audreywhitson.com

Category: History

  • Fall Equinox 2025: Homing

    Hundreds of millions of birds are on the move, have been migrating through Alberta for several weeks now. First the landbirds (warblers, sparrows, flycatchers, vireos, hummingbirds and others) who left northern Alberta in early August. Next the shorebirds, the raptors, and the waterbirds. The last to go (as late as November) will be the waterfowl: the ducks, geese, and swans. You can follow them in real time here.

    Homing is a verb, the homing instinct an action: an ability to return home from a great distance. Usually associated with animals: salmon, caribou, especially birds returning to their place of birth. Or in this case, their winter shelter, a geographic memory from before the parting of the continents.

    I wonder how much we humans still have that instinct? To find our way home. And what does home mean in the 21st century? Do we know our origins?

    The last couple of years personal circumstances have challenged me to rethink the meaning of home. I’ve also been listening to the stories of many (human and more-than-human*) displaced this past summer by wildfires, especially Indigenous people. It has almost become an annual ritual in some parts of the country.

    There is a place, a piece of land that I go back to in my mind and sometimes still in the flesh, that place where I grew from a child into adulthood. A farm, north of Edmonton. Its creeks, swamps, fields, bushes; some of them gone now. Where I first connected with the more-than-human world. Where I had many of my formative experiences. There have been other places since where I’ve bonded too, maybe over years or only a moment, where I’ve felt connected to everything that is. That is home to me. Sometimes a particular air current, a scent, the right slant of light, a piece of music, a conversation, an image will bring me back there.

    My current physical home has so much of me in it: the wall colours, the window coverings, the flooring, the art, the greening courtyard out my front window. There is a balance and a beauty to the setting that visitors often comment on. But the feeling of “being at home” is much more than this. Feeling at peace in my own skin, home as a place of peace and sanctuary, a place of welcome. Home as a staging ground, a place to rest, renew, and draw energy and spirit for relationships, for work, for creativity. Home is in my relationships. This is my habitat. What about yours?

    At one time, before settlement, there were probably hundreds of billions of birds in skies at the fall equinox. Just like there were millions of bison on the plains.

    As we approach the National Day for Truth and Reconciliation or Orange Shirt Day for survivors of Indian Residential Schools, let us remember the relationships that bring us home.

    *Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass (Milkweed Editions:2014)

  • Summer Solstice 2025: What We Know

    “To be native to a place, we must learn to speaks its language.”
    Robin Wall Kimmerer

    The land where I now live was known as River Lot 20 in fur trade and settlement times. But of the layers (the people and their stories) “before contact,” I know almost nothing.

    To show these layers on a page, this screen, I would need reams of blank space. A great silence. Not because there was nothing there but because so much was erased with colonization. So much forgotten. Or buried. In the earth but also buried in our psyche. Do I even begin to feel the loss? The land holds billions of years of story, most of it in pieces.

    Just metres below the surface of this city, according to the archeologists. Within walking distance of my home, on both the north and south sides of the river at Queen Elizabeth Park, Walterdale Flats, Rossdale Flats, Victoria Flats, Groat Road and more. What they’ve found.

    We know this: How these First Peoples cooked (from the ash and charcoal hearths left behind). How they processed their food (from the fire-broken rocks). How they hunted (from spear and knife points). We know some of what they ate; kin we can still recognize: seeds of kinnikinnick, bunchberry, pin cherry, and choke cherry. Bones of bison and ungulates (deer, elk and moose). Used for medicines, for food.

    We know some of what they traded with the first Europeans who came to this part of North America: lynx and beaver pelts for glass beads and clay pipes. We know where some of their bones lie, the Papachase Cree and the Métis, alongside the Irish, English, French and Scottish traders of the Hudson’s Bay Company Fort. But even this sanctioned graveyard, until it was uncovered by a utilities expansion, hadn’t survived the collective memory.

    There is so much we do not know.

    Yet there is a longer history to this land. Buried for centuries within Indigenous communities where language has been kept alive. Visions, ceremonies, sacred societies, and stories have been passed on, searched out, and sometimes shared. For myself I have learned from the work of so many Indigenous authors: Robin Wall Kimmerer, Richard Wagamese, Maria Campbell, Tomson Highway, Joy Harjo, Thomas King, Louise Erdich, Drew Hayden Taylor, Tommy Orange, Augie Merasty, Eden Robinson, Billy-Rae Belcourt, Tanya Tagaq, Patty Krawec. I can’t name them all.

    One project where I live has been gathering stories of the North Saskatchewan River, many of them told by Indigenous elders. The North Saskatchewan had many names before the Europeans arrived: the Kisiskâciwanisîpiy (Cree for the swiftly flowing river) and omaka-ty (the big river to the Blackfoot), to name just two. As we approach National Indigenous Peoples Day in Canada, Indigenous people have events planned everywhere across this land.

    They have prepared a feast for us. They are inviting us to the table.

