cîpay sakahikanak

August 13, 2026

Erasure and defacement concoct ghosts; I don’t want to haunt you, but I will.

– Eve Tuck and C. Ree

cîpay¹ sakahikanak ²

sakahikanak

You wouldn’t know it unless you were told, or unless you went and looked for yourself (in archives, in the way the land in the neighbourhood of McKernan dips into a bowl), but there used to be two sakahikanak, each 30 acres in size (that’s 22 football fields, or 264 basketball courts) that sat close to the south side of the kisikâciwani-sîpiy.³ They are gone now, just ghosts to be whispered about. I don’t want to start this by talking about their draining, but I suppose if I am speaking about cîpayak, their draining is a kind of beginning.

Before they were drained, they had names. After settlement, one lake was called McKernan’s Lake (with the possessive, as if the lake belonged to McKernan, though it never did), after Robert McKernan, an Irish settler who developed a lot of businesses in the area. The other lake was called Lendrum, after Robert Watt Lendrum, an Irish settler and land surveyor who bought the 320 acres of land within which the sakahikanak were located. Sometimes in historical records, Lendrum Lake is stripped of her name completely, amalgamated with her sister lake and referred to as simply “the McKernan lakes”. Sometimes she was referred to as Parkallen, though sometimes she isn’t mentioned at all, ignored in favour of her slightly bigger sister lake. Both these sakahikanak may have had other names prior to contact, names the nehiyawak⁴ would have given them as they travelled, perhaps resting at their shores. I don’t know those names, though. Most of the information readily available about these sakahikanak are in the City of Edmonton archives. But history, when told only by the settlers of a place, is always full of holes, gaps, empty sakahikanak where once was 30 acres of memory. This essay, then, is an attempt at water, at filling, if only to make some mud.

These sakahikanak were killed⁵ by the city, slowly and with purpose, over a number of decades. I had, at first, tried searching for an exact date, though I should have known better. That kind of violence takes time. The city started lowering the water as early as 1914, after a weeks-long heavy rainfall flooded the lake and its banks, where settlers had built their houses. In 1920, a small wooden pump station was built into the lake to redirect water into the sewage system. But the final draining—killing—happened between 1948-1950, and in the sakahikanak’s place, 150 houses were built. When speaking of The City as the perpetrator of these actions, it’s easy enough to simply imagine an amorphous entity, though it’s important to keep in mind there were people (swathes of them—councillors, workers in several departments) responsible for these decisions. The City, too, refers to its residents. From as early as 1914, settler residents petitioned the city to drain the sakahikanak, which they claimed was “a breeding place for mosquito’s and a very obnoxious odor arises in the warm weather.” This petition had pages and pages of signatures. In short, violence is made, quite literally, by a whole city.

I want to imagine the sakahikanak before the draining. My Elder, Dr. Jerry Saddleback, says that nehiyawak were traditionally ecospecialists. We had a deep and exacting understanding of the ecosystems of the prairies, which we travelled through and beyond during spring, summer, and fall. This kind of knowledge was necessary for our survival and our relationship with the land. Kisikâciwani-sîpiy has long been known as a gathering place, and pre-contact, the land around it was a dynamic landscape of muskeg, marsh, and prairies, sparse with aspen, poplar, birch, and spruce, sandwiched between the boreal forests to the north and the desert and coulees to the south. I imagine that nehiyawak had a similar relationship with the sakahikanak as they did with the kisikâciwani-sîpiy, which was a place of refuge, medicine harvesting, trade, and ceremony. The sister sakahikanak were connected by an artery, a waterway wide enough for a canoe,⁶ before the land was changed and made into farmland, and then lots for houses. A traditional nehiyaw canoe is made from birch to be about 15 ft long and as wide as a torso. I wonder how many torsos have travelled through this vein, from one sister to the other, before they were forced to stop.

This imaging—the pre-contact landscape, the relationships between the people and the water—is in stark contrast to what eventually transpired. The draining, yes, but also other, earlier removals: the city displaced⁷ the Papaschase Cree from the north side of kisikâciwani-sîpiy after the settlement of Fort Edmonton, and forced them onto a reserve on the south side where the sakahikanak were surveyed within the lands of their reserve.⁸ The reserve was then erased by the City of Strathcona (at the time, the sister city of Edmonton, before it was annexed by Edmonton in 1912) who wanted the land, further displacing the people who lived on the reserve and forcing them to join others. Most archival references to the Papaschase on the sakahikanak are short, fleeting, if existing at all. Often, they are mentioned by vague, opaque descriptions (the sound of drums, lake shores “rarely without some Indian teepees”).⁹ These, too, a kind of ghostly accounting, nothing tangible, just more gaps, a thin mist on a lake.

