Canada

In Grade 4 our teacher hung a banner across the front of the classroom that said “We Are All Treaty People.” I remember asking what treaty, and being told Treaty 4, and that it was signed at Fort Qu’Appelle in 1874, and that Regina was inside it. What I did not understand until much later was that there are two versions of that treaty. One is the printed text in English. The other is what the Cree and Saulteaux people who were there understood they had agreed to, which was carried in speech and ceremony and has been retold ever since. My family has a paper history too: the title to my great-grandfather’s quarter section near Balcarres, which my dad keeps in a folder with the insurance papers. My baba has another version, about the winter they nearly lost the farm, which is not in the folder anywhere. Thomas King says in The Truth About Stories that the truth about stories is “that’s all we are” (King 2). If that is right, then it matters a great deal which stories get written down, who reads them out, and who is left out of them.

M.J. Hydara’s Songs of Dust and Water is full of records. There is a griot who remembers every word spoken in a minister’s meeting, an engineer’s exercise book, a trader’s ledger, a wall in a village square where the accounts are pinned up every Friday, and an agreement that has to be read aloud in the local language before anyone signs it. It would be easy to read it as a story in which oral tradition is wise and paperwork is a trick, but the book does not let us. In Part One, both the spoken record and the written one fail the village of Madina, because the people who hold power decide where the story begins. In Part Two, the village of Nafawol protects itself with a different kind of record: one that is read aloud, kept in public, corrected in the open with a name beside the correction, and willing to leave a gap where a name is still missing. My argument is that the novel’s real question is who gets to start the story, and whose names are allowed into it.

The first signature Madina gives is a lie that is technically true. When Adam Sterling brings the Madina Agreement to the meeting tree, the farmer Samba warns him in English, so that his words will not have to pass through the official signatory: “The paper does not matter if the line is wrong” (Hydara 17). The line he means is a grazing line between two clans that has been disputed for three generations, and the land staked for the plant belongs to a widow who has held it for twenty years. Samba’s answer is the sharpest sentence in Part One: “A signature tells you who held the pen… It does not tell you who agreed” (Hydara 18). Adam chooses the pen. More than a year later Nabil tells foreign investors that the nearest households “have been relocated, with compensation,” and the widow turns out to have been moved to a nephew’s compound in the district centre; “what the Energy Fund had paid her, nobody in Madina ever learned” (Hydara 72). The document is valid. It also erases the person whose agreement mattered most.

Reading that scene in Regina, I could not help thinking about the land title in my dad’s folder. It says who owns the quarter. It does not say how the land came to be available to be owned. That is not the same as what happens to the widow, but it showed me what Samba means. A document records a transaction; it does not record whether the people affected agreed to it, and it has no way of noticing who is missing.

If the novel stopped there, the obvious answer would be to trust the griot instead. Balla, Minister Khresay’s griot, is introduced as “the keeper of histories” (Hydara 7) and sits through Adam’s presentation “remembering all of it, exactly as it had been spoken: the foreigner’s words, the Minister’s, the silence after the word touch” (Hydara 9). It is a better record than any minutes, but it protects no one. When Adam later brings Khresay a flash drive with proof of the fraud, Khresay tells him, “Evidence is a goat. It goes where the man holding the rope leads it” (Hydara 66). Then Balla speaks “in the flat voice he kept for things already settled in the record” (Hydara 66). What he says is that the histories blame Wagadu’s fall on drought while the grandmothers blame a broken promise, and “Both are the same sentence, told by different people” (Hydara 66). I read that flat voice as honesty about what the griot can do. He can keep the record. He cannot make anyone in power listen to it. His story is already settled, and the plant is already ash.

The written record fails in the same way at the inquiry. Nabil reads out findings that Adam swapped a motor and ignored warnings, and the narrator says, “The worst of it was that none of the facts they read out were false. They had simply started the story where it suited them” (Hydara 63). A record can be accurate in every detail and still lie, if whoever controls it chooses the first sentence. The Madina Incident Committee starts with Adam’s panic at Intake-04. It does not start with the fake gaskets, the shell companies or the amendment Dunia handed him on camera. King makes a similar point about how much depends on where you begin a story, because the beginning tells you what kind of world you are in.

