People of the Watershed: Photographs by John Macfie

While working as a trapline manager in Northern Ontario during the 1950s and 1960s, John Macfie, a Canadian of Scottish heritage, formed deep and lasting relationships with the people of the Indigenous communities in the region. As he travelled the vast expanse of the Hudson Bay watershed, from Sandy Lake to Fort Severn to Moose Lake and as far south as Mattagami, he photographed the daily lives of Anishinaabe, Cree, and Anisininew communities, bearing witness to their adaptability and resilience during a time of tremendous change. Macfie’s photos, curated both in this volume and for an accompanying exhibition by the nîpisîhkopâwiyiniw (Willow Cree) curator and writer Paul Seesequasis, document ways of life firmly rooted in the pleasures of the land and the changing seasons. People of the Watershed builds on Seesequasis’s visual reclamation work with his online Indigenous Archival Photo Project and his previous book, Blanket Toss Under Midnight Sun, serving to centre the stories and lives of the people featured in these compelling archival images.

"John Macfie's vivid and stirring photographs show a way of life on full display - the world my ancestors inhabited and that my mom fondly described to me. It is a world that, shortly after these pictures were taken, ended. So distant and yet achingly familiar, these pictures feel like a visit home."
- Jesse Wente, Anishinaabe broadcaster, arts leader, and author of Unreconciled: Family, Truth, and Indigenous Resistance

While working as a trapline manager in Northern Ontario during the 1950s and 1960s, John Macfie, a Canadian of Scottish heritage, formed deep and lasting relationships with the people of the Indigenous communities in the region. As he travelled the vast expanse of the Hudson Bay watershed, from Sandy Lake to Fort Severn to Moose Lake and as far south as Mattagami, he photographed the daily lives of Anishinaabe, Cree, and Anisininew communities, bearing witness to their adaptability and resilience during a time of tremendous change.

Macfie's photos, curated both in this volume and for an accompanying exhibition by the nipisihkopawiyiniw (Willow Cree) writer and journalist Paul Seesequasis, document ways of life firmly rooted in the pleasures of the land and the changing seasons. People of the Watershed builds on Seesequasis's visual reclamation work with his online Indigenous Archival Photo Project and his previous book, Blanket Toss Under Midnight Sun, serving to centre the stories and lives of the people featured in these compelling archival images.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Paul Seesequasis is a nipisihkopawiyiniw (Willow Cree) curator and writer in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan. He has been active in the Indigenous arts as an artist and a policymaker since the 1990s, and since 2015 he has curated the Indigenous Archival Photo Project. He is the author of Blanket Toss Under Midnight Sun: Portraits of Everyday Life in Eight Indigenous Communities (2019).

John Macfie (1925 - 2018) was a photographer, local historian, and writer. In the 1950s and 1960s he was a trapline manager with the Department of Lands and Forests in Ontario. 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.