Artículos de investigación
(En)gendering Shoreline Law:
Nishnaabeg Relational Politics Along
the Trent Severn Waterway
(cid:129)
Madeline Whetung*
Abstracto
This article examines the colonization of Michi Saagiig Nishnaabeg territory by the Trent
Severn Waterway. By examining legal bracketing as a process within Canadian common
law alongside prevailing Nishnaabeg philosophy and legal thought, I consider how the
construction of a canal system connecting Lake Ontario to Georgian Bay disrupted
practices integral to Nishnaabeg law. I offer up the concept of shoreline law as a way to
understand particular place-based relationships that Mississaugas hold with water and
land and other beings with which they share territory. En particular, I show how colonial
domination of Nishnaabeg territory resulted in a gendered dispossession of land that
continues to have reverberations throughout Nishnaabeg political systems today. Shore-
line law offers up a way to rethink international relations by showing the importance of
multiple relationships within the shared space of the shoreline.
Yeah, it was me. i blew the fucking lift lock up in downtown peterborough and then tara
wrote a song about it. so what. sue me. arrest me. i hated that thing and you should have
hated it too, if you’d ever stopped to think about it critically, like even for a second, y entonces
now parks canada has one less nationalism park in its collection of family jewels. big deal.1
En 1833, in the territory of the Michi Saagiig Nishnaabeg,2 a group of six
white-settler men conspired to build a canal system of locks3 and dams connecting
*Chi miigwech to Sarah Hunt, Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, and Heidi Kiiwetinepinesiik Stark for
feedback on early drafts of this article. Chi miigwech to Glen Coulthard and Kate Neville for the
opportunity to share this article and to my anonymous reviewers for feedback and suggestions.
And above all, chi miigwech to Doug Williams for continuing to teach me about Nishnaabeg history.
1. Excerpt from “nogojiwanong,” by Leanne Simpson (2013).
2. The Michi Saagiig Nishnaabeg, also known as Mississaugas, are a part of the Nishnaabeg nation.
The Nishnaabeg (or Anishinaabeg, Anishinaabek, or Anishinaabe) nation spans a large territory
across the US–Canadian border in the Great Lakes region. The north shore of Lake Ontario and
northward into inland lakes is the historical and present-day Mississauga homeland.
3. A lock is a structure that connects bodies of water over different levels of land and through
rapids in order to make the water navigable by steamships and other large boats.
Global Environmental Politics 19:3, Agosto 2019, https://doi.org/10.1162/glep_a_00513
© 2019 by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Publicado bajo una atribución Creative Commons 4.0
Internacional (CC POR 4.0) licencia.
16
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Madeline Whetung
(cid:129) 17
Lake Ontario to Georgian Bay (Angus 1988, 3). These men were powerful,
upper-class settlers who conceived of this waterway as a public enterprise to-
ward their own material gain (Angus 1988, 4). As advocates for the construction
of the waterway, these men argued that it would increase settlement and bring
capitalism through the area (Angus 1988, 4). Hoy, a monument stands at the
Bobcaygeon lock that celebrates the canal’s purposes to “open up the interior of
the province, and to promote agriculture, lumbering and commerce.” This lock,
celebrated as the first in the system, was in fact not conceived of as part of the
larger canal but was instead imagined by James Bethune as a private profit-
making endeavor to transport goods, capital, and people into the area surround-
ing Bobcaygeon (Angus 1988). Hoy, this history is often collapsed, y el
waterway is celebrated as a “National Historical Site of Canada,” despite the pri-
vate motivations of businessmen and years of advocacy to ensure it was built
(Angus 1988). The history that James Angus (1988) tells of the Trent Severn
Waterway (TSW) is a story of white-settler men’s corruption, self-interest, y,
I argue here, overall disregard for the pre-existing laws within the territory.
While settler men advocated for and built this canal, the life of Michi
Saagiig peoples, who had lived in the territory for thousands of years, contin-
ued. This territory and the waters upon which the locks of the TSW sit form my
home and the homeplace of my nation: the Michi Saagiig Nishnaabeg. The ter-
ritory the TSW crosses has shaped our lives and our laws. Yet the pre-existing
Nishnaabeg relations of the territory were ignored throughout construction,
and they continue to be layered over by the dominating settler colonial context
of private property and public dams. As Mississaugas, we have made our lives
along the shores of the “land between” for generations.4 Adger et al. (2011)
point out the importance of considering the validity of place-based relation-
ships and acknowledge that Indigenous societies continue to hold “systems of
practice and belief[s] of how the natural world works” (5). Tal como, in this ar-
ticle, I draw on oral history and tell personal stories of my lived experiences as
an Anishinaabekwe alongside colonial history of the TSW and Treaty 20 de 18185
to show that place-based knowledges provide the foundation for intricate rela-
tional political systems. This mixed-methods approach ( Johnson and Larsen
2013) is intended to draw together Indigenous and settler geographies frequently
considered “parallel texts” (Murton 2013). I work within an Anishinaabe meth-
odology (Simpson 2011, 2014, 2017) wherein “research” takes place in an on-
going relationship with an elder—in this case, my friend Doug Williams—while
we visit with each other and Nishnaabegaki6 and use these teachings and land-
based experiences to talk back to the archival record. It is necessary to bring the
4. www.youtube.com/watch?v=1z-WhyWa9vI, last accessed June 25, 2019.
