tracing carefull paths

Michelle Wilson

My storytelling meanders, retraces itself, stays in place and excavates, changing slightly with every narration. These stories trace the contours of movement, for example, migration routes or rivers. And so, I use maps to guide their telling; maps that, like ‘land,’ are formed through relations. They are mnemonic devices that direct my wandering mind.

On this map, we, the Coves Collective, illustrate the land we traced with our bodies during walks and workshops and recorded with GPS apps (see the white-on-white stitches). We create images with threads stained and dyed with plants from this place. Soils with long memories nourished these plant beings. They remember the relationships that played out across their surfaces, the toxins that leached down or were born through groundwater, and the bullets and chemical tanks embedded in their depths.

This island of land, nestled in the crook of a horseshoe of muddy ponds, was formed millennia ago by a meander off the river known to its Anishinaabe stewards as the Deshkan Ziibi or Antler River.1 Settlers had yet to sever this meander from the Deshkan Ziibi when the Deshkan Ziibiing Anishinaabeg signed McKee Treaty No. 2 and London Township Treaty No. 6.2 As deceitful as those treaties were, one thing is clear: the Deshkan Ziibiing Anishinaabeg never ceded title to the bed of the Deshkan Ziibi.3

1 Later the French called it La Tranchée. Most recently, LieutenantGovernor John Graves Simcoe called it the Thames River.

2 The Deshkan Ziibiing Anishinaabeg are commonly referred to today as the Chippewa of the Thames First Nation.

3 This is a brief and simplified interpretation of the treaty relationships in London, Ontario. For a thorough and more nuanced understanding I urge you to read "London (Ontario) Area Treaties: An Introductory Guide" (2018) by Stephen D'Arcy. It is available at: http://works.bepress.com/sdarcy/19/

Following the ponds’ banks today, I have found that only one trickling finger stretches toward the Deshkan Ziibi. This is because the river inflow was blocked over a century ago by railway embankments and later, in the 1950s, by a garbage dump. Still, I understand this place, known as the Coves, as part of the watershed that the Deshkan Ziibiing Anishinaabeg nation never ceded. But what does ownership mean when we understand that this area also falls under the inherent Indigenous rights of the Minisink Lunaape (Munsee-Delaware Nation) and the Onyota’a:ka (Oneida Nation of the Thames)? The waters that wore away the banks that define and protect this place also mark it as a place where I can feel what should be palpable throughout this town, province, and country; I am on Stolen Indigenous Land.

So, who does this land belong to?

This answer, again, returns us to the river. In 1937 the Deshkan Zibii crested its banks and swamped much of the city of London, Ontario. In response, the city instituted flood control measures that arrested the seasonal submerging of the lowlands held within the oxbow. Thus, on the eve of the Second World War, the Canadian government offered up this land, which they had used for nearly sixty years as a rifle range and training ground for agriculture.

Simultaneously, the advancing tide of German expansion drove the Wolf family from what was then Czechoslovakia. In 1939 Thomas Wolf purchased nearly all the land we have mapped in this piece. He planted a fruit orchard, built a house, and quietly continued his family trade in the basement, mixing paint.

Within a decade, Thomas Wolf and his family established the Almatex Paint company. It expanded quickly, and before anyone could raise alarms about the environmental impact, it became a significant employer in the city. The factory closed in 2001. Its warehouses, laboratory, and factory are gone. However, the chain link fences topped with barbed wire, cement pads, and blocks of concrete threaded with rebar remain, marking where the toxic chemicals were once mixed. This summer, I led walks through a hole in the fence to this site. We poured water gathered from the ponds onto a living artwork: a ring of goldenrod planted by the Coves Collective into a trench we cut into the cement with a circular saw. This goldenrod removes lead in the soil, one of the many invisible presences Almatex left behind. In the center of the ring, we marked our presence by stacking rocks and chunks of concrete to form a cairn. In August, the former factory site is similarly ringed with four-foot-high goldenrod, nourishing swarms of bees, vibrantly declaring that these plant beings are already working to heal this place. The Coves Collective's work humbly draws attention to what these plant beings have already begun.

I told those who accompanied me on my walks about Mrs. Ayshi Hassan, who wrote to the city in 1971 and informed them that all the birds had left the area, driven away by the stench of noxious fumes. I told them about the "paint pit" that children set on fire in 1966, creating a column of smoke that rose hundreds of feet above the land we stood on. I told them about the two towering evergreens that were felled in 1981 when a labour strike turned violent; the Almatex management replaced the trees with a giant pole topped with a CCTV camera. One day as I was telling these stories, two deer raced around the interior perimeter of the fence, circling us before escaping through a gap known only to them. One of the youths with me that day asked, “what is the opposite of traumatized?”

Valspar, a subsidiary of Sherwin Williams, who bought out Almatex, still owns this land. Their contractors only visit the site to test the groundwater through blue test wells that dot the land.

But does the land belong to them?

We walked the trails made by humans and animals and picked up the small apples that still grow yearly. I heard that decades ago, the caretaker shot salt pellets at the children sneaking into the orchard to eat the fruit. There we found half a ginger cat, consumed by the resident coyotes. A child left behind tobacco and the whispered words, 'rest in peace'.

As recently as the 1920s and 30s, the ponds that circle this land still flowed with water from the Deshkan Ziibi. They were so clear and clean that settlers set up ice-harvesting businesses on their banks. Now the only water that flows into them is runoff from streets and neighbourhoods. This has kicked the natural sedimentation process into overdrive. The water has become nearly opaque in places. In the spring of 1970, almost all the fish in the East Pond died. Today there are thriving populations of turtles and Common Carp. The carp, a non-native giant in these small waterways, stir up the silt, keeping sunlight from penetrating these waters and keeping aquatic vegetation from taking root. These carp are too big to be prey for the herons and egrets who have returned to nest on these banks. So, as the Coves Collective, we have tried to establish better relations with this place by harvesting carp. We honour their lives by eating their flesh (when it is safe) and tanning their hides (which will eventually be incorporated into this map).

We do this work because we attend to this place; as we walk here, harvest clay and plants here, and attempt to enter into reciprocal relations here. Not because this place belongs to us but rather because we, the Indigenous and non-Indigenous members of the Coves Collective, are in the process of belonging to this place. p

The Coves Collective is an ad-hoc group of artists, educators, and activists that have come together to attend to our responsibilities and relationships with the Coves, an environmentally significant area recovering from years of misuse. These actions include Tracing CareFull Paths, a communityproduced textile map facilitated by Michelle Wilson and Reilly Knowles, on the land teachings, including traditional medicine gathering and medicine pouch making led by cultural-justice coordinator Candace Dube, and clay harvesting and vessel making guided by Indigenous ceramicist Shawna Redskye.

Michelle Wilson is an artist and mother currently residing as an uninvited guest on Treaty Six territory in London, Ontario. She earned a PhD in Art and Visual Culture from the University of Western Ontario and is currently a post-doctoral scholar with the Conservation Through Reconciliation Partnership at the University of Guelph. www.michelle-wilson.ca