The one record in Part One that survives is Aisha’s exercise book. When Khresay can no longer help her, he gives her one instruction: “Write everything down… Every warning. Every part. Every date. Keep a copy somewhere they cannot reach” (Hydara 44). It is not a neutral log. On a page of its own she writes “that refusing the smith’s bracket had been sound engineering, and that leaving it in the dust without learning the smith’s name had not” (Hydara 44). Even her private record is about names, and about whose name was never asked for. She goes on carrying it for the rest of the novel, wrapped in plastic, first in her duffel bag and years later in the glovebox of the district water office’s pickup, until the last chapter, when she leaves it in the library of the academy at Nafawol. Hassan describes it to Kadiatou as “a record of a plant that burned in that village before any of this began” (Hydara 231). Kadiatou does not ask to see it. She says, “Read me the first page” (Hydara 231). The written account that Madina could never use in court ends, nearly twenty-five years later, as something read out loud to an old woman on a veranda.

Even the honest records leave Madina out. Proxima’s own inquiry runs to three hundred pages, but when a board member asks what the village paid, in figures, the director answers, “We didn’t ask them” (Hydara 82).

Part Two is where the comparison with Canada’s numbered treaties became hard for me to avoid. When Adam arrives in Nafawol, the elder Mamadou asks where Proxima’s new rule is written, “Somewhere only you can read it?” Adam promises that “the agreement will be read aloud here, in Nabari, before anyone signs it” (Hydara 91). Nine days later the reading begins, and Fatou the trader takes the papers out of Dr Arramata’s hands. Her reason is the whole history of colonial contracts in one line: “Every buyer at the port has read me his paper himself, in my own language, very kindly… Every one of them skipped a line” (Hydara 100). She reads every sentence silently first, then in Nabari, and “Where a word would not go into Nabari she stopped and said what it did instead” (Hydara 100). Mamadou makes her read the third and fifth clauses twice.

Treaty 4 was also negotiated through interpreters, in languages the printed text was not written in. The text that was signed says that the nations “cede, release, surrender and yield up” their rights to the land (“Treaty No. 4”). The Saskatchewan elders whose accounts Harold Cardinal and Walter Hildebrandt collected in Treaty Elders of Saskatchewan describe something quite different: an agreement to share the land, made as a sacred promise with the Creator as witness, and not a sale. I cannot settle what was said at Fort Qu’Appelle in 1874, and neither can a novel set in fictional countries. What Songs of Dust and Water does is imagine what it would take to close that gap before the signing instead of arguing about it for a hundred and fifty years afterwards. Someone the community trusts reads every line. Where a word will not translate, she says what it does. Anyone can say “Again.” Later, the young lawyer who drafts the Coffer Fund charter learns to read each clause in Nabari in his head and “to strike out anything that sounded, in Nabari, like a man trying to hide something” (Hydara 129). When he writes “disbursement,” Isatou tells him, “Then write taking money out” (Hydara 128). The novel treats plain language as protection. It does not trust a document that cannot survive being said aloud in the language of the people bound by it.

One more detail made me think of treaty. When the Union registers under the Republic’s law, Minister Sulayman replies that “the Republic knew of no place called Senebia” (Hydara 173). Senebia is the people’s own name for the region, “older than the border,” as the note at the front of the book says. Later, when TransGlobal moves its disputes from London to Port Walada, Fatou notices that those courts belong to the same Republic. A written agreement is only as good as the court that will read it, and a state can decline to recognize the name a people uses for themselves.

The ledger is where Hydara’s idea of a good record is clearest. On paper it is the most “written” thing in the book, but it behaves more like oral tradition, because it is public and spoken. It is pinned to the wall in the square every Friday, and Bintu’s class copies its columns in chalk and checks their totals against Fatou’s. When Isatou brings the committee her list of what the women of the kafo spent feeding the road crews, her request is about the future telling of the story: “When the road is finished, the men will say, ‘We built this road.’… I want it written down who fed them while they built it, and what it cost, so that the grandsons can read it for themselves” (Hydara 113). She knows that, left to memory, “the work has always forgotten it by the time the road is finished” (Hydara 113). Here writing protects the people that the oral version would leave out. From then on her list is read aloud at every accounting, by her, before anyone else’s.

