Northern Light
Power, Land, and the Memory of Water
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
Winner, Banff Mountain Book Award for Environmental Literature
Finalist, Lambda Literary Award (LGBTQ Nonfiction)
"It begins to rain as we fly, falling in solid sheets, water from sky to earth — a free system of exchange."
Kazim Ali’s earliest memories are of Jenpeg, a temporary town in the forests of northern Manitoba where his immigrant father worked on the construction of a hydroelectric dam. As a child, Ali had no idea that the dam was located on the unceded lands of the Indigenous Pimicikamak, the "people of rivers and lakes."
Northern Light recounts Ali’s memories of his childhood and his return to Pimicikamak as an adult. During his visit, he searches for the sites of his childhood memories and learns more about the realities of life in Pimicikamak: the environmental and social impact of the Jenpeg dam, the effects of colonialism and cultural erasure, and the community’s initiatives to preserve and strengthen their identity. Deeply rooted in place, Northern Light is both a stunning exploration of home, belonging, and identity and an immersive account of contemporary life in one Indigenous community.
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
As a child in the ’70s, poet and essayist Kazim Ali lived for a time in a prefabricated Manitoba village erected to house the families of engineers like his dad, who helped build a nearby hydroelectric dam. When he sets out to revisit his boyhood home, what he finds is far more strange and disorienting. Ali’s nostalgic journey pulls him into the history of the Pimicikamak, a band of Cree First Nations people who have kicked out the power company and taken back their land. As a self-described rootless queer child of South Asian immigrants, Ali at first associates their story with his own outsider feelings. But with remarkable openness and vulnerability, he discovers the tragic depth of the Pimicikamak’s long, ugly history with the Canadian government and their current heartrending struggle to rebuild their community in the face of economic decline and physical isolation. This slim, emotional memoir packs a wallop—especially if you’ve ever felt a longing for home.
