research proposal

PhD Comprehensive Examination Research Proposal

Conversations with my Ancestors:

 Imaginings of the Trent-Severn Waterway National Historic Site

By: Danielle Gendron

Introduction

The Trent Severn Waterway (TSW) is a 386-kilometre line that meanders through the landscape connecting Lake Ontario with Lake Huron. Following this line connects rivers and lakes through a series of locks, dams, and canals built over a span of 91 years starting in 1833[i]. It reveals multiple ways of knowing Canada. This proposal is built from the many ways that I, as an anthropologist, have come to understand the TSW, what it touches, is made up of, and/or reveals. It traverses through what conservationists call “The Land Between”— a unique “ecotone” where ecosystems of the Canadian Shield and the lowlands of the St. Lawrence Basin meet creating a unique ecosystem (The Land Between 2019). It passes through diverse communities including First Nations reserves (from west to east): Rama Mnjikaning First Nation, Chippewas of Georgina Island First Nation, Mississaugas of Scugog Island First Nation, Alderville First Nation, and Curve Lake First Nation; cities such as Peterborough with research institutions and medical centres; and, Trenton home to a Royal Canadian Air Force base; also, lumbering towns turned tourist hubs such as Bobcaygeon. Luxury summer vacation homes line the shores of the many lakes throughout the Muskoka and Kawartha regions. The TSW is federally sanctioned land that meanders past provincially governed parks and wildlife protection areas, as well as regionally governed conservation areas. The largest concentration of petroglyphs in North America (Vastokas and Vastokas 1973), the only Serpent mounds found within Canada (Kenyon 1986), and the remnants of trading posts of the fur trade era all exist along the shores of the TSW. The TSW zigzags through parts of the Robinson-Huron Treaty 61 of 1850, Williams Treaty of 1923, Treaty 20 of 1818, and the John Collins’ Purchase of 1785. In the 17^th Century, the Wendat (Huron) led French explorer Champlain through the rivers and lakes of traditional Anishinaabe territories that makeup the TSW (Campbell 2002) – portaging their boats where we now float through canals and locks – to wage war on the Haudenosaunee (Iroquois). Though the Wendat and Haudenosaunee did not live on what would become known as the TSW, it was a route known and utilized by many nations. The construction of the TSW brought in waves of settlers that established farming and lumbering towns, which in effect transformed the environment and the ways that people live with it. Today the TSW operates under Parks Canada as a National Historic Site of Canada and is a popular recreational site for boaters. It exists in the national imaginary as a site of innovative infrastructure[ii]. “Cottagers” (See Harrison 2013) use the TSW to access their vacation homes by water. Anishinaabe peoples continue to interact with the many cultural different types of sites that exist throughout what is known as the TSW (Whetung 2016). The traditional Anishinaabe wild rice harvest is an ongoing site of Indigenous-settler dispute over land and water ownership and use[iii]. Renewal of the TSW infrastructure is currently underway over the 2018-2019 seasons the Federal government is spending $330 million to replace and repair bridges, locks, and dams (Kovach 2017). To study the TSW is to confront the palimpsest of Canada, where layers of history have been built on top of one another. To traverse it is to encounter the contestation of rights, including issues of land and water ownership and the makeup and meaning of treaty relationships. These myriad layers of history existent along the TSW are representative of a wider history of Canada, making it an ideal microcosm to investigate the tension between the colonialscape (Hunt 2014) and Canadian heritage.

A fascination with exploring my Métis ancestry, in particular the archival traces of my 4th great-grandparents Hipolyte Brissette and Archange L’Hirondelle, is what initially brought my attention to the Trent-Severn Waterway. Hipolyte was implicated in multiple points of colonial encounter: he served in the war of 1812, worked for the Hudson Bay Company as a middleman in a canoe for nearly 30 years, and assisting in the survey of the 30,000 islands of Georgian Bay. Less is known about Archange; she met Hipolyte at Lesser Slave Lake and married him at Drummond Island in 1824, she moved with him across a vast landscape, had several children with him, and lived with him until his death in 1885. Details of Archange’s life are derived from the traces her husband left behind; she exists merely as a ghost (See Gordon 2013). Whether Archange was Métis or Cree differs in various archival records, family tellings, and oral histories. North West Company archives indicate that her father was from Kahnawake suggesting that she may have been of Haudenosaunee descent. Hipolyte’s ancestry is also uncertain, whether he was Métis or purely of French descent varies between records. Nevertheless Hipolyte, Archange, and their children were part of the historic Métis / half-breed[iv] community of Drummond Island voyageurs that were displaced to Penetanguishene, near the mouth of the TSW, in 1828 and 1829 (See Osbourne 1901). Tracking the circumstances of my ancestor’s displacement to the western end of the TSW, and subsequent generations of my family living on/with the land and water, prompts me to feel emplaced along this route and a yearning to experience it.  In August 2018, I paddled the 386-kilometre waterway with my father in order to acquaint myself in a landscape to which I feel a strong affiliation, yet have never been immersed. My goal was to get a better sense of the reason for this attachment, as well as the meaning and implications of my family’s settlement there. Hipolyte and Archange’s presence in this research is not simply about following the ghosts of ancestors, but they act as guides, whose existence along the TSW was at once colonized and colonizing. Their presence serves as a spatial and temporal anchor – a device through which I construct a historical ethnography (See Brown 2008; Connerton 1989; Cruikshank 2015; Teaiwa 2014; Trigger 1976) of the Trent-Severn Waterway.

Although this project incorporates auto-ethnography (Coffey 1999; Ellis et al., 2011; Hastrup 1992), it brings multiple dimensions of analysis into consideration. Spatially, I focus on an individual historic site that is heavily curated to communicate a particular “heritage” of place (Casteñada 1996), yet the TSW is also made up of multiple distinct communities and sites each with their own history and heritage. Throughout my interrogation of the TSW I consider how its various social complexities are flattened and/or erased in order for it to contribute and uphold a wider national heritage narrative (Campbell 2017; Foote 2003). Temporally, this project considers the roles and relationships of the TSW through time and accounts for how socio-political mechanisms, or the stategraphy (Thelen et al. 2014), that uphold and maintain the colonialscape (Hunt 2014) have transformed through time. Kwakwaka’wakw scholar Sarah Hunt (2014) uses the term colonialscape to describe the spatial mechanisms of settler-colonialism, how typical Canadian understandings of the landscape– including narratives, mapping, and ownership – stamp out the histories and presence of Indigenous peoples that have continually existed across the landscape for millennia. Space and time are inextricable; time is produced by space and produces space (Munn 1992). Accounting for space and time requires consideration for their multifarious, non-linear, and uncontainable nature (Knight 2015; Munn 1992; Ringel 2016). This project accounts for how each is experienced in distinct ways, exemplifying what Comaroff and Comaroff (2003) might call “ethnography on an awkward scale” wherein there are multiple intersecting dimensions of locality and trans-locality, and various ways of how evidence of colonialism is explained. As such this project uses a multi-sited approach (Fortun 2003; Marcus & Fischer 1999), in order to grapple with “the challenge of representing multiple scales and angles on system [of heritage narratives and nation-building] within a single text” (Fortun 2003: 175).  I limit my focus to eight sites, or nodes (Gordillo YEAR), along the waterway. Here, Cruikshank’s (2005) work serves as inspiration for how to bring together seemingly disparate encounters, from multiple spatial and temporal scales, into conversation about the circulation of diverse and changing ideas. I take a multi-dimensional approach to grapple with the co-production of social fact and social imagining (Comaroff and Comaroff 2003) and the co-construction of kin, state, and nation (Bornemann 1992). This project is driven by a conversation with my ancestors about the differences in the shapes and rhythms of various encounters with colonial forces. Through material traces and an imaginative conversation with my ancestors, I will generate an historical ethnography of the TSW at the time of their arrival there. In contrast, my experience of the TSW in the present is grounded largely in knowing and experiencing the contemporary infrastructure through participant observation and interviews.

I conceptualize the TSW and its role as a monument of colonialism through bringing together a diverse set of concepts. My consideration of the infrastructure of the TSW as a colonialscape of Canada (Hunt 2014; Whetung 2016) looks to the ways that infrastructure does not simply alter the physical environment and ecosystems, but also social relations and ways of being in the world (Anand 2017; Carse 2012; Chua 2015; Jewell 2017). This approach also acknowledges how such projects aid in processes of displacement and dispossession (Hunt 2014; Simpson 2014b; Whetung 2016). I consider work on ruins (Gordillo 2014; Stoler 2008; Tsing 2005) to examine the repurposing of infrastructure as a National Park (Campbell 2017) and as heritage site (Foote 2003; Harrison 2012; Smith 2006).

This project uses imaginative processes (Culhane and Elliott 2016; Hayes et al. 2013; Stoller 2007) to explore the stories archives tell (Robertson 2005; Simpson 2014). It encompasses genres of auto-ethnography (Denzin 2013; Ellis et al. 2011) and historical ethnography (Brown 2008; Connerton 1989; Cruikshank 2015; Teaiwa 2014; Trigger 1976). I will use a robust set of ethnographic methods, including participant observation, interviews with people using and living along the TSW, and archival work to imagine a dialogue between how I encounter the TSW in 2018-2019 and how my ancestors would have encountered it just before its construction. The goal is to create a conversation with my ancestors that will serve as a critique the Canadian project of nation building, by way of examining the TSW as a project of the state.