The ledger is also the only record in the book that admits its own mistakes in public. When the inspector from the banking regulator finds that Fatou entered one payment twice, Fatou “did not cross either of them out” (Hydara 138). She writes a line explaining the error, and “At the end of it she wrote her name in full” (Hydara 139), then pins a copy on the wall at dawn, though it is not yet Friday. Compare that with the Madina inquiry, which used true facts to tell a false story. Fatou’s correction leaves the false entry visible and puts her own name beside it. Mamadou does the same thing when his grandson Lamin is caught skimming from the Fund. He asks the committee to write Lamin’s name and the sum, and then, “Then write mine under it, as the one who asked for the rule” (Hydara 169).

The most moving entry in the ledger is a blank. The culvert on the Road of Hands has two lines, one for building it and one for building it again after it was smashed, and “Beside the second she had left a space for a name” (Hydara 132). When the inspector asks about it, Fatou says, “A name… When we have it” (Hydara 139). In Year 5, Alkalo Musa of Sirawol confesses that two men from his village broke the culvert, paid by the cotton buyer’s agent. Mamadou’s answer is “Let it be written down… In your record and in ours” (Hydara 155). Fatou writes the buyer’s name into the space. Nobody can prove anything in court, but “every trader on the floodplain could read the two records” (Hydara 155), and within a year the man is buying cotton somewhere else. Two villages that had been close to a feud settle it by keeping matching records. I found this the most hopeful idea in the novel, and the most relevant to Canada. Reconciliation is sometimes talked about as if it means agreeing on one story. In this novel it looks more like two communities each writing the same wrong into their own book, with the same names, and leaving a space open until the truth arrives.

None of this means the novel gives up on the griot. At the farewell feast in Year 10, a griot from Talawol sings the ten years “from the first drop in the beaker to the last signature,” and he “left out nobody who had carried a stone. He named each by a deed: Kadiatou by the rope, Isatou by her list, Edrisa by the first stone of the road” (Hydara 214). Balla recited what was already settled. The Talawol griot names people by what they did, including Isatou by the very list she demanded so that the men could not forget her. He also sets the story “beside Kaabu and Jolof… so that Wagadu would not have to carry it alone” (Hydara 214), which gives the story a place in more than one people’s history.

Still, no record in the book is a guarantee. The Coda repeats Balla’s Wagadu story with one new sentence: “One pair of hands can always be made to let go” (Hydara 233). That is why the book’s records are kept by many hands at once: three signatures from three households, two villages’ books, a ledger copied by schoolchildren every week. And there are also good acts the ledger never catches. When Edrisa comes back from the coast and starts laying the walls of the academy’s second building before anyone has found the money to pay him, “There was no line for the wall in the ledger. Nobody had been paid, and nobody had asked to be” (Hydara 167). On the same page, the money Kadiatou’s son sends from Port Walada goes into the building fund, and at Kadiatou’s request Fatou records it simply as “From the docks” (Hydara 167).

By the end of the book the record-keeping has spread to the place where it failed. Talib, who once showed Adam the data and was told it was noise, now keeps a notebook where he writes “the name of the union” (Hydara 202) that he heard on the radio. In Madina, Mustapha’s son keeps the village papers as his father did, but he “read every one aloud under the tree before he signed it” (Hydara 224). That small change is Samba’s warning answered a generation later. When Halima sees a photograph of a ledger painted on a wall in a village three borders away, she says, “They copied our ledger,” and Kadiatou corrects her: “They wrote their own” (Hydara 227).

I think I understand my Grade 4 banner better now. “We are all treaty people” means that the people who live under an agreement are responsible for knowing both versions of it, the written one and the spoken one, and for asking where each version chose to begin. Songs of Dust and Water does not pretend that a better ledger would have fixed what happened at Fort Qu’Appelle, or what happened to the widow on Madina’s grazing line. What it shows is a village that learned to read its agreements aloud before signing them, to put its corrections on the wall with a name attached, and to leave a gap for the name it did not yet know. If King is right that stories are all we are, then the novel’s suggestion is that we should be careful about who gets to start them, and about who is still missing from the page.

