{"id":13755,"date":"2015-12-18T10:23:47","date_gmt":"2015-12-18T15:23:47","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/carleton.ca\/history\/?p=13755"},"modified":"2024-07-03T19:53:36","modified_gmt":"2024-07-03T23:53:36","slug":"contested-histories-of-the-ottawa-river-a-summary-of-the-2015-quelques-arpents-de-neige-conference","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/history\/2015\/contested-histories-of-the-ottawa-river-a-summary-of-the-2015-quelques-arpents-de-neige-conference\/","title":{"rendered":"Contested Histories of the Ottawa River: A Summary of the 2015 Quelques arpents de neige<\/i> Conference"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
\n
\n\n
\n
\n
\n

\n Contested Histories of the Ottawa River: A Summary of the 2015 Quelques arpents de neige<\/i> Conference\n <\/h1>\n \n \n <\/header>\n\n <\/div>\n\n <\/div>\n\n <\/div>\n<\/section>\n\n

On June 14, 1613, while exploring the Ottawa River, Samuel de Champlain wrote about his encounter with a spectacular site:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The water falls in one place with such force upon a rock that it has hollowed out in course of time a large and deep basin, in which the water has a circular motion and forms large eddies in the middle, so that the savages call it Asticou<\/em>, which signifies boiler. This cataract produces such a noise in this basin that it is heard for more than two leagues. The savages when passing here observe a ceremony which we shall speak of in its place.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

–Voyages of Samuel Champlain<\/em>, 1611-1618, Volume 3, translated by Charles Pomeroy Otis, (1882) p54<\/p>\n\n\n\n

More commonly referred to today as the Chaudi\u00e8re Falls, the archipelago of sacred islands is literally central to the history of the National Capital Region. Last Friday, scholars, students and activists gathered at the annual Quelques arpents de neige<\/em> environmental history workshop series\u2014hosted by Carleton University\u2019s Department of History\u2014to revisit this contested history.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"View<\/a>
\u201cA view of Ottawa, some of Hull and of the Ottawa River circa 1859, including views of the Chaudi\u00e8re Falls and of Parliament Hill (formerly Barrack Hill) prior to the construction of the Parliament Buildings.\u201d ca.1859, by Stent and Laver, Library and Archives Canada,C-002812.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

A River\u2019s Contested History<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

The speakers at Arpents were all concerned with whose heritage was being preserved in the National Capital Region (NCR). More particularly, they provided attendees with an opportunity to illuminate the ways in which the history of the Chaudi\u00e8re Falls still resonates in present day contests between Aboriginal and working class peoples, real estate developers, and the federal government.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The traditional history of Ottawa as the capital of Canada emphasizes the role of industry and the federal government in building a \u201cWashington of the North\u201d out of a backward lumber colony. In this story, the critical transition occurred in the middle of the twentieth century, when a Federal District Commission (FDC) rescued the waterfront from the careless management of Ottawa\u2019s industrial elite. After decades of failed attempts to develop the Capital, the FDC received broad powers from the Mackenzie King government to implement the Plan for the National Capital\u2014<\/em>the Master Plan developed by French urbanist Jacques Gr\u00e9ber between 1938 and 1950. The legislative powers granted for implementing the \u201cGr\u00e9ber Plan\u201d established the National Capital Commission (NCC) in 1958\u2014the federal planning agency responsible for the built heritage of the NCR, as well as its future development.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As Monique Manatch showed at Quelques arpents<\/em>, this narrative ignores thousands of years of aboriginal history in the region. The executive director of Indigenous Culture and Media Innovations, Manatch provided attendees with Algonquin perspectives on Chaudi\u00e8re\u2019s history, as well as its future development. Drawing from her work on a documentary about the Falls, Manatch charted the work of Algonquin elder and spiritual leader William Commanda in protesting the development of condominiums on what is still for Algonquin people a sacred space. Commanda\u2019s call to free the site from its recent concrete legacy would be taken up by numerous Algonquin peoples, including the prominent architect Douglas Cardinal.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As Manatch points out, the Ottawa River is a paleontological and archeological \u201cgold mine.\u201d Along its banks and beneath its surface we still find artifacts that are thousands of years old. Historians have established that this site where the waters of the Rideau and Gatineau Rivers meet those of the Ottawa were a major meeting place for religious ritual and trade, connecting the region to locales as distant as Labrador and Florida. Says Manatch, \u201cIt\u2019s ironic that Ottawa became the nation\u2019s capital, because in a sense it always was.\u201d There have been multiple plans for the National Capital in Ottawa\u2019s history, yet we rarely hear about the ones proposed by Aboriginal communities, which emphasize the sacred over the profitable.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

For Noel Salmond, professor of Religion at Carleton University, the category of the sacred offers rich insight into the contests over space along the Ottawa River. According to Salmond, given its location at the heart of the NCR, the debates surrounding use of the Chaudi\u00e8re site may in fact be the most important contemporary environmental issue in Canada. As a contested site, debates over Chaudi\u00e8re underline the tensions between status and non-status indigenous communities, the \u201cvexed legalities\u201d of the Crown developing on land that does not belong to the Crown, the difficulty of recovering the sacred at what is now essentially a site \u201cdesecrated\u201d by industrial development, as well as the looming presence of the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Aboriginal People and its very real applicability to these debates. There\u2019s \u201csomething weird,\u201d argues Salmond, about the lack of official recognition for 5,000 year old sites in the NCR, which raises important questions about the role of erasure in heritage management. As discussions following Salmond\u2019s talk illustrated, the Chaudi\u00e8re Falls debate epitomizes a postindustrial contest between deep ecology and boutique environmentalism.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Rivers and Industry\u2014Alternative Perspectives<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

