Islands in the Straits is my first monograph, currently being drafted. The book tells the story of island making in the Detroit River—from myth to materiality—and in so doing, shows how the river and the Great Lakes are part human part nature. Through the particular and individual stories of islands in the river, Islands in the Straits travels through time and space to weave a rich tapestry of connections and histories of the Great Lakes, in different but overlapping ways. The core of this book is a story of transformation, technology, and human hubris. As much as this is a story of transformation, it is also one of the spaces settler colonialism creates, normalizes itself, and erases Indigenous histories, especially significant for a binational river that forms the border between two settler states—the U.S. and Canada. Island transformation was also infrastructural—through a series of changes, the river flowing around the islands became more of a system of hidden underwater canals than a river. This system of underwater canals runs through the Great Lakes, and points to the hybrid entities that are the Great Lakes. The creation of these islands and underwater channels i.e., hidden piecemeal infrastructures of control and flow in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries fundamentally altered the hydrologic rhythm of the lakes whilst emboldening the trope of freshwater abundance.