The Creation and Endurance of Memory and Place Among First Nations of Northwestern Ontario, Canada.

The Creation and Endurance of Memory and PlaceAmong First Nations of Northwestern Ontario, Canada

John Norder

Published online: 27 April 2012# Springer Science+Business Media, LLC 2012

Abstract Examinations of rock art typically focus on acts of creation and composi-tional meaning, with little attention paid to the position of these created places in thepalimpsest of history. As these sites endure, their recognition and importance withinsubsequent social developments, including memory and oral tradition, are bothinvented and reinvented as descendant populations become established or as newpopulations move in displacing or replacing the makers. This paper examines theways in which oral histories of historic and contemporary First Nations populations innorthwestern Ontario, Canada, challenge standard understandings of rock-art in theregion, taking these sites out of the maker/meaning context and placing them within aframework of user/caretaker. The results of this contextual shift contest notions ofapplied cultural affiliation and traditional ownership, resulting in a perspective thatreveals a transgenerational and transcultural endurance of these places in the con-temporary social memory of these Indigenous communities.

Keywords Canadian First Nations . Social memory . Landscape . Rock art

Introduction

Toward the end of July 2005, plans began for an inter-band homecominggathering on Lake of the Woods. During interviews my assistant and I hadbeen conducting earlier that summer, we were aware that the location ofthe gathering was to be held at a village site on one of the westernislands. The particular place was chosen for a variety of reasons. Theprimary one was its centrality to the First Nations communities aroundLake of the Woods and Shoal Lake, so, while accessible only by boat, it

Int J Histor Archaeol (2012) 16:385–400DOI 10.1007/s10761-012-0180-3

J. Norder (*)Department of Anthropology, Michigan State University,355 Baker Hall, East Lansing, MI 48824, USAe-mail: [email protected]

was relatively equidistant from each of the reserves. The second reasonwas to come home. The village had been one of several aboriginalsettlements on the islands of Lake of the Woods whose inhabitants hadbeen relocated in the early part of the twentieth century to places alongthe major roads running around the lake, ostensibly to make it easier forfederal and provincial agencies to provide services and resources.

As we were finishing up our time in the region, we were fortunate to beinvited to go out to the island with a group of elders from several of theFirst Nations reserves around the lake. Transport out to the island was ona large pontoon boat, and as we traveled from our launch at Big GrassyFirst Nation under a clear sky and with calm waters a golden eagleappeared from a side channel and floated along ahead of the boat for afew minutes. Everyone on the boat saw the eagle and for a few momentswe all sat in silence is it flew slightly ahead of us about 20 yards off thebow. Then, as if on cue, everyone pulled out either cigarettes or loose leaftobacco and leaned over the sides of the boat to scatter the herb into thewaters. The moment passed without comment other than appraising glan-ces and smiles from the elders.

Research on rock art has developed considerably in the past decades looking not onlyat questions of symbolic and compositional meaning but examining broader contextsof the creation of these places and the embedded nature of these locations as part ofthe social and sacred landscape of a people or peoples. In these latter types of studiesconcepts of landscape have been explored that draw attention to the nature of rock artas not simply an act of creation that is placed in a particular location, but one that ispart of a corpus of such events that accrue on the landscape over time. Thispalimpsest, resulting from human actions, can be interpreted as a text of sorts (Smith2001, pp. 213–214), a visible record of human experience, history, and memory thatcan be drawn upon through experiential encounters that serve to reinforce a commu-nal sense of place and identity (Basso 1996; Bradley 2009; David 2002; Feld andBasso 1996; Ferguson and Colwell-Chanthaphonh 2006; Mills and Walker 2008;Palmer 2005; Rubertone 2008; Tilley 2008; Van Dyke and Alcock 2003).

Simultaneously, because of the time-depth often involved, this accumulation mayrepresent the activities of more than one community. As the geographer Yi-Fu Tuan(1977, pp. 162–163) has noted, “certain objects, both natural and man-made, persistas places through eons of time, outliving the patronage of particular cultures.” Forarchaeologists this is a common observation in regards to the evolution of a culturallandscape over time. Places are created, recreated, renewed, and abandoned associeties develop differing needs and conceptions of the use of space, with the“old” either taking on new meanings as part of these transformations or simply beingset aside as their presence is no longer recognized. However, despite these changesobjects on the landscape, such as rock art, can endure and memory may be associatedanew as they are encountered or re-encountered.

