Review of This Was Our Valley by Shirlee Smith Matheson and Earl K. Pollon

Book review
BC Studies
2020

The 2019 edition of This Was Our Valley by Shirlee Smith Matheson and Earl K. Pollon continues a longstanding conversation about the impacts of large dams in northern British Columbia. This story, told in three acts, renders a detailed account of life along the Peace River in the vicinity of Hudson’s Hope over the past one hundred years. Whereas much of the recent writing on this subject has focused on the social and political turbulence surrounding the construction of the Site C Dam (Sarah Cox’s excellent Breaching the Peace comes to mind), the reissue of This Was Our Valley begins at a time when hydropower on the Peace was a distant fantasy. This long historical view of life along the Peace (that is, settler colonial life) captures the breathless transformation of the river from a place of trappers and gold-panners to a fully infrastructuralized landscape within the short span of a mere half-century.