For Whom Does the Water Flow?

The Politics and Aesthetics of Eeyou Istchee’s Water in Blue Bear Woman by Virginia Pesemapeo Bordeleau

Abstract

In Virginia Pesemapeo Bordeleau’s Blue Bear Woman, water of the storied region—James Bay, or Eeyou Istchee as the Îyiyû (Cree) people knows it—is part of profound relationships between human and other-than-human. In our paper, we examine how Pésémapéo Bordeleau’s novel and the narrator’s voyage back to her Indigenous territory are narratives of water connected to the flooding and the devastating impact of their redirection on the territory and Îyiyû peoplehood; we study the (re)mapping of Eeyou Istchee by the settler state as it is mediated by fiction—understood as an extension of Indigenous storytelling and oral tradition. The protagonist of Blue Bear Woman resignifies water and provides grounds to understand how water is politically and aesthetically linked to culture, spirituality, and Indigenous peoplehood in more than one way.