I examine these issues of the invention and endurance of the social memory of rockart sites and other sacred places among the Algonquian-speaking First Nationspeoples of northwestern Ontario, Canada. In particular, I take issue with claimsregarding the lack of an enduring association between these communities and the

386 Int J Histor Archaeol (2012) 16:385–400

land that they inhabit. Frequently, cultural affiliation with a specific region by anIndigenous descendant population is determined within the maker/meaning context,or a framework that is defined by the historically demonstrable actions and knowl-edge of a people in the creation of places and/or objects. As I will outline, such aframework is problematic when applied to rock art sites, as among other createdplaces, particularly when couched within Indigenous knowledge systems.

During the time frame in which pictographic rock art was being created byancestral Algonquian peoples of the region it was limited in its production, placementand distribution across the landscape (Norder 2003). The reasons, as suggested byethnohistoric and ethnographic accounts (Conway 1993; Dewdney and Kidd 1962;Rajnovich 1994; Steinbring 1982; Vastokas and Vastokas 1973), and elaborated uponbelow, were that these sites were specialized in function and socially restricted interms of who could make them. Furthermore, the knowledge concerning the specificmeanings of these sites may or may not have been shared among members of thelarger community depending on additional social conventions. As such, the act ofcreation and specific meanings of these places on the landscape are not necessarilythe enduring aspects maintained in social memory. Consideration of these sites withina different context, that of user/caretaker, presents a more realistic recognition of thesocial processes associated with these sites and their maintenance as part of commu-nity identity and memory.

Discourses of Landscape and Social Memory

When I went to the reservation to visit family and friends during theannual powwow, my mother took my brother and me out to see the areaaround Devil’s, or Spirit, Lake as it is more accurately translated from theLanguage. As we passed from view of the lake and entered the leasedfarmlands to the south my attention was immediately drawn to an isolatedhill rising from the relatively flat plain. As we came closer I thought thatit looked like something familiar. I finally asked my mother what the hillwas and she casually said that it was called the Devil’s Heart but saidnothing further. I looked back at the hill, and saw immediately why it wascalled that and why it had tugged at my attention so. Down the middle ofthe hill on the side we were approaching from ran a shallow gully thatdivided the hill into two halves that made it look exactly like a heart. Ipointed this out to my mother and brother, and my mother laughed statingthat she had wondered if I would see “it.”

The approach taken here begins with the two concepts of landscape and memory,both of which have garnered significant attention in archaeology and, as exemplifiedhere, are often discussed together. Beginning with the concept of landscape, mostresearchers recognize that it is a complex concept to define. This complexity emergesin part due to disparate disciplinary discourses ranging from philosophy to architec-ture, but it also emerges from questions concerning how humans encounter, perceive,shape, and define the world around them. Recognizing the inherent complexity of thisconcept, I take a view that situates landscape as both a palimpsest of history that

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humans deposit upon the world and subsequently draw from, and engage with, in theformation and subsequent maintenance of communal identities and social memoryand also as something that exists outside of these human contexts and, as such, has anon-anthropocentric vitality of its own.

To situate this view further, research on landscape and social memory is most oftendiscussed within phenomenological frameworks in which landscape conceptuallyexists contingent upon human agency, imagination, and actions (Arntzen 2003; Basso1988, 1996; Ryden 1993; Tilley 1994, 2008). Within this paradigm, the physical andnatural landscape is dependent on anthropocentric human perception, with phenom-ena outside of this point of view lacking definition until encountered, an argumentsimilar to, if not derived directly from, the old philosophical riddle regarding the“noise’ of falling trees. Tilley (2008, p. 273), in particular, illustrates this pointthrough his observation that “[l]andscapes … influence forms of perception andactivity, but they do not determine thought and action and not anything can be madeof them.” Subsequently, while there is a tacit understanding of the presence of aphysical landscape that exists outside of human experience—in other words theremust something to which humans respond—it is only considered relevant insofar as itcan inform that experience.

Some researchers have been critical of this anthropocentric view of landscape,observing that, like other non-human objects and phenomena, landscape is notsomething waiting to be defined by humans who encounter it but exists with anagency and phenomenology of its own (Gell 1998; Nogué i Font 1993; Ingold 1993;LaTour 1999, 2005; Mills and Walker 2008). As Ingold (1993, p. 171) observes:

The landscape, in short, is not a totality that you or anyone else can look at, it israther the world in which we stand in taking up a point of view on oursurroundings. And it is within the context of this attentive involvement in thelandscape that the human imagination gets to work in fashioning ideas about it.For the landscape … is not so much the object as ‘the homeland of ourthoughts.’

