A Girl from Parry Sound: Enchantment as Method (Past, Present and an Unforeseeable Future)

I Am Rock, I Am Nothing, I am Part of Everything, 2017 Image Credit: Ella Morton. Photo of Erratics on Huckleberry Island, Georgian Bay

To dwell, according to the Oxford dictionary, means live in or at a specified place. In my youth that meant on the eastern shore of Georgian Bay, specifically Parry Sound, and in summer on Huckleberry Island in a cottage that my parents built in the early 1950s, a 20-minute boat ride from the town harbour. Parry Sound is located within the Robinson-Huron Treaty area. This treaty, signed in 1850, covers the territory of several First Nations, including Wasauksing, Shawanaga, Magnetawan, Dokis, and Henvey Inlet. The treaty also encompasses the traditional lands of the Anishinaabeg peoples, specifically the Ojibwa, Potawatomi, and Odawa.

Among other culturally specific circumstances, I am the product of the cottage phenomenon of the 50s and 60s when swaths of Crown land were opened for sale to the public. Writing those words, Crown land, all these years later holds significant weight. Mine was a lived experience decades before Truth and Reconciliation, before any acknowledgement, education or understanding of colonialism, the legacy of which remains deeply embedded in Canada’s legal, political, artistic, and economic systems. It was also when, at thirteen years of age, I had a special connection with a young boy, Frank, who lived on Parry Island First Nation (Indian reserve). It was a friendship cut short, blunted, by parents who in their settler-colonial ignorance told me I couldn’t be friends with him. Sixty-two years later I still have his gift of a small birchbark canoe that he had his grandmother make for me, my name embellished on one side spelled out in porcupine quills.

I have been many places nationally and internationally since my youth and yet I am haunted by one place. Like a salmon swimming back to its home stream, I return year after year. It is a landscape like no other, a place like no other. How do I know this place? By its shape and smell, by its feel. By how my soul, stolen daily through the cut and thrust of contemporary life, returns to me through the geography of this place.

I am enchanted.

Excerpt from Upcoming Artist Book Project

Image is Part of a Series Taken in 2017 When I Returned To Do A Photographic Art Project