People & Culture

A prayer not a protest

The South Saskatchewan River is under unprecedented pressure. Now, a major irrigation project is set to expand.

Elder Marjorie Beaucage praying for the South Saskatchewan River.
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The South Saskatchewan River is beautiful. That’s the first thing you need to know about her. From my vantage point on her east bank near my home in Saskatoon, I watch her slide silently past, her surface mirroring the trees along the far shoreline and the fairytale outline of the Bessborough Hotel. Somewhere upstream, geese are bleating loudly. Vehicles on the bridges purr back and forth, producing a sibilant hush. There are no sirens, no flashing lights, no obvious signs that this river is at risk.

I think of the epic journey the river has made to get here and where she is heading next. This is pure mountain water, sourced from cascading rivulets high up on the eastern slopes of the Rockies before being then channelled across the drylands of Alberta through the gradually converging watersheds of the Bow, Oldman and Red Deer rivers — the three major tributaries that then come together to form the South Saskatchewan.

By the time their combined waters reach me, the river has begun to bend northward, heading for the Forks, east of Prince Albert, Sask., where she merges with the North Saskatchewan River for the journey onward, via Lake Winnipeg and the Nelson River, into Hudson Bay. From alpine cirque to subarctic coast, the water travels almost halfway across the continent, making her one of the largest freshwater systems in Canada and the world. Where I stand, in the drought-prone heartland of the Prairies, the South Saskatchewan River is the only reliable source of water for myriad uses, from farming to industry.

And there is another, more intimate, way of tracking where the South Saskatchewan flows. Taken as a whole, this river system provides drinking water to more than three million people, including the residents of Calgary, Red Deer, Lethbridge and Medicine Hat in Alberta and Moose Jaw, Regina and Saskatoon in Saskatchewan. Many of us feel her pulse surging through our veins. If this river is in trouble, we are too.

A view of the river looking downstream south of Prince Albert, Sask.
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What is a river? That is a question to which filmmaker, author and Métis Elder Marjorie Beaucage has given a lot of thought. Now 77, Beaucage grew up in southeastern Manitoba, raised by the land, but has lived for many years in the town of Duck Lake, Sask., more or less midway between the north and south branches of the Saskatchewan River. For her, a river is not just a geographical phenomenon, much less a commodity or a natural resource. Instead, she experiences water as a presence, a gift from Creator, a relative. “All the tides of life and all of the waters are governed by Grandmother Moon,” she explains in an online forum called Our river, kisîpînaw, noo rivyer. “Our tears, our blood, the rivers, the oceans, the rains … It is our responsibility to take care of the waters of life, all of us, but women especially, because we are life givers. That is a sacred gift and a trust that we have.”

Map: Chris Brackley/Can Geo; Data credits: Effective Drainage Area of the AAFC Watersheds Project - 2013: Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada; Dams: Global Reservoir and Dam Database (Grand), 2011; Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment 9 (9): 494-502
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As a mark of love and respect, Beaucage uses the personal pronouns “she” and “her” to refer to water, a practice that she teaches by example.

So no wonder Beaucage was alarmed when, back in 2016, a pipeline operated by Husky Oil leaked 225,000 litres of heavy crude oil into the land and ultimately the waters of the North Saskatchewan River not far from her home. Communities along the river scrambled to find alternate sources of drinking water until cleanup crews could remove enough of the oil and its diluting agents from the water. First Nations communities that live on the contaminated stretch of river, which spanned hundreds of kilometres, said irreparable damage had been done to their hunting grounds, homelands and the surrounding wildlife. Husky Energy was charged under the Fisheries Act and the Migratory Birds Convention Act and fined $3.8 million. Even now, Beaucage keeps a bottle of water from the oil spill on an offering table in her dining room. “It is always there in my mind,” she says. “I pray for her every day.”

Four years later, in 2020, Beaucage’s alarm bells rang again when the Government of Saskatchewan announced a plan, then pegged at a cost of $4 billion, to more than double the area of irrigated land in the province by extracting an additional 600 million cubic metres of water from the South Saskatchewan River each year — almost half again as much as the 1.275 billion cubic metres already being allocated. 

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“A river is the lifeblood of Mother Earth,” says Beaucage, a beat of urgency in her voice, “and Mother Earth is suffering a lot right now — a lot — with the droughts and the floods and the fires and all the harm that we’ve caused her. How is it that we are treating water like an unlimited resource? The river is…” She breaks off in frustration. “I get overwhelmed sometimes when I think about the way we use her and exploit her without thinking about the consequences of our actions.”