In other words, for Ingold, landscape “is” and what is known about it is limited byhow humans encounter and perceive it. In Nogué i Font’s (1993, p. 159) study offarmers and artists in Catalonia, she underscores this point by stating “that bothphenomenologies, [human and landscape], exist, and do not exclude each other. Theyare simply there.” Consequently, definition arises out of sensual encounters, whichmay range from the simple act of walking from one place to another and observing(de Certeau 1984) or from the intentional shaping of landscape through acts ofphysical creation (Bradley 2000, 2009; Tilley 1994, 2008). The significance of theseobservations underscores the recognition that people and landscapes co-exist in arelationship that has elements that are at the same time both inextricably linked to andentirely independent of each other.

In conceiving of phenomenology and its application in this more expansivemanner, physical landscapes and humans can be seen to interact within a discursiveframework where memory and meaning are evoked inasmuch as they are imaginedby experience. Michael Harkin, for example, in his examination of the differencesbetween tourist and the Heiltsuk First Nation views of landscape in the developingecotourism industry of British Columbia, referred to the “recursive” (Harkin 2000,


pp. 49, 58) process of landscape. Borrowing from Heidegger (1962), he observed thefollowing:

many of my [aboriginal] consultants used landscape traces to reexperience thepast, which was with them in a way I did not fully appreciate … Such ancestralacts are not restricted to the distant past, but resonate through time … the pastpersists through its continued effects on the present, through the foreclosure ofunrealized possibilities, and through the opening of new grounds of possibility,which Heidegger called ‘appropriation’ (Harkin, 2000, pp. 49–50).

In other words, the ways in which memory is evoked by a landscape is not onlydiscursive but also time-transcendent, possessive of historicity. Researchers havereferred to this as the “temporality” of landscape (Ingold 1993; Tilley 1994, 2008),wherein physical places and natural landscapes are imbued with memory or signif-icance that accrues over time as people maintain their engagements with them in acontinuously shifting and changing dialectic defined by the circumstances of thatgiven time and place.

David (2002), in his collaborative work on studying the origins of the Dreamtimeamong Indigenous communities of Australia took this perspective further with hisconception of “preunderstanding,” adapted from Gadamer (1979). Preunderstandingbuilds on temporality by observing that “[a]ll things appear to us through the systemof meanings already at work in the cultural framework from which we approach theworld” (David 2002, p. 3). In this case, human encounters with new and potentiallyunfamiliar landscapes are couched within ontologies and epistemologies that evokeculture-specific responses. So once again, human-landscape engagements are dialog-ic and recursive, but David offers us the additional recognition of the significance andrelevance of the diversity of human knowledges in shaping the outcomes of theseexperiences and engagements.

Harkin (2000, p. 59) addresses this issue as well, noting that:

Certain places have potentialities, which are realized repeatedly throughhistory … Such a landscape is inhabited. It is saturated with habits of mind andbody, with traces of ancestors and their actions … A sense of belonging to aplace, replete with its possibilities and limitations, constitutes the sense of self ina way that middle-class Westerners have largely forgotten.

In this statement, Harkin highlights how social memory and identity emerge for theHeiltsuk not through acts of explicit creation, but through these acts of observationand appropriation, and of recognition and imagination that arise from the inherenthistoricity of the landscape and the Heiltsuk’s ancestral association with it. While aproblematic essentialization to some, Harkin’s contrast to “middle-class Westerners”via depictions of the region in art, comparable to that of Nogué i Font’s work (1993),serves to highlight this difference in the outcomes of these landscape engagements bydifferent communities.

Overall, what these various discourses are meant to demonstrate is that landscapehas existence and a life-cycle (Ingold 1993, p. 157) that humans engage with tovarying degrees and with differing outcomes. What should further be apparent fromthe above discussion is that the significance of an original maker or innovator whoconstructs or gives a place on the landscape specific meaning is limited, focusing only


on a single point in time in this larger co-existential life-cycle. The same observationapplies to the study of an entire series of such moments. Each one, in and of itself,allows for a brief moment of focus and in conjunction can reveal patterns of activeengagement with the landscape. However, while the act of creation may result in avisible presence, that presence may not provide indication of the significance of thisobject subsequent to its creation.