 (Un)making of place – places in motion Places as forces

Foundational to this project is theoretical understanding that the history and spatiality of TSW is a site of settler-colonialism (See Tuck and Wang 2012; Arvin et al 2013). I understand the mechanisms of settler colonialism through the lens that space is an active process that is continually produced and reproduced through intricate interrelationships between objects, products, and experiences (Casey 1997; Lefebvre 1992; Massey 2005; Pink 2015; Soja 2008); wherein the only constant is change (Massey 2005). Lefebvre’s (1992) triadic understanding of space as being divided into three facets wherein each relates to and influences the others simultaneously, acts as my framework to grapple with the plurality of place (Bender 2002; Lefebvre 1992; Massey 2005). Through this framework I ruminate on perceived space – the production of materials, conceived space – the production of knowledge, and lived / endured space – the production of meaning (Lefebvre 1992).  I use this triadic approach to tease apart the myriad mechanisms through which, and to whom, some dimensions of the TSW are made visible while others obscured. It is differing perceptions, experiences, and histories, that provide access to particular imaginings of and relationships with place (Casey 1997; Gupta and Ferguson 1992; Lefebvre 1992), and not all imaginings of place are visible to all (Robertson 2005). Thus I position the TSW not merely as a grid in which people live and move through, but as a force of settler-colonialism with which humans are in relation, it reflects and reveals ways of knowing and being in the world (Basso 1996; Simpson 2014a; Larsen & Johnson 2017).  

Following Lefebvre’s triadic approach to space I consider the production of materials in the form of infrastructure (Anand 2017; Carse 2012; Larkin 2013) – locks, dams, canals, and water. I look to national heritage narratives (Climo and Cattell 2002; Foote 2003; Harrison 2012; Smith 2006) and colonial memory (Robertson 2012) as the production of knowledge. The production of meaning is considered in the form of emplacement (Culhane 2016; Ingold 2008; Moretti 2011; Pink 2008, 2015) or what Soja (2008) determines as third space, how it is used, how it should not be used, et cetera. Each of these three dimensions interact and inform one another to produce and re-produce the multiple ways that the TSW is known as colonialscape (Hunt 2014; Simpson 2014b; Whetung 2016), as heritage site, among diverse other ways it is known and experienced. I am interested in how and where these diverse ways of knowing the TSW collide, converge, and/or are in tension. 

Materials: The Ruins of Colonial Infrastructure

Infrastructures cannot be considered solely as technologies, they are part and parcel of our physical and social environments (Anand 2017; Carse 2012; Larkin 2013). They hold power beyond the delivery and mitigation of services, they reveal: social desires and possibilities (Larkin 2013); social hauntings (Jewell 2017); ways of belonging (Anand 2017); ethics and moral behaviours (Von Schnitzler 2008); structures of government control (Amin 2013; Collier and Lakoff 2008). Carse (2012), Larkin (2013), and Chua (2015) have each demonstrated the ways that infrastructure projects alter their surrounding environments and eco-systems, which in turn impacts not only the way that people relate to and interact with the landscape but also to each other. Construction of the TSW played a significant role in the displacements of Indigenous peoples and the dispossession of Indigenous territories (See Simpson 2014b; Whetung 2016), while asserting the dominance of colonial rule. The TSW infrastructure, and resultant landscape, is the physical manifestation of the social and political colonialscape.

I look to the TSW infrastructure not merely as indicative of a narrative of the past, but affective in the social and political realities of the past, present and futures (Casteñada 1996; Gordillo 2014; Gordon 2013; Navaro-Yashin 2009; Stoler 2008; Tsing 2005). I think of the locks, dams, and canals as “imperial debris” (Stoler 2008). That is, the TSW, like other colonial projects, has and continues to alter not only on the landscape but the political and social structures and relationships structuring lives throughout the landscape. Thinking with “imperial debris” is one way to conjure narratives that expose the diverse ways people are emplaced, beyond state narrations. Jane Bennett’s (2009) concept of “vibrant matter” is useful for considering how imperial debris does not simply expose stories of the past, but is affective in “uncontrollable and unforeseen ways” (Navaro-Yashin 2009), and elicits the ways that colonial processes have been and continue to be felt and experienced. Dependent on emplacement, the affective experience of the infrastructure can be felt: as “imperial debris” (Stoler 2008) that considers what it is people are left with in the wake of colonial destruction; as a site to make real the mythology of Canadian identity being born of the landscape (see Anderson 2006; Angus 1988); as the “friction” created by global economies to deliver on promised dreams (Tsing 2005). The colonialscape is not stagnant but is continually being produced and reproduced, taking on new forms to uphold the structures of settler-colonialism. The forces of the TSW colonialscape have transferred from the infrastructure’s alteration of the physical landscape and displacement of Indigenous people, to the TSW as a national historic site.

