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The reserve’s dirt roads were winding and had no road signs. The houses were small and weather-worn. “Shoal Lake is my home,” said Preston Redsky, part of a crew tearing down the old band council office, which had been condemned because its floors were sagging. “I don’t want to live in any other place in the world.”

On the spectrum of injustices imposed on Indigenous communities in Canada, Shoal Lake No. 40 was a particularly vivid and tragic example of a broken colonial relationship that had yet to be mended. Winnipeg’s clean drinking water — the same water that activists said was threatened by Energy East — was drawn from Shoal Lake, and the engineering that made that possible had also doomed the reserve to live under a boil-water order that would soon enter its third decade.

A century ago, Winnipeg needed a modern water supply, so it built an aqueduct from the edge of Shoal Lake to the city, a distance of more than 135 kilometres. The city also built a dike to divert murkier water entering the lake away from the aqueduct intake; this sent it toward the reserve. “The majority of the natural spring water is taken out,” said Daryl Redsky, the band’s consultation officer. “But at the same time it’s getting mixed up with the water that’s being drawn in from Lake of the Woods.” When cryptosporidium was detected in Shoal Lake in 1997, the city began treating its water, but the reserve couldn’t afford to build a treatment plant of its own: the lack of road access made the project too expensive. “Until about 15 or 20 years ago, you could walk down the hill from here, stick your head in the lake, and drink right out of the water,” Redsky said. “That’s how clean and fresh it was. That doesn’t happen anymore. You go down there, you’ll get sick.” Children were getting rashes when they took showers and baths, he added.