Our best journalism of 2024: Northern dams, female sports officials

The impacts of Hydro on Manitoba’s north are complex and, at times, deeply painful for those who have lived, as one Tataskweyak member told me, “in the shadow of the dams.”

Photographer Tim Smith and I traveled to Gillam and Fox Lake Cree Nation for nearly a week to tell the story of five First Nations bringing hope and healing to their communities as they work to protect their homelands.

Up close, the scale of the dams and transmission towers is staggering.

Every day, we drove over the Long Spruce dam and watched the horizon drop away to one side as the river lapped at the edge of the road on the other.

We watched the sun set over the maze of transmission lines that hang above the forest.

We took a boat trip on a small stretch of the mighty Nelson River that’s walled on either side by dams.

We aimed — in both the writing and photography in this story — to bring some of the uncanny, impressive and sometimes troubling realities of Manitoba Hydro to life for readers who have perhaps never had the opportunity to see the north up close.

-Julia-Simone Rutgers

Officiating is one of the toughest — and perhaps among the most thankless — jobs in sports.

But what about female referees working on their craft in what was once an all-male domain? Why do they put up with the abuse?

For answers, I talked to six Manitoba women who are active on basketball courts, football fields and hockey arenas for their unique perspective on a job they all love to do.

The consensus was they wouldn’t be able to do it without the support of “their people”: other women doing the same thing.

-Mike Sawatzky