Shivering in Brent, Ontario: Haunted Recreation in Algonquin Provincial Park Ian Sorjo Grant Puppe a Thesis Submitted to The

SHIVERING IN BRENT, ONTARIO:

HAUNTED RECREATION IN ALGONQUIN PROVINCIAL PARK

IAN SORJO GRANT PUPPE

A THESIS SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF GRADUATE STUDIES

IN PARTIAL FULFILMENT OF THE REQUIRMENTS

FOR THE DEGREE OF

MASTER'S OF SOCIAL ANTHROPOLOGY

GRADUATE PROGRAM IN SOCIAL ANTHROPOLOGY

YORK UNIVERSITY,

TORONTO, ONTARIO

FEBRUARY 2012 Library and Archives Bibliotheque et Canada Archives Canada

Published Heritage Direction du Branch Patrimoine de I'edition

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While these forms may be included Bien que ces formulaires aient inclus dans in the document page count, their la pagination, il n'y aura aucun contenu removal does not represent any loss manquant. of content from the thesis. Canada Abstract

This thesis follows the reproduction of the Canadian 'national-cultural phantasm' through an investigation of the campgrounds and former town site of Brent in the north end of

Algonquin Provincial Park. As a place that requires great physical, emotional and economic effort to get to, visits to Brent actualize the nostalgic longing for authentication of Canadian selves and subjectivities found in the representation of origins, and immersion in its wilderness and history. The spectral rhythms of presence and absence encountered in visits to the place and in the official history of Brent as a part of the Park serve to legitimate the post-colonial erasure of First Nations claims through the valorization of colonial heritage in practices of haunted recreation. Visiting Brent, in body or in imagination, brings together re-presentation and immersion in practices of re-creation always inflected by the weight of the past.

IV Dedication

To Lesley,

Mom and Dad. Acknowledgements

I am grateful to all of the people in and around the Park who were willing and often enthusiastic participants in this project. It would have been an impossible undertaking without the thoughtful, considerate, brave and honest collaboration between all of the various people involved who often hold such divergent interests in the place that so many of us love. I am also grateful to the land itself for being more than a background, but the main impetus behind my efforts and a continuous companion.

A special thank you goes directly to those who spent time with me in Brent, along the trails, at the campgrounds, and at the museums and galleries that I went to all throughout and around the Park, from Mattawa to Haliburton. To Jake, Rob, Gantry, Jim and Marie, Dave,

Jennifer, and Sharon, and all of the other dedicated visitors, staff and 'volunteers' who made my visits possible, I send my appreciation for your time, energy, hospitality and willingness to answer some awkward and sometimes meaningless seeming questions. To all of those who asked, I place the plea here in the most direct form possible; please do something to make the online registration system participate in a more friendly relationship towards those who wish to visit, and towards those who need to employ it in daily use. To echo one voice in particular;

"Visiting the Park and enjoying your stay shouldn't be limited by some online system that only has a real impact because we won't ignore what it says when there's no one on a site and it keeps telling everyone its occupied. If you've never been here, then don't tell me how things are here, and don't tell me I don't know how to look after this place if you've never seen how I do." To use a metaphor, I hope this opens up more space on the observation deck to see what's happening in the Brent crater. And to those in Levack, London, Toronto, Kitchener, Hamilton

vi and all of the other places who have shared their memories, space, time and resources with me,

Megwich and Thanks.

I have spent a number of years at York University in Toronto and I am indebted to far too many people there, past and present, to list all of their names. Thank you to all of my colleagues and all of my "bredren," throughout my education, formal and informal. Each one, teach one, and to each and all, onelove. To my Master's cohort, I feel particularly blessed by circumstance that we were able to spend this time together and I will forever be reminded of my incalculable debt to you every time that I sit down to share a plate of nachos. To all of the staff of the Department of Social Anthropology who helped me ramble my way through over the years I am grateful. Many of you have been inspirational and influential. More fudge is promised. Likewise to my committee members Kenneth Little and Teresa Holmes. I am so fortunate for the time that I have had with both of you and I will draw from the wisdom and passion you have both shown during my time working with you through all of my future endeavours, singular and collaborative. Thank you. Thanks as well to Professors Marilyn

Silverman, David Lumsden, Daphne Winland and Zulfikar Hiiji for their direction and mentorship over my time at York and for the encouragement that they have offered to me, often when I was most in need. And thanks to Professor Regna Darnell at The University of

Western Ontario for comments on early drafts and for efforts that go beyond.

To Lesley, it is absolutely without doubt that this would not have been possible without your unending support, encouragement, and participation. You are wonderful and I love you.

And thank you to Corporal Hans Gunter for keeping me in line.

vii To my parents and family, extended and adopted, I thank you for your good humour, patience and participation and for the space that you have given me to explore and to pursue my interests, however unusual they may have seemed at the time. To my parents Monica and

Soijo Puppe, thank you for being fun, inquisitive and sound examples and for all of the time that you spent with me conversing and learning together. And to my Aunt Margaret, thank you for all of the time spent sitting and talking. We have not always agreed, but together your wonder and appreciation for the natural has encouraged and influenced me profoundly. Thank you.

And thank you. Table of Contents

Abstract iv

Dedication v

Acknowledgements vi

Table of Contents ix

Table of Figures x

Introductions - Orienteering: "The forgotten part of the Park" pg. 1

Chapter One - Access Denied or "/ ain't afraid of no ghosts T pg. 16

Chapter Two — "My Fingers Eat Graphite" or

Sketchy Ethnography: The Abstract Sketch as Ethnographic Device pg. 37

Chapter Three - The Algonquin Visitor Centre and Museum:

"And to the right...'''' pg. 75

Chapter Four - The Algonquin Logging Museum:

"Hold on, let me grab my axe." pg. 138

Chapter Five - Brent, the Brent Store, and the Brent Road:

"Shirt comes off, shorts go on, and that's how it stays." pg. 164

No Conclusion - Torch Song pg. 199

References Cited pg. 204

ix Table of Fieures

1. Map of the Park Pg- 1 2. Brent Grave Site (2010) pg. 25 3. Brent Road Curves (2010) pg.41 4. Rock Lake (2010) pg. 46 5. No Shelter (2010) pg. 47 6. Teeth (2010) pg. 50 7. Moose (2010) pg. 52 8. Domed Tent (2010) pg. 55 9. Shaking Tent (2010) pg. 56 10. Looming Over a City (2009) pg. 60 11. Deep Hill (2010) pg. 61 12. Fire at Water and the Great Birds (2009) pg. 64 13. A Walk in the Park or a J-Stroke (2010) Pg- 67 14. Layback (2010) Pg- ^l 15 .Big Moon (2010) pg. 73 16. Booth's Rock View (2010) Pg- 79 17. Eagle's Feast Display (2010) pg- 83 18. "Heads you live, Tails you die... " Display (2010) pg. 85 19. Teddy Bear Display (2010) pg. 86 20. Cedar Lake Sunset (2010) pg. 90 21. "The Parkand Us" Display (Anonymous Woman) (2010) pg. 94 22. "The Park and Us " Display (Ranger Mark Robinson) (2010) pg. 96 23. "The Park and Us " Display (An early fanner and his horