There’s a collection of colour slide photographs that visually show the intimate First Nation relationship with the land through the eyes of a settler. You might think this is a back roads dichotomy.
Using Google’s AI, it creates this summary. “Indigenous peoples have an intricate, respectful, spiritually and physically dependent, grateful, and protective tie to the land. Each First Nation has its own unique relationship with the land.
“They see the land as an extension of their identity, family, and culture. This relationship is based on a sense of stewardship and responsibility for the land and its inhabitants.”
A McMichael Canadian Art Collection travelling exhibit offers a candid and intimate portrait of life in Indigenous communities in the Hudson’s Bay watershed of the 1950s and 1960s.
Guest curated by nîpisîhkopâwiyiniw (Willow Cree) writer, journalist, and cultural advocate Paul Seesequasis. This is the first museum exhibition of settler John Macfie’s photographs of Indigenous life during a period of intense and rapid change in the far north of Ontario.
Paul has been active in the Indigenous arts as an artist and a policymaker since the 1990s, and since 2015 he has curated the Indigenous Archival Photo Project, an online and physical exhibition of archival Indigenous photographs that explores history, identity, and the process of visual reclamation.
I contacted Paul in Saskatoon. First off he taught me to say “Tansi” (ton say) or hello in Cree.
He explained John Macfie (1925 – 2018) worked as a trapline manager in Northern Ontario for more than a decade.
“A Canadian of Scottish heritage, John formed deep and lasting relationships with the people of the Indigenous communities in the region,” Paul said.
As he travelled the vast expanse of the Hudson Bay watershed, from Sandy Lake to Fort Severn to Moose Lake and as far south as Mattagami, “he photographed the daily lives of Anishinaabe, Cree, and Anisininew communities, bearing witness to their adaptability and resilience during a time of tremendous change. “
Macfie visited remote communities, travelling the land of hundreds of lakes and rivers, and transitions from boreal forest to muskeg to tundra; in all, spread over more than 500,000 square kilometres of northern Ontario.
“Though he was a settler, Macfie developed a deep and lasting relationship with the Indigenous peoples in the region, from summer camps to trap lines to canoe trips to local towns.”
He was employed by the Ontario Department of Land and Forests, “Macfie spent more than a decade travelling across lakes, rivers, forests, and tundra, becoming familiar with both the land and the Indigenous communities of the region, and capturing with his camera the activities, warmth, and resilience of the people he met.”
The exhibit
Macfie’s photos, curated by Paul, document ways of life firmly rooted in the pleasures of the land and the changing seasons.
His book People of the Watershed builds on Seesequasis’s visual reclamation work with his online Indigenous Archival Photo Project and his previous book, Blanket Toss Under Midnight Sun, serving to centre the stories and lives of the people featured in these compelling archival images.
Paul said in 1956, Macfie heard of a woman of the land: an Anishinaabe woman who lived off the land and only came to the closet town, Osnaburgh, once a month to pick up supplies and her old age pension.
“Her story intrigued Macfie, who packed up his Zeiss Contax camera, and timing it right, walked to the shores of Lake St. Joseph and waited.
“It was not too long before he saw an older woman approaching, paddling a canoe. The woman’s name was Maria Mikenak. She was likely in her mid-to-late 60s, and lived in the bush, subsisting off fish, berries, manomim (wild rice), potatoes, rabbits and birds, and was near self-sufficient.
“Travelling with her that day was her grandson. Mikenak only spoke Anishinaabemowin, with a sprinkling of English words, while Macfie spoke only English and a bit of Cree, so they communicated mostly through hand gestures."
More than 60 years later, while researching images of the north at the Archives of Ontario, Paul came across Macfie’s photographs of Maria Mikenak and her grandson.
“I pored over two dozen photos of her paddling, setting up camp by the shore, starting a fire, and close-ups of her canoe.
“The images captivated me. To my pleasant surprise, the photographer was still alive, retired in Parry Sound, Ontario,” Paul said. “We struck up a correspondence and in 2017 and 2018, before his passing at the age of 93, John Macfie spent several hours in taped interviews with me."
As Paul delved deeper into his portfolio of northern Ontario photographs and also his stories, “I realized that there was something more here than just compelling images; this was a thematic oeuvre framing the Indigenous peoples and communities over the vast territory of the Hudson’s Bay watershed.”
John Macfie understood from the beginning of his time in the watershed region that this world was rapidly changing. This in part inspired his urge to capture it in photographs—not just the way things were done but, importantly, the people who did them. In the mid-1950s, snowmobiles had not yet become common and trapping lines were still maintained and passed downthrough families as they had been for generations.
Paul explained some of the causes of change. Bush planes were becoming increasingly common, as were outboard motors, powering square-sterned canoes. A seasonal nomadic lifestyle was prevalent, though a more sedentary lifestyle was on the increase in villages. Residential schools were having a profound and detrimental effect on Indigenous family life.
Paul’s perspective
People of the Watershed is Paul’s first exhibition focused on Macfie’s photographs.
What prompted you to take on this project?
“My initial intention was to explore the archival collections of museums, libraries and national and regional archives, to explore, visually, the history of Indigenous people and communities through photography. I also sensed, from an early stage, that there are images that reveal another layer to the past that it’s not the normal beads and feathers thing that you see with so many photos of Indigenous peoples, or of being framed as a tragic victim of progress. As I explored, it became evident there is a much different story: of resilience, hard work, community and joy; and my desire to help represent that alternate reality.”
