Process: Beaver-meadow

I’ve been reading the book Atlas historique de Montréal by Jean-Claude Robert (1994), poring over the generous series of reproductions of ancient maps, starting from Champlain’s Le grand sault Saint-Louis in 1613 to the present-day. The map by Gaspard-Joseph Chaussegros de Léry (1733) is intriguing in its detailing of the Sulpicians’ proposed canal project. What I find striking is the size of Lac Saint-Pierre, a large bloated, organ-like shape that lies in the area of the present-day Lachine canal. Roberts describes how as early as 1670, plans were underway for a canalization project to avoid the treacherous passage through the Lachine rapids. The plan was to link Lac Saint-Louis to the smaller Lac Saint-Pierre, then to dig and divert the Rivière à Pierre towards Pointe-à-Callière instead of its natural discharge into the Saint-Laurent, near L’Île-des-Soeurs.

The petit lac Saint-Pierre was often referred to as Lac-aux-Loutres during the French Regime because First Nation people regularly navigated in the reed-filled marshlands and extended waterways to hunt for otter. The abott Cyprien Tanguay mentions this lake in The Dictionnaire généalogique des familles canadiennes depuis la fondation de la colonie jusqu'à nos jours (1871):

VACHER dit St. Julien, Sylvestre, b 1622, tué par les Iroquois, près du lac aux loutres: 26 oct. 1659, à Montréal.

Walking home from Saint-Henri on rue de Courcelle, I came across the small parc du Lac-à-la-loutre. A panel stated that it was the site of the 18th century lake. Engineers later drained this body of water to build the Lachine Canal. I noticed a wide asphalted space that started from the park all the way to St-Rémi. A long empty corridor, it did not seem to follow the street grid. I wasn't alone in my puzzlement. Benoit Gratton points out on his blog that this alley way was once the site of the petite rivière Saint-Pierre. On the Bibliothèque et Archives nationales site, you can access an impressive collection of digitized maps and plans. The Atlas of the City of Montreal and vicinity (1912) shows a dotted line to indicate the canalization of “Little River Pierre” with the inscription “River Covered In”. Almost a hundred years later, the city is planning to create a multifunctional green space on this very site in an effort to combat heat islands and build community. I hope there are plans to include some sort of museological display or monument to showcase how the petite rivière Saint-Pierre played a role in the construction of the Lachine Canal.

Another online archive of interest is the David Rumsey Historical Map Collection with over 150,000 maps focusing on rare 18th and 19th century maps of North and South America. The Plan of Montreal, with a Map of the Islands & adjoining Country by John Melish (1815) has an amusing depiction of Lac-aux-loutres – like an outsized ameba. I'm drawn to this mutable association because a lake is indeed like a shape shifter, its water levels waxing and waning depending on climate and time. This is the crux of my Tongue Rug project — the fact that a lake can never be documented in the same way. There will always be discrepancies in mapping practices through time, not to mention the intent of the cartographer.

 

 

When reading Roughing it in the Bush (1852), I liked how Susanna Moodie described the marshland near her home in the Douro Towneship; she coined the expression "beaver meadow". South of the ancient beaver-meadow of Lac-aux-loutres was the tranquil Village de la Côte Saint Paul that appears on a map of the island of Montreal as early as 1702. This pastoral landscape is no more: walking in the boroughs of Côte-Saint-Paul and Ville-Émard today, you will likely hear the dull roar from the Turcot interchange.

Living in N.D.G., it was routine to see a family of skunks parade about as soon as dusk set in, as well as a pair of lumbering raccoons that would fight in a tree outside my apartment. Likewise in Émard these night critters are a habitual sight. Yet I still find it difficult to imagine otters ever having inhabited the area north of the Canal when contemplating the barren Turcot yards.

 

I’ve never seen otters in the wild; just a pair at the Ecomuseum Zoo in Sainte-Anne de Bellevue. Last time I was at the Redpath museum, a stuffed specimen caught my attention by its sheer size — the Lutra Canadensis. I returned for a visit intent on sketching the animal. Equipped with a pen and some bits of paper, I attempted to capture the sleek graceful curve of the back and the open mouth displaying a set of tiny, sharp teeth. My drawings did not do it justice. My otter looked too canine-like and I did not capture the beady eyes nor the flattish head, expressively designed to dive into the water without making a ripple. I would need to return with proper sketching material.

