“So Great Was the Rush of Water”: Speculative Histories of Other-than-Human Survivance Against the Trent-Severn Waterway

Abstract In this essay, the author employs survivance—a concept of active and agential survival developed by Anishinaabe author and scholar Gerald Vizenor—to explore decolonial other-than-human opposition to the Trent-Severn Waterway, a roughly 240-mile-long system of locks, canals, and dams built onto waterbodies throughout Central Ontario, Canada, as a case study for more broadly considering the decolonial roles of other-than-human beings. If decolonization is to proceed in accordance with Indigenous futurities in a settler-colonial Canadian context, then plants, animals, fungi, waters, rocks, and other other-than-human beings ought to be considered as having agency, animacy, and spirit, as they do in the ontologies of many Indigenous Nations. After outlining ways that the Trent-Severn Waterway enacts settler-colonial violence against other-than-human beings, the author speculates on floods, logjams, disease outbreaks, and similar acts as histories of other-than-human resistance, refusal, resentment, and resurgence—utilizing the work of Indigenous scholars including Audra Simpson, Scott Richard Lyons, Glen Sean Coulthard, and Leanne Betasamosake Simpson. These speculative histories serve to illustrate how settler and other non-Indigenous scholars and activists, interested in supporting Indigenous Nations in dismantling settler colonialism, might better attend to other-than-human beings as potential agents and teachers of decolonization.