Northern Writes

Who owns the North? The question is perennially relevant in Canada, where a population clustered near the southern border prides itself on living in the world’s second-largest country, thanks to a sprawl of tundra that most will probably never see. That gap — between claiming land and inhabiting it — has become politically urgent, especially with Donald Trump’s threats to take over Greenland. Quebec has its own take on the matter. Although most francophones live in the St. Lawrence Valley, the province’s borders have steadily extended northward. In 1898, the predominantly Cree territory around James Bay came under Quebec’s jurisdiction. The Inuit villages of Nunavik followed suit in 1912.

Annie Desrochers and Samuel Lalande-Markon set out to experience Quebec’s northern regions for themselves, confronting histories of extraction and colonial dispossession in the process. Transmission documents Desrochers’s week-long road trip to the James Bay region with three of her sons. Their aim was to investigate the massive hydroelectric complexes that power half of Quebec at the cost of flooding a vast swath of Cree land. Lalande-Markon’s Marche au pays réel (Walk in the real country) details his more adventurous journey: biking and skiing from Quebec’s southern border to Ivujivik, on the Hudson Strait, over the course of three months. Both works cross genres. Transmission was first released as a podcast in 2019 and has now been adapted as a graphic novel, while Lalande-Markon’s voyage was the subject of a 2025 documentary (released in English as North of Ourselves). Desrochers and Lalande-Markon also grapple with the same core issues. How can southern Quebecers relate to the North in ways that respect Indigenous peoples? What are the authors’ connections to this land that is and is not their own?

Transmission begins with a dramatic declaration: “In the collective unconscious, James Bay is not a territory. . . . It is a dam.” Desrochers thus introduces Robert Bourassa’s “project of the century,” in which the premier set out to build the largest hydroelectric installation in North America as part of his 1970 campaign pledge to create 100,000 jobs. The chosen site was so far north that a new 620-kilometre road had to be built before work could begin. For Desrochers, the reliance on hydroelectricity has since become part of Québécois identity: “In going to find our main source of energy in the rivers that criss-cross our territory, Quebec affirms its uniqueness.”

In part, Desrochers wants to remind her readers of the audacity of a project that is often eclipsed in memories of the 1970s by the rise of the Parti Québécois. But her motivations are personal as well. As a senior adviser to Bourassa, her grandfather Paul Desrochers played a major role in the James Bay developments. His prominent public life helped inspire his granddaughter to pursue a career as a Radio-Canada journalist. His death by suicide in 1983 also continues to haunt her family. Her voyage north was thus an attempt to reconcile with his legacy.

Yet when she reached the land that the Cree call Eeyou Istchee, she had to confront the disregard for existing communities that marked Quebec’s self-assertion. Left out of the planning process, the Cree launched a court challenge to stop the construction of the dams. Eventually they joined with Inuit representatives to negotiate the 1975 James Bay and Northern Quebec Agreement, which recognized Aboriginal title over some land, ceded other zones for resource development, and created a compensation system. Described by the geographer Louis-Edmond Hamelin as “the most important moral-political act Quebec has ever committed,” the treaty also paved the way for the mass destruction of ancestral hunting grounds. Some 11,500 square kilometres of earth were plunged under water — an area that’s roughly the size of Jamaica.

In Chisasibi, the majority Cree town of 5,000 people near the dams, Desrochers found a community that is relatively wealthy, with modern hotels, roads, an airport, and locally owned businesses. This comfort exists alongside a palpable sense of cultural loss. Lamenting that “money controls our destiny,” a local man, Roger Orr, recalled visiting the island where he grew up: “It frightened me. The river, the current is so strong, you see chunks of land floating by.” Addiction is endemic, fuelled by the absurd number of slot machines and alcohol shipments that the government permits in nearby Radisson. Faced with these competing narratives, Desrochers was disoriented and “no longer knows on what to base my understanding of these events.”

Surprisingly, Christian Quesnel’s illustrations miss the opportunity to depict the extent of the environment’s transformation. Two spreads contrast a stretch of flooded territory with its previous incarnation, showing that an island was once a mountain, the surrounding landscape eradicated in the name of progress. Still, a more detailed map would have helped show the scale of the devastation. The three biggest bodies of water in Quebec are all products of this flooding, including the Caniapiscau Reservoir, which is Canada’s second-largest artificial lake. (The Smallwood Reservoir in Labrador, which covers even more territory, has a similar history: it feeds into Churchill Falls, another massive hydroelectric project from the 1970s.) Because the book follows the same beats as the podcast, images are often dominated by people talking, but the format limits how much they can say. For instance, Desrochers reflects on an Inuit doll her grandfather gave her that could now be interpreted as embodying a racist stereotype. On the page, she asks, “What did my grandfather really know of Indigenous peoples?” The dialogue-heavy podcast pushes her reflections further, as she wonders, “Do I have the right to be attached to this Inuit doll?”