Such can be the case with rock art sites. Produced through specific actions, theyendure as visible markers that may elicit David’s preunderstanding or possessHarkin’s potentialities, with meanings that are both constrained and open to a view-er’s experience and subsequent interpretation. Furthermore, they are continuouslysubject to appropriation by those who encounter them regardless of the culturalcontext. While a more difficult proposition to address archaeologically, it is theseacts of appropriation, or use, which serve as enduring foundations for the formationof communal identity and social memory.

The Aanishinaabeg Landscape of Northwestern Ontario

Meetings with elders among the Anishinaabeg communities around Lake of theWoods since my initial fieldwork in 1998 remain, as always, the most importantand influential experiences on how the fieldwork addressed here has evolved.When I began that work, it was always implicit that learning about rock art inthe region was contingent on the communities’ willingness to work with me.This included the basic understanding that if they weren’t, the work wouldn’thappen. I know what “no” means. Fortunately community members werewilling to meet with me from the very beginning, and my field experienceswere made that much richer as a result. Yet, this richness did not emerge fromlearning about the meaning of rock art. In fact, I learned very little, a topic Idiscuss in greater detail elsewhere (Norder 2007). Instead the richness camefrom learning about the history of their interactions with the regional landscape.

After the communities were relocated away from their traditional settle-ments on the lake, life, of course, changed. Because they were locatedalong the major roads, economic opportunity did come for these people,mainly in the form of the developing tourism industry of the region. Giventheir knowledge of the region’s history, resources, and geography manyfound work as hunting, trapping, and fishing guides, but as Lake of theWoods became increasingly settled by Euro-Canadians this changed. As thetourists became permanent occupants, the need for Indigenous guides di-minished as non-Indigenous entrepreneurs established themselves in thesetraditionally aboriginal roles. They had, after all, learned the lay of the land.

As part of the 2005 archaeological and ethnographic field research undertaken innorthwestern Ontario, Canada, I conducted a series of interviews with elders from FirstNations communities in the region around Lake of the Woods (Fig. 1). Interviewquestions were structured by five themes: general regional history, land tenurepractices, learning landscape, sacred places, and contemporary development issues.


The questions were broad in scope allowing for a free form dialogue between myselfand the elders I interviewed so that rather than trying to target specific information Ifocused on developing a sense of the different types of knowledges people possessedas they related to the broader landscape. Overall, the goal of these interviews was toassess the ways that the contemporary communities still engaged with the landscapein terms of traditional beliefs and subsistence practices, and how these were negoti-ated within contemporary social and economic pressures and developments. While Iwas only able to conduct a handful of interviews with elders in these communities,they provided a rich, yet often melancholy, picture of the shifting nature of traditionallife, memory and landscape in the region.

Of interest to the discussion here were the questions that I asked about landscapeknowledge regarding places like rock art sites and other locations of significance onthe landscape. For example, as part of my discussions with one First Nation’s elderfrom Wazhushk Onigam Reserve I asked about a famous painted rock on the Lake ofthe Woods called Devil’s Rock (Fig. 2) to see if it meant anything to him. The rock,garishly painted and depicting a grinning carnival style devil depiction, was some-thing I had earlier been led to believe was something the non-Indigenous locals hadpainted to draw tourists to that particular area. Much to my surprise, this elder told methe rock was not only known to him but was not a tourist destination. In fact, the rockturned out to be an important sacred location to the First Nations communities in theregion. He told me the following:

A fella over at Shoal Lake, he painted that [rock at Devil’s Gap]. He lives intown now. A few years ago he was asked to paint it, paint over the stuff thatthose damn kids had been putting on it … they been putting stuff on it for

Fig. 1 Lake of the Woods watershed and project research area


maybe 45 years … maybe a little more than that. See, it’s the Keeper of theLake. It’s an important place on the lake. We got a lot of secret places out there.Powerful places. What we do is we leave tobacco [there] so we could travel,journeys, safe journeys.

In another conversation with an elder at Whitefish Bay Reserve, I broached thesubject of places which were considered dangerous. She provided me with thefollowing description:

In some areas you can’t go… there. Maybe something is there. Something mustbe living there that doesn’t want nobody to disturb them you know. Even on thelakes here, on the lake that’s what they say. Like maybe there could besomething … out here. They said there is something there way under there likethere’s a big hole there, maybe something’s living there that’s what they told me… Maybe that’s why you have to put tobacco or things like that when they tellyou not to go in those places.

