Cross Lake. Layli is like me, somewhat of a wanderer, having been raised in the Southwest—living in the Phoenix Valley as a child, in the Four Corners area as a teen, then on the Navajo Nation and in Santa Fe, where she lives now. She also has family on the Lakota reservation, whom she often visits. Layli’s book of poetry Whereas has played a huge role in how I understand the actively moving parts of Indigenous language and existence on the North American continent. Her work tries to excavate sediments of hidden history, language, and politics, and I felt a sense of kinship with her as I wondered to myself, what would I discover in Cross Lake?
“Kazim!” she exclaimed, when I explained to her what was going on, that I was leaving for Manitoba the next morning. “I never knew this about your childhood, that you grew up on the rez!”
I laughed. “I never knew either. No one told us we were on treaty land. I didn’t know anything about Cross Lake except that’s where the other kind of Indians lived.”
“That’s always the secret,” said Layli. “Whose land you are on, what happened there before.”
“In fact,” I said, “when we were little, we didn’t even think about the people in Cross Lake. I kind of vaguely remember people saying denigrating things about them, that they were drunk all the time or something. Stereotypical stuff.”
Layli was silent.
“Am I betraying my father somehow by going?” I blurted out. “Even though honestly, I’m sure he had no idea about what might happen because of the environmental impact of the dam. How was he supposed to know? And who knew the province would screw up the treaty promises?”
“I think you’re honoring him by going,” Layli said then. “You’re going to represent him, and help to remediate in some small way.”
“Do you think?” I said. “But I don’t know. What can I really do? Write about it a little bit? How’s that going to matter? Who’s going to read what a poet has to say?”
“Well,” she said matter-of-factly, “you can’t avoid it anymore. You opened the door. Why are you nervous?”
“Do you think the people there are mad at me or my father?” I ask.
“They wouldn’t ask you to sweat, if that were the case,” she says.
“Maybe. I’m wondering what they are expecting of me, though,” I replied. “I’m going up there and I’m going through this sweat lodge—are they trying to purify me or something?”
“That isn’t how it works,” Layli said. “Our spirituality isn’t transactional. It’s an invitation to you to share in their life. They are welcoming you as family. They are inviting you into their community and their sacred space. There are no strings attached to that from their side, because they believe in the powers of the ceremony itself. But don’t go in if you aren’t yourself willing to be changed.”
I was never sure. If anything, I felt apprehensive. My father is one of the men who built this dam that led to so many broken promises, to such economic, social, and environmental disaster. How would they look at me?
“People have been connected to the land for thousands and thousands of years,” Layli continued. “To be cut off from it is not a small thing; and honestly, Kazim, when you think about how few years it has really been since the Europeans came to this continent and changed things so much, we are only at the chronological beginning of this trauma. There is still time to work against the disconnect, to reconcile with both land and people. I think that’s why they invited you. Inviting you to the sweat lodge was a gesture of generosity. They are asking for your service, not just to report on them or be a passive witness.”
“That’s the part I wonder about. What can I do, in the end?”
“Well, what started you on all this in the first place,” Layli asked, changing the subject. “So you were looking for information on your hometown, but then why get so interested in Cross Lake?”
“It was the rash of suicides,” I replied. “I couldn’t believe it when I read it. It happened last year—seven suicides in one month and then twenty-five more attempted suicides. At a school with five hundred students or so students. Can you imagine? The council called a state of emergency, the elders performed some ritual—.”
Layli cut me off. “What?”
“In the spring,” I said. “Last March. The elders, they performed this ritual calling the spirits of the land and the water and the sky to come help the young people in community.”
“Oh Kazim,” she said, her voice dropping. “They called you.”
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