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Reviewed by:
  • Power from the North: Territory, Identity, and the Culture of Hydroelectricity in Quebec by Caroline Desbiens
  • Neil S. Forkey
Power from the North: Territory, Identity, and the Culture of Hydroelectricity in Quebec. Caroline Desbiens. Vancouver: UBC Press, 2013. Pp. xxiii + 281, $95.00

To speak of the provincial North is to do so in relative terms. As Graeme Wynn, editor of the ubc Press series Nature | History | Culture, suggests in his foreword to the book, what residents of the southern areas of most provinces consider to be the North may still be considered “southerly” by those residing in the most extreme northern reaches of provincial boundaries. This semantic exercise is not lost on Université Laval geographer Caroline Desbiens as she traverses the space connecting southern population centres along the St Lawrence River north to James Bay. Along the way, she considers the uses of the North as image for Quebec during its Quiet Revolution.

Quebec’s North and the power, both physical and symbolic, that it creates has inspired three noteworthy studies in environmental history: Amassing Power: J.B. Duke and the Saguenay River, 1897–1927 (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2000) and Quebec Hydropolitics: The Peribonka Concessions of the Second World War (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2011), both by David Massell and both focused upon the Saguenay region. Hans M. Carlson’s Home Is the Hunter: The James Bay Cree and Their Land (ubc Press, 2008) takes a penetrating view of that portion of the province’s geography and Aboriginal homeland. These books demonstrate the interplay between local people and the far-reaching economic systems that affect them. To this list of fine studies, we can now add Desbiens’s volume to those concerned with Quebec’s North, however defined.

This is a well-integrated, richly textured meditation on the multiple meanings of “Power from the North.” Desbiens ponders the first phase of James Bay hydroelectric development and what it meant in spatial and cultural terms for the Québécois. Aboriginal perspectives on the project are assessed in the second chapter. The emphasis of her analysis is on the veritable “culture of hydroelectricity” that emerged in the late 1960s through the early 1980s. The viewpoints of policy planners, nationalists, white newcomers to the North, project labourers, and consumers are covered in this highly original treatment [End Page 273] of the province’s recent past. Throughout, the author reminds the reader of the changing relationship between citizens of the South and the distant North, which even in the 1960s seemed to some Québécois to be a remote, even undiscovered, corner of the province.

The book is presented in three parts. The first part plays upon Premier Robert Bourassa’s ambitious 1971 plan to extend hydroelectric development to James Bay. This is well contextualized in contemporary provincial and federal politics. An exploration into the “new world” that was imagined to exist in the far North, at least from the vantage point of southerners, then follows. Desbiens situates the project within French Canadians’ longstanding quest to harness and control their own natural resources. Alongside, the “roman de la terre” and the place of resources in the literary history of French Canada are mined to build the symbolism of the North. The most path-breaking chapters of the book are found in the third section, and they deal with the new settlers who pushed the bounds of southern residence prior to the 1970s; the male and female workers who built and operated the power complex; and the manner in which the state presented its finished product to the general public. For environmental historians, her discussion of workers and the James Bay project might prove to be the most engaging. Despite the rhetoric of bravely encountering the new world of the North, men and women were subjected to a work regime that alienated them from the natural world. In fact, they were often segregated so as to minimize socialization and maximize production in an almost prison-like work atmosphere. Finally, Desbiens addresses the recently announced “Plan Nord” and analyzes how this initiative can be comprehended as part of the ongoing dialogue of development.

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