KNOWLEDGE: Heritage Narratives

Historic sites are unique forms of story telling in that they embed story in place (Azaryahu and Foote 2008). National Historic Sites of Canada present a national heritage narrative (Campbell 2017; See also Foote 2003) that guides visitors through a particular, yet contested, narrative of the past (Castenada 1996; Herfeld 2003), in order to build a national identity (Foote 2003), which maintains and legitimates the “imagined community” (Anderson 2006) of Canada.  Heritage is an “active production of the past in the present” to meet contemporary needs (Harrison 2012: 184). It is a project of creating social memory, an attempt to connect people to a past by providing an “embodied heritage” experience in place (see Erickson 2015) in order to generate living memories as a site of a united identity rather than relegating the past to history books (See Climo and Cattell 2002). The project of Canadian heritage communicates that a united national identity is inherited from past interactions and relationships embedded in the landscape (Ashworth and Tunbridge 2007); it is a state practice of building collective memory (West 2002). Underpinning Canadian heritage is the notion that Canada was borne out of a vast empty landscape, wherein European settlements, infrastructures, and political systems are viewed as essential for the creation of “a viable society” (Chretien in Heisler 1973). Voyageurs of the fur-trade are popularly imagined as the founders of the nation (Standen 2008). Thus, traversing waterways via canoe conjure a particular nostalgia for an idealized Canadian past (See Dean 2013; Erickson 2013).

However, heritage is not simply about the past but is a projection of desires and relationships with the present and future (Ashworth and Tunbridge 2007; Geismar 2015; Harrison 2012). I examine the TSW not solely as a site of heritage but as a site of enacting a “heritage regime” (Geismar 2015) where the state appropriates and deploys a certain past (Lowenthal 2015) to recognize particular identities while excluding others as legitimate to/in the nation (Ashworth and Tunbridge 2007; Geismar 2015). Thelen et al.’s (2014) concept of  “stategraphy” – or the everyday social relations and interactions that are conditioned by and emerge from the linkage between state practices and state representations – provide a lens through which to examine state operationalization of heritage. Here, I understand the state practice as the maintenance of the colonialscape, and state representations as the national heritage narratives that work to transform “what was social hieroglyph into a legible and administratively more convenient format” (Scott 1998: 3) and act as “public matrices for the creation of collective conscience” where a national identity is defined (Bornemann 1992: 48).

Although, national historic sites deal directly with national heritage narratives, personal, familial, and state histories are co-constructed (Bornemann 1992; Carsten 2008) as people come to understand themselves and their place in the world. Thus, an interrogation of local and family heritage narratives in and around the TSW, including my own, will provide insight into how national heritage narratives are “negotiated, approved, and transformed” (Thelen et al. 2014) in everyday interactions and relationships. Where what is absent reveals political and moral stances (Carsten 2008). The power of historic sites rests within visitors’ abilities to imagine that they are being transported back to the time being represented; visitors’ knowledge and imagination of the past influence whether historic sites are deemed authentic, and thus acts to legitimate the national heritage narrative (Gable and Handler 2003). They act a form of cultural salvage wherein they position themselves as the best mode to preserve what would otherwise be lost (Gable and Handler 2003), and aid in the creation of a national social memory (Climo and Cattell 2002).

Family narratives are not simply documents of personal lineages but reveal how political-economic systems and their transformations impact social lives (Million 2009, 2011; Walley 2013), additionally tracing genealogies aids to expose the imposition of colonial forces on social lives (Brown 2008; Podruchny& Peers 2011; Goeman & Denetdale 2009). Family narratives and geneaologies are powerful sites of social memory that can reveal “invisible histories” (See Feierman 1999) of struggles and power relations, of particular interest in this project is how family narratives and geneaologies can reveal what Robertson (2012) calls colonial memory  “a more or less shared—or at least understood – universe of narrated (and silenced) stories about colonial incursion” (Robertson 2012: 51). Examining family narratives and geneaologies is a method for examining how national heritage narratives impact personal narratives and vice versa. In examining family narratives I will pay particular attention to the traces and absences for what they indicate about social realities and the systems that determine life stories and experiences (Gordon 2013).

MEANINGS: temporality and historicity

The meaning of place is constructed through how it is experienced (Lefebvre 1992; Pink 2008, 2015; Soja 1998). As time and place are inextricable (Bender 2002) and time is a non-linear (Auyero 2012; Knight 2015; Munn 1992; Stewart 2016) social practice (Munn 1992; Ringel 2016), I look to how the past – embedded in the present – (Ringel 2016; Stewart 2016) constitutes meanings and reflections of/in place. I use the concept of historicity to account for the ways that narratives of ancestors (whether they be blood-related, or historical figures such as voyageurs imagined to be the forefathers of the nation) merge into imaginings of the present (Stewart 2016) and the concept of “temporalization” (Munn 1992) to account for the ways that people are continually constructing senses of time based on their relations and activities, which provide different temporal reference points (Knight 2015; Munn 1992). 

Along the TSW multiple temporalities exist: temporalities of colonial presence (such as the infrastructure) intersect and collide with various temporalities of Indigenous presence throughout the landscape. Often, these collisions sever Indigenous realities and relegate them to the past through artifacts. For instance, along the TSW is the Peterborough Petroglyphs site, or Kinoomaagewaabkong, which holds the largest concentration of petroglyphs anywhere in North America. A building was erected around Kinoomaagewaabkong to protect the site from the elements; this building also limits the connection within the wider environment and alters the “spirit of place”, its significance, and use (Zawadzka 2008; see also Arnett 2017). As a National Historic site and a Provincial Park it operates under consultation with Curve Lake First Nation for the protection and protocols governing human relations with the site; a cultural centre in the park narrates the importance and connection to contemporary Anishinaabe culture and peoples. However, the significance of Kinoomaagewaabkong enters the official heritage narrative to relegate Indigenous presence on the landscape to the past. Outside of the park at the nearest TSW lock station, the state narrates that the petroglyphs as a site of spiritual significance to the “Algonkian Indians” when they were carved 500-1000 years ago, separating them from the “Ojibway settlers”[v] that are currently experiencing a re-birth of spiritual practices through their study of the site. The national narrative opposes and undermines how Kinoomaagewaabkong is understood and narrated by Curve Lake Nation in the cultural centre located where they exist.

The telling of time by the national narrative is politically arranged and used as what Auyero (2012) deems a “manipulative veil” and Munn (1992) calls “strategic temporalizations”. This manipulative veil or strategic temporalization, produced by the state outside of where the petroglyphs are housed, serves to disconnect contemporary Indigenous peoples living on nearby reserves from having any direct connection to Kinoomaagewaabkong. This highlights a process of the heritage regime wherein knowledge of the past is produced. Representations of the processes of colonialism, such as residential schools, the Indian Act, the reserve system, treaty making, and land dispossession, are silent for how they severed relationships between Indigenous peoples and their traditional lands. I have yet to uncover any official narratives about how colonial events, structures, and processes severed relationships between contemporary “Ojibway settlers” with the landscape and with their “Algonkian Indian” ancestors.  To gain deeper understanding of the manipulative veil, I ask what are the different ways that relationships with the petroglyphs are narrated?

Following Knight (2015), I recognize that we each inhabit and experience a multiple-temporal reality that at once includes pasts as well as the present. I contend that not all are experienced and/or known (Robertson 2005), and ask which temporal registers matter and which do not, to whom, and under which circumstances? How do these temporalities figure into the ways that people know and experience place?  How do the people that use and live along the TSW imagine it to have been populated (and by whom) in the past? What are the differences in these imaginings?

METHODOLOGY

My personal fascination with uncovering my ancestry in Canada reveals a window into the complications of colonial encounters – my ancestors were at once colonized and colonizing. Queries into my personal heritage exposed a Canadian heritage regime and merged with my academic interests in colonialism (Hunt 2014; Stoler 2008; Simpson 2014b) and imaginative ethnographic methods (Culhane and Elliott 2016), to transform an engagement with my genealogical records into a methodological approach to research. Throughout my anthropological training I never planned or was in auto-ethnographic work, however the convergence of my personal and professional interests leads me to and through a project that is just as much about personal process as it is about research (Ellis et al. 2011). As a white-coded Métis woman (See Adese et al. 2017) exploring and reclaiming Métis identity (See Devine 2010), my emplacement in Canada follows from the story of how my paternal line came to live along the TSW. Tracing this history reveals the ways that Métis bodies were used to further the colonial project. This fuels my imaginative engagements with the intersection of my ancestry, colonial encounters across histories and spaces, and the TSW. My methodology finds inspiration from Gordon’s (2013) query as to what happens when we follow ghosts, and is informed by my fascination to converse with my ancestors. I do this through imaginative experiences of being in place and by engaging with various archives (See Robertson 2005; Simpson 2014). I build a conversation with my ancestors in part through a methodology I term canoethnography[vi].

What I first found most striking about the lives of my ancestors is their extensive movements across the landscape (See Figure 1). They travelled through waterways, mainly via canoe, due to work with the Hudson Bay Company. Maps of the waterways were inscribed onto Hipolyte’s body as tattoos (Osborne and Patterson 1901; see also Miner 2011) indicating that knowledge of the landscape was central to his life. Considering the conditions of his work and his movement – how his body physically engaged and moved through the landscape –brings my attention to bodily ways of knowing the world and connecting with my ancestors through a practise of movement – specifically paddling. Works by Cole (2002), Basso (1996), Nagam (2014), and Simpson (2014a) demonstrate that being in place, more specifically moving through and interacting with landscape, is vital to Indigenous intellectual traditions and ways of knowing and doing, which are not simply about knowing place, but knowing self by living through stories and connecting with ancestors (Basso 1996; Cole 2014; Nagam 2014; Simpson 2014a).