5. There are other treaties relating to this territory and other territories that the TSW crosses. Sin embargo, I
begin my analysis here with Treaty 20 de 1818, as it is conceived of as the first “land cession” treaty we
firmado, which also covers the territory in which the first dam of the TSW was constructed at Bobcaygeon.
Further work could be done relating the construction of the TSW to other treaty territories.
6. Our homeland, the Anishinaabe territory.
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18 (cid:129) (En)gendering Shoreline Law
Indigenous and settler geographies together to demonstrate how their separation
has led to the marginalization of Indigenous relationships to our lands, waters,
and each other.
The TSW has affected us and our relatives for hundreds of years. For many
years the deeper waters altered the biodiversity of the shorelines, making it dif-
ficult for manoomin to grow.7 The movement of animal relatives has also been
altered, with far fewer eels and bullfrogs in the territory. While we know these
relatives through our oral histories and relational teachings, the physical ab-
sence of them in our territory today alters practices that bring to life particular
relationships and thus alters a contingent relational politics. When I asked Doug
Williams about smoking fish, he told me that this was lost because in order to
smoke fish, one needs fatty fish.8 The pickerel that people continue to fish is not
fatty enough, and our eel and salmon relatives have long ceased making their
ways up our waters as a direct result of the dams (Hoggarth 2017; Simpson
2011). Despite disruptions to these relational systems through colonial projects
such as the TSW, Nishnaabeg sustain relationships to our lands and waters and
the nonhuman beings with which we share territory, even in the face of mass
development of public dams and private property, because of a political orien-
tation toward shorelines.
As a young Anishinaabekwe, part of my responsibility to my nation and
my territory is lived through my relationship to water (McGregor 2012, 2015).
Como resultado, shoreline law in Nishnaabeg territory is formed and informed by the
gendering of bodies, both human bodies and bodies of water. The gendered re-
sponsibility held by women toward water has sometimes led to the gendering of
agua; sin embargo, I think of water as a spiritual being who exists outside of human
gendered paradigms, especially the gendered paradigms of femininity and mas-
culinity that dominate within a settler colonial context. Yet still, as I will show in
this article, the imposition of settler colonial gender paradigms alongside the con-
struction of the TSW has impacted Anishinaabe gendered relationships in place.
Given Anishinaabe women’s historical relationship to water, and the reality that
the six men who advocated to shackle the water with locks and dams were white
hombres, gender violence is embedded within the structure that forms the TSW. Built
over the course of one hundred years, the TSW is a monument to what Rob Nixon
(2011) has called “slow violence,” because its impacts have accumulated gradu-
ally and unseen over time. Here I expand this thinking by considering the slow
gendered violence of the TSW. By centralizing gender in my analysis, the relation-
ship between the intimate and the national becomes more visible.
Through my own relationships to and in my place, I have lived the impor-
tance of this relational politics, and here I describe this lived reality as shoreline
law. Connections across the intimate spheres of our lives to national and inter-
national governance are widely recognized within Anishinaabe theory (Borrows
7. Manoomin is wild rice.
8. Doug Williams, personal communication, Curve Lake First Nation, Abril 4, 2018.
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Madeline Whetung
(cid:129) 19
2010; Simpson 2011, 2014, 2017; Rígido 2010). In this way, intimate acts and
relationships inform the ways Nishnaabeg engage politically and economically
within and across national relationships. This is why Nishnaabeg have theorized
governance through such practices as breastfeeding (Simpson 2011) and marriage
(Rígido 2010). The intimacy of our politics stands in stark contrast to the deper-
sonalization and bracketing of forms of relationships from one another within
the common law and within Canadian narratives that dominate on our lands.
The spaces between the intimate and the national that evokes Anishinaabe law
across multiple embodied spheres of our lives form shorelines themselves. En
the shoreline space, where worlds meet, particular place-based relationships live,
thus engendering Anishnaabe law. As “the world is made up of many worlds”
(Inoue 2018), this article invites scholars into the world of the Nishnaabeg to
create space for reconsideration of what constitutes international relationships.
Tal como, in this article, I put forth the idea of shoreline law as embodied in
our relationship to the shoreline through practices and in our relationships to
one another, human and nonhuman. Shorelines bring to life relational politics
because they form the liminal space between worlds (water and land). I work to
recontextualize the relationships that the TSW has attempted to disrupt by juxta-
posing this relational politics against the bracketing out of relationships to water
and land from one another in colonial law.
Storied theorizing and multiscalar politics in which personal experiences
inform our political world are carried out in the structure of this article. I use
personal stories and Anishinaabe histories juxtaposed against archival docu-
mentation to illuminate the intimacy of Nishnaabeg politics against the de-
personalized bracketing of the common law. I begin in the first section by
contextualizing the construction of the TSW with Treaty 20 de 1818. These two
governing entities are rarely discussed together, but here I illuminate how Treaty
20 and the TSW are inextricably connected by gendered water relations. A pesar de
the attempt to bracket out these two governing bodies from one another, the set-
tler government’s attempt to uniformly claim water and land through Treaty 20
renders them inextricably connected.