    When we sit down to the first meal of this Summer Solstice, we too gather around food and story. Maybe we make kinnikinnick tea or have last year’s pincherry or chokecherry syrup on our pancakes. Perhaps we are gathering like the ancestors of this land, to give thanks for the greening of things and for the land that feeds us body and spirit. For what we know.

  • Winter Solstice 2024: The Sacred Tree

    Winter Solstice 2024: The Sacred Tree

    A Manitoba maple on what would have been the southwestern border of River Lot 20. December 20, 2024.
    A Manitoba maple on the southwestern border of what would have been River Lot 20, Edmonton, Alberta. Dec 20, 2024.

    Trees have always been part of our family. My father was a sawyer as well as a farmer. My mother grew up on the “Dust Bowl” prairies of the 1930s and for all her adult life planted and nurtured trees wherever she could. We still have a “quarter section” of boreal forest in the family. Though as a child I often tired of tree duties—watering, weeding, hoeing, not to mention filling the wood box for our stove (my daily chore at four years old)—trees are in my blood.

    Trees are considered holy in many cultures: rowan (Irish), oak (English), spruce (German), cedar (Coast Salish), ceiba (Mayan), bodhi (Buddhist), and kauri (M?ori), to name a few. Many outlive people, provide layers of habitat to birds, small and large animals. Provide shade, shelter and fruit to humans. Provide medicines. We still see the survivals of this reverence in the Western traditions of the Maypole and the Christmas evergreen. The Christian church tried to replicate the heights and majesty of ancient old growth forests in its European medieval cathedrals. The same feeling, I propose, that city planners and architects today attempt to reconstruct with skyscrapers.

    When I walk along the North Saskatchewan River kisiskâciwani-sîpiy or “swift-flowing river” in nêhiyawêwin (Cree); Omaka-ty or “the big river” in Niitsitapi (Blackfoot), I am always listening and watching for other creatures: the chickadees, woodpeckers, and nuthatches; the wind; the coyotes, hares, and squirrels; the grasses, the light; the bees, mosquitos, and butterflies; the bushes, the trees, the water; among others.  I ponder. Perhaps that’s how I started thinking about the Manitoba maple (acer negundo) growing all along the river edge in Dawson Park (which crosses over the old River Lot 20 where I live today.) Their pretty winged seed pods, pink-edged in fall, tan in winter. Their gnarly trunks and wizardly branches. Manitoba Maples are drought and flood tolerant, adaptable to any soil, form clumps (read: grow in community), have a tendency to find their footing on riverbanks and floodplains. Manitoba Maples have an average lifespan of 60 years, but it seems that some well exceed that. How did they get here? They’re not native.

    The notes on the 1882 survey of the Edmonton Settlement list four types of vegetation starting from the river flats to the heights: “prairie,” “brush,” “swamp” and “poplar timber.” That’s pretty much the description both sides of the river in all directions, with minor changes to the order. Good habitat for beaver, aka Beaver Hills House or amiskwacîwâskahikan (one of Edmonton’s earliest names). Also good habitat for Indigenous peoples for whom the prairie fed bison; brush and swamp meant berries, medicines, large and small game. We also know before settlement that Indigenous peoples practiced cultural burns to renew and replenish the land for these creatures.

    I have a theory that the Manitoba Maple were introduced by the Métis and others with a connection to the original Red River Settlement. And even though eye witness accounts say that the forests were practically gone from the Red River Valley by the 1870s, paintings and photographs from that time still show the odd shade tree in yards. What kind is not clear. But fossil records for the same period show that the Métis people still burned local Manitoba maples in their fireplaces at least some of the time. I wonder if the Métis chose the Manitoba maple as a testament to their survival and resilience? Both as a memory and a dream: a place they once loved, a place that held a vision of a different kind of Canada and the experience of a different kind of community?

    Métis Laurent Garneau migrated to Edmonton from St. Andrews Parish on the Red River and planted a single Manitoba maple behind his house on River Lot 7 on the southside of the river in 1874, where it presided until 2017. Richard Charles Hardisty, Chief Factor of the Hudson’s Bay Company, first Métis Senator and advocate for Métis rights, planted a circle of maples around his garden at 106 Street and 97 Avenue in 1875, just outside the walls of Fort Edmonton. Mr. Hardisty grew up in the Red River Settlement. In 1906 David Latta planted the same tree on a corner of his riverside property at Jasper Avenue and 90th Street within the old confines of River Lot 20. Here he built a new house for his second wife, a Métis woman named Emily Decoteau, whose father fought in the Riel Resistance. Other settlers planted them too, but these were some of the earliest.

    These days the kisiskâciwani-sîpiy valley near where I live is a cacophony of flora from many other places and even continents, very much reflecting the people who live here. Domestic gardens and fields run feral, including the Manitoba maple: pine, mountain ash (rowan), green and black ash, elm, oak, false holly, lilac, caragana, goji berry from the Himalayas, buckthorn, Canada thistle, and burdock, grow alongside their native fellows: poplar, trembling aspen, birch, spruce, chokecherry, cranberry, gooseberry, saskatoon, wild rose, red willow, sage, wild onion, yarrow, and wild grasses. Their multiplicity, a lesson in human relations. To quote a Beaver Bundle carrier, Ryan First Diver, we are here to learn from plants and animals so we can mature as a species. Some dominate and destroy. Others work alongside their fellows. Together they’re holding this space for us. And this light.