Introduction

My city takes its drinking water out of Lake Superior, and most people in Thunder Bay never think about it. A few hundred kilometres north of us, the people of Neskantaga First Nation have had to think about almost nothing else since 1995, when their boil-water advisory began (TBnewswatch, 2023). In the fall of 2020, after an oily sheen was found in the community’s reservoir, about 250 residents were evacuated and spent weeks at the Victoria Inn here in Thunder Bay (The Canadian Press, 2020). I was in Grade 6. I remember adults talking about it as if it were a plumbing problem. The research I did for this course convinced me it is a question about power: who owns a community’s water, who decides how it is managed, and who gets blamed when it fails.

M.J. Hydara’s novel Songs of Dust and Water (2026) is set in two fictional West African countries, but it asks exactly this question. In Part One, a foreign fund builds a solar water plant in the village of Madina that the villagers are not allowed to touch, and it is captured by a corrupt ministry and burns. In Part Two, ten years later, the village of Nafawol gets a water harvester on very different terms: the village owns it, holds the key and sees the numbers every week. At the centre of Part Two is Kadiatou, the “Yaara-Jaxo, the Water-Keeper” of Nafawol (Hydara, 2026, p. 85). In this essay I compare her role with the long-term drinking water advisories on First Nations reserves in Canada and with the work of the Anishinaabe water walker Josephine Mandamin, who lived in Thunder Bay. I argue that the novel’s answer to water insecurity is governance before technology: water is secure when the community that drinks it owns the system, can stop it, keeps honest public records of how it is really performing, and accepts the costs of that control.

Water That Nobody Is Responsible For

Both parts of the novel begin with water that is failing slowly while outside authorities look elsewhere. In Madina, the new plant’s water was for irrigation; as the narrator says, “The plant’s water was for the fields. The well had never been on the drawings” (Hydara, 2026, p. 22). After the fire, the engineer Aisha finds “a borehole two hours’ walk from Madina” and tells the minister, “The water’s good. Nobody is responsible for it” (p. 70). That sentence could describe a lot of water infrastructure on reserves in Canada. As I understand it, responsibility there has been split between the federal government, which funds the systems, and First Nations, which operate them, and Ontario’s own drinking water law does not apply on reserve land.

In Nafawol the situation is worse. “The well had been going bitter for six years before anyone from outside acted” (p. 81). The village’s leader, Alkalo Sankung, “had written to Port Walada about the well every year since it turned, and every answer had been short” (p. 88). Dr Arramata, the engineer who was born in the village, had measured the salt for eleven years and “published the figures twice,” and nothing happened, because “Nobody funds a study of a place nobody intends to visit” (p. 89). This felt very familiar to me. Neskantaga’s advisory had reached its twenty-eighth year by 2023 (TBnewswatch, 2023). The problem was well known and well documented. What was missing was someone outside the community who was answerable for it.

The contrast with Walkerton is useful here. In May 2000, contaminated water in Walkerton, Ontario, killed seven people and made more than 2,000 sick. The province held a public inquiry, and Justice Dennis O’Connor’s report (2002) led to Ontario’s Safe Drinking Water Act of 2002. The response took about two years. It shows that when a community’s water failure is treated as everyone’s responsibility, things change quickly. Hydara’s novel imagines what a community does when it cannot wait for that.

Who Keeps the Water: Kadiatou and Josephine Mandamin

Kadiatou’s title has “passed through the women of her line, an inheritance no one boasted of and no one refused” (Hydara, 2026, p. 85), and the women of her family marry within the village “so that the well would never be kept by a stranger” (p. 85). She is not an engineer. Her knowledge is in her hands: “The rope knows me” (p. 96), she thinks, when she first looks at the machine, and “This thing only hums” (p. 96). Her job also has a moral weight that the novel does not soften. Because there is no other water, she draws the bad water every morning and gives it to the children of the village, including her own granddaughter Mariam, who is sick from it. Her thought is blunt: “This water is slow poison, and I am the one who serves it” (p. 87).