In the second section, I move on to a broader discussion of Anishinaabe
stories in order to highlight the relational nature of Anishinaabe law and how
our laws are lived along shorelines. Returning to the intimate in the third sec-
ción, I consider the (en)gendered nature of shoreline law, which lives between
us in our embodied relationships to each other and in our embodied relationships
to the land. En esta sección, I put forth some of my thinking about how the TSW has
had impacts across the multiple spheres of our lives, from the intimate to the
national, and discuss some of the ways that the disruption of shoreline relations
reverberates throughout our nation and across the intimate shorelines between
each other in our embodied lives and loves. By drawing these multiple scales into
conversation with one another, I hope to demonstrate how colonial structures like
the TSW deeply impact our lives, while also showing how the relationality of our
laws has allowed us to live in and around colonial domination.
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20 (cid:129) (En)gendering Shoreline Law
The Trouble with the Trent Severn Waterway
The territory that the TSW spans is primarily Anishinaabe territory. In some places
it is Haudenosaunee territory, and in yet other parts it is considered shared terri-
tory between the two nations. There are several different treaties, both pre-Canada
treaties between Indigenous nations and the more recent treaties between the
Crown and Indigenous Nations (Blair 2008). Rarely is the TSW contextualized
with the treaties signed by the Crown and the Anishinaabe, either in governance
practices by branches of the colonial government or in academic scholarship.9
Sin embargo, from listening to oral histories, I understand that treaties and the TSW
are intertwined, and it is this historical present that I intend to bring forth in this
sección. While there are a number of colonial treaties that govern the total territory
the TSW spans, from Georgian Bay to Trenton, in this article I focus in on Treaty 20
de 1818. As an early “land cession” treaty signed by Mississauga chiefs, the treaty
offers particular insight into the approaches to treaties held by both the Mississaugas
and the Crown. Además, the signing occurred prior to the construction of what
would become the first dam in the TSW and relates to the specific geographic area
where this first dam was built. Placing these two entities into conversation with
one another is of paramount importance to understanding the complex land and
water relations in the area. I use the Mississauga understanding, as taught to me
by Doug Williams, of Treaty 20 de 1818 to demonstrate the lack of clear juris-
diction and effective control held by the TSW as a governing body.
In thinking through the lack of engagement with treaties by the TSW, I
have frequently turned to legal geographer Nicholas Blomley’s work on brack-
eting. As Blomley has defined it, bracketing
Entails the attempt to stabilize and fix a boundary within which interactions
take place more or less independently of their surrounding context. Eso
which is designated as inside the boundary must be, in some senses, disen-
tangled from that identified as outside. Bracketing, in this broad sense, es un
ubiquitous and seemingly inescapable dimension of experience and percep-
ción. It entails complex and subtle calculations that govern what is, y qué
is not, to be included within a particular setting. (Blomley 2014, 135–136)
Bracketing is a practical process, used both in the formation of settler
relationships to Nishnaabeg land and in the ongoing interpretations of settler laws
in the interest of colonial expansion. This section uses Blomley’s interpretation of
bracketing to highlight what has been or continues to be bracketed out between the
textual representations and embodied realities of
the waterway. I pair this
bracketing approach used by colonizers with Nishnaabeg understandings of treaties
as relational, containing responsibilities pertaining to all the parties involved and
requiring perpetual reciprocity and renewal (Simpson 2017; Rígido 2010).
9. Frustrated by the lack of work that put these two governing entities into context with one
otro, I undertook some of this work in my MA thesis, “Nishnaabeg Encounters: Living
Indigenous Landscapes.” Aside from conversations in community, I have not seen the TSW
contextualized with our treaties.
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Madeline Whetung
(cid:129) 21
The text of Treaty 20 forms a mere paragraph in its published format and
recounts mostly the boundaries of the land described in the treaty. Though the
treaty was considered to have preserved hunting and fishing rights, it was also
understood by the Crown as a land cession treaty.10 Colonial government offi-
cials did not differentiate between water and land and considered their dis-
cussions with Nishnaabeg signatories regarding land as also relating to water.
Nishnaabeg, sin embargo, had a different take on the discussions about water and
land. Several direct and relational requests to maintain shoreline access and water
relations were not recorded in the written document of the treaty. The nuances of
these governance relations are recounted regularly by Nishnaabeg community
members within the region and form a part of our lived understanding of the
history of the colonization of our water and land. Tal como, the notion that water
governance was ceded through Treaty 20 has persisted in the minds of colonial
government officials to this day. Nishnaabeg, sin embargo, continue to remember
and recount our version of events and dispute settler treaty interpretations.
En 1833, when what would become the first dam in the TSW was con-
structed at Bobcaygeon, not only were the treaty relations with Nishnaabeg ig-
nored, but our continued embodied presence was also discounted. A pesar de la
reality that Nishnaabeg had made the land that is now Curve Lake First Nation a
gathering place for thousands of years and, with the preliminary influx of
settlers, had made it a year-round home, settlers still considered that very few
people were living in the area (Angus 1988; Whetung-Derrick 1976). Whether
overlooking our presence was born of ignorance, intentional, or due to the col-
onizers’ belief that we were not “people” under their laws, the result was that
mass development had begun in our territory. The dam at Bobcaygeon would
become the first dam in the TSW; sin embargo, at the time, it was a private enter-
prise undertaken by a man named John Bethune. Bethune did not want the TSW
constructed, nor did he believe it would ever happen (Angus 1988). Todavía, el
Bobcaygeon Dam is celebrated within the Canadian mythology as integral to
bringing “settlement, agricultura, lumbering, and commerce” to the region (ac-
cording to wording on the monument at Bobcaygeon) and continues to stand as
a monument to the “slow violence” (Nixon 2011) within Nishnaabeg territory.
Though Bethune did not intend the dam as the inception of the construction of
the TSW, the truth of this history is often collapsed in national narratives of the
waterway, and the public/private bracketing that occurred in that historical
moment is left out. The capitalist reality of a waterway touted as a public good
is indicative of the long tensions that stand in the territory between private and
10. The government assumed that when we signed the Williams Treaty in 1923, this also extin-
guished the rights captured in Treaty 20 (despite each treaty’s explicit relationship to different
tracts of land). Sin embargo, in the opening of a court case relating to the Williams Treaty in 2012,
the Minister of Natural Resources indicated that Treaty 20 rights were never intended to be ex-
tinguished by the Williams Treaty (Retrieved from http://www.williamstreatiesfirstnations.ca/
about/). This has resulted in a flurry of reclamation and resurgence with respect to hunting,
fishing, and harvesting within our territory and a recent financial settlement negotiated between
the Crown and Indigenous signatories.
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22 (cid:129) (En)gendering Shoreline Law
public enterprise, lack of consultation and consent seeking by colonizers, y
Nishnaabeg law.
The archival record captures the bracketing that occurred with respect to
Nishnaabeg and the TSW. As a brief example, in the early 1900s, near to the com-
pletion date of the full canal system, the Mississaugas at Mud Lake submitted a
claim to the Department of Railways and Canals through the secretary of Indian
Affairs, j. D. Mclean, in relation to the later publicly constructed Buckhorn Dam.11
In his letter to L. k. Jones on April 3, 1909, Mclean wrote that “damages are also
claimed in behalf of the Indians of Mud Lake (or Chemung Lake) Indian Reserve
for a tract of land in their reserve which was flooded by the raising of the water in
connection with the Trent Valley system and for islands in some of the lakes which
have been similarly damaged.”12 This letter was the beginning of a chain of corre-
spondence that occurred over twenty years between the Department of Indian
Affairs, the Department of Railways and Canals, and the Council at Chemung.
The Department of Railways and Canals continued to defer responsibility by
responding with a regular refrain that the issue would receive attention, pero
action was not taken until the department had found a way to bracket out
legal responsibilities by interpreting property laws as isolated from one another
across both time and space in order to support its interests in dispossessing
Mississaugas of their land.
The Department of Railways and Canals’ final word on the issue came on
Febrero 5, 1917, and relied heavily on bracketing within property law. El
letter from L. k. Jones follows:
From the copies of Deeds on file here, it appears that your Department did
not acquire the lands in question until 1898 y 1900, many years after the
lands were flooded by reason of the Buckhorn Dam, and your Department
could have no claim for damages previous to that time, not even if the
Deeds purported to transfer a right of action in respect to such flooding,
cual, in point of fact, they did not. Such a right of action is not legally
transferable between private parties, and certainly not against the Crown.
It would appear that, previous to the lands coming into possession of your
Departamento, the Crown had a prescriptive right to flood the same, y el
Indians obtained them subject to such a prescriptive right.
It is not understood that there is any claim or basis of claim for dam-
ages since 1898 o 1900.
It does not, I am to say, appear that the Indian claim is well founded.13
11. Colonizers once gave the name “Mud Lake” to Curve Lake. Buckhorn Dam (lock 31) is just
below Bobcaygeon Dam (lock 32). I suspect it may have been possible to claim damages in
relation to Bobcaygeon Dam, but it was privately constructed. The development of “private
land” and the responsibilities of private property owners, and private business owners, remain
unresolved issues in Canada.
12. Library and Archives Canada, Department of Railways and Canals, Correspondence with the Depart-
ment of Indian Affairs, Mississaugas of Mud Lake Claim, Record Group 43, volumen. 1554, File 7435.
13. Library and Archives Canada, Department of Railways and Canals, Correspondence with the
Department of Indian Affairs, Mississaugas of Mud Lake Claim, Record Group 43, volumen. 1554,
File 7435.
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Madeline Whetung
(cid:129) 23
This passage captures the heavy reliance upon bracketing by colonial officials
to evade responsibility for the slow violence enacted on Nishnaabeg bodies and
land by the construction of the TSW. Jones’ abdication of responsibility held by
the Department of Railways and Canals hinges upon the fact that the land at
Chemung had been deeded to a religious mission, the New England Company,
to be held “in trust” for “the Indians” in 1837 (Whetung-Derrick 2015). Este
deeding could only take place because it was considered that the land had been
ceded in Treaty 20, and no reserve provisions had been made in the treaty. Como
semejante, the colonial government later attempted to rectify the situation by deeding
the land to the missionary colonizers spreading Judeo-Christian religion within
the Mississauga community. As the land was not transferred to the Department
of Indian Affairs until 1898, the Department of Railways and Canals was of the
opinion that rights to compensation for flooding did not carry over with own-
ership transfer when the flooding occurred while the New England Company
held the deed. Este, por supuesto, does not account for the truth that Nishnaabeg
lived along those shorelines for thousands of years, and continued to live there
while others held the deed, which they were unable to hold because they were
not considered legal persons under colonial law. The bracketing of Indian rela-
tions to the Department of Indian Affairs prevented the Mississaugas from first
owning their land and then advocating with respect to their continued presence
on it. All of this was mediated by different branches of colonial law, which had
no interest in rectifying their relationship with the Mississaugas. As this one
example shows, bracketing occurred through time and was delineated by who
held certain rights in relation to the land at certain times.
