Utilities which produce and distribute electricity often choose to name their large hydropower dams topographically, after regional landforms or water forms, or administratively, after established elected officials. Canadian power dam names in fact include “Limestone” in northern Manitoba, “Churchill Falls,” Newfoundland and Labrador, Hydro Quebec’s “Robert-Bourassa” and “La Grande” generators, and “Revelstoke,” British Columbia.

Internationally, the most reputed and bitterly controversial dam project is China’s Three Gorges, named neutrally after a legendary canyon in the Yangtze River Valley.

However, Government of Manitoba and its electric utility Manitoba Hydro have curiously chosen the name “Conawapa Generating Station” for a $6 billion hydroelectric generation and transmission infrastructure project, bigger than Limestone, and the largest ever planned in northern Manitoba.

“Conawapa Generating Station” would export significant quantities of electricity to Minnesota, and to south-central Ontario. Winnipeg has long promoted the bi-provincial connection within an unconvincing East-West electrical grid concept, which is criticized by tough-minded Tom Adams, Toronto-based executive director of Energy Probe.

Manitoba Aboriginal community activist opposition to hydroelectric mega-projects was reflected by elders of the 6,500-member Pimicikamak Cree First Nation to the Tenth Assembly of the Lutheran World Federation in Winnipeg, July 2003.

“Manitoba Hydro is breaking our hearts,” said Chiefs John Miswagon and Eugenie Mercredi. “Our reserve territories have been flooded by Hydro’s power dams. Shorelines have been washed away, and forests swallowed up by rising water levels.”

“The Pimicikamak, once a healthy society with a sustainable traditional economy now has catastrophic unemployment, mass poverty, despair and one of the highest suicide rates in North America,” the leaders grieved.

The Pimicikamak jointly intervened in November 2000 with the James Bay Cree Nation at the World Commission of Dams, alleging dispossession and devastation by the adverse biophysical, socioeconomic and cultural effects of water and energy mega-projects. “Tens of thousands of square kilometers of our traditional hunting grounds and waters have been flooded or rendered inaccessible; our fish and waters have been contaminated with methyl-mercury…”

Manitoba Hydro representative Glenn Schneider explained in an interview: “Conawapa was the name of an Aboriginal guide to Anthony Henday on his inland trip of discovery from York Factory in 1754.”

Why York Factory?

Historical journalist Peter C. Newman summarized years of research and writing on Hudson’s Bay Company: “… the most essential Hudson’s Bay Company destination, then and now, York Factory is where history and present-day reality come together. This was where the Company first perfected the fur trade as a world-scale enterprise; it was from here that most of its pathfinders set off to probe its inland empire … here was the center of North American commerce, the overseas headquarters of the Company of Adventurers.” (Company of Adventurers, Penguin Canada, 2005 , page xvii)

Why Henday?

Foremost academic historian Harold A. Innis recounted: “Anthony Henday was sent to the interior in 1754 to persuade the Plains Indians to come down to the forts, to encourage the middlemen to trap more extensively, and to check the influence of the French … on his journey from Hudson Bay in 1754 and 1755 [Henday] obtained an accurate picture of the situation:

May 24: The natives received from the Master [of a trading post near present-day La Pas, Manitoba] ten Gallons of Brandy half adulterated with water and when intoxicated they traded Cats, Marten and good parchment Beaver skins. (The Fur Trade in Canada, University of Toronto Press, reprinted 2000) pages 97, 138.

Utilizing sources perhaps unavailable to Innis, Dictionary of Canadian Biography Volume Three 1741 to 1770 added that Henday was “ outlawed as a smuggler in 1748. “HBC officials who hired and promoted him apparently did not learn his record.

Why Conawapa?

The Hudson’s Bay Company Archives disclose that HBC in May 1754 sent Henday with “a trusty home Indian Conawapa to: Bring “presents” to “country Indians"; “Get goods” from them, and deliver these pelts to York Factory; See all the Natives you can.

HBC Archives document A. 11/114, “Instructions to Anthony Henday,” courtesy of Government of Manitoba Archives.

In sum, Hudson’s Bay Company pressed or cajoled one of their “Homeguard Indians” Conawapa into service exploiting “inland” effectives against stiff competition from French rivals.

European imperialists developed their discovery doctrine to de-construct original Peoples of North America as individual human beings, living together in rule- of- law type societies, and to re-construct these erased people and Peoples as monolithic dependent populations, termed “Indians” and ”Natives” requiring civilization, said writer-sculptor Stewart Steinhauer of Alberta-based Saddle Lake First Nation.

Politically opposite Calgarian Tom Flanagan describes in First Nations?: Second Thoughts, (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2000) page 55, the eighteenth century European exploration Doctrine of Discovery and Doctrine of Terra Nullius (no-one’s land), which “denied the status of nation to the non-agricultural inhabitants of the Americas, referring to them rather as ‘tribes,’ [which] cannot take to themselves more land than they have need of or can inhabit and cultivate.” (page 55)

The Dictionary of Canadian Biography concludes that HBC compelled Conawapa to: Function as middle-man and go-between interpreting Henday to indigenous sources of bush knowledge and fur pelts; Support Henday, with “a party of Crees,” in his frightful confrontation with French explorer-adventurers.

The name “Conawapa” is unseemly and should not be appropriated for a problematic mega-project in the boreal and sub-arctic North. At a minimum, Government of Manitoba should withdraw this name from consideration.

Stephen Salaff is a Toronto based freelance energy and environment writer, who researches waterpower and renewable energy. Salaff published “Native Communities Refuse Nuclear Waste” in Seven Oaks, and an interview article in Dominion: “Land Claims and the People of the Great River” on the Ontario Algonquin resistance , which was instrumental in Salaff’s study “License Renewal Refused to Nuclear Waste Polluter in Pembroke,” for The Activist.