With these perspective-shifting words, Dr. Brittany Luby’s brilliant monograph Dammed announces its critique of a Canadian postwar historiography that emphasizes general “postwar affluence,” ignores or marginalizes Indigenous experience, and fails to acknowledge either the racial specificity or the colonial basis of mainstream prosperity. The wealth and opportunity that so many enjoyed after the Second World War not only did not extend to her people, the Anishinabeg of Niisaachewan, but were actually created partly at their expense. In centring Anishinaabe experience and perspectives, the book insists that they be granted space and recognition in our understanding of Canada’s past. This approach operates as a powerful corrective to the standard practice within Canadian historiography and public discourse of treating Anishinaabe communities as “peripheral,” as the “remote,” “isolated” places where resources could be found and extracted to enrich the “centre.” Moreover, it effectively reasserts the meaningfulness and continuing reality of Anishinaabe identities and territorial boundaries: “Postwar development is said to have occurred in ‘peripheral’ spaces or spaces without social and economic systems valued by settler-colonists. This definition of space has assumed a shared citizenship across these two zones (centre and periphery), normalizing colonial conceptions of space that overwrote Indigenous homelands.” Reading Luby’s words in Winnipeg, Treaty 1 territory, I am located only a few hours’ drive from Niisaachewan (formerly Indian Reserve Dalles 38C), in Treaty 3 territory. Within my own geographic and research context, I am better placed than many Canadians to appreciate the wide applicability of Luby’s observations about the Niisaachewan Anishinabeg’s experience of colonization. Anishinaabe, Ininiw, Ithine, Dakota, Métis, Oji-Cree, and Dene peoples in Manitoba can all point to similar or parallel experiences by which resources, security, and opportunity were transferred from their own communities to non-Indigenous Canadians. As I write, the electricity powering my computer continues to flow from northern Manitoba, where it is generated at great cost to Ininiw and Ithine peoples’ lifeways, food sources, economies, and health. My drinking glass holds water that is piped to Winnipeg from Shoal Lake at the expense of the Shoal Lake 40 Anishinaabe community, whose reserve was cut off from the mainland and from clean drinking water by the aqueduct constructed to sustain the big city. As a researcher working with Ininiw and Ithine people, I have personally heard the stories about the harms to every aspect of life caused by hydro dams and operations in their territories. One element that looms large in both Manitoba hydro-affected communities and Luby’s account of Niisaachewan history is the loss of food sovereignty: colonialism’s drastic erosion of the people’s ability to obtain the healthy, nutritious country food that sustained their communities for millennia, and the cascading harms that follow. Dammed shows the links between hunger and parents’ desperate decision to send their children to residential schools, where they believed the children would at least have enough to eat. It shows how the contamination of rivers due to dams and sewage-dumping made their timeless staple of fish unsafe to eat, and how breastfeeding mothers lost access to the whitefish that helped them produce healthy, abundant milk for their babies: “The collapse of household economies experienced by the Anishinabeg is part of the story of twentieth-century colonization and industrialization in Canada.” Thus, this monograph contributes to historical understanding first and foremost by documenting the great harm caused to an Anishinaabe community by the damming of rivers, initially for industry and later for hydropower. Though scholars have produced some excellent work on the impacts of damming and polluting waterways, which have been extremely common phenomena in Canada, there is much more work to be done. Indeed, the fact …