People of the Watershed: Photographs by John Macfie
People of the Watershed: Photographs by John Macfie includes more than 100 photographs taken by John Macfie (1925–2018), a settler trapline manager who worked in Northern Ontario in the 1950s and 1960s. Macfie travelled with a camera, recording life in Anishinaabe, Cree, and Anisininew communities during a period of intense and rapid change. The people and places of Attawapiskat, Sandy Lake, Mattagami, and other communities across the Hudson’s Bay watershed are revealed through his lens in ways that emphasize the warmth and continuity of community life. Curated by nîpisîhkopâwiyiniw (Willow Cree) curator, writer, journalist, cultural advocate, and commentator Paul Seesequasis, the exhibition centers the lives and resiliency of the Indigenous people represented, many of whom have been identified by Macfie and Seesequasis.
In the following essay, Seesequasis outlines his discovery of Macfie’s work, and explores the contexts within which the photographer created his intimate and expansive suite of images.
In 1956, Macfie, a trap management officer with the Ontario Department of Land and Forests, heard of a “woman of the land”: an Anishinaabe woman who lived off the land and only came to the closest town, Osnaburgh, once a month to pick up supplies and her old age pension. Her story intrigued Macfie, who packed up his Zeiss Contax camera, and timing it right, walked to the shores of Lake St. Joseph and waited. It was not too long before he saw an older woman approaching, paddling a canoe. The woman’s name was Maria Mikenak. She was likely in her mid-to-late 60s, and lived in the bush, subsisting off fish, berries, manomim (wild rice), potatoes, rabbits and birds, and was near self-sufficient. Travelling with her that day was her grandson. Mikenak only spoke Anishinaabemowin, with a sprinkling of English words, while Macfie spoke only English and a bit of Cree, so they communicated mostly through hand gestures.
More than 60 years later, while researching images of the north at the Archives of Ontario, I came across Macfie’s photographs of Maria Mikenak and her grandson. I pored over two dozen photos of her paddling, setting up camp by the shore, starting a fire, and close-ups of her canoe. The images captivated me. To my pleasant surprise, the photographer was still alive, retired in Parry Sound, Ontario. We struck up a correspondence and in 2017 and 2018, before his passing at the age of 93, John Macfie spent several hours in taped interviews with me.
As I delved deeper into his portfolio of northern Ontario photographs and also his stories, I realised that there was something more here than just compelling images—this was a thematic oeuvre framing the Indigenous peoples and communities over the vast territory of the Hudson’s Bay watershed. Macfie had spent more than a decade traveling the land of hundreds of lakes and rivers, and transitions from boreal forest to muskeg to tundra—in all, spread over more than 500,000 square kilometres of Northern Ontario. Though he was a settler, Macfie developed a deep and lasting relationship with the Indigenous peoples in the region, from summer camps to trap lines to canoe trips to local towns.
John Macfie understood from the beginning of his time in the watershed region that this world was rapidly changing, and this in part inspired his urge to capture it in photographs—not just the way things were done but, importantly, the people who did them. In the mid-1950s, snowmobiles had not yet become common and trapping lines were still maintained and passed down through families as they had been for generations. Bush planes were becoming increasingly common, as were outboard motors, powering square-sterned canoes. A seasonal-nomadic lifestyle was prevalent, though a more sedentary lifestyle was on the increase in villages. Residential schools were having a profound and detrimental effect on Indigenous family life.
People of the Watershed is the first exhibition focused on Macfie’s photographs. When seen together, it is an ambitious visual work, recording the people, and the lands, of the watershed. There is an intimacy here. This is the product of an attachment built through time: it feels less like extraction and more like immersion, as if the photographer himself was trying to explore his own sense of belonging to this moment and time. The longevity of this extended project, a full decade, is also remarkable. Macfie’s vocation imparted a connection to his subjects that would not have been possible were he just an outsider passing through. After a time, people knew who he was. He developed friendships, and the journalistic side of his nature made him curious about people.
After his decade in the northwest of the province, Macfie finally settled in Parry Sound, Ontario. He wrote popular columns for the Georgian Bay Beacon and the Parry Sound Star. Eventually, Macfie gifted his collection of prints and negatives—over 1,200 of them—to the Archives of Ontario for posterity. A selection of them is presented in People of the Watershed.
Curated by Paul Seesequasis
Presented by the McMichael Canadian Art Collection in partnership with CONTACT
John Macfie (1925–2018) was an amateur photographer, local historian and writer. Originally from Dunchuch, Ontario, Macfie moved to Sioux Lookout in 1950 to become a trap management officer with the Department of Lands and Forests. He later moved to Gogoma where he worked as a fish and wildlife supervisor, before returning to Parry Sound in 1960. He later became a columnist for the Georgian Bay Beacon and the Parry Sound North Star. This is the first major exhibition of his photography.
Paul Seesequasis is a nîpisîhkopâwiyiniw (Willow Cree) curator, writer, journalist, cultural advocate, and commentator in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan. He has been active in the Indigenous arts as an artist and a policy-maker since the 1990s, and since 2015 he has curated the Indigenous Archival Photo Project, an online and physical exhibition of archival Indigenous photographs that explores history, identity, and the process of visual reclamation. He is the author of Blanket Toss under Midnight Sun: Portraits of Everyday Life in Eight Indigenous Communities (2019).
Curated by Paul Seesequasis
