Ebook: Openings: A Meditation on History, Method, and Sumas Lake

British Columbia's Sumas Lake was drained in the 1920s to create farmlands in the Fraser Valley. This event is the subject of Laura Cameron's Openings, a multifaceted exploration of the complex relationship between place and history. On one level it is a history of a lake and its "reclamation" as seen from the perspectives of various groups - Native people, bureaucrats, families, farmers. On another it is an innovative meditation on the historian's craft, locating the past not only in the fluid process of making oral history and the creative transformation of archival documents but also in the bonds people forge between stories and the places around them.