Yet still, the brackets discussed in the preceding example all deal in rela-
tion to landownership and do not address the water in particular, aside from
putting forth the reduction of the reserve land base through flooding induced
by the construction of the TSW. Long before this, in Treaty 20 negotiations, re-
quests made by the Nishnaabeg with respect to the water were left out of the
written record, representing a bracketing out of Nishnaabeg legal relations prior
to the land/property-based interpretations recorded in the archives, demonstrat-
ing that bracketing is both a formative and interpretive legal process. By omit-
ting particular Nishnaabeg claims from the written documents, certain brackets
were formed that allow for later interpretation of them as historically and
geographically separate. Doug Williams’ oral history, shared with me over the
años, includes details about the water that capture the relational nature of
Nishnaabeg law and the importance of shorelines to Mississauga lifeways. Encima
the years Doug has taught me that we wanted to keep the maple bushes, el
wetlands, the points of land, and the islands and that we asked to keep the beaver
houses. These requests evidence the relationality of Michi Saagiig Nishnaabeg
legal practices that would have shaped Mississauga negotiations in treaties with
the Crown. In the next section, I look deeper into the meaning of this relation-
ship between beavers and humans, using a historical story recorded by William
Jones and interpreted by Heidi Stark about the woman who married a beaver.
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24 (cid:129) (En)gendering Shoreline Law
This story captures Nishnaabeg attitudes toward treaty relations that inform my
understanding of the history taught to me by Doug Williams with respect to
Treaty 20 and our ongoing lived reality in the territory. It is these two treaty
relationships that I take up in the next section.
Nishnaabeg Relationality and the Shorelines of Nishnaabeg Law
Nishnaabeg stories teach relational politics and guide the intranational and in-
ternational relationships of the Nishnaabeg nation. Leanne Simpson (2017, 58)
indicates that Nishnaabeg maintain “a series of radiating relationships with
plant nations, animal nations, insects, bodies of water, aire, soil, and spiritual
beings in addition to the Indigenous nations with whom we share parts of
our territories.” This “Nishnaabeg internationalism” (Simpson 2017) is a way
of conceptualizing international relations that stands in contrast to Western
nation-state practices of bordered sovereignty, exclusionary rights, and human
modes of production and can illuminate how Nishnaabeg approached treaty
relations with other human nations (such as the Haudenosaunee) and white-
settler newcomers. Tal como, in this article, I use an Anishinaabe story of the
woman who married a beaver to contextualize Nishnaabeg requests to maintain
rights to shorelines in the Treaty 20 negotiations of 1818. A multitude of
networked relationships exist within and across Nishnaabeg territory, and these
relationships across differences (p.ej., of species) in a shared geography form
shorelines between us. Shorelines are fertile ground on which to reconsider
the meaning of international relations. En particular, by illuminating the
Nishnaabeg political orientation toward shorelines, the importance of net-
worked legal relationships, as opposed to bracketed legal relationships, ser-
comes apparent. In considering our radiating relationships, I explicate what I
have come to understand as shoreline law and how it can form the basis for
ethical relationships in multiple spaces of law.
In the story of the woman who married a beaver, a young woman on a
vision quest is asked by a being to come be his wife; she agrees and finds that
she is living with a beaver. Her beaver partner and their beaver children regu-
larly go to visit the Nishnaabeg, always returning with gifts, and over time, she
realizes that the Nishnaabeg are harvesting the beavers for furs and food,
though the beavers never really died. When her beaver partner does die, she
returns to live among her own people and carries teachings of the great love be-
tween the Nishnaabeg and the beaver people with her (Rígido 2010; Blanco
1999).14 Anishinaabe scholar Heidi Stark (2010) analyzes this story as demon-
strative of the Anishinaabe principles of reciprocity and renewal in treaty rela-
tionships. This story shows how Anishinaabe legal tenets are formed in a
variety of relationships and relational settings. Treaty principles are learned in
14. In order to remain true to this story, some of the language is borrowed directly from both
William Jones’ and Heidi Stark’s transcriptions.
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(cid:129) 25
the intimate setting of marriage, and these principles are both specific to the
Nishnaabeg relationship to beavers and applied across other international rela-
tionships. This story describes more than just a social and cultural worldview; él
shows that Nishnaabeg legal tenets exist in multiple spheres of our lives and that
the intimate sphere is frequently understood as a precedent-setting forum for
legal relationships.
As mentioned, Doug Williams has taught me that in the Treaty 20 nego-
tiations of 1818, Mississaugas asked to keep the beaver houses. Within the re-
lational framework of Nishnaabeg law, this seemingly simple request has
multiple complex meanings. While explicit requests were also made to retain
access to wetlands, points of land, and islands, a request to keep the beaver
houses further embeds the relationships that exist between and across water–
beavers–humans–land. Given the ecological relationship that beavers share
with shorelines through their beaver houses and dams, the beavers maintain
and influence the shoreline and the waterway. This relationship plays an inte-
gral role in homeplace creation for other plant and animal relatives as well as
for us as Nishnaabeg, as beaver damming creates wetland spaces that allow
much of what we depend on for survival to thrive. This stands in contrast with
the massive human dams created through the brackets of colonial law, cual
led to flooding of shorelines and wetland destruction as colonizers worked to
create a waterway deep enough to bring steamships through. While colonial
laws rely on bracketing out these relations from one another, Nishnaabeg law
relies on these multiple “radiating relationships” to connect the various nations
sharing the territory. Stark’s analysis shows the necessity of respect, reciprocity,
and renewal to Anishinaabe treaty relations with the beavers and that these
values are learned through the intimate relationship of marriage between a
beaver and a Nishnaabekwe.