Against the backdrop of debates over current plans for Chaudi\u00e8re, we were presented with the stunning exhibit curated by the talented photographers of the Workers\u2019 History Museum (WHM). Carleton history professor David Dean\u2014who also serves as a patron of the museum\u2014introduced us to the Museum\u2019s mission to give presence to workers and workers history in the National Capital. For 150 years, the E.B. Eddy complex was a central site of industrial activity in Ottawa. Closed in 2006 and expected to be the site of a new condominium, this exhibit captures the history of the E.B. Eddy complex \u201cas it disappears.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"Control<\/a>
Elevated control platform at E.B. Eddy complex. Photo credit: Workers\u2019 History Museum, 2015.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

In an engaging presentation, WHM Photographer and Image Archivist Paul Harrison showed us highlights of an archive consisting of more than 76,000 images and 36 hours of video. While this emerging archive offers digitally-minded historians enormous potential for reconstructing the ruins of the EB Eddy, the archive also complements the 150 year documentary history of this central industrial site. From the exhibit\u2019s brochure:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The photographs that hang from these walls are not passive. They do not freeze time nor are they simply captured snapshots. They act to create new histories and new meanings with each viewing, and with each viewer.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

To hear Harrison and fellow photographer Andrea Cordonier speak, the year-long process of documenting the site\u2014supported by the Windmill Corporation\u2014was a phenomenal experience; it was an opportunity to explore dark and wet recesses of a mysterious ruin, to express themselves artistically, and to feel the rush of adrenaline as steam flowed through the old facility\u2019s pipes and the ruin appeared to breathe.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Offering a different perspective on the relationship between rivers and industry, Will Knight\u2014Curator of Agriculture and Fisheries at the Canada Science and Technology Museums\u2014offered observations on the introduction of Bass to Algonquin Park, and the critical relationship between railway expansion and sports fisheries in Ontario.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"Illustrated<\/a><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Contrary to other stories of human-led biological introductions, Bass were a Native North American species and their introduction occurred over a short distance. That said, the story of their introduction runs is inseparable from the history of the railway. They were originally introduced to private lakes, but the species quickly spread across Algonquin Park due to the natural interconnections between Ontario lakes, as well as the artificial connections created by loggers. Relatively quickly, sports lodges emerged near private lakes, increasing demand for a rail corridor to deliver fishermen to the Park. This transition from a commercial to a recreational fishery had important consequences for Native peoples, whose traditional ways of life were marginalized in favour of timber and game activities.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Introducing the Ottawa Environmental History, Heritage and Humanities Network<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

On Saturday morning a few attendees decamped to the National Art Gallery to discuss the formation of a new network to bring together scholars, students, public historians, and others interested in environmental history in the Ottawa-Gatineau region, as well as to support those passing through on research trips. Pete Anderson (Geography, Queen\u2019s University), Joanna Dean (History, Carleton University), Susan Ross (Canadian Studies, Carleton University), Dan R\u00fcck (History and Indigenous Studies, University of Ottawa) and Beth Jewett (Canadian Studies, Mount Allison University) discussed the name, goals, and program of the new network.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Bringing together those interested in the environment, the Ottawa Environmental History, Heritage and Humanities Network (or Ottawa EHHH for short) has planned an ambitious series of lectures, informal discussion nights, and field trips planned for 2016. Those interested are encouraged to follow Ottawa EHHH on Twitter<\/a>, Facebook<\/a>, or to send an email to ottawaehhh@gmail.com<\/a> for more details on the upcoming program.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

About Arpents<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Quelques arpents de neige <\/em>brings together scholars in Quebec, Ontario, and in nearby U.S. states who share an interest in environmental history and historical geography. Arpents<\/em> was founded in 2003 as a workshop that met three times per year in various locations, but in 2011 changed the format to having one larger annual meeting on the second Friday\/Saturday of December. We make a particular effort to create an informal, workshop atmosphere, and to this end, we do not expect all papers to be polished and ready for publication, but encourage speakers to view Arpents as an opportunity to test new ideas and engage the audience with works in progress.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Next year\u2019s conference will be hosted at Mount Allison University, in Sackville, NB and will be organized by Bell Postdoctoral Fellow, Beth Jewett.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

-Article by Carleton PhD Student, Shawn Anctil<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

On June 14, 1613, while exploring the Ottawa River, Samuel de Champlain wrote about his encounter with a spectacular site: The water falls in one place with such force upon a rock that it has hollowed out in course of time a large and deep basin, in which the water has a circular motion and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":13757,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[43,1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-13755","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-history","category-news"],"acf":{"cu_post_thumbnail":"null"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/history\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13755","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/history\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/history\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/history\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/history\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=13755"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/history\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13755\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":13764,"href":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/history\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13755\/revisions\/13764"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/history\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/13757"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/history\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=13755"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/history\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=13755"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/history\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=13755"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}