At the same time that canoeing provides me a way to engage with my ancestors, it also builds my anthropological understanding of place. Movement provides knowledge of the physical makeup of landscape, but also provides experience of how place is socially made up and experienced via the senses (Culhane 2016; Ingold 2010; Larsen 2017; Moretti 2011; Pink 2008) – how people know and interact with the physicality of place. By moving through places the body “imports its own emplaced past into its present experience” (Casey 1997: 194). The specific sensuous experience of paddling is a site of feeling part of nature (Concha-Holmes 2015) and embodying Canadian heritage connected to voyageurs (Erickson 2015). Here I meditate on the concept of heritage as I tack between personal ancestral connection to a voyageur, and the ways that national imaginings of voyageurs have seeped into my imagination and understanding of Canada[vii]. I incorporate the metaphorical power of paddling a canoe to conjure imaginings of voyageurs (Dean 2013; Erickson 2015) into my methodology, but direct it to imagine Hipolyte and Archange encountering the present landscape rather than imagining that I am following in their footsteps. I use my paddling through the TSW, as a way to converse about the pace and rhythms of the colonial encounter and how it has changed; how effects of colonial encounters of the world of my ancestors have left residual effects, or as Stoler (2008) calls it imperial debris, that have transformed and continue to affect the world and how we encounter it today. I have outlined elsewhere (Gendron in review) how I use Joseph Dumit’s (2014) implosion exercise to consider and meditate on the objects that I pack in my canoe trip to anchor my imaginings in the current colonialscape. I do this to tether myself to my current reality, and prevent myself from getting lost in the fantasy of seeing the canoe as an entry-way into experiencing life as a voyageur, as is often done by paddlers (Dean 2013). I seek to be accountable for my engagements with and my complicity within the imaginaries of the colonialscape.

In order to have a conversation with Hipolyte and Archange I must understand their reality. I cannot travel back in time to know their lives, but can imaginatively engage (Robertson 2005) and contend (Simpson 2014) with archives in order to recreate their world and perspectives to converse with. Following Appadurai (1996) I view the imagination as a tool that enables a complex engagement with reality rather than a detachment from it. To tell the story of the lives of Hipolyte and Archange I take inspiration from Gordon’s (2013) work that looks to the undocumented forces and relationships experienced by a slave through imaginatively feeling her life through the journals of her slave owner. Instead of using the journals of one man I use a diverse set of what Robertson (2005) calls “imaginative resources”. I bring together documented oral history, books from local historical societies, family photo albums, conversations with family members, genealogical records, survey records, newspaper articles, Hudson Bay Company journal archives, military service records, survey records, census documents to put together the life of Hipolyte. From Hipolyte’s archival traces I can extrapolate to also imagine Archange’s life (See Gordon 2013). I put this into the context of the socio-political world that they were living in by considering the treaties, laws, maps, government makeup, as well as records of the TSW construction and use, to understand their interactions and entanglements with colonialism. Through ruminating on an imagined conversation between my ancestors, who arrived along the TSW five years prior to its construction, and myself, paddling through it nearly 100 years after its completion, I uniquely position myself to interrogate the tension between the heritage regime of the TSW and the colonialscape.

Although this project is led by an auto-ethnographic engagement, the way that I encounter the TSW is informed through by anthropological lens that considers experiences beyond my own, through employing multi-sensory ethnography (Culhane and Elliott 2016; Pink 2015), and tuning my attention to affective relations (Berlant 2011; Million 2009; Stewart 2008), and conducting interviews. Pink (2015) determines that there is a wide range of experiences of being emplaced, a sensuous interrelationship between mind-body-environment entangled within the ethnographic project. Canoeing through the TSW is how I developed my understanding of my own emplacement within the landscape and its heritage; accounting for multiple other ways of experiencing the TSW is necessary to provide a fuller understanding of what the TSW is and how it is known. Following Pink (2008) and Moretti (2011) I will move through place, via paddling, with others in order to be led through ways of being in, experiencing, knowing the TSW. I pick up on the work of Stewart (2008) and Berlant (2011) to contextualize the everyday and ordinary affective encounters between people within wider systems such as capitalism, and in this case of TSW settler-colonialism. Looking to ordinary encounters reveal the “generalized condition of human interaction” (Hinkson 2017:51), while also exposing how the ongoing history of colonialism embedded along TSW is experienced and felt (Million 2009).

The canoe is a practise through which we come to know, it is a site of intimate relationship building (Cole 2002; Nagam 2014), thus I feel it to be a sacred space that I will not share with just anyone. Following my paddle of the entire waterway with my father in summer 2018, I will continue to paddle through different sections of the TSW with family members and friends to engage in conversations about heritage, emplacement, and colonialism. Paddling with family members will allow for further engagement with understanding my family’s emplacement along the TSW, rather than relying on my own personal interpretation of it – which has been heavily influenced by my incessant engagement with family and national archives as well as academic writings on related topics. I will also paddle through the waterway with friends that live or have spent time along different sections of the TSW in order to incorporate different ways of being emplaced within and knowing this waterway; these friends include individuals from First Nations along the route, and others whose have family history working as lockmasters. Each person I include is uniquely emplaced along the waterway; living in Canada they have interacted with and been affected by the heritage regime of Canada through multiple sites of encounter beyond the TSW, including televised heritage minutes, national historic sites etc. These paddles with family and friends also allow me to continue participant observation along and through the waterway; I am a novice paddler, at best, and feel safest in a canoe when paddling with others. I will not actively seek interlocutors to canoe with due to concerns for my personal well-being and safety related to canoeing with a stranger. However, if I develop meaningful and comfortable relationships with interlocutors, which is often the case in anthropological fieldwork, I may invite them to paddle with me.

