Louise Abbott

Louise Abbott is the author of Eeyou Istchee: Land of the Cree and director of the documentaries Nunaaluk: A Forgotten Story and The Ahiarmiut: Out-of-the-Way Dwellers.

Reviews by Louise Abbott:

November 3, 2017
On the cover of Wrestling with Colonialism on Steroids, a portrait of author Zebedee Nungak appears superimposed on a photo of what Hydro-Québec calls “the giant’s staircase.” This spillway for the Robert-Bourassa Dam on the La Grande River boasts ten steps blasted from bedrock that each exceeds the span of two football fields. It is a tourist attraction of the James Bay region – symbolic of the monumental scale and technological prowess of a power-generating system that the Quebec government trumpeted as “the Project of the Century” when announcing plans to build it in 1971. For the Inuit of Nunavik, however, the giant’s staircase conjures up the provincial Goliath that once threatened their homeland in northern Quebec with proposed hydroelectric installations on the Great Whale and Caniapiscau Rivers.