Progress: November 14, 2010

While on my field trips, I didn't have extra room for photography equipment, as my tent and camping gear already took up enough space. Plus, the more I piled onto the bike, the slower the ride. I ended up taking photos with an old 35 mm camera without the use of a tripod. As a result, the panoramas of my waypoints were a little uneven, if not wayward. I did not have a consistent point of view. If I saw something of interest, I could not help taking photos in that general area, haphazardly.

Back at the studio, instead of using stitching software, I assembled my panoramas by hand, piece by piece — almost like the process of crafting a patchwork quilt. A slow and imperfect process but fitting: photos didn't always match up, perspectives were skewed, a lot like my unreliable memory.

I was experimenting with new Quicktime VR software (CubicConvertor) on the weekend. I came across what they termed the Vanilla feature: a simple export of the cubefaces in HTML. I was pleased with the effect because it recreated my vision of the Rolling Studio. I liked that I could only see part of the image at one time, as if I was looking out of the window onto a landscape. The YouTube videos had the same distancing effect, but this larger format was more generous in its detail.

Process: Homesteads and Ghost Towns

Gabrielle Roy's Fragiles lumières de la terre (1978) is a collection of non-fiction that spans her entire career. I found the chapters on immigrant communities quite interesting thinking back on my train trip across the Prairies. The author writes of Manitoba and her encounters with several ethnic communities: the Doukhobors, who immigrated from Russia beginning in 1898; the Hutterites, who arrived from Germany in 1918; and the Mennonites, who settled in Canada from Russia between 1923-1927. The Prairies have always intrigued me because my grandmother hails from a small francophone village in Saskatchewan. And yet this chapter of Canadian history that focuses on the homesteading process is largely unknown to me.

 

Melville, Saskatchewan

 

Case in point. One morning of my train trip, traveling eastward from Vancouver, I sat with a young couple in the dining car for breakfast. They were very soft spoken and I could detect what I thought was a German accent. I was puzzled however because they said they had moved to British Colombia from Paraguay. As we had been talking about Montreal’s multilingual aspect, I thought it odd the fact that they spoke German and Spanish — they were not languages that I normally associated with each other. In retrospect, after reading Roy’s book, I realized that they were probably Mennonites. Upon further research, I discovered that Paraguay was a sought after destination for German immigrants in the 1920’s and 30s as they were promised homesteads, religious freedom and the right to practice their language. A Canadian group from Manitoba founded the Menno colony in Paraguay (1926-1927).

 

Melville, Saskatchewan

 

Reading Susanna Moodie’s “Journey into the Woods” (Roughing It in the Bush, 1852), which describes her family's venture deep into a forested marsh to develop their homestead, I thought of my own grandparents’ attempts to better their lives by moving to a new environment. Though they displaced themselves inter provincially, if one considers Canada’s large landmass and the harsh terrain at the time, it was still a considerable distance to travel to meet the unknown.

Growing up, I never tired of hearing the story of how my grandmother came to Sudbury to marry my grandfather. It’s only now that I recognize how her eastward trip was effectively the same journey  — in reverse — that her own father, Théophile Leclerc, had undertaken to reach his homestead in the wilds of the Saskatchewan bush.

 

 

Théophile Leclerc and Philomène Drolet were married in Ste-Catherine, Québec in 1907 and established themselves in Pont Rouge. The couple moved with their three children to Shell River, Saskatoon five years later. Théophile had accepted a homestead, sight unseen, in Debden, a small village where the majority of the population has Fransaskois origins. The lot of land turned out to be in a remote region, hidden away in thick forest and bogland. He needed to clear the trees before he could even build a makeshift shelter. This shack, originally supposed to be a temporary dwelling, served as the family home for a period of 20 years as Théophile was often away for work in Saskatoon, Marcelin and Edmonton. Philomène was left at home with six children: Ovila, Jeannette, Noella, Cécile, Lucien and my grandmother, Florence.

On October 19th, 1939, Florence Germaine Leclerc took her own journey east in search of work, hitching a ride with other travelers to Northern Ontario. Hardly speaking a word of English, she embarked to start a new life in Sudbury with a mere $400.00 in her pocket. After a brief stint as a chambermaid in a downtown boarding house, the parish priest found her employment with the widower J. A. Lapalme, father of 8 children. They married the following May and she bore him another 7 children. My paternal grandfather's ancestors go back thirteen generations to Martin Janson (1605) in St-Sulpice, Paris, France.