I will also encounter and engage in conversations with people moving through the waterway in watercraft, lockmasters, and those visiting lock stations. Casual conversations and encounters (See Moretti 2011; Pink 2008) regarding the significance and meaning of the historic site will be included in my understanding of the TSW. Some of these encounters may develop into longer research based conversations, as is the nature of social scientific research. In order to keep track of these conversations I will record notes in my journal. I will have an audio recording device on hand to record any extended conversations, after gaining consent from interlocutors to record them. The entirety of my project will not be spent paddling between lock stations, as this project also relies on interviews and archival research, and the paddling season is quite short – May through October. A major portion of my research will be conducted in communities adjacent to the waterway. I will first contact interviewees through my existing networks of family and friends, as well as Facebook communities related to my fieldsite in which I am an active member such as “Trent-Severn Waterway”, “Families of Port Severn Honey Harbour and surrounding areas”.  Additionally, I will contact potential interlocutors through local historical and geneaological society meetings and message boards.

There are too many sites of significance and communities along this 386-kilometer stretch of Southern Ontario to engage with each of them in any significant way, thus I organize my interactions with the TSW around eight sites to set a limit to my fieldwork. I use an approach similar to Gordillo’s (2014) wherein he examines nodes from which to examine the processes that are stored within and beyond objects. I use the methodology of multi-sited research (See Marcus and Fischer 1999) to understand nodes as the sites of intersecting interactions that make wider systems visible. This approach reveals the presence of history throughout and across a landscape and informs understandings of connections and interactions between places rather than viewing them as containers. The movement among nodes entangles other nodes, and reveals the multiple historical forces and processes that affect the same landscape. From East to West I will focus my attention on: Trenton, Peterborough, Petroglyphs Provincial Park, Curve Lake First Nation, Bobcaygeon, Orillia, Rama Mnjikaning First Nation, and Port Severn. I choose each of these sites for the official heritage narratives that they promote and project through their historic sites and museums that fit into a wider national heritage narrative. Limiting my engagements to these eight nodes will also provide an organizational structure to write my dissertation.

(1) Trenton is the site of lock 1; it connects the TSW to Lake Ontario. One of the three TSW visitor’s centres along the waterway, a Port Historical Society, as well as major sites of the state —a large military base and the National Air Force museum are located here. (2) Peterborough is the largest city along the waterway with a population of approximately 82,000. Locks 19, 20, and 21 are located within the city limits; lock 21 is touted as the prize feature of the TSW, the tallest hydraulic lift lock in the world. Major sites of the state, TSW visitors centre, the Canadian Museum of the Canoe, and Trent University are all located here. (3) Petroglyphs Provincial Park is a seasonal day use park that operates only during summer months. It contains the Peterborough Petroglyphs National Historic Site, Kinoomaagewaabkong, as well as a cultural centre that provides official versions of teachings and worldview of the Anishinaabe that was established in consultation with Curve Lake First Nation. Within the park limits is also Lake McGinnis one of the only meromictic lakes – having distinct layers of water that don’t mix – in Canada. (4) The traditional territory of Curve Lake First Nation encompasses vast swaths of the TSW; Curve Lake First Nation reserve currently sits on Buckhorn Lake between locks 31 and 32. Nearly 100,000 tourists visit the First Nation each year to attend their pow-wow, or to visit sites of official Indigenous narratives at the cultural centre and museum. (5) Bobcaygeon is the site of lock 32, the very first lock built on the TSW. Originally established as a lumbering town, the town itself represents a palimpsest of settler history along the waterway. It is now a tourist destination in the heart of what is known regionally by settlers as cottage country, or summer vacation homes on the lake (See Harrison 2013). Part of the tourism industry in this village of 3000 permanent residents includes historical societies, museums, and a recreation of a settler village. Furthermore, its name is the title for a popular Tragically Hip song has made it significant in the wider Canadian imagination. (6) Orillia is a city with a population of 30,000 and was the location of a former Hudson Bay Company post, there are multiple museums, a monument of Samuel de Champlain, which was recently restored in summer 2018, and abundance of historical plaques regarding settler – local First Nations history. Orillia lays at the Atherley Narrows that connects Lake Couchiching and Lake Simcoe (the largest lake on the TSW) and is sits directly across from Rama Mnjikaning First Nation. (7) Rama Mnjikaning First Nation is a community of Chippewa Ojibway (Anishinaabe) people located on the shore of Lake Couchiching between locks 41 and 42. The submerged Indigenous Fishing Weirs of Atherley Narrows Historic Site are one of the oldest sites built by humans in ‘Canada’, dating to 3300 BCE (Ringer 2006). Casino Rama is an Indigenous owned and operated entertainment resort. (8) Port Severn is the site of lock 45 connecting the TSW to Lake Huron. Multiple generations of my family have lived here, and it is the only site throughout the TSW that I had ever spent time in prior to embarking on this project.