Another imagining: my nehiyaw ancestors in ceremony on the shores of kisikâciwani-sîpiy and the sister sakahikanak. Though this imagined history, too, is interrupted by a violent reality: it’s unlikely that my capanak¹⁰ on my mom’s side had been allowed to travel to amiskwaciwâskahikan¹¹ in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, as their movement was restricted by the Pass System (in place from the 1880s-1930s), the Indian Act, and the residential school system. This prolonged period of acute colonial violence, a large gap in time where my ancestors were forced into stagnation. My kokum¹² would spend time in Edmonton later in her life. She spent weeks at the Cross Cancer Institute as she underwent chemotherapy for lung cancer. My kokum did not survive her cancer and died at the young age of 62. The Cross is located next to the neighbourhood of McKernan. I don’t remember much about visiting her in the hospital, only the plants in the atrium that always looked too green to be real. If the sakahikanak were still there, I might have been able to see them if I looked out a south facing window.

I started this section with deaths (sakahikanak draining) and I finished it with death (my kokum’s), but what I really want to know is: Did the sakahikanak still know her, despite the gaps in history that prevented my family’s presence for so long? Did they feel her footsteps when she stepped out of the Cross? Did they hear her great belly laugh?

McKernan

Robert McKernan immigrated from Ireland to Ontario, and from there to Alberta. Robert and his wife, Sara, built a farmhouse by the sister sakahikanak (which would eventually be renamed after him) in 1879, twelve years after Canada became a country. Robert and Sara left Ireland during the time of An Gorta Mór,¹³ as just two of the two million refugees who had to flee Ireland during the mass starvation and disease engineered by the British. Robert was Protestant and organized the Orangemen Glorious Twelfth parades in Edmonton as the master of the Lodge of The Loyal Orange Institution, commonly known as the Orange Order. In Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland, Patrick Radden Keefe notes that the Orange Order is a “Protestant fraternal organization that had long defined itself in opposition to the Catholic populations… who were ardent in their loyalty to the British crown.”¹⁴ Robert built The Orange Hall in 1903, which still stands in Edmonton to this day, where it is considered a historic building—a place where Orange Order meetings were held and served as the point of departure for the largest Orange parade on record in Alberta.

Here, another gap, another obfuscation of truth: The Orange Order was a racist and discriminatory organization. In Edmonton, members of the Klu Klux Klan found support among Orangemen, as their members already rallied against Roman Catholics and the French, groups also targeted by the KKK. In 1930, J.J. Maloney became the leader of the local KKK group in Edmonton, and his pro-Protestant campaign, which was virulently anti-Catholic and anti-French, was supported by the Loyal Orange Order. Maloney also apparently pulled strings with the provincial government to get the Klan recognized as an incorporated society; his efforts found success in 1932, making Alberta the only jurisdiction in the British Empire to give the Klan this official recognition.¹⁵

In every historical account I’ve read of Robert, his leadership within the Orange Order is always cited as a success, listed alongside his other “accomplishments,” such as his businesses—the Dominion Hotel, and the Princess Theatre, which he opened with his son in 1914. What’s missing is the historical background that problematizes the existence of the Orange Order.

The history of Catholic and Protestant tension is centuries old and runs deep. Patrick Radden Keefe notes that “Northern Ireland was home to a million Protestants and half a million Catholics, and it was true that the Catholics faced extraordinary discrimination: often excluded from good jobs and housing, they were also denied the kind of political power that might enable them to better their conditions.”¹⁶ Because nationalism seldom stays where it was born, this discrimination carried over to Edmonton (J.J. Maloney had a blacklist that included Catholics whom he wanted put out of business or stripped of their power). And though Canada’s history with Catholicism should perhaps lead me to have less sympathy for Catholics (many residential schools were run by the Catholic church), that’s not the case. The residential school system, like many organizations and institutions founded on violence, was always the product and genocidal imagining of the Canadian state, by colonization enacted by the British—an experience that Irish-Catholics, ironically, also understand.

Regardless of religious (or, in my view, nationalist) identity, it was a series of violences— starvation, genocide, oppression—that brought Robert McKernan from Ireland to Canada, lands that both held a history of British violence and settlement. Violence begets violence begets violence.

Mitsoh¹⁷

Dolours and Marian Price were sisters, born in Northern Ireland to Irish-Catholic parents, who joined the IRA and became a part of a group called The Unknowns. They were tasked with high-level and top-secret activities, including disappearing informers. The sisters were a part of a car bombing attack in London in 1973, known as the Old Bailey bombing, which injured over 200 people. Once imprisoned in London, the sisters went on a hunger strike to demand that they be moved to a women’s prison in Northern Ireland, back on their homeland.

After forty-three days of hunger striking and near death, the Price sisters were force fed by British prison authorities. Force feeding was a process of holding the women’s mouths open with callipers,¹⁸ then forcing a tube down their throats and into their stomachs, where they were administered just enough liquid nutrients to keep them alive. Prison authorities, under the order of Margaret Thatcher, did this for 165 days. Dolours and Marian almost choked and died multiple times, and they finally forced this process to stop by physically resisting with so much disruption that the process became impossible. Later, the International Medical Council ruled the practice of force feeding hunger strikers unethical.

In the end, the hunger strike worked. The sisters were transferred to a women’s prison in Northern Ireland, where Marian was freed in 1980 and Dolours the year after, both on humanitarian grounds. Dolours developed an eating disorder that lasted the rest of her life. She died in 2013, as a result of a toxic interaction between sedatives and anti-depressants.

Before the sister sakahikanak were emptied, people built houses around them. A trolley led from the city through muskeg and forest to the sakahikanak, where residents held picnics in the summer and ice skating in the winter. There were no streetlights, and nothing to light the way in the dark except porchlight, so sometimes the trolley crashed into the bush. Even when it was daytime, the trolley often fell off the tracks, which had moved apart, or been swallowed by the ground (muskeg is a type of acidic peatland with waterlogged and shifting soil. You don’t have to be an ecospecialist to know this).¹⁹

The city started losing money off the street car and wanted to shut it down. The repairs were costly, and the sakahikanak just kept eating. As Matthew James Weigel says in Whitemud Walking, “there is nothing the train hates more than derailment.”²⁰ And, if I were one of the sakahikanak, there would be no revenge I’d love more than sucking tracks into the ground, moving them to odd and unmanageable angles, or disappearing them entirely. If I could ask the sakahikanak one more question it would be: What does a railroad spike taste like?

I don’t want to suggest that the mere existence of humans pissed the sakahikanak off. As I’ve mentioned, nehiyawak and other Indigenous peoples visited their shores for thousands of years prior to settlement, though we never built homes intended to be permanent fixtures there. But as Quill Christie-Peters notes in On Wholeness: Anishinaabe Pathways to Embodiment and Collective Liberation, “the minutiae of colonial architecture are relentless with compartmentalization. Importantly, settler colonialism must not only remove us from our relationality but also hold us in place.” It was the compartmentalization of city boundaries and land divided by railroads that allowed certain people (settlers) access to the sakahikanak while removing others (native people) that, I imagine, ultimately led the sakahikanak to eat and eat and eat. Even before they were drained, they were sending clear messages (flooding, derailing trains) to the settlers building houses, to the trains running across their banks, to the people visiting their shores. If I were to interpret those messages, they would simply say: awas.²¹

Other writers have also referred to the sakahikanak as ghosts,²² though when I think of ghosts, I prefer to understand them as Eve Tuck and C. Ree describe them in their essay “A Glossary of Haunting”: those killed by systems of colonial violence who refuse to stay dead, who appear again to haunt those that have wounded them. “Haunting,” they write, “is the relentless remembering and reminding that will not be appeased by settler society’s assurances of innocence and reconciliation”. Ghosts are there to remind wrongdoers of the violence perpetuated against them, not for hope of reconciliation, but with the knowledge that justice lies simply in their refusal to stop.²³ After the 1914 flooding, the sakahikanak flooded again in 1953, 2004, and 2012, damaging houses and property. Refusing to stop.²⁴