I'd like to travel to Debden someday so that I can fully understand the courage it took for my grandmother to pack up and travel to a place unknown.

 

Falconbrige, Ontario

 

My maternal grandmother, Loretta Alma McPhail (b.1912), grew up on a farm in Whitefish, Ontario with her 4 sisters and one brother. She often spoke of her second adopted brother, Wilbur McNab. Her aunt had also adopted his brother Robert. The children were sent to Canada from overseas (Isle of Mull, Scotland) during the war. Everyone called her brother Charlie. Charlie Hamilton.

As my grandmother was Catholic, she had to elope to marry my grandfather, John Desmond McPhail (b. 1904) a Protestant whose ancestors hailed from Torosay, on the Isle of Mull. They were married August 26, 1932 in Espanola. His parents only learned of the marriage many months later. I remember her telling me stories about how she first met her "Jack". She said she knew upon seeing him for the first time, that she would marry him. He was a tall, handsome fellow playing the banjo at the dance hall.

Her father, Désiré Hamilton, was born in Ste-Félicité in 1879, but raised and educated in Sayabec, Québec. He married Odila Boulay (b. 1974) in Matane, Gaspé. In 1899, they moved to Victoria Mines in Walden, Ontario where he worked until 1910. Désiré then began farming in the summer and working in lumber camps in the winter. He did so until 1917 when he was employed by INCO to work at the old O’Donnell ore roast yard, west of Copper Cliff.

 

Falconbrige, Ontario

 

While the Walden region is made up of the communities of Lively, Naughton, Worthington and Beaver Lake, three ghost towns are also situated within its limits – Victoria Mines, High Falls and Creighton. Victoria Mines was a company town that sprang up around the Canadian Pacific Railway line and the Mond Nickel Company mine and smelter, which was established in 1900. Abandoned after the mine’s closure in 1913, it became a ghost town. In fact, many of the town’s buildings were moved to Coniston using the CP Rail line where a Presbyterian church still remains standing. Jeri Danyleyko’s Ontario Ghost Towns site highlights Victoria Mines complete with historic maps and archival images.

I think of how a good many of my friends seem so mobile today, ready to pack up and move at a moment’s notice for the promise of a good job: off eastward to the Maritimes, off to oil country out west, even overseas. Considering Théophile and Désiré’s displacements a century ago, perhaps today's mobility is not really a new occurrence? People undertook various jobs, often in dangerous conditions, and traveled great distances to support their families. These ghost towns are now the only trace of bustling company towns that attracted workers from all over Canada and beyond.

When I look back on my grandmother’s journey, I think that people also have an innate lust for adventure, a yearning for freedom and new beginnings. Migration and displacement will always play an important part in history based on a multitude of economic and social factors.

Story: Panache Lake / Lac Panache (PA-1)

View Tongue PA-1 in a larger map

 

Lac Panache: 45.5N -73.583333W

Julie Lapalme
Montréal, Québec
October 9, 2010

Roughing it in the Bush, first published in 1852, recounts Susanna Moodie’s settler adventure in the Canadian wilderness. In 1834, the Moodie family moved to a bush farm near Douro Towneship north of Peterborough. In “Burning the Fallow”, she describes the discovery of Lake Katchewanooka in such terms as to suggest she has made a new friendship.

Moodie had made during the winter a large clearing of twenty acres around the house. The progress of the workmen had been watched by me with the keenest interest. Every tree that reached the ground opened a wider gap in the dark wood, giving us a broader ray of light and a clearer glimpse of the blue sky. But when the dark cedar-swamp fronting the house fell beneath the strokes of the axe, and we got a first view of the lake, my joy was complete: a new and beautiful object was now constantly before me, which gave me the greatest pleasure. By night and day, in sunshine or in storm, water is always the most sublime feature in a landscape, and no view can be truly grand in which it is wanting. From a child, it always had the most powerful effect upon my mind, from the great ocean rolling in majesty, to the tinkling forest rill, hidden by the flowers and rushes by the bank. Half the solitude of my forest home vanished when the lake unveiled its bright face to the blue heavens, and I saw sun, and moon, and starts, and waving trees reflected there. I would sit for hours at the window as the shades of evening deepened round me, watching the massy foliage of the forests pictures in the waters, till fancy transported me back to England, and the songs of birds and the lowing of cattle were sounding in my ears. It was long, very long before I could discipline my mind to learn and practice all the menial employment which are necessary in a good settler’s wife. (281-282)