In reflecting on these narratives, it would be easy to relegate what is observedto a maker/meaning context, where the landscape is invested with belief and iscreated through the imagination and history of the people living there. In bothexamples, place is endowed with meaning through the mediums of naming andoral history; the landscape is appropriated and is structured by experience(Basso 1996). In this case travel on the water is understood to be a hazardous activityon the Lake of the Woods, so the creation of a Keeper of the Lake and creatures thatlive in the water that make it even more hazardous is in keeping with this perceptionof danger. In order to avoid these dangers, behaviors are invented, such as the leavingof tobacco offerings that mediate between people and the beings that they have placedon the landscape.

However, as noted above, this framework of maker/meaning is limiting. It offers aview of a point of origin for actions and beliefs, but it is little more than a stimulus/response view of the world; people see, experience and, in response, create suitableforms of engagement. There is a dialectical process involved, but, like an ethno-graphic moment, it becomes fixed within cultural praxis and is typically the limit thatmany archaeologists working with features like rock art will tend to explore as part of

Fig. 2 Devil’s Rock,Lake of the Woods, Ontario.(Photo by J. Norder)


interpreting past landscapes. Once this observation is made, what happens afterwardis of little consequence, but, as Smith (2001, p. 218), citing Ryden (1993, p. 127),notes: “Through time, people create many signs and markers … creating ‘a palimp-sest: a layered accumulation, with each new layer erasing and obscuring the last.’”Within this statement we can see that acts of creation accumulate as subsequentgenerations engage with the landscape, and older acts become distanced or forgotten.Yet, referring back to Harkin above, traces of the ancestral past are rarely totallyerased or obscured. They endure in some fashion.

This was the situation that I encountered in my work when I asked questionsregarding who made rock art sites in the region, or if they were aware of what theymeant. As noted above, some places, such as Devil’s Rock, were known, and peopleknew where the rock art sites were located around the lake, including a few that hadnot been documented. However, regardless of who I talked to, the uniform answerwas that there was little to no knowledge of the makers or the meaning of the rock artsites. Historically, ethnographers and travelers in the region were told that the siteswere produced by other-than-human beings, usually the little people, the Maymayg-wayshi (Conway 1993; Dewdney and Kidd 1962; Rajnovich 1994). In fact, oneperson I had interviewed several years earlier, an archaeologist who was also amember of one of the regional First Nations communities, thought that studying rockart sites was a ridiculous pursuit. Her view was that the rock art sites were onlymeaningful if they had something to teach, and since no-one, in her opinion orexperience, knew what the images at these sites meant they held no intrinsic com-munity value and, as a result, researching them was a pointless endeavor.

Occam’s razor provides two explanations for this phenomenon. The first is that thepeople in the region were not the makers. Academics have argued for decades overwhether or not the present-day Aanishinaabeg, or Ojibwa, to use the more familiarterm in the literature, were present in the Lake of the Woods region prior to contact. Itis known that during the early seventeenth century the Cree were in the region, but itis unknown if they were there prior to that time period and were subsequentlyreplaced by an Ojibwa expansion into the region, or if they were temporary occupantsliving in the region alongside the Ojibwa. Archaeology and ethnohistory supportsboth arguments to a certain extent (Bishop 1981, 1994; Dawson 1987; Ray 1998).However, it is my opinion that the argument is not particularly relevant in the longterm in regards to the makers of rock art. There is considerable evidence to supportthe assertion that both groups, among other northern Algonquian-speaking peoples,are descendants of the makers of these places, which are considered to be part of thelarger stylistic tradition referred to as the Canadian Shield Rock Art Tradition(Conway and Conway 1990; Hlady 1970; Meyer and Smailes 1974; Steinbring1982; Steinbring et al., 1969; Wilford 1955).

The second explanation is that temporal distance, social change, and/or lack ofcultural or oral transmission shifted the knowledge of maker and meaning out of thesocial memory of the descendants. Assuming that this is the case, it should not havebeen as surprising to me as it was (Norder 2007) that this was not an issue of concernto any of the Anishinaabeg peoples with whom I spoke. Yet, despite this seemingambivalence towards these sites they still were clearly part of the lives of thesepeople. The issue, when considered in the following narrative from an elder fromWhitefish Bay provides a clue as to how. In this case, the topic I discussed with the


elder concerned what he did when he encountered someplace new that struck him assignificant or important in some manner. He explained that:

I guess it’s like an instinct. It’s an instinct … there used to be an elder livingacross from us there, years ago. I was only 14, 15, 16. We used to go to his placeand give him tobacco, and he’ll tell, what do you call those? He tells of all thetrees we had, animals, he tells of everything from those stories, and tales.Anyways, legends, stories I guess. What we saw, what we see today, and allabout the birds and animals every living thing in the woods and stuff like that.See each one has a story, and he’ll tell you that.