This is why Beaucage has recently become a Water Walker. She is inspired by the late Josephine Mandamin-baa, known as Grandmother Water Walker, a world-renowned water activist and water protector

from Wiikwemkoong First Nation on Manitoulin Island, Ont., who, from 2003 to 2017, was the first to lead ceremonial walks to bring awareness to water pollution in the Great Lakes and on Indigenous reserves. Before adopting Mandamin’s ceremony, Beaucage first sought guidance from the Midewiwin Lodge, the traditional spiritual society to which Mandamin belonged. Then, with encouragement from the Unitarian congregation in Saskatoon, she and a group of supporters set out in the summer of 2021 to walk the length of the North Saskatchewan River, from the headwaters in the Columbia Icefields to the Forks. Over the following two summers, Beaucage and her companions turned their attention to the South Saskatchewan, tracing her 1,392-kilometre length, step by prayerful step.

“The Water Walk is a ceremony, not a protest,” Beaucage explains. “Every step is a prayer, for the water. That is the purpose of the Water Walk — to heal our river.” 

Lake Diefenbaker at Elbow, Sask.
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In recent years, a number of rivers around the world — including the Ganges and Yamuna in India and the Te Awa Tupua, or Whanganui, in New Zealand — have been granted legal “personhood.” To date, the only Canadian river to receive this level of recognition is Mutehekau Shipu, or the Magpie River, in northeastern Quebec. In 2021 (coincidentally just about the time that Beaucage began to plan her ceremonial walk), the Innu Council of Ekuanitshit and the Minganie Regional County Municipality jointly endowed the sacred Mutehekau Shipu with nine rights, including the right to flow, maintain its natural rhythms, support biodiversity and, with the assistance of human caregivers, seek redress for damage in court.

The South Saskatchewan River has none of these protections. Instead, from the earliest days of colonization onward, her water has been put to work, supporting development in parts of the Prairies that would otherwise be scarily unsuitable for agriculture. Today, more than 90 per cent of all extractions from the South Saskatchewan system are for irrigation. From the late 19th century onward, withdrawals of water — amounting in some years to up to half of the river’s natural flow — have allowed the sun-scorched plains of southern  Alberta to produce a diversity of crops, from alfalfa to sugar beets, and to develop lucrative agribusiness spinoffs like feedlots and Frito Lay factories. One recent study puts the contribution of irrigation to the Alberta economy at $5.4 billion a year. 

“Rivers are given to us to take care of. Nobody owns the river. The river owns herself.” 

By comparison with its western neighbour, Saskatchewan got off to a slow start with irrigation and has never managed to catch up. It certainly hasn’t been for lack of effort. Interest in irrigation expansion in this province intensified in the 1940s, in the aftermath of the disastrous 1930s drought. Dust and despair blew through the soul of the province — two-thirds of the rural population were forced to accept government relief — and all eyes turned to the river for help.

Thus was born the South Saskatchewan River Project, an audacious plan proposed in the early 1950s to stabilize the province’s economy by impounding the river behind two dams, a small one to regulate the outflow into the Qu’Appelle River system to the south and a massive earth-filled wall — at that time, the largest in the world — to obstruct the main channel, 100 kilometres downstream from Saskatoon. The primary goal was to capture water for irrigation, with hydropower, flood control, recreation and municipal water supply as supplementary gains.

A royal commission by the federal government studied the project’s proposal and recommended against it, arguing that the benefits did not justify the strain on the public purse — around $1 billion in today’s money. But when Saskatchewan’s own Conservative party leader John Diefenbaker won the federal election in 1957, the newly minted prime minister overturned the calculations, and the project launched the following year. The dams were completed in 1967, and the 225-kilometre-long reservoir, dubbed Lake Diefenbaker, filled to the brim three years later. Under the water lay the fragments of paskwâwi-môstos-awâsis asiniy, Buffalo Child Stone, a monumental boulder sacred to the nêhiyawak (Plains Cree) and other Indigenous nations. It had been blown up, ostensibly to provide safe passage for pleasure boats. 

And yet, the heady promise of this effort has never been fulfilled. The infrastructure was designed to irrigate more than 200,000 hectares, or 500,000 acres, of farmland in the region around Lake Diefenbaker, thereby (or so proponents said) freeing farmers from reliance on uncertain rainfall and securing the economic future of their land. But according to the latest tally from the Saskatchewan Irrigation Projects Association, a group that speaks for pro-irrigation farmers, less than a quarter of the target acreage, around 47,000 hectares, or 115,000 acres, has been serviced since the project opened for business almost 60 years ago.