I could relate to her description, as my own Lac Panache is like a dear friend that I visit regularly throughout all four seasons. The lake has seen me grown up on her shores. I’ve fished for rockbass off the dock with my cousins, lazily slumbered on an air mattress carried by her gently rippling surface, explored her inlets by canoe and pedal boat, plunged into her cool depths after a sauna, and swam as far as I could from shore before returning to the safety of the cottage. But most of all, I’ve simply sat and watched the sun quiver on her vast expanses, I listened to loons call out to her.

 

 

When I dream of Panache, it is often from a bird’s eye view. I cover the distance between one end of the lake and another with a rise and a swoop to skim the surface without going under; there I see shadows, large moving forms. When I do dream I am swimming in her depths, I am not alone. She is squirming with creatures of all kinds. A complex, mysterious friend, but a faithful one.

 

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Process: Schnabel and Goodwyn

Planned a stopover in Toronto on my way to Sudbury so that I could visit the AGO. Perfect timing, as I was able to see substantial work from Julian Schnabel and Shary Boyle — Flesh and Blood was an impressive collection of her intriguing and masterful porcelain pieces while his Art & Film exhibit was the first time I had seen so many of his works in one place.

A series of his paintings dealt with the practice of bullfighting — very large surface areas with smudged shapes, as if he had dipped beef quarters or sheep carcasses in paint to then imprint them onto the canvas. I found El Espontaneo (for Abelardo Martinez) (Oil and banner on tarpaulin, 1990) more successful than the scarlet Anno Domino because of the colour choices. The pink and tan make the gory scene subtler somewhat, but nonetheless disquieting, muffled. I also enjoyed the slick and almost quivering Portrait of Bella and Lolita (Oil and resin on canvas, 2007). The purity of the colour, l’éclat, seemed to match the lucid gazes of the girls.

I appreciated his reflection on process:

“The movies were more real to me than my life was at home. And whether it’s a screen in a movie or whether it’s the rectangle that is the perimeter of a painting, it’s an arena where this battle takes place, between everything that you know and don’t know. And I think that I apply the same system to both paintings and films. I don’t know what it’s going to look like when I’m done. I know how to start. I know how to lean towards the divine light. But I figure it out as I’m going along. And the process of doing, that’s the thing.”

There were also exhibits dedicated to three artists who shared a deep commitment to their studio practice: Betty Goodwyn, Work Notes, Eva Hesse, Studiowork and Agnes Martin, Work Ethic. I was instantly drawn to the Goodwyn room because it included a large display of her notebooks. A small room set the stage before entering the exhibit. It displayed all the process materials related to Parcel for Karachi (Parcel VIII), 1971: the parcel that was used to make the soft ground impression on the copper plate, the copper plate itself, and the final etching.

A series of photos (Gelatin silver prints, 1942) by Welsh artist Geoffrey James depicted Goodwyn’s Montreal studio on Avenue Coloniale in 1994. It was an unprecedented glimpse in the objects and forms that moved and inspired her: a mirrored cabinet, a copy of Rilke’s Selected Poems, rusty metal tools laid out like an anthropological display, postcards, photos, sketches, box-like containers and ephemera such as nests, twigs, moss and wire.

Audio interviews with art dealer René Blouin and photographer Geneviève Cadieux gave insight into Goodwyn’s studio practice. Blouin recollected on how the artist’s studio space had no windows so that, in her words, “energy could not escape”, though a skylight did give the effect of shadowless pure light. A video in another room revealed how she had gutting out and redesigned her studio space. The light quality was indeed ethereal, like a sealed, quiet bubble.

Cadieux talked of her own art process and how “space affects work of art”. For her, Goodwyn’s studio was a continual work in progress, gathering all the pieces that were not yet resolved.  Indeed, her notebooks were infused with this incomplete aura, filled with fragmented sentences and hurried sketches at times, and at other times, elaborate plans and detailed scribbles. Out of all the notebooks, I saw only one with a French sentence: veste sur un support – foncé, vulnerable (Notebook 62, 1972 – 1976). Another notebook has stamped dates as if the dates were inserted after the fact. Of interest was her rigid documentation process: if she gave someone a sketch from her notebook, she would make a photocopy and insert it in her notebook as a placeholder (Notebook 93, 1985 – 1988).

