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Paper short abstract:

Within the Anishinaabe thought world that Vizenor’s concept of survivance emerges from, elements of Land are agential persons. This paper uses stories of other-than-human survivance against the Trent-Severn Waterway to explore how other-than-human persons can teach and inspire decolonial praxis.

Paper long abstract:

Much of Gerald Vizenor’s thought emerges from Anishinaabe philosophies that also recognize elements of Land, including plants, animals, waters, rocks, and others, as persons, kin, and nations possessing agency, animacy, and spirit. From an Anishinaabe perspective, other-than-human persons undertake acts of survivance, actively and agentially surviving against settler colonialism and environmental destruction.

This paper explores other-than-human survivance against the Trent-Severn Waterway (TSW) and how it can teach and inspire decolonial praxis. The TSW is a 386-kilometer-long system of locks, dams, and canals built onto waterbodies throughout what is now colonially considered central Ontario, Canada, in order to connect Chi’Niibish (Lake Ontario) with Waasegamaa (Georgian Bay). The waterway was constructed throughout the nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries to facilitate colonial settlement, logging, and commercial shipping. However, at the same time that it expanded access to central Ontario for settler Canadians, the TSW had devastating impacts on the Indigenous—principally Anishinaabe—Nations whose territory it cut through, and many of their other-than-human relations. The construction of the waterway reshaped rocks and waterbodies, flooded forests, destroyed manoomin beds (wild rice; Zizania palustris), and caused the extirpation of Atlantic salmon (Salmo salar) and American eels (Anguilla rostrata). However, other-than-human persons also resisted and survived against the colonial imposition of the TSW through floods, logjams, inclement weather, disease outbreaks, and other acts of survivance. Using these stories of other-than-human survivance, this paper highlights the varied and dynamic nature of survivance and considers the lessons that other-than-human persons can teach about dismantling settler colonialism.