“Niagara as Technology”: Rupturing the Technological for the Wordy Ecologies of Niagara Falls

Abstract

My research-creation examines how colonial language and words inspire the logic behind resource extraction, appropriation, and exploitation. Through found poetry—a creative and analytical process of using different (“found”) sources and various methods to critique and view the world—I create a collection of poems responding to Daniel Macfarlane’s Fixing Niagara Falls: Environment, Energy, and Engineers at the World’s Most Famous Waterfall (2020). Macfarlane claims that the “result” of Niagara Falls is a “compromise between scenic beauty and electricity generation” (208). However, I argue that Niagara Falls is not a “compromised” space but a hub of ecosystems coming into being. My poetic techniques emphasize the arbitrariness of colonial practices that classify beings as successful, political, and economic gains or progress. As such, I use various found methods to think with water and Indigenous modes of healing with Niagara Falls. By redacting, cutting, and layering the found words, I create an ethos of confusion, apprehension, unease, and responsibility in order to call into question the colonial logic that defines how settlers position themselves on Indigenous lands and in order to offer the possibility to listen otherwise.