Josephine Mandamin was an Anishinaabe grandmother from Wiikwemkoong Unceded Territory on Manitoulin Island who moved to Thunder Bay in 1979 and worked here for decades, including with Beendigen and the Ontario Native Women’s Association (City of Thunder Bay, n.d.). In 2003 she and other Anishinaabe women began the Mother Earth Water Walk, carrying a copper pail of water around Lake Superior. Over the following years she walked the shorelines of all five Great Lakes, more than 17,000 kilometres in total, before she died in February 2019 at the age of 77 (CBC News, 2019). In a 2016 interview she said, “As women, we are carriers of the water. We carry life for the people” (as cited in CBC News, 2019). In elementary school we read Joanne Robertson’s picture book The Water Walker (2017), which tells her story, and I remember being surprised that someone from my own city had walked that far.

I want to be careful with this comparison. Kadiatou is a fictional character in a fictional society, and the glossary at the back of the novel marks the Yaara-Jaxo as a fictional custom. The Mother Earth Water Walk comes from Anishinaabe ceremony and teaching, and I am not an expert on it. But the two women share an idea that I think matters for water policy. In both cases, the person who keeps the water is a woman whose authority comes from a long relationship and a responsibility handed down to her, rather than from a job description or a contract. Neither of them owns the water. They are answerable for it. Kadiatou even keeps drawing a bucket from the old well after the taps arrive, carrying the bitter water to her okra and tasting it every season, so that she is the first to know when it changes. In the tenth year, after the old river channel fills for the first time in decades, “the rope was a little heavier in her hands” (Hydara, 2026, p. 211), and she “stood with the rope in her hands and did not tell anyone” (p. 211). Mandamin walked to make people pay attention to water. Kadiatou watches it because nobody else will.

Ownership: The Committee’s Key

The most important difference between Madina and Nafawol is who holds the key. In Madina the engineer Adam Sterling promises that “Nobody in Madina will ever need to touch it” (p. 8) and refuses the blacksmith Malik’s repair of a broken bracket because it would void the warranty. Malik’s comment to his apprentice is the warning the whole first half proves right: “A thing you are not allowed to mend is not yours” (p. 16). When the energy minister seizes the plant, the village has no legal standing, and when it burns, the foreign engineer is blamed and the village is pushed aside.

In Nafawol, Kadiatou sees the danger before anything is built: “A well has no gate. Anyone with a rope may draw from it. A machine like that is kept behind a fence, and somebody holds the key” (p. 92). The agreement answers her. Its fifth clause gives the village committee a key to “The harvester, the borehole and the common account” (p. 100), with a second key held by Proxima for ten years and then handed back. When Kadiatou asks, “Who keeps the padlock?” Adam answers, “The committee” (p. 101). The key itself is small and ordinary. The elder Ousman says, “It’s lighter than a groundnut” (p. 101), and Fatou, the trader, puts it “in her purse, with her coins” (p. 101). The rule behind this comes from Proxima’s own board, which after Madina decided to fund only projects where the people living with the result “owned it, and could stop it” (p. 82). Adam repeats it in the village: “If Nafawol does not own what stands here, the money stops” (p. 91). When Proxima’s ten years end, Adam hands over the second key and Fatou says, “Ten years you kept a second key to our house… It was always ours. This is only the receipt” (p. 213).

In the novel, ownership also means that the people of the village can run and repair the system. Nafawol builds an academy because Dr Arramata warns that the mill “runs on two people” (p. 147), and students like Bintu and Hassan learn to fix the equipment themselves. This connects to a point that comes up again and again in Canadian discussions of the advisories: a new treatment plant does not end an advisory on its own if there is no trained, paid operator to run it. The government’s own tracker counts advisories lifted and advisories still in effect. As of September 10, 2026, it reported that 158 long-term advisories on public systems on reserves had been lifted since November 2015, with 38 still in effect in 36 communities (Indigenous Services Canada, 2026). That is real progress. But the commitment on the page is Ottawa’s commitment, measured by Ottawa. In the novel, the community holds the key and keeps the count.

Honest Numbers: Seventy Per Cent and the Friday Borehole

What surprised me most about Part Two is that the technology does not fully work, and the novel says so plainly. Dr Arramata calls the harvester “a bridge” (p. 102) and admits that if the old river channels do not recover, “we’ll have built a very expensive way to lose slowly” (p. 103). By the second dry season, the harvester “had settled at a little under seventy per cent of its design yield” (p. 125), worn down by salt in the dust. Her response is the most practical line in the book: “It will not get better… We stop asking it to. We plan around it” (p. 125).