  • Summer Solstice 2024: Land Acknowledgement

    Wild rose in mixed and poplar woods, Dawson Park, Edmonton, June 2024.

    Friends and taxi drivers are always getting lost trying to find my address in Edmonton. In Boyle Street, the streets and avenues seem squished together; there are no straight lines. I used to blame it on the bend in the river. Turns out, it goes much deeper than that. As we approach this National Indigenous Peoples Day in Canada, I want to offer a partial archeology of this place, a kind of cross-section from the archives. There are so many layers, so many Indigenous Peoples, so much wildlife, so much loss. But this Summer Solstice I want to focus on those times and people in-between the First Nations and the European settlers: the Métis and their footprints on this land. Specifically this small patch of ground beneath my feet, River Lot 20.

    One thing about the pandemic is how it washed all our structures away, stripped us back to the essential relationships: family, home, immediate community and land. Allowed us to imagine a different present, a different future. To imagine not some kind of dreamy ideal but to know that things weren’t always like they are now and may not be tomorrow either.

    At one time (1906-1920) there was a federal penitentiary on the very spot of ground where I now live (p. 26) and just south of that along the river’s edge was a coal mine that the inmates had to work. Further south and earlier yet (1893), Mr. J. B. Little started his successful brick yard on the flats of the valley (Riverdale). But before any of this and the reason for all the angles in my neighbourhood has to do with the river lot system.

    The surveyor maps of 1882 show there were already forty-four river lots on the North Saskatchewan either side of Fort Edmonton; even numbers on the north side and odd numbers on the south. The lots on the south side ended at what is now University Avenue. The lots on the north (a mile long) ended at Rat Creek or 118th Avenue.

    There were river lots all over Alberta before settlement and after the Métis practice at the Red River Settlement (inherited from the French practice in Quebec). River lot settlements thrived for decades along the southern rim of Beaverhills Lake, at Laboucan on the Battle River Crossing, further up the North Saskatchewan near Smoky Lake (now Métis Crossing), out at St. Albert along the Sturgeon River and around Lac Ste. Anne to name a few. Several families moved west after the 1870s after the failed struggle for a Métis homeland in Manitoba. And while many of the names on the Edmonton river lots sound Scottish, the men often married Métis women or were of mixed Indigenous and European heritage themselves. Here is a just sampling.  

    In 1860 two brothers-in-law, James Rowland and Kenneth McDonald staked (respectively) River Lot 18 and River Lot 20. They were the first Hudson’s Bay Company (HBC) men to live outside the Fort. Kenneth McDonald was a Scot from the Isle of Lewis who signed on as “middleman” (rower) to a York boat with the HBC at the age of 19 (1847). In 1886, after gaining legal title, he built a new house for his growing family on what is now 92nd Street and Jasper Avenue, a little south of me. The McDonald house still stands as part of Fort Edmonton Park. Just before his death in 1906 he sold a chunk of his property. Was it for the new penitentiary? Perhaps as a way to care for his remaining family?

    His wife, Emma, remained in their house until she died in 1929. Emma was a midwife, herbalist and healer; Indigenous knowledge. Besides James Rowland, her other brother, Fred, occupied River Lot 22. There were Métis with kin further east on the river too, at River Lot 28, John Fraser, the son of a Colin Fraser (Scottish) and Nancy Beaudry (Métis); the Fraser sisters Betsy and Flora resided with their husbands on lots 30 (William Borwick) and 32 (James Guillion). River lots 32 and 34 had further family and Métis ties: James and George were brothers from the Orkneys and George was married to a Métis woman, Marguerite Brazeau. These ties were the beginnings of Edmonton. The river lot system allowed each family to have access to needed resources: wood, water and game as well as land for grazing and planting. But perhaps more important for the Métis were the kinship ties the river lot system allowed them to maintain with all their relatives: human, water, land, sky, and forest.

    The river lots on the north side of the river had closer ties to the HBC than those on the south. And their land rights were more likely to be honoured after the Northwest Resistance. That conflict divided Indigenous families on all fronts. Three of James Rowland’s brothers (William, John and Alexander) served as scouts on the government side during the Resistance. Nothing is said about the other nine siblings involvement, but in 1885 their mother (and Kenneth McDonald’s mother-in-law) Elizabeth Rowland claimed Métis scrip at Edmonton as did James. One can imagine the talk of the Resistance around the kitchen tables all up and down the river. Especially among the women.

    But before the river lots? There is just a hint at an earlier time and earlier peoples in Kenneth McDonald’s obituary in the Edmonton Bulletin: “The east side of the village was then where the Grand View Hotel now stands and the district between that centre and his farm was a dense poplar forest.”

    A dense poplar forest… I’m imagining conversations now when I walk to the edge of the valley and look out on the dawn. The mix of cultures and languages and voices. The mix of species. How we could be together differently in this land.

    In gratitude.