At first glance, the narrative is, once again, consistent with the anthropocentricperspectives discussed above, and in this case also with that of researchers who havestudied language and landscape (Basso 1996; Palmer 2005). Keith Basso’s classicwork with the Western Apache of the American Southwest, for example, identifieshow features of the landscape, both natural and constructed, are defined by stories asthey are encountered. They are, as he states, “[a]nimated by the thoughts and feelingsof persons who attend to them” (Basso 1996, p. 108). Subsequently, these storiesbecome tools of the makers that are used to guide behaviors among the community.However, the elder’s narrative above does not quite fit with this line of argument.Instead it is more consistent with the theoretical approach I have constructed so far.The critical distinction comes from a careful reading of the last two sentences.Overall, the narrative speaks to the process that leads to preunderstanding (David2002) as the elder tells of the way in which he learned about the landscape throughtraditional teachings. However, at the same time, the elder speaks to the potentialities(Harkin 2000) of the landscape in terms of its historicity and a description of non-human agents that alludes to a vital landscape that has its own stories and voice(s),which human observation and actions simply serve to reveal.

This may be a problematic view for some who might simply consider the above assimply the relativism of cultural perception, a view that could also be implied, albeiterroneously, from the work of Harkin (2000) and Nogué i Font (1993). Basso com-ments on this issue, however, with the following critical observation: “For wherenative men and women are concerned the external world is as it appears to them to be– naturally, unproblematically, and more or less consistently … Cultures run deep, asthe saying goes, and natives everywhere take their ‘natives' point of view’ very muchfor granted” (Basso 1988, p. 100).

While there may be an element of truth to this statement in that a people’s views oflandscape are embedded within daily practice such that it is “taken for granted,” therather cavalier assertion that Native people, in particular, may be blinded by that sameperspective seems excessive. To give Basso credit, in this article he is addressing thedialectic between ethnographer and the “other” in regard to the difficulties in under-standing and communicating landscape, much in the sense I encountered. However,he ultimately falls back on the anthropocentric view.

For the Aanishinaabeg elders that I interviewed, I could only hazard that theywould find a view like Basso’s to be almost like a joke. For one thing, they would notdeny that places are created and invested with meanings by humans. For example, arecent practice that was adopted by some traditional elders, and also adopted bytourists visiting the region, was the construction of Alaskan Inuit Inukshuks (Fig. 3).


The story associated with this adoption was actually a sad one, as one communitybecame divided over a land development project on their reserve, which impacted anancient cemetery. Despite strong protests on the part of the traditional elders theproject went through and destroyed a significant portion of the cemetery. A fewcommunity members, upset with this outcome, began to construct Inukshuks atparticular locations in order to communicate to the disturbed ancestors and theCreator their continued respect and sorrow over the event (C. S. ‘Paddy’ Reid,pers. comm.).

At the same time, they would laugh at the absurdity of so narrow a view. Asillustrated by the elder’s narrative above, places, objects, and the landscape, each withtheir own stories, inhabit the world co-existentially with humans. Reflecting back onSmith’s statement, the Aanishinaabeg of the region understand that the landscape isan historic palimpsest, with memories already inscribed upon it through stories thatare either known, yet to be learned, relearned, or even to remain a mystery. However,in their view, the landscape provides the impetus for these stories as much as humansdo. Places on the landscape speak, and it is the responsibility of the people inhabitingit to listen and to learn what they must to engage appropriately with it.

Use and Care of the Landscape

In the summer of 1998, while I was doing my pre-dissertation fieldwork, I and aFrench-Canadian colleague traveled across Ontario visiting rock art sites andmeeting with First Nations communities, provincial archaeologists, and provin-cial park rangers who were familiar with these places. One of the places westopped was at Quetico Provincial Park where we had the fortune of meetingwith the park director, himself. Given our travel plans, we realistically couldn’tvisit any of the sites in the park, but the park had archived research on the park’snumerous rock art sites in their library, to which the director gave us access. Healso put me in touch with the cultural officer for the relatively nearby Lac LaCroix First Nation, but not until after he had told us about the relationship thatthe park had with the Lac La Croix.