I responded to the following entry — wavering between self-chiding and encouragement — the exclamation marks like a nudge in the ribs to work harder!

Betty Goodwyn, Notebook 90, 1985

2.25.85
Hovering fear – greatly [disappointed] with myself about the “Pierre incident” – the whole circle of bitterness  - anger – competitiveness – Focus on studio – work “notebooks” and catalogue! What a dispersed weak psyche – discouragement – pulled into the tornado – right into the heart of it. So anxious to put all that aside and move, develop drawings further – how to start on structures. Where to start with notebooks – [Losing] part of my privacy – but that is the burrowing and releasing”.
[transcribed as borrowing]

It was truly an inspiring show. To be able to glimpse into another artist’s creative process was quite humbling especially knowing that her studio was such a private creative space. She had created a luminous space free of outside distractions.

 

 

I thought of my own art studio and how I was not free of interruptions with the large window, the e-mails and the incessant phone calls. Yet, the light that filters through the greenery at a certain time of day is a welcome diversion, as is the dusk light at the waning of the day. Where I related most to Goodwyn was in the sense of urgency that emitted from her notebooks, the pressing need to create, to give form to vague thoughts and visions. After viewing the show, I myself was itching to get work on my Tongue Rug project.

I had originally wanted to build a life-size version of the Rolling Studio and then had settled for a virtual representation because of a lack of funds and space. The ironic thing is now that I do have the space and the time to create physical objects, I’ve come to reconsider my process. I do not necessarily need to construct objects in space. They already exist on a conceptual plane.

While I was doing my fieldwork, collecting data on my lakes during my cycling trips, the wheels of my bike became a sort of Rolling Studio. Likewise, the computer screen became the window facing onto the world of the structure. Between the bike and the computer, I have already created the studio. I don’t need to illustrate it; the Rolling Studio is about process. As Schnabel said, "the process of doing, that's the thing".

In the same way, the web nurtures online communities. I do not need to create a formal Parlour Room to house the tongue rug and solicit feedback. The blogosphere itself is the tongue rug.

Progress: October 6, 2010

Continued work on the Sladdakavring Icons, adorning all the tongues with the chosen keywords from the associated blog postings.

I then re-worked my Tongue Rug mock-up. The first version reminded me of snowshoes somewhat: leather tongues with what resembled catgut stitching. Used an ASCII (American Standard Code for Information Interchange) filter to achieve a charcoal finish on the embroidered edges.

 

 

Though I wanted to capture a hand drawn look and feel, I chose the filter knowing ASCII is a common way to encode characters to transmit data from one database to another — thought it fitting considering this project’s focus on language and archives.

 

 

This Tongue Rug has more of a cartography feel to it, in part because of the choice of a Calligraphic Script font. I'm inspired to start work on the maps. I am starting to envision the possibilities for an animated version of the sladdakavring. À venir.

 

Process: Palimpsest

Went to the Maison de la culture Marie-Uguay on a rainy Sunday as part of the 16th annual Festival international de la littérature (FIL) and Les Journées de la culture 2010. Sébastien Ricard read Rainer Maira Rilke’s Lettres à un jeune poète (1929), a collection of ten letters that were addressed to Franz Xaver Kappus over a period of five years (1903 – 1908). The Austro-German poet (1875-1926) did not know this young man of only twenty years of age. The generosity, sincerity and modesty of Rilke's writing is even more moving to me considering he never once met Kappus. Any artist would grow with a mentor such as Rilke; a friend to help quell the unavoidable self-doubt that accompanies creation, which he himself struggled with.