Each of these eight nodes has distinct ties and relations to the TSW, and provides unique perspectives on the meaning and use of the TSW. At each node I will bring together local tellings of history – compiled via interviews, museums and historical site visits, et cetera – to examine narratives about the role of the TSW in the establishment and history at that node. I will visit local sites of significance, including but not limited to museums, historic sites, as well as attend local historical society meetings, fairs, festivals, and pow-wows. I will investigate the narratives of place created and disseminated in/by each of these places, paying particular attention to how Indigenous-settler histories are presented. These nodes will inform how the past has been imagined along the TSW as part of the larger national heritage narrative.

Beyond completing participant observation, I will speak with people to understand more personal conceptualizations of and grapplings with the past. I aim to interview people as diverse as those who use and live alongside the TSW, including Indigenous people and settlers, fishermen, recreational boaters, cottagers, lockmasters and lock visitors. As I will be spending much time in and through the TSW and attending events I know that I will engage in many research conversations by chance. I will also identify research interlocutors through use of Wolf’s (2001) concept of sets of overlapping networks. The core network will consist of family and friends who have affiliations with the TSW or nodes that I have identified, as well as members of the Trent Severn Waterway Facebook group of which I am an active member and through contacting band offices. I will first request interviews and direction for sites to visit from my already existing network and will follow their lines of communication to expand my project. This will bring me beyond the sites that I have identified and will make connections between nodes that I had yet to consider or realize, and help me to establish second and third tier contacts. These expansive overlapping networks will provide a robust set of insights and observations, which will reveal differences in understanding of the TSW, its makeup, significance, and connections between nodes.

Additionally, I will complete archival work in each of the identified nodes in order to create historical understanding of place. I will engage with records of geneaological and local history societies to incorporate family histories and narratives. I will work with the archives of local museums and libraries to create historical context.

Project timeline

The operating season of the TSW runs from Victoria Day weekend to Thanksgiving weekend. Thus far I have completed a 386-kilometer paddle through the TSW with my father, and have collected archival traces of my ancestors Hipolyte Brissette and Archange L’Hirondelle – who act as the temporal anchor in this project, as such my research timeline does not follow the standard 12-month field season for dissertation research.  

May to October 2019

I will paddle parts of 386-kilometres of the Trent- Severn Waterway with friends and family members, retracing portions of the waterway that I canoed in August 2018.

I will revisit portions of the Trent-Severn waterway in which I have identified traces of histories other than the official narrative conveyed by the National Historic Site. This will include driving to particular communities along the waterway as well as paddling (or boating) through these again with my father, additional family members, friends, and research participants contacted and identified along the waterway, and through Trent Severn Waterway Facebook group. While the waterway itself does not close, operations of the locks open Victoria Day weekend and close on Thanksgiving weekend, which provide me with a timeline for paddling.

November 2019 to February 2020

I will visit the waterway through multiple seasons, building my own relationships to it, as I understand the knowledge and experiences of others. The majority of my time will be spent in communities adjacent to the waterways: conducting interviews, visiting heritage sites, museums, and historical society, and conducting archival research.

March – May 2020

Rest, read notes, and organize and synthesize materials. Identify chapters.

June 2020 to August 2021

Dissertation writing.

Figure 1

Pins mark locations where Hipolyte Brissette (1796 – 1885) lived or travelled as identified through documented oral histories, Hudson’s Bay Company records, Canadian census records, and war of 1812 records.

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[i] See Angus 1988 for a thorough history of the TSW infrastructure.

[ii] See Parks Canada website for articulation of how the TSW rests as a site of engineering ingenuity https://www.pc.gc.ca/en/lhn-nhs/on/trentsevern.

[iii] Anishinaabe peoples are revitalizing wild rice harvesting sites throughout TSW, settler land owners have been given permits from Parks Canada to clear waters of the plant life seeing them as weeds and intrusive to settler movement and use through the waterway. (See Jackson 2016)

[iv] Some Métis communities, including my own, are starting to use ‘half-breed’ amongst other identifiers in the wake of being excluded by the Métis National Council’s new stringent and narrow membership structure.

[v] A plaque along the TSW separates contemporary Anishinaabe peoples, calling them “Ojibway settlers” from the land and creation of the petroglyphs by their ancestors through identifying their ancestors as the “Algonkian Indians”. Algonkian is a language group, identified by Anthropologists, under which Anishinaabe peoples, including Ojibway, are categorized.

[vi] Thank you to Dr. Rafael Wainer for putting a name to the methodology I was too busy being led through to identify that it was unique.

[vii] See Standen 2008 on voyageurs being popularly regarded as the forefathers of the Canadian nation.