Ecosystems of Memory
Ecosystems of Memory re-frames women homesteading narratives within other-wise1 narratives in Treaty 6 Territory. The series of photographs sees photo-sculptures in relationship with landscaped stones beside the Battle River. The photo-sculptures are casts of stones sewn together with hand-printed silver-gelatin family photographs. During COVID-19 pandemic I am learning how to visit with, listen to, and care for unfamiliar family photographs and landscaped stones beside the North Saskatchewan and Battle River.
I inherited a Red Rose Tea tin that holds my family photographs from 1880-1960 and an uninvited-guest/homesteader history. In this work, I have physically re-imagined my family photographs and revisited the places where the photographs were first taken. The act of visiting 2 is a method to re-learn the relationships between families, earth and image. The photo-sculptures visit with the landscaped stones and acknowledge the non-human knowledges that are present and lasting, and reconsiders the photograph as a privileged technological construct of knowledge that shifts over time.
I am in relationship with the river, stones and family photographs as listener, outsider, granddaughter, niece, mother, and artist. I understand the stones as being the oldest knowledge keepers in this place and the river as origin of life. The ecological relationships around the Battle River hold me accountable to working ethically as I begin to unsettle/ re-lens inherited colonial and gendered narratives and navigate the complex intersectional knowledges within these memory sites.
1 Garneau, David, Imaginary Spaces of Conciliation and Reconciliation, West Coast Line 74 vol no2, Summer 2012.
2 J. C. Gaudet, “Keeoukaywin: The Visiting Way—Fostering an Indigenous Research Methodology” in aboriginal policy studies (2019): 47-64.
