Deep dive into colonialism needed
Before We Lost the Lake: A Natural and Human History of Sumas Lake Chad Reimer | Caitlin Press Inc. $24.95, 272pp.
Drive out the freeway to Abbotsford and look from the escarpment just outside the town toward Chilliwack and you’ll see a flat prairie divided into tidy farms. It used to be a lake and surrounding wetlands.
The size of Sumas (or Sema:th) Lake varied with the seasons (at its largest 33 miles long and four miles wide) and it was home to sturgeon and salmon, trout, whitefish and many other fish species. Its wetlands provided a home for enormous flocks of ducks, geese and other birds, while around the margins of the lake and on the grasslands and mountain slopes that surrounded it, deer, elk, badgers and many other mammals ranged.
The Sema:th First Nation lived around the lake from time immemorial. With the arrival of European settlers in the valley in the middle of the 19th century, the long established rhythms of Indigenous peoples’ lives around Lake Sumas were disrupted, as the “hungry newcomers” (as the original inhabitants of the valley called the settlers and explorers) staked out land claims that ignored the Indigenous title of people who had lived there for millennia.
After many false starts, a massive project (1922-1924) involving stream diversions, dams, dykes, canals and pumps drained the lake, revealing 33,000 acres of new farmland.
The Sema:th, already much reduced by European diseases and relegated to tiny reserves, were not consulted about the project and their objections, when voiced, were ignored.
Local historian Chad Reimer’s new book, Before We Lost the Lake, tells the story of the lake and long and often sordid process that finally led to the engineered transformation of lake and wetland into prairie.
Reimer’s is a tale of colonial incursion and violence, appropriation and exploitation, racism and environmental heedlessness. At a time when there is much talk of reconciliation, it is important to have more information about the crimes of colonialism. We cannot fix what we do not see. Reimer has done us all a favour with this well crafted history.