River Energies

Streaming Contested Waterworlds along the Ottawa River

Abstract

From 2024 and its spring débâcle to 2025’s first fall snow, an ethnographical collective of researchers from the University of Ottawa took off from campus for two ‘‘river semesters.’’ Following a speculative drop of water taken from the Kichissippi River (the Ottawa River in English or rivière des Outaouais in French), we fieldworked in, on and around water for an experience in elemental anthropology. We engaged with the various circulations sustained by the river flow, at times geo-chemical, at times eco-cosmological, always anthropogenic. From the sacred Anishinaabe island of Asinabka, to the adjacent massive dam of Chaudière Falls, through the headquarters of Brookfield Energy (a major hydroelectricity trading firm), to the multimillion-dollar riverfront development called Zibi—with its net zero dream of community living and neighbouring toilet paper factory that heats buildings in the winter—we regarded this sensitive anthropological confluence as a saturated flow (following Ruiz and Jue (2022)). A flow where water is, disparately and at times concomitantly, looked upon as a natural resource, a valuable landscape, a precious witness of perilous climate events to come, an alluring promise, a discomforting oracle or a forthcoming expansion of capital. Along the flooded banks of this continuously changing watercourse, which once was a highway for Indigenous peoples to travel, trade, and strive, and where the parliament of a rather young state now sits, we investigate the pulsating milieu where everything that is to come seems to run from.