Fig. 3 Inukshuk sculpture,Lake of the Woods, Ontario.(Photo by J. Norder)


Besides the relatively untouched wilderness of the park and its no motor policyfor watercraft, the rock art sites in the park were a major draw for people andresearchers over the decades. In fact, the Quetico Foundation had funded thefirst publication of Selwyn Dewdney’s and Kenneth Kidd’s rock art researchback in the 1960s. As the director explained this history to my colleague andme, I had a nagging sense that I knew where the story was going, and I wasn’tdisappointed. In the early 1990s the park was in the process of developing anew management plan for the park and its resources, and, for the first time, theyincluded the Lac La Croix, whose traditional lands included the entirety of thepark. One of the questions the park officials asked the Lac La Croix was if theyhad any concerns about the rock art sites in the park.

As the director described this meeting, he recalled that the elders from Lac LaCroix in attendance consulted with each other briefly in the Language, andwithout any hesitation informed the park officials that they did not wantpictures to be taken of the sites anymore. The park officials were somewhatsurprised by what was clearly not a request by the elders but a statementexpected to be respected and acted upon, and the park subsequently did acton it to the extent that they realistically could. I smiled to myself at this, becauseit should not have been a surprise that the traditional owners of these locationswould assert control when the opportunity presented itself. My subsequentdiscussions with the Lac La Croix cultural officer confirmed this and he hadbeen very pleased with the park’s willingness to work with their community onthe plan and how this had subsequently led to a more open and productiverelationship for both.

In landscape engagements, it is through this discursive process of human responsibility,discussed in the previous section, where a user/caretaker framework serves to explainphenomena where a maker/meaning context does not readily apply or lacks interpretivepower. Among the contemporary Aanishinaabeg of northwestern Ontario, much of theirtraditional knowledge with the landscape is framed in terms of active and negotiatedengagement with the world. The preceding narratives all illustrate this point to oneextent or another. The world is inhabited and vital and requires active negotiation byhumans through their “user” actions, which are governed by normative cultural rulesthat outline particular forms of behavior (David 2002). In the first two narratives, anoffering of some sort was the means through which people and the landscapeinteracted with each other. This was done through the medium of a particular place,whether it is the stone known as the Keeper of the Lake or “those places” where youare not supposed to go. For rock art sites in the region, the same rules apply, with theonly exception being the lack of knowledge of the makers and their meanings.However, this is not at all surprising given the contexts of production.

Regional rock art sites, from what little is documented ethnohistorically, werecreated in a similar social context as another regional, albeit portable, pictographicmedium: Birch Bark Scrolls (Densmore 1929; Dewdney 1975). Both were limited intheir production, with each one usually produced by religious specialists or peoplewho had particular types of visions. Documenting these visions onto either mediumwas a private process, with the knowledge of the specific meanings of the composi-tions known to either just the individual, or communicated to a small number of


people. Relying on oral transmission to maintain, and because of the private nature ofthese compositions, the memory and meaning of both was susceptible to loss or,alternatively, attribution to unknown persons or other-than-human beings. As notedabove, rock art sites in many parts of the Canadian Shield were attributed to theMaymaygwayshi, or little people of Aanishinaabeg myth who would come out oftheir hiding places at night and occasionally mark the stones around the entries totheir homes with rock art images (Conway 1993; Rajnovich 1994).

In my own encounters with Lake of the Woods elders such stories were generallypresent and discussed, but everyone I spoke with either fundamentally knew orsuspected that their ancestors had produced them if not the specific details as towhy. This was not the case for every community in the region, however. AnastasiaShkilnyk, who worked with the Grassy Narrows First Nations community locatednortheast of Lake of the Woods, provided the following transcript of her discussionswith an elder:

Our people used to believe there is a spirit that dwells in those cliffs overthere. Whenever the Indians thought something like that, they put a marker.And you can still see these markers on the old reserve. Sometimes you seepaintings on rocks. These mean something; they were put there for apurpose … The rock paintings mean that there is a good spirit there thatwill help us on the waters of the English River. You see a cut in the rocksover there; that's where people leave tobacco for the good spirit that inhabitsthat place (Shkilnyk 1985, p. 71).