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Explanations for this disappointing outcome vary, with some blaming a lack of resolve by succeeding governments and others pointing to the significant start-up costs for farmers who want to get into the game. (The total price tag for irrigation, on and off the farm, averages $12,400 per acre; a single pivot in a pivot irrigation system, a type of mechanized irrigation machine, costs $150,000.) Meanwhile, the dream of transforming the economy of Saskatchewan by banishing the spectre of drought has been literally vanishing into thin air — lost to evaporation from the waves of Lake Diefenbaker — or allowed to slip away, water over the dam, on its long journey to Hudson Bay.

In the vernacular of the province, Saskatchewan’s renewed call to irrigate the missing acres is an attempt to finally get ’er done. After all, the province is “the breadbasket of Canada,” home to more than two-fifths of the country’s cropland and one of the world’s leading producers of oilseeds, pulses and cereal grains. What could be more important than securing this basic industry?

“This is what the dam was built for,” explains Jillian Brown, executive director of the Saskatchewan Irrigation Projects Association. “Look, water is fundamental to life, so the idea of additional use is concerning to every person. But we have to recognize that agriculture is a fundamental part of our existence and our livelihoods in Saskatchewan, and we need to coexist in a space where we are respecting our natural resources and using them sustainably. I firmly believe that is possible.” 

Beaucage is a Water Walker, and has walked along the South Saskatchewan River in ceremony since 2022.
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One Sunday morning last August, a friend and I left Saskatoon well before sunrise and made the 45- minute drive to Duck Lake in the almost-dark. Despite the hour, a small group of women were already stirring around Beaucage’s house, preparing for that day’s continuation of the Water Walk. Anxious as she was to get going — the forecast called for another day of 30-plus-degree heat — Beaucage took a moment to sit us down and provide a few basic instructions.

One person to carry the eagle staff. The other to carry a small amount of South Saskatchewan River water in a copper pail. When it is your turn to carry, be sure to keep your feet moving. “It is all for the water,” she reminds us, “to keep her flowing. For the children and the children’s children so there will be water for them.” The river needs us, Beaucage says. The river is not well.

As the day unfolds, we pick up the rhythm of the ceremony. At midday, we stop on the side of the road for lunch and conversation. The weather has been sizzling like this all summer, Beaucage says. “And we have not been rained on even once — like a few thunderstorms at night because the weather got too hot, so after we are back in camp. But I never got wet this summer on the Water Walk.” (Globally, July through September of 2023 were the hottest months on record. In a post on the social media platform X, Zeke Hausfather, a scientist with Berkeley Earth, a non-profit that provides climate data, described this jump in global average temperatures as “absolutely gobsmackingly bananas.”) It wasn’t just the weather that caused Beaucage concern; it was the state of the river herself. Even though Beaucage had set out expecting trouble, she hadn’t thought things would look this bad. “We could have walked across the river at Outlook [just downstream from the dam],” she laments. “The floor of the river was bare. People were building inukshuks in the middle of the river on sandbars.”

She recalls a presentation she gave a few weeks earlier about water and treaty rights. “I told them ‘As long the sun shines,’” she says, “and that day it was all smoke from the forest fires. ‘As long as the grass is green’ — all brown because of the drought. ‘As long as the water flows’ — and there was hardly any water in the river all summer long.”

For Beaucage, Saskatchewan’s irrigation expansion proposal extends the violations of colonialism. “That’s the mind of the settler,” she says. “They worked hard for it, and it’s theirs. No. Rivers are given to us to take care of. Nobody owns the river. The river owns herself.”

Jillian Brown near an irrigation canal in Outlook, Sask.
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Beaucage wasn’t the only person who was worried about the South Saskatchewan last year. John Pomeroy is, among other things, the Canada Research Chair in water resources and climate change and director of the Global Water Futures research program at the University of Saskatchewan. He is also an internationally respected expert on cold-region rivers, with a special focus on the South Saskatchewan.

In 40 years of studies, he and his colleagues have observed the impacts of dams on the river’s character, watching her transform from a tepid, braided, silt-laden stream with her own distinctive species and seasonal rhythms into a cool, clear, regulated flow with a radically altered community of insects and other lifeforms. The impact of these changes has been especially profound on the biologically rich Saskatchewan River Delta, hundreds of kilometres downstream, which is slowly dying because of changes caused by Lake Diefenbaker and other impoundments. Deprived of water, lacking restorative spring flooding and starved for sediments that replenish the ecosystem with nutrients, the delta can no longer support the once thriving populations of muskrat, moose and other creatures that have sustained local Indigenous communities for generations. One study published in 2019 in the International Journal of Water Resources and Development, which considered data from both instrumental measurement and Indigenous knowledge, found that populations of all wildlife species in the delta and some fish species have declined since the dams were built in the 1960s. 

As Pomeroy sees it, this tragedy is a predictable result of the piecemeal way the river is managed. The allocation of flows across provincial borders is governed by the Master Agreement on Apportionment, which has been in force since 1969. A rare demonstration of the “peace, order and good government” promised by the British North America Act, the agreement is managed by the Prairie Provinces Water Board, which brings together experts from the federal government and its provincial partners. 

John Pomeroy in his lab in Saskatoon.
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The water board is tasked with ensuring that Alberta passes on a minimum of 50 per cent of the “natural flow” of the river to its neighbour to the east. Saskatchewan, in turn, must provide Manitoba with half of the water it receives from Alberta, plus half of the small flow that is added as the river crosses the plains. Within its own borders, each province is free to allocate water as it chooses. But even with these guardrails in place, Pomeroy’s data shows that — despite willing compliance with the apportionment agreement — flows coming into Lake Diefenbaker today are 40 per cent below the long-term historical average, a decline attributable to human water use compounded by the effects of a warming climate. Saskatchewan’s own withdrawals leave the river’s flow even more depleted.

No one, not even world-ranked experts, knows for certain what the future holds for the flow of the South Saskatchewan. As Pomeroy and his collaborators in the Changing Cold Regions Network explained in a recent paper, “the past is no longer a reliable guide to the future and system trajectories can be unexpected.”

But this uncertainty has not prevented the research consortium from hazarding a long-range forecast. By combining years of monitoring data with sophisticated modelling, they have concluded that as winters warm, snowpacks in valley bottoms dwindle and glaciers vanish, the contribution of meltwater to the South Saskatchewan River will decrease faster than it has already over the past century. But surprise: the models also suggest these losses will be more than made up for by an increase in summer rains, with the result that the overall volume of the river can be expected to increase by as much as 40 per cent. This is a heartening prospect and music to the ears of proponents of the Saskatchewan irrigation expansion project.

“So that’s all fine, but then last year happened,” Pomeroy says, referring to the winter of 2022-23. “We ended up with a year that, in the mountains, looked a lot like what the predictions show for the end of the century, except the extra rainfall didn’t materialize.”

Without the normal early-summer flush of snowmelt and with heavy withdrawals for irrigation, Lake Diefenbaker did not fill up. “Water levels were metres below normal,” Pomeroy says, “and that put us in a very bad situation.” In response to this challenge, the amount of water released from the dam was reduced to a trickle, just enough to meet minimum standards and satisfy Saskatoon’s municipal needs. Meanwhile, downstream in the delta, months of low flows and dwindling reserves forced the Village of Cumberland House to declare a drinking water emergency.

Pomeroy and his colleagues view this kind of precarity as the dark side of what the future holds, with highs and lows that vacillate beyond anything we’ve ever experienced. “How’s that going to play out in how we manage and use the river?” Pomeroy asks, a question that even he cannot answer.

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By late January, the situation was looking bleak. After months of freakishly warm weather and meager snowfall, the province of Alberta had found it necessary to issue 51 “water-shortage advisories” and to mobilize its Drought Command Team for the first time in more than 20 years. The team’s mission was to negotiate water-sharing agreements for the drought-stricken Bow, Red Deer and Oldman rivers.

Six weeks later and several hundred kilometres downstream, Saskatchewan Premier Scott Moe announced the launch of Phase 1 of the Lake Diefenbaker irrigation expansion project, a remediation and extension of existing infrastructure that will extract water to irrigate 32,375 hectares, or 80,000 acres, of farmland. Construction is set to begin in 2025 at an estimated cost of $1.15 billion (more than twice the initial estimate for Phase 1). The future of the remaining two phases, intended to service an additional 380,000 acres, remains unclear.

Meanwhile, the Federation of Sovereign Indigenous Nations, which speaks for the province’s 74 First Nations, has issued a call for a comprehensive environmental review of the entire project under the federal Impact Assessment Act, a process for assessing the impacts of major projects and projects carried out on federal lands. This request, amplified by several other Indigenous and environmental organizations, sits in limbo, not least because parts of the act have been deemed unconstitutional by the Supreme Court of Canada.

As for Marjorie Beaucage, she knows exactly what her next steps will be. Later this summer — probably in August “when the bears have eaten their fill of berries” — she and a small group of seasoned Water Walkers will gather at the Saskatchewan River Forks to raise the pipe and pick up their journey where they left off last year. The walkers will set out along the Saskatchewan Tote Road, Highway 55, following the eastward course of the river. “It is all for the water, to keep her flowing,” they will remind themselves. “Every step, a prayer for the river.”

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