 [...] Cherchez en vous-mêmes. Explorez la raison qui vous commande d'écrire; examinez si elle plonge ses racines au plus profond de votre cour; faites-vous cet aveu : devriez-vous mourir s'il vous était interdit d'écrire. Ceci surtout : demandez-vous à l'heure la plus silencieuse de votre nuit; me faut-il écrire ? Creusez en vous-mêmes à la recherche d'une réponse profonde. Et si celle-ci devait être affirmative, s'il vous était donné d'aller à la rencontre de cette grave question avec un fort et simple "il le faut", alors bâtissez votre vie selon cette nécessité; votre vie, jusqu'en son heure la plus indifférente et la plus infime, doit être le signe et le témoignage de cette impulsion.
— Paris, le 17 février 1903

To be read to is also a pleasure. It is one thing to sink into Rilke’s text and in one’s own thoughts when reading: it is another to let go and listen to someone read the poet's words out loud. Another form of concentration, especially in a crowded room. The act of reading out loud is also one of generosity: the inflections of speech and the rhythm, the voice that needs to project outwards to carry across the room and yet, be delivered in the proper tone that befits the style of writing. Ricard read with a respectful intensity, as if he were merely the messenger for the author’s lucid prose. I found solace in Rilke's quiet passion, his defense of the often-difficult embrace of solitude and contemplation as necessary parts of the creative process.

Rainer Maria Rilke was born René Karl Wilhelm Johann Joseph Maria Rilke. René is the French form of the Roman name Renatus meaning “is reborn”. A tradition existed whereas a baby that was born after the death of a previous child was named René.

It was his friend and lover, the Russian-born intellectual and writer Lou Andreas-Salomé (1861-1937), who suggested the name Rainer. She herself was born as Luíza Gustavovna Salomé. I’ve always been interested in this process of naming; the act of choosing a name or exchanging it for another — like a palimpsest of fleeting placenames on hand drawn maps.

 

Process: Sudbury Saunas

My interest in placenames started quite early at our cottage on Lake Panache in Whitefish, Ontario. As a youngster, I remember familiar sights all along the dirt roads off of Ojibway Road: tree trunks covered pêle-mêle with handmade signs. The cottagers’ names were as varied as the trees in the area with French Canadian, English and Italian names amongst many other ethnic groups. I always wondered why there were not more Aboriginal names in the area considering the proximity of the Ojibwa Whitefish Lake First Nation.

 

The ride to the cottage itself also piqued my curiosity about the neighbouring cottagers: we would pass a series of mailboxes on Little Panache road with unfamiliar names to me such as Juutinen, Kauhanen, Kannakko or Salmi. At the time, I did not know that these names were Finnish, though I suspected that they were Scandinavian. Still today, street names in the Louise Township are both Finnish (Salminen, Nurmi, Makala, Kusk and Suikkola) and French-Canadian, with names like Panache, Desormeau and St. Pothier — a country road where my maternal grand-mother grew up on a farm.

It was to increase my limited knowledge about Finnish settlements in Sudbury that I recently read Between a Rock and a Hard Place: A Historical Geography of the Finns in the Sudbury Area by Oiva Saarinen (1999).

 “Reading Between a Rock and a Hard Place was a moving experience for me, as names and faces of people who were part of my childhood are not only placed in the historical context, but given respect and honour.”
— Judy Erola, former minister of State for Mines (1980), minister responsible for the Status of Women (1982) and minister of Corporate and Consumer Affairs (1983).

Judy Erola lived in the cottage beside ours. Though I knew that at one time she had been a federal Member of Parliament for Nickel Belt, I was unaware of her Finnish heritage. She was the grand-daughter of Thomas Jacobson, described by Saarinen as the "First Pioneer" in the Sudbury area. It was sad to say, but I didn’t know much about the history of Finnish immigration to Canada: this, despite counting several Finns as friends in art college and having lived in the Donovan for a period of time — a working class neighbourhood with a high mixity of different ethnic groups including a Finnish community.

 

 

A walk through the Donovan today still displays this interesting social mix with the Ukrainian Greek Orthodox Church of St. Volodymyr, the Croatian Centre and the Serbian Club within a couple of blocks from each other. For a historical tour of the Donovan in the first half of the 20th century, I enjoyed perusing this wonderful website Sharing authority with Baba: A collaborative History of Sudbury’s Ukrainian Community, 1901 – 1939 by Dr. Stacey Zembrzycki.

 

 

My only window into Finnish culture was a handful of Arto Paasilinna books in my library, translated into French. This, and the sauna. Since all the cottages on Panache seemed to have a sauna when I was a youngster, I naively assumed all French-Canadians carried this family custom. I didn’t realize that it was the Finns who brought this tradition with them when first settling in the area.