The first half of Lalande-Markon’s voyage overlapped with Desrochers’s trip in a mixture of convergences and contrasts. In Chisasibi, they all spent time with Sylvain Paquin, a celebrated modern-day voyageur who lives in an isolated cabin, howls with the wolves, and encourages his Indigenous neighbours to collect gourmet mushrooms for export. Both authors were stunned that they could not film or take photographs near the dams because of security concerns. And Lalande-Markon echoes Desrochers’s more abstract reflections on the significance of the project, observing that “Quebec asserted itself on its peripheries, in places scattered across its territory that a majority of people did not know existed.”

Family was central to Desrochers’s account: she brought three of her sons with her on the road trip, contrasting her approach to parenthood with her grandfather’s absence from his home. In comparison, Lalande-Markon’s voyage stands out as an archetypically masculine exploit, justified by the simple fact that it had not yet been done. Single and childless, he headed into the wilderness with a male companion and reveals little about himself beyond a childhood dream of being a coureur de bois. His decision to bike from Quebec’s southernmost border to Chisasibi in the middle of February has a hipster feel to it, reinforced by tensions with drivers that are straight out of urban bike lane debates. As he describes sleeping in a tent in yet another minus‑30 night, the narrative starts to sound like a humble brag regarding his own toughness.

Luckily, these bravura elements are mitigated by a strong dose of self-awareness. At the Chisasibi cultural centre, Lalande-Markon asked a Cree man if he had been further north to Whapmagoostui. His interlocutor responded, “Why would I go there? I have everything I need on my land.” Newly self-conscious, Lalande-Markon “suddenly had the impression of being a white man doing white things.” The second half of his journey involved travelling to Ivujivik on imported Scandinavian skis, and Lalande-Markon pauses to explain his choice not to use the snowshoes that are more common in the area. He also considers the ethical dilemmas of others who share his passion for the wilderness, including a geographer whose “work contributed to a better knowledge of the land, which led, on the other hand, to its commercial exploitation.”

Ultimately, the most impressive part of Marche au pays réel is not that Lalande-Markon reached his goal but rather his extended reflections on how landscapes are interpreted. Although the book includes a generous insert of colour photographs, Lalande-Markon also leans into the strengths of prose by creating a dense intertextual network. Citing Serge Bouchard, Gabrielle Roy, Mathieu Bélisle, and Pierre Nepveu, among others, he synthesizes a wide range of French Canadian perspectives on the North, including analyses of relationships to the land in nineteenth-century Quebec literature that are worthy of any cultural critic. Further afield, he considers the etymology of Russian terms for ice formations and Margaret Atwood’s lecture on the Franklin expedition. Most important, Lalande-Markon elevates viewpoints that are too often ignored. He draws on the Inuit writer Zebedee Nungak’s Wrestling with Colonialism on Steroids, for example, and details the complex reception of the silent movie Nanook of the North in Inukjuak, where it was initially filmed. As part of his meditation on “the importance of naming the territory, because it transmits a knowledge, a way of living and being in the world,” Lalande-Markon meticulously includes Cree and Inuktitut place names for each new location. He also highlights the hilarious Inuktitut term for French-speaking Quebeckers: uiuiit, based on the francophone tendency to say “Oui oui.”

This turn to other perspectives reveals a latent tension. Desrochers and Lalande-Markon operate within a Québécois imaginary, with few references to the rest of Canada. Yet they encountered people who almost always communicated with them in English: their voices can be heard behind a French overlay in the Transmission podcast, and Lalande-Markon labels his poetic interviews with Inuit elders as translations from either English or Inuktitut. James Bay Cree and Inuit communities extend into Ontario and Nunavut, respectively, and during the 1995 referendum on Quebec sovereignty, both groups hosted their own votes and rejected independence at the resounding rate of 96 percent. Lalande-Markon traversed the length of the Quebec peninsula in an effort to “better inhabit our country,” but it’s far from clear that the people who live in the North define their country in the same way.

As he describes his journey’s end, Lalande-Markon provides a romantic image of reconciliation. While he was being interviewed on community radio, an elder phoned in to express his hope that young listeners would be inspired by his trip “because what we had done, his people had done for millennia.” Lalande-Markon choked up and insisted “that they were the ones who inspired me, that the encounter with their territory, with their culture, filled me with a sense of humility and respect.” In fiction, such a moment might be cheesy at best, ideologically suspect at worst. But the interaction was real, and it suggests that for all of history’s fractures and the present’s complications, openness and goodwill can still go a long way.