Planning around it means two things. First, the borehole makes up the rest of the water, and Arramata treats that deep water as something borrowed from the future: “Every litre this makes is one we leave in the deep water” (p. 103). Second, the community watches the numbers in public. She puts the harvester’s output curve “in the square where anyone could see it,” and “every Friday Dr Arramata lowered a tape into the borehole and wrote the depth beside the curve” (p. 125). In the bad eighth year, “Every Friday the figure was lower” (p. 205), and the village rations water. Isatou, the head of the women’s group, sits between the taps with an exercise book and “ticked off each compound’s buckets” (p. 205). Even this is recorded openly: “A woman who came late got what was left in the pipe, and Isatou wrote that down too” (p. 205).

I think this is the novel’s best idea for real water governance. A boil-water advisory is a notice that tells people what they cannot do. The Friday number on the wall tells people what is happening to their own water and trusts them to act on it. The novel also shows long-term work that pays off slowly. Crews build knee-high stone lines across the dead river channels for seven dry seasons. When a boy asks why the grandfathers built such things if they never saw them pay, an old man answers, “For us,” and “set another stone” (p. 126). In Year 10 the water finally stands in the channel and soaks into the ground; Arramata says it must stand for eleven days, and “It stood for twelve” (p. 211). By Year 15 “the borehole’s line on the wall had stopped going down” (p. 225).

The Cost of Control

The novel does not pretend community control is free. In Year 7 a corporation, TransGlobal Agriculture, offers up to two billion dollars across the region and fifty thousand dollars per family, with a university and a hospital. Its representative, Evelyn Reed, uses the honest numbers against the village. She points out that the harvester has run at seventy per cent and that the borehole makes up the rest “from water your own scientist says belongs to your grandchildren” (p. 186). “With whose hand on the key,” Kadiatou says (p. 187), and Reed stops smiling. When the student Bintu finds that the contract would give TransGlobal the rights to the village’s future inventions “in perpetuity,” Fatou sums it up: “They are offering to buy the right to decide who gets it” (p. 196). TransGlobal removes that clause within two days, but Adam notices what remains, the company’s veto over large investments: “They have taken out the part that frightened people… They have left in the part that matters” (p. 197).

The representatives vote with black and white stones, and the offer is refused fourteen to ten. Then the novel shows the bill. A drop in crop prices at the coast leaves no surplus, the Teranu family leaves for the coast, Mariam loses a year of study, and in the hot season the borehole falls so far that the taps open for only four hours a day. Fatou tells Kadiatou, “Reed would have carried this year” (p. 205), and Kadiatou agrees. When old Jankero of Kumbawol dies, his son says of the hospital he had asked about, “It is as far as it was” (p. 206). Kadiatou never tells her granddaughter the vote was right: “It cost you a year… I will not tell you it was wrong either” (p. 204). One village, Kerewol, even sells its mill and leaves the Union, and “nobody had been able to tell Kerewol it was wrong” (p. 225).

I think this honesty is what makes the novel useful for thinking about Canada. Fast outside money can build things, and long delays cost lives, as the people of Neskantaga know. The novel does not say that refusing outside control is always right. It says that whoever holds the key also has to carry the bad years, and that a community can only make that choice if the numbers and the costs are in front of everyone.

Conclusion

At the end of the novel, Kadiatou is too old to draw the bucket alone, so her great-granddaughter Halima pulls the rope with her, “the fibres biting both their palms” (Hydara, 2026, p. 232), and the water comes up clear. The narrator says, “The well was kept now by a girl who did not yet know it was hers” (p. 232). That line made me think of Robertson’s picture book and of the kids in Thunder Bay who learn about Josephine Mandamin before they know anything about water policy. The novel’s harvester never did better than a little under seventy per cent, so its answer to water insecurity was never going to be a better machine. What it offers is the idea that the people who drink the water should hold the key, see the borehole depth every Friday, and be the ones who decide. For First Nations in Canada, much of that decision-making power still sits somewhere else. Songs of Dust and Water is fiction, but it gave me a clear way to ask who holds the key to the water in my own region, and who is still waiting for it.