What I tell you here is not intended to be poetic or beautiful. When I say the land has agency, when I say she does things with purpose—eats a railroad spike or two, grows and floods—I mean that. When I say she remembers, I mean that too. I make the connection between the Price sisters (who, upon being freed from prison, remained politically active) because bodies are of the land too. Women, in particular, hold a history of violence, by people and institutions, especially medical, in which consent to their bodies are often not considered. The sakahikanak didn’t consent to what was done to them, either. I have fasted in ceremony every summer for four years out on the land on or near amiskwaciwaskahikan. Fasting—not eating or drinking water for four days—is a decision I make every time I do it. It is hard on the body and on the mind, but it is a ceremony that brings me closer to Creator, though I won’t say more than that (I do not want to be devoured). What I will say is that every fast is completed with a pipe ceremony and feast. The Elder leading the pipe ceremony signals the end of our fast by one command: Mitsoh. All these memories live here—on the land, in our bodies. In this way, I am a living ghost. This is not meant to be poetic or beautiful, either. It is a threat. I am here to haunt you.

Jessica Johns is a queer nehiyaw aunty and a member of Sucker Creek First Nation. Her debut novel, Bad Cree, was a Canada Reads finalist, and won the WGA Fiction Prize, Alex Award, and MacEwan Book of the Year Prize.

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Footnotes:

1
Ghost ↩︎
2
Lakes ↩︎
3
North Saskatchewan River. ↩︎
4
Cree people. ↩︎
5
The actual process of the lakes’ draining—how it happened and by what method—was difficult to discern, though I did find an article by Katherine Koller who noted that “The water was diverted from the lake bed through a series of irrigation ditches to the University Farm.” ↩︎
6
“McKernan’s Lost Lake” by Katherine Koller. ↩︎
7
The most glaring gaps of truth I observed in my research involved the consistent employment of language that suggests the Papaschase were a consenting party to removal, as evidenced in Koller’s article that states that “by 1885 the Papaschase band moved southward again”. I want to bury the use of the word “moved,” here, in this footnote, as it suggests that the Papaschase had a choice and were not forcibly displaced. ↩︎
8
In Whitemud Walking, Matthew James Weigel employs language that chisels the truth into a bright, shiny point, such as when he states that the Papaschase reserve was extinguished through fraud, and that settlers of the city of Strathcona were squatters. This book is the record of Edmonton history I hope is always found in the archives. ↩︎
9
This quote is found in Koller’s article and is attributed to a MacGregor, though I didn’t bother to look up this text myself. I feel as though I got the gist. ↩︎
10
Great grandparents. ↩︎
11
Beaver Hills House. ↩︎
12
Grandma. ↩︎
13
“The Bad Life”; “Famine,” “Potato Famine,” or “Great Hunger” are also used. ↩︎
14
Page 20-21. ↩︎
15
Old Strathcona Before the Great Depression by Tom Monto. ↩︎
16
Page 18. ↩︎
17
Eat! ↩︎
18
A metal tool used predominantly in metalwork or carpentry to measure the linear dimensions of an object or hole and consists of two metal legs hinged together. These legs are referred to as jaws. ↩︎
19
When I was maybe seven years old, I lived in Rainbow Lake, a small town in northern Alberta, in a house surrounded by muskeg and woods. My siblings and I would spend all day in the trees. One time, we came across a small pond with so much algae floating on top it looked like you could walk on it. But we’d grown up on the prairies, so even at our young ages we knew better than to touch it; we knew from experience the vice grip a sucking swamp can have on a limb. I don’t remember who saw it first—the pair of pants, shoes, and shirt crumpled next to the water—all I remember is starting to panic, imagining a person who, thinking they could swim, had jumped and gotten sucked in. It was my sister that told me something I’d never forget: Muskegs are acidic. Bodies, when buried or sucked into them, stay perfectly preserved. It shouldn’t have made me feel better—the person would still be dead, after all. But it did. ↩︎
20
Page 138. ↩︎
21
Fuck off! ↩︎
22
Katherine Koller refers to the lake as a “ghost” in that its shape is discernable on early maps. ↩︎
23
Page 642. ↩︎
24
As I edit this piece in August 2026, Edmonton has had its wettest summer on record. Many parts of the city have flooded, including large stretches of Groat Road. This road used to be a creek that flowed into the North Saskatchewan River before the city, in the 1900s, culverted the creek below ground in order to build on top of it. Videos have gone viral of cars getting swallowed by the flooding water. ↩︎