He said, “There is an intimacy here. This is the product of an attachment built through time: it feels less like extraction and more like immersion, as if the photographer himself was trying to explore his own sense of belonging to this moment and time.
The longevity of this extended project, a full decade, is also remarkable. Macfie’s vocation imparted a connection to his subjects that would not have been possible were he just an outsider passing through.
“After a time, people knew who he was. He developed friendships, and the journalistic side of his nature made him curious about people.”
Interesting sidebar
The expression, “Who knew,” is warranted here. Within this story, there is one photo, among others in the exhibition, from Fort Severn, depicting a younger girl helping to repair fishing nets with her grandmother.
I contacted George Kakekaspan from Waśahohk or Wasaho, (meaning bend in the river - Fort Severn) because there are community photographs included in the exhibit.
George was with us on the pursuit to get to the most northern point in Ontario, the border of a Nunavit, Manitoba and Ontario on Hudson Bay, there were two Village Media stories related to that trek. Check the archives for Back Roads Bill has close encounters with polar bears and Back Roads Bill makes it all the way this time.
Coincidentally, George has the People of the Watershed book.
People know their community members. George asked around. He said the young girl in the portrait photo and the same with an older woman is thought to be Rosalie Gray, now in Thunder Bay. George said they are the daughters of Jemina Gray. The family name is a well-known family in the northernmost of all communities in Ontario.
He commented on the Fort Severn photos. “I thought the pictures were great being from way back, they looked like they had been taken by a pro.” (At the time John Macfie was just getting started as a photographer, 65 years back – he had the eye for composition.)
In a follow-up with Paul, he said, “The stories of community and individuals. People on social media, when the photos, as many archival photos are unnamed, are identified and someone says ‘That’s me!’ or ‘that’s my auntie!’, and out of that sometimes arises a whole oral history about that person, community, or time, that would not have occurred without that photo. It is like reconnecting the photo to its community.”
More - John Macfie?
After his decade in the northwest of the province, the Macfies finally settled in Parry Sound, Ontario. Macfie wrote popular columns for the Georgian Bay Beacon and the community newspaper the Parry Sound Star.
John (Jack) Alvin Macfie died on Friday, Oct. 26. He was 93.
In an October 30, 2018, Parry Sound Star article (by Stephannie Johnson), post Macfie’s passing, part of his life’s story was linked to his time up north.
“Few have reached nonagenarian prestige. Even fewer with the gumption, wit, and charisma to pack as much abundance into those years as John Macfie.
“You might guess Macfie’s natural gift for storytelling was created and nurtured on that farm and around Listening Rock, where the family would often gather for storytelling. Macfie came by the talent honestly through his mother, who went to school to be a teacher, and owned a camera; passing on her love of writing and photography.
“I rattled around like a lot of other people after the war trying this and that and joined the Department of Lands and Forest in 1949,” Macfie said in a 2017 interview with YourTV Muskoka.
“In 1950, after working in the Forest Protection and Timber branches of the Ministry of Natural Resources, Macfie moved into the Wildlife department and won a job competition that had him move to Sioux Lookout to become a trap management officer, where he spent the next decade travelling the woods behind Aboriginal trappers between Lake Superior and Hudson’s Bay.
“I had taken up writing very early in my career in the north because I was seeing and taking pictures of stuff and other people and I got the notion of doing photo stories,” Macfie said in 2017.
Macfie authored 13 books, wrote more than 1,000 newspaper and magazine pieces and provided some 1,200 of his photographs to the Archives of Ontario.
Paul said of the fortuitous meeting with John. “I was fortunate, in timing, to connect with John Macfie when he was alive, get his lived experiences as he remembered them, and many of the stories behind the ‘People Of The Watershed,’ which evolved into a photo book and a travelling exhibition.”
More to come
Paul has more to offer. “The project has evolved; there is still a social media aspect but I tend to forward photos now to the communities themselves, as many now have amateur historical sites. That really didn’t exist a decade ago. And focusing on collections, like the John Macfie photographs, over a decade-span, of northern Ontario. Follow him and his ongoing photo postings on Facebook.
“It’s not only about the photos and the people in them, but a moment of time and the photographers themselves. That is very rewarding and the direction I would like to pursue with a couple of projects in the works.”
His expectations for people viewing the exhibit: “I hope people are moved by the beauty of Macfie’s colour slides, of both the people and the land, and an appreciation of such a different time. The relationship between people living off the land, in the swan song era of the dog teams and river travel. I hope it resonates with people. Macfie’s photos I feel bring that alive in a way that no other form, writing, painting, music, could.”
For more on this exhibit and the 192-page book - watch the in-depth YouTube video Children of the Watershed curatorial talk on May 11, 2024, with Paul.
The People of the Watershed exhibit recently concluded at the McMichael Canadian Art Collection. It is now a travelling exhibit. The first stop, just opened to the public, is aptly scheduled in Parry Sound (West Parry Sound District Museum); Paul will attend. The exhibit, with more than 100 photos, will be featured in Temiskaming Shores, Timmins, Kenora, Sudbury and North Bay.
I have seen the exhibit’s photographs, and they are poignant and compelling, - past life’s moments – to be thought of through a geographical perspective because that is what the academic subject is – the relationship between people and the land. It was a mindful white man who had wherewithal and intention, beyond his job, to capture the importance of the people he met. These photos are time machine vignettes showing a lifestyle we are learning to respect beyond the back roads.