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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Poet Ali (The Voice of Sheila Chandra) chronicles his return to the small Canadian town he lived in during early childhood in this layered memoir. On an especially cold winter night, Ali writes, he began reflecting on memories of his early childhood in Manitoba, Canada, and wondered what became of Jenpeg, the town where his family lived. Upon his return to Jenpeg built to house people constructing a dam on the Nelson River he found that the town no longer exists and the native community, the Pimicikamak, were suffering the economic and environmental impacts of the dam ("The water rises and falls because of the dam, the shore is chewed away"). Ali began to study the ways the dam changed the landscape, such as shore erosion and changing silt levels, as a way to empathize with the challenges faced by the Pimicikamak and to understand the legacy of the dam his family helped build. Along the way, he bonded with the community's chief, Merrick, and locals Lee Roy and Mervin, who taught him about Pimicikamak Cree culture, including the nation's sweat lodges and ceremonies. Ali's prose shines when recalling his interactions with members of the Pimicikamak community and friends. Those concerned with environmental justice or the plight of Indigenous peoples will want to give this a look.