The networking of relationships is further demonstrated through the
Nishnaabeg request to keep the beaver huts in the 1818 treaty negotiations.
While we could read this on the surface as a purely economic request for retain-
ing access to a subsistence livelihood, the request carries deeper meaning for
Nishnaabeg. In asking to keep the beaver huts, the Nishnaabeg effectively bring
their pre-existing treaty relationship to the beavers into the new treaty relation-
ship with settler newcomers. This shows the basic understanding among the
Nishnaabeg that the territory is shared with multiple beings and that each
group’s thriving is dependent on the network of relationships. This approach
to treating with other human and nonhuman nations had been used by the
Nishnaabeg for generations. In bringing their relationship to the beavers into
the treaty talks in 1818, the Nishnaabeg worked to connect legal spheres in
order to sustain a relational politics wherein land can be co-inhabited. El
one sentence about keeping the beaver huts carries the meaning of the great,
networked reality that lives along the shorelines within Nishnaabegaki. But as
Doug Williams said, the hope that the treaty negotiators would record these
networked relationships between water–beavers–humans–land did not come
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26 (cid:129) (En)gendering Shoreline Law
to fruition, and “they surveyed them out.” This bracketing out of Nishnaabeg
place-based relationships has been a tool of settler colonialism. What is re-
corded in the written version of the treaty and on its corresponding maps does
not capture the multiplicity of embodied relationships lived out along and
through the shorelines. Yet these relationships live on in these stories and
through the resurgence of embodied shoreline practices by Nishnaabeg.
I have come to think of the ethics that govern the multiplicities of these
relationships as “shoreline laws.” These laws come to life along the literal shore-
lines between water and land and in our relationships between ourselves and
other beings. In these relationships, we are governed by the ethics of “consent,
reciprocity, respeto, and empathy” (Simpson 2017, 61). Just as certain plant rel-
atives and animal relatives are brought to life along healthy shorelines between
water and land, certain ethics and qualities come to life in the shorelines of our
embodied relationships to one another.15 As such, Nishnaabeg law is lived out
along the multiple shorelines of our lives. The Nishnaabeg learned about the
ethics of their treaty relationship to the beavers through an intimate relationship
between a young woman and her beaver partner. The intimacy of this relation-
ship and Stark’s (2010) interpretation of it as demonstrating treaty principles
prompt a reconsideration of how we understand international relationships
and the spaces where differences meet. In the transitional spaces where water
becomes land, the radiating relationships of Nishnaabeg become visible and
illuminate the value of considering relational, political, and legal shorelines.
In the next section, I turn to a closer examination of the intimacies that exist
en (en)gendering shoreline law.
(En)gendering Shoreline Law
In summer 2015 I paddled my canoe from the swamp in my mother’s backyard
that leads out into Chemung Lake, around the peninsula that is Curve Lake First
Nation, through the Bobcaygeon lock, to the area that was described by my great
grandfather in the 1923 treaty negotiations as Whetung harvesting territory.16
This “research” was a solo paddling trip wherein I tried to understand the com-
plications of engendering Anishinaabe laws in a densely settled context where
private property runs right up to the water’s shoreline. I wanted to understand
how colonial laws made the construction of the canal system connecting
Mississauga Nishnaabeg lakes possible and how Nishnaabeg law lives in and
through and around these colonial laws and their infrastructure/monument pres-
ences. I begin this section with this embodied practice because this journey taught
me that the brackets of colonial laws rely on monuments/infrastructures, like the
TSW dams, to make them work. I also learned that we give rise to Nishnaabeg
law when we engage in our practices in place. Though we are affected by the
15. Chi miigwech to Lila Asher for asking the question that got me to make the explicit connection
between these two things when I spoke at the University of Toronto on February 15, 2018.
16. Doug Williams, personal communication, Curve Lake First Nation, primavera 2015.
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(cid:129) 27
realities of private property along our shorelines, we continue to live our lives in
our place, as we have done for generations. The more I am engaged in reclaim-
ing Nishnaabewin in my life, the more I understand how our laws live relation-
ally and that we engender law through practices—and the more I understand
the importance of gender within the multiple histories of our waterway.
En 1818 the people who negotiated and signed Treaty 20 were all men,
either Indigenous or settler. This was not unusual, though some anthropologists
would argue that it was a departure from pre-existing economic relations during
the fur trade, wherein women were often powerful traders ( Blanco 1999). Como
Leanne Simpson (2011, 2014, 2017) has argued, and the historical record ex-
amined by anthropologists corroborates (p.ej., Blanco), Anishinaabe society was
based on egalitarian values, with women holding positions of power in all
aspects of life, from the familial to the ceremonial to the political and economic.
The TSW was developed to facilitate Anishinaabe land dispossession, con el
explicit purposes of bringing settlement and commerce to the region and open-
ing “the interior of the province” (Angus 1988). As mentioned, the construction
of the canal system continues to be celebrated for promoting “agriculture,
lumbering and commerce.” A canal conceived of and built by men, it is funda-
mentally tied to the dispossession of our land as well as to intimate disposses-
sions that are gendered. The embodied nature of Nishnaabeg shoreline law is
lived out through our gendered relations in place and can be connected back
through the stories that compose our history.
