In the River: A Socio-Historical Account of Dialogue and Diaspora

Abstract

I give encouragement to David Nickell and the Between the Rivers community by offering an account of good relations between a government natural resource land management agency and local people: Canada's St. Lawrence Islands National Park and the people of the Thousand Islands, focusing on Grenadier Island. I speak from my perspective as a descendent of the former year-round community on Grenadier. I describe our diaspora, our heated disagreement with the St. Lawrence Islands National Park's 1970s expansion plans, and how the local community successfully engaged a dialogue that ended these plans. I recount what I term the double politics of dialogue, a “good-cop/bad-cop” approach used by the community, and its resulting providence of good relations. I conclude with the prospect of such providence for the people of Between the Rivers.

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“…8 The constructive resistance framework posits that these types of activities can be usefully analyzed according to their ratio of how much resistance (operationalized as visibility or the repressiveness of the response provoked) versus construction (operationalized as consequences or scale of social change achieved) is involved (Sørensen 2016:59). In this sense, it is related to schemas that classify strategies and tactics according to the extent to which they are disruptive versus non-disruptive (Rojas 2007), orderly versus violent (Tarrow 1995), or based on conflict versus consensus (Bell 2007).…”

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