Involvement with the ‘higher’ levels of culture is comparatively optional – but no one can escape the conditions of creaturality, of eating and drinking and domestic life… — Norman Bryson, Looking at the Overlooked
The creaturality garden project wonders about the muffled histories and stories passed over and lying underfoot, beneath and between the paved-over landscapes of public spaces. ‘We have always been here’, says an Anishinabeg woman as she introduced a song at a drumming circle. Traces of the people shows another history of indwelling 9-15,000 years before we newcomers arrived to start telling quite a different tale. I am using my recently completed Master’s thesis, Art, Nature and the Virtual Environment, as pulp material for compost in a garden/installation project in the backyard of the Gardener House Studios at Britannia Bay beach in Ottawa. I have an itinerant residency there this summer and am blogging about it at creaturality.wordpress.com . In a raised bed planter built out of discarded books and filled with dirt, I am growing a Haudenosaunee or Iroquois three sisters companion planting: corn, beans and squash, to de- colonise the site by bringing back traditional food growing to a typically landscaped beachside park, beside a river previously navigated by a mostly exterminated aboriginal culture.
DIRT BANK the creaturality garden project
places traces use value gardens
collections plants , books and dirt by barbara cuerden
Barbara Cuerden
Besides my thesis I wonder what else might be buried at the bottom of the garden? Some online digging reveals to me that ‘ the history of the Ottawa River watershed is inseparable from the history of the Algonquin Nation’ – except that in fact it has been separated from it. Chasing words and the empty spaces between them, (and remembering the Britannia of Rule Britannia ) I find out that the history of the anishinabeg and other local indigenous peoples is not the kind of knowledge made available for surface consultation by a visiting public. The archives box at Britannia Bay reads as point form history beginning with ‘Capt. John Lebreton (vet. of the War of 1812) acquired landgrant’ [sic].What is left out between the lines of historical text are the extant land claims and treaty agreements collectively ‘overlooked’ by government officers and paper mill barons such as Philemon Wright. These waterways were colonised in the service of pulp and paper industries. In multiple ways the ‘base’ material of aboriginal indwelling was disappeared . Like so many other species of things, it has been written out, but perhaps leaving traces behind for newer ‘tracts’.
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