Within Anishinaabe culture, women hold particular responsibility for the
agua (Mcgregor 2012, 2015). In discussions about gendered relations and roles
within Nishnaabewin, I am cautious not to map our conceptions of gender di-
rectly onto Western binary understandings of biological sex and socialized
género. Anishinaabe gendering is tied to a diversity of social roles and does not
operate within a biological sex–gender binary (Simpson 2011, 2017; Blanco
1999). Though women and men exist within the Anishinaabe thought-world, I
do not expect these gendered conceptions to be understood as the same as or even
parallel to Western understandings of what makes a “woman” or a “man.” Here,
when I say women hold particular responsibility to the water, I want to be clear
that the standards, normas, and practices surrounding gender in Nishnaabewin were
and in some places continue to be quite different from those of colonizers.
Sin embargo, I am also leaning on the binary in part, because this binary was enforced
upon us in treaty negotiations, where men were signatories and women were not.17
Además, Leanne Simpson (2011) has written about Nishnaabeg gov-
ernance structures and details that women were frequently (though not exclu-
sively) responsible for the internal governance of the family and nation, mientras
men were frequently (though not exclusively) responsible for international
17. Though there is evidence that genderqueer people were at times included in negotiations, semejante
as the famous Chief Yellowhead (see Simpson 2017), and I continue to learn about the roles of
genderqueer and two-spirit people.
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relations.18 She tells, aunque, that men understood their responsibility to repre-
sent the interests of women in negotiations with foreigners and would go into
discussions having previously determined with the women what would be dis-
cussed (Simpson 2011). This rings true for me when Doug tells me that we
asked to keep the maple bushes in negotiations as these were historically gov-
erned by women within communities. I now understand this intermediary role
men played across the internal–external boundary of community as one among
many relational shorelines in Anishinaabe law.
Settler men negotiating the treaty did not ascribe the same meaning to
keeping the shorelines, the points of land, the islands, and the maple bushes
as we did. This disregard for our shoreline ways and seasonal movements re-
sulted in fragmenting forms of dispossession, as many of the areas toward
which women held responsibility go unmentioned in the treaty, but all the
while it was considered that rights to hunting and fishing practices were
maintained—a responsibility often held by men.19 I call this a fragmenting dis-
possession, because it created a rupture in the gendered divisions of labor within
Nishnaabeg society through the loss of mass tracts of land with waters flowing
a través de, islands, shorelines, points of land, and maple bushes—all unmoveable
sites of much of women’s labor. This forms part of the slow gendered violence in
Anishinaabe territory, the effects of which took time to become visible and with
which we are still grappling today. The dispossession of territory toward which
women hold particular responsibility has over time contributed to the subjuga-
tion of women’s roles in Nishnaabeg society and to the creation of a structure
that allows for increased violence against Anishinaabe women. When we lose
the sites of much of our places of governance and the locations of our labor,
our integral value to the running of the nation is more difficult to see. Flooding
by the TSW hid not only the plant and animal relations that live along the shore-
line but also the embodied gendered relations that women live out along the
shoreline by decreasing our access to the places of our work.
The gendered dispossession of our literal shorelines, where much
Nishnaabeg law lives, reverberates throughout our embodied relations. Es
not only the fragmentation of Nishnaabeg women’s relationships to our places
but the intimate dispossession of particular gendered relations and possibilities.
In our relationships to one another, we form shorelines between us, where cer-
tain realities are brought into being. Just as some lives are only lived along
shorelines, such as the lives of cattails, some relational possibilities are only
brought to life in the shorelines between us. Shorelines are places where this
relationality takes shape as a living legal forum; the transitional space where
water meets land is the geography that emphasizes the importance of seeing
18. www.leannesimpson.ca/writings/not-murdered-not-missing-rebelling-against-colonial-gender-
violence, last accessed June 25, 2019.
19. These rights were maintained until the 1923 Williams Treaty was signed. Después 1923, our hunt-
ing and fishing rights were considered illegal, until they were restored in 2012 in the Treaty 20
área.
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how these two separate entities are connected. While settler colonial law used
brackets as an attempt to separate these beings from one another, they are for-
ever connected along the shoreline, just as we are embedded within our embod-
ied relationships. I think we most clearly can understand this through cattails,
which are used by Nishnaabeg to weave warming mats and to build the walls of
shelters. The roots and pollen can be eaten. The fluff of the cattail can be used to
stuff pillows, and the gel found within the layers can be used to soothe skin
irritations (Geniusz 2015; Wall-Kimmerer 2015). Mary Siisip Geniusz (2015)
describes cattails as “the defenders of the shoreline,” as they prevent the water
from eroding the land. She tells that this description comes from one of the
Anishinaabemowin20 words for cattails. This description shows the importance
of shorelines as relational spaces that mediate between worlds, stories, y se-
ings and give form to particular legal relationships. The cattails, shoreline inhab-
itants, anchor the importance of the shoreline space as a geography that reveals
Anishinaabe relational legal principles.