 

 

Between a Rock and a hard Place proved to be a very interesting read. According to Saarinen, it was the Swedish-Finnish explorer Pehr Kalm’s Travels in North America, published in English in 1770, which first introduced Canada to Finland. However, the first wave of Finnish immigrants did not immigrate to Canada until early in the 19th century by way of the United States when workers found temporary employment in the construction industry: Montreal’s Lachine canal and the Welland, Ontario Canal between 1829 and 1887 (5). Direct immigration to Canada from Finland did not start until the 1880s despite recruitment campaigns that dated back as early as 1874. The Canadian Pacific Railway, amongst other companies in need of cheap labour, had sent representatives to Finland to entice people to immigrate and join the workforce (10). While Finns did work in the railway constructions camps from 1882 – 1883, Saarinen notes that the first site of permanent Finnish settlement was not Sudbury but Copper Cliff, a company town.

As the Canadian Copper Co. (CCC) owned 75% of the area, occupational segregation was used to establish dominance: the labour force was distributed through sections of the town according to a “hierarchy based on occupational status”. In this way, Copper Cliff, Orford and Evans housed the Anglo-Saxon miners and mine officials, Shantytown gathered the Finns, Poles, Ukrainians and French Canadians in one area, and Crow’s Nest was reserved for the Italians. However, this ethnic concentration also helped to created a thriving “Finntown”, that is, a close-knit working-class neighbourhood. The first Finnish hall was constructed in 1895 and commercial enterprises like general stores, public saunas, a bakery, a shoemaker, a tailor shop and even a movie theatre and billards room sought out the business of what was generally young single males. Saarinen emphasizes this fact to account for the popularity of the many rooming or boarding houses known as poikatalo (37).

Canada then saw a second wave of immigration in 1921 due in part to immigration restrictions in the States (16) as well as the promise of employment in the mining and construction industries North of the border where unskilled labour could command high wages (30). Between World War I and World War II (1921 – 1951), the largest non French/English ethnic group in the Sudbury district was Finnish, soon taken over by Italians in the 50s (29).

There were also Finnish homesteads in rural enclaves such as Wanup, Waters Township, and Louise Township. In 1923, Oiva Svensk, Kalle Hotti and Rev. Heinonen applied for provincial help for the construction of a wooden bridge across the Vermillion river enabling the recreational development of Little Panache Lake (82). Finnish communities began to settle in the Louise Township, located around Grassy, Kusk and Little Panache lakes while French-Canadian settlements were concentrated in the northern parts of the township (84). In 1934, the construction of a bridge across Little Panache and the opening of the road to Marina Bay made it easier than ever to commute from Sudbury to Panache (84). Judy and Voitto Erola bought the marina in Dieppe township in 1971, renaming it Erola’s Panache Landing before selling it five years later to Louis Dozzi. My cousins and I were frequent visitors to Penage Bay Marina in the summer, slowly making our way across the lake in our beat up pedal boat.

More so than the marina or the Finnish placenames, it is the sauna that remains the surefire symbol of Finnish culture in the Sudbury area. Saarinen describes how “[i]n rural areas such as Beaver Lake and Wanup, it became part of a circular farmstead featuring a house, barn, hayshed, ice shed, milk house, woodshed, tool/implement shed, root house, outhouse and garage” (248). What I found surprising was that the rural tradition followed suit in urban centres: before World War II, a slew of public saunas were in operation such as Copper Cliff Finnish Baths (Jaakkola’s Sauna), Sudbury Steam Bath (Sepällä’s Sauna) and Alavo Steam Baths amongst others. After World War II, the sauna tradition flourished and other ethnic groups adopted the practice in cottage country (251). Still today, a canoe ride on Panache is not complete without seeing the many saunas — with the telltale puffs of smoke — dotted all along the shoreline.

Progress: September 10, 2010

I've always wanted the Tongue Rug project to be multilingual. I chose to write the blog in English simply because writing in French always necessitates translation — elaborating my thoughts in my second language can be a laborious process. I am not so precious about writing in my mother tongue. Yet, despite the language choice, by the very nature of my project — where I am researching amongst other subjects the history and literature of French Canada and Quebec — other languages were sure to come into play. Indeed, my writing does include French and Aboriginal words, especially when referring to placenames.