This narrative highlights many of the issues I have presented here in regards to thedistinctions between maker/meaning and user/caretaker contexts. The elder speakingto Shkilnyk clearly knew that his ancestors were the creators of these paintings, butthe specific meanings of compositions were either not known or were not theimportant point to emphasize. The narrative is not clear on this account. However,what was emphasized is the general use of these places by all of the people, whichwas to “help us on the waters of the English River.” Caretaking of these places wasdone by the leaving of offerings, which helped to maintain goodwill between thespirit of that particular place and the people. This practice continues into the presentamong all the communities that I encountered.

Before concluding this section, I want to make one careful distinction in regards tothe use of the concept of “caretaker.” As McNiven and Russell (2005, pp. 235–237)point out, concepts of caretaking, or stewardship, are ontological constructs that areproblematic because of their applications in contemporary Indigenous heritage man-agement and cultural resource management, in general. Caretaking, as with steward-ship, is frequently couched within stakeholder or “interest” group models and inheritage management is framed by negotiations and consultations between these“interested” parties. The concept of user/caretaker used here is meant to reference arelationship between these locations and their “owners.” As the opening anecdote ofthis section exemplifies and to paraphrase McNiven and Russell (2005, p. 236) theAanishinaabeg people of Lake of the Woods as “owners” of these sites not only havethe knowledge concerning the significance of these places but have the rights todefine and control the rules for engaging with these and other culturally significantplaces on their ancestral landscape.


The Palimpsest of the Past in the Memories and Actions of the Present

There is a site located on Lake of the Woods on a rock outcrop overlookingDevil’s Bay. I have visited the site every time I have gone to Lake of the Woodssince 1998. It has an image of a Thunderbird along with a couple of other faintimages located to its right. Over the course of a single decade, the faint imageshave almost completely disappeared and the Thunderbird has been following.The last time I visited the site, if I hadn’t known it was there, I could have easilymissed it completely as a blank wall. Meanwhile, on the other side of theoutcrop, 20 m away, also overlooking the waters of the bay, is a contemporaryrock painting of a fish, which was, I later learned, done by a local First Nationsmember seeking to continue this tradition of marking landscape with memories.

What this paper has sought to demonstrate is that the role of landscape in theendurance of social memory is a complex phenomenon with multiple frames ofreference. In this case I argued that the importance of place in social memory maylie in its use and care rather than derived from a specific understanding of themeaning. Rock art sites, while a known phenomenon in the region I worked, aretypically not remembered in terms of their specific meanings or even origins. Theirimportance emerges as part of the historicity and agency of landscape. These sites areremembered as places of engagement between people and the spirits, and remainwithin social memory as places of power where contemporary First Nations peoplescan still go to in order to pray and re-engage with these spirits through these places.

To encounter rock art sites, whether known or not, is to always understandthem as living places because of the images that mark them. There is nomystery in how they should be engaged with other than that they be usedand cared for properly. At many sites today you will find offerings left by localFirst Nations people and others who have learned the way that these placesshould be treated. What they mean, however, is not a relevant question to thecontemporary descendants. As I began, I take issue with those who believe thata lack of remembrance of who created these places signifies a lack of affiliationwith them. Clearly, in this case, the importance of rock art sites lies not in itscreation, but in the places that they mark and the actions they inspire forsubsequent generations who continue to understand how to listen, learn andengage with the landscape through this process of remembering the forgotten.

Acknowledgments I want to thank the elders of the First Nations communities who offered the gift oftheir time and words to this project and the opportunities to spend time with them as they prepared for theirfirst inter-band homecoming ceremonies on the Lake of the Woods in the fall of 2005. In addition, mythanks also go to the members of the Anishinaabeg of Kabapikotawangag Research Council and the Kay-Nah-Chi-Wah-Nung Historical Centre for helping me in meeting and establishing the connections withthese elders as well as their guidance in locating community members who were interested in working withme over the years. I also want to give my deepest gratitude and respect to the late C.S. ‘Paddy’ Reid for themany hours he spent pointing out what I was doing wrong and setting me on the right path in my research inthe region. I also must acknowledge the work of Dillon Carr, my field and research assistant in 2005 and2006, who stepped hesitantly but easily outside of his comfort zone of Paleoindian research to assist withthe field survey, interviews, and long hours of transcriptions. Finally I want to thank Michigan StateUniversity for their generous financial support in funding this project.


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The Creation and Endurance of Memory and Place Among First Nations of Northwestern Ontario, Canada.

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