These shoreline learnings can be carried with us into embodied relation-
ships between other human and nonhuman relatives. I understand the shore-
lines between us most clearly in the story of the woman who married a beaver,
where the treaty between the beavers and the Nishnaabeg is brought to life
through the intimate marriage relationship. Shoreline law is engendered
through this embodied relationship between beings. Their appreciation, respeto,
and love for one another is brought to life through an understanding of the shore-
lines formed in the embodied space between them. This is learned through the
connection to their shoreline geography and is transferred into relational laws that
operate at both intimate and national scales. My understanding of the shorelines
between us intensified when I paddled my canoe through our Nishnaabeg waters,
which allowed me to see how Nishnaabeg law lives on through us and in our
actions along the waterway. Shoreline laws are learned in relationship to the shore-
line. When we lose access to shorelines and the perpetual renewal of this relation-
ship is diminished, so too is the renewal of embodied gendered relationships.
Pairing together the stories and practices of Nishnaabeg law along our shorelines
amplifies the gendered dispossessions of treaties and the TSW. Looking between
the brackets imposed by colonial laws to separate water and land, the multiple
ways that this disrupted gendered relationships is illuminated. The imposition
of the colonial gender binary has impacted both our physical shoreline relations
and the embodied shorelines between us. The disruption of shorelines by the TSW
flooding reverberates out through the relationships in place that rely upon the
delicate radiating balance described by Leanne Simpson, so that the value of those
of us who work and live along the shoreline, from cattails to women, is obscured.
Sin embargo, the importance of these beings within the relational governance of the
place can be called up through the water through our stories and practices, de este modo
bringing shorelines back to life.
20. The Anishinaabe language.
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30 (cid:129) (En)gendering Shoreline Law
Conclusions
In this article I have worked against the brackets of colonial law by putting forth
a place-based and relational accounting of Nishnaabeg legal processes through
shorelines. Water calls the law of property to account for itself at the shoreline.
Shorelines are constantly shifting and changing, showing the instability of colo-
nial brackets and the constant work required to maintain the illusion of seam-
lessness within colonial laws. Despite the attempts of settler men to overwrite
place-based Nishnaabeg relationality within colonial laws, stories, and the phys-
ical imposition of dams on our waters, shoreline law lives on when we evoke it
through stories and practices. The disruptions and dispossessions across our
individual and collective lives as Mississaugas are real and are felt; the dams
stand still. The specific claims for flooded lands are ongoing and being settled
through the Canadian court system. The eels and salmon no longer travel to our
inland lakes. The beavers and muskrats are fewer. Our shoreline access is
obstructed by private property to the water’s edge. As a result of this, our gover-
nance has shifted as well. The loss of access to the sites of women’s labor has
contributed to a shifted perception of our value within our societies. The shore-
lines between us in our intimate lives have been threatened by the shoreline
destruction within our landscapes.
While the TSW stands as monument/infrastructure to colonial violence,
both intimate and national, the possibility of engendering shoreline law re-
mains. When we make connections between story, law, práctica, and presencing
our places, we evoke the possibilities of shoreline law. When we embrace the
relational space of shorelines, we work against the boundary brackets of colo-
nial narratives of our places. Along the shoreline, it is possible to see the impor-
tance of the multiple embodied and gendered roles we each hold within society.
The importance of applying intimate models to political relations is demon-
strated through the intimate relationship of marriage between the beaver and
the Anishinaabekwe that informs treaties. International relations can be learned
from intimate relationships, and there is value in rethinking what constitutes
international relationships in a shared geography where colonial law continues
to dominate Nishnaabeg law. I am also calling for a recovering of intimate re-
lationality through learning within the international space of the shoreline. El
transitional space of the shoreline makes possible many different types of rela-
tionships, be that between water–cattails–land or water–beavers–humans–land.
Engendering shoreline law prompts a reconsideration of the spaces of interna-
tional relations beyond bordered sovereignty between nation-states. The shore-
line holds multiple relationships across species boundaries and gendered
differences that are understood as international relationships whose wellness
is interdependent. This reframing of interspecies relationships as international
has implications for the way governance over shared territory is conceived of
internationally and enacted in our embodied lives. Engendering shoreline law
shows how reciprocity and mutuality of nations can exist within the same space
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Madeline Whetung
(cid:129) 31
and counters the colonial legal process of bracketing these connections out from
one another.
In this space, what I have worked to show is that the embodied relation-
ships the shoreline brings to life are also gendered and that their disruption has
had gendered implications within the ongoing settler colonial context. El
damage done to the shoreline territory is reflected in the damage done to shore-
lines between us. Just like Winston Taylor, “I know they done the water wrong
by making that system” (Hoggarth 2017). This wrongdoing has reverberated
throughout our relationships, both human and nonhuman, and is gendered.
Despite the constant work of colonial laws and infrastructures to bracket out
multiple bodies from one another and the broader context the shorelines regen-
erate, manoomin grows out into the shallow lakes again. The defenders of the
shoreline continue to cultivate relationships between water and land. We can
engender shoreline law through our practices along the waterway. Colonial
brackets cannot contain water forever; it flows out all around them and, en
the shallows, resumes the verdant relational space of the shoreline. A recovery
of the gendered and international relationships within the shared space of the
shoreline would re-embed the importance of reciprocity and mutuality within
international relations.
Madeline Whetung is a citizen of the Nishnaabeg nation and a member of
Curve Lake First Nation of mixed descent. While working on this GEP article,
she has been working toward a PhD in geography through the University of
British Columbia. Her research focuses on highlighting the connection between
the intimate and national spheres of our lives.
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