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.”

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. 

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.

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.” 

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.”

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.