The Floodgates

Rivers don’t flood, wrote Toni Morrison; they remember, because “all water has a perfect memory and is forever trying to get back to where it was.” The damming of a river, then, is an act of enforced forgetting, an unnatural intervention, when forests are inundated, animal habitats obliterated, and lakes created where none existed before. So it is in a scene that unfolds late in Virginia Pesemapeo Bordeleau’s Blue Bear Woman as the narrator, Victoria, is driving alongside the Eastmain River in Eeyou Istchee — an area in Northern Quebec — having returned to the place of her birth to reconnect with her mother’s family and her Cree heritage. “I take in the Eastmain’s banks crowned with forests soon to be flooded by millions of cubic metres of water,” she relates. “I’m overcome with sorrow.”

For many years, Victoria has lived away in the south, where she married and made a successful career as a poet. Her return coincides with the construction of the Eastmain...