Disturbance as Direction: Rethinking the Seaway

by tqđ

Iroquois, Ontario during demolition in preparation for the flooding

The following is an excerpt from a longer zine entitled “Remember to Thank Your Tap.” This project seeks to move beyond the manufactured dichotomy of city versus nature, encouraging humility when relating to the place we inhabit, Tiohtià:ke / Mooniyang / Montreal.

The Seaway is not the river.

It is a remade channel, carved by machines and capital, lined by concrete, bordered by fences, and guarded by signs. “There are many unseen dangers in and around seaway channels,” the warnings say. And yet the real danger has already passed through—engineered into the landscape as part of a continental ambition. The author Stephanie Phillips notes, the Saint Lawrence Seaway was a dream of extraction and defense, of economic flow and geopolitical control. It was, and remains, a project of settler futurity: a water highway designed to move grain, iron ore, and imperial desire across vast distances, regardless of the consequences.

We cannot narrate the Seaway without returning to the 49,000 acres it drowned, the 11,000 people displaced, the violent severing of Kahnawá:ke and Ahkwesáhsne from their river, the ways of life lost when access was gated off, or the theft of over 1,392 acres of Indigenous territory.
These are not just historical facts but enduring geographies—testimonies to how colonialism shapes water as property, border, and infrastructure. The Seaway is part of what Mishuana Goeman described as a “colonial cartography” —a geography that flattens relations, erases responsibility, and imposes a narrative of progress that must be constantly maintained. Hydroelectric damming, territorial expropriation, and the legal fictions of “national defense” and “economic need” are all extensions of this settler spatial story.

The Saint Lawrence seaway cannot be uncarved, but it can be read differently. This means recognizing that the Seaway, while not the river, is now within it. Drawing on the work of Margaret Somerville, we’re reminded that “water is our body”—and thus the damage, too, circulates through flesh and flow. Hydrological infrastructure is never just technical but social and ontological—it reroutes not only rivers but kinship, governance, and presence. The Seaway is a colonial project that created borders, rendered movement a threat, and made care criminal. The Seaway’s layered history includes closed canals, averted labor strikes, submerged towns, and restructured economies. It holds within it incompatible timelines: U.S. and Canada, Ontario and Quebec, settler and Indigenous. These overlapping and often conflicting narratives are not a flaw in the story—they are the story. What is where? And in the case of the Seaway, there are many answers depending on who speaks, where they stand, and how they move.

The question is not whether we can return to a time before the Seaway, but whether we can, as theorist Alexis Shotwell puts it, find “life-promoting patches” in its aftermath. Sovereignty is not fixed in time or form; it is an evolving practice, sometimes visible, sometimes opaque. Refusal might not always appear as a protest. If we are to imagine otherwise, we must learn to speak of water not as a route for capital, but as a relation, a tension, and a teacher.

The Seaway both is and is not the river. You cannot swim in its waters; signs warn of unseen dangers. Fishing is prohibited. Unlike the stories that emerge from Coast Salish conceptions of unbordered waters—fluid, dynamic, relational—the Seaway represents a fixed, bordered, policed vision of water. In their writing on Indigenous oceanic knowledge systems, Rachel Yacaaʔał George and Sarah Wiebe remind us that Indigenous oceanic epistemologies do not reduce water to resource or backdrop, but rather, emphasize interdependence and accountability. In doing so, they resist settler narratives of dominion and mastery over natural resources.

Somerville also disrupts these colonial spatial orders by identifying ways in which water exceeds property lines, national boundaries, and the assumed permanence of settler infrastructure. The Seaway then becomes the antithesis of these relational geographies.

Métis scholar Michelle Daigle offers another way of understanding this rupture. She describes water as a site of “movement politics”—a medium that both connects and grounds, that allows intentional shifts between motion and stillness. Through Daigle’s lens, the violence of the Seaway is not only what it destroyed, but what it tried to fix in place: how it locked water, gated access, fenced off bodies. These efforts to control water reflect a broader settler anxiety about the uncontrollable. In contrast, conceptualizations of water demand unfixing, a refusal of settler spatiotemporal logics, a recognition of water not as commodity but as kin.

What kind of river will the Saint Lawrence become when the Seaway is no longer profitable? Its landscape has already been transformed—new canals dug, locks installed, islands made from its excavated bed. Whole villages submerged. If we consider it as more than an object of critique, it becomes a site of orientation. Not a utopia, but a direction. A way to mark position, reroute relations, and (re)map toward futures not yet contained.

But imagining a new relationship to the Seaway also requires unlearning.
Goeman cautions that Indigenous caretaking of the land must not be romanticized as a natural or fixed trait. These relationships are a product of intellectual labour: cultivated, taught, and passed down through generations. There is no inherently good relationship to land that we can simply return to. It must be formed and reformed with intention.

This work involves settlers, whose proximity to land often mirrors the alienating infrastructures that dominate it: cynical commutes, disconnection masked as convenience, climate despair disguised as resignation.

If we critique the world around us without undoing the terms of our participation in it, we remain confined by the very logics we hope to resist. Playing by the rules, speaking in sanctioned tongues, accepting surveillance as the cost of belonging—these strategies have limits. As fellow traveler Klee Benally reminds us, “hope is a terrible tactic.”

If we want to imagine different ways of being here, of relating to land and to each other, we must break the rules. We have to refuse Canada as a coherent container for relation. We don’t yet know what that new language is, but the river, if we learn to listen, might already be speaking.