I’ve been thinking about the icons that will adorn each of the tongues. For a long time I envisioned creating traditional sladdakavring icons like flowers and abstract symbols. In the end, I decided to use words; a fitting choice as the tongue swatches were sometimes initialized to represent people or important dates. It came to me while using Antidote HD: one of the filters combs though the text and lists all the recurring words. While this is a way to avoid repetition and to vary one's vocabulary, it can also be used to analyze the text for keywords. On a whim, I searched for an online filter to do the same in English and came across Martin Molch's site — find-keyword.com.

The process was interesting. The blog postings for each tongue were easily transformed into lists of keywords. Some lists being considerably long, I had to go through each one and select about a dozen nouns for each tongue. As all the words were lower case, I encountered a few word slippages. For instance, Robin is both the name of a person and the name of a bird. Also, some of the tongues have saintly overtones because of the simple fact that placenames in Quebec have the “saint” prefix or other religious associations. Once the words were stripped from their context, they were reduced somewhat to the same status: the words that top the list are the ones with the most instances in the text.

Once I set up a list of the Sladdakavring Icons, I worked on a mock-up of the embroidered tongues. A first draft. Not sure if this does it justice? It is striking though how simply reading the list of keywords can trigger memories of place for me, as if the tongue itself has become a memory map.

 

Tension existed between the automated way of capturing keywords and the more deliberate action of choosing words. For TONGUE LA-3 the automatic process culled these words: september (8); saint (8); 2009 (8); lapalme (7); esprit (7); assomption (6); waterway (5); waypoint (5); french (5); route (4); town (4); time (4); québec (4); lanaudière (4). My selection process included these words: achigan, trousser, postillon, sarrasin, galette, jésuites, outaragavisipi. The former is descriptive and quantitative — focusing on the date, the place and the surroundings — while the latter is more evocative and qualitative — minor details, digressions and inner thoughts.

 

Progress: September 5, 2010

Now that I have completed the fieldwork for Tongue Rug — it was inconceivable to be able to document all of the waypoints by bicycle — I am free to simply explore the Montreal Island and its vicinities while I work on other aspects of the project. I stumbled across a nicely detailed map for The West Island Heritage Bicycle Trail while researching Legault placenames; four houses on the island can be traced to the Legault dit Deslauriers family.

 

View Historic Legault houses in a larger map

 

As it was a brisk fall day, I decided to venture out on a scenic ride to Pierrefonds. There was a dilemma however. If I were able to cycle north-west as the crow flies from the Lachine canal, it would have been a relatively short route. Unfortunately, the north-south cycling paths on the island leave much to be desired. I had to go east then north using the Christophe-Colomb route, then west again to reach my waypoint. The return trip ending up being a 70 km ride. Though there is surely another way to get there, I admit that the bike path is a safer alternative. Plus, it was a glorious day for cycling with a bright sun and a cool breeze. Everyone seemed to be out on the trails.

The ride to Pierrefonds was also worth the ride considering the varied architecture found on Boulevard Gouin and the ride through the Parc-Nature-du-Bois-de-Saraguay, home to many species of rare trees such as black maple (érable noir or Acer nigrum), swamp white ash (frêne blanc or Fraxinus Americana) and common hackberry (micocoulier occidental or Celtis occidentalis). Will have to return on a day trip to visit this park.

 

 

The Maison Legault dit Deslauriers overlooked a small park facing the Rivière-des-Prairies. The West Island Heritage Bicycle Trail had erected a small panel that listed the year of construction as 1789. The fieldstone farmhouse was inhabited by Legault family members and passed from generation to generation. The architecture adapts elements from the Québécois style (1760-1880) such as end-wall chimneys on opposite sides of the roof, commonly called “cheminées en chicane”. In 1908, it was transformed into a fashionable teahouse called “ Thé Habitant” by Mary Whitney Blaylock; the Duke of Kent was a visitor in 1930. It has since been a restaurant and a private home.

What was once known as the Lower Saraguay had changed considerably since the 18th century. Still, I could imagine a more rural habitat with meadows interspersed among the fieldstone farmhouses.

 

View Larger Map

 

I noticed a new function with alternative transport choices — public transport, cycling or walking — in Google Maps when I went to retrace my path. Now I can include one-way streets with cycling lanes in my routes. However, for this map the cycling option did not function. I used a beta version of the walking directions. Six and a half hours to walk that distance; four hours return on two wheels at a steady pace. How long would it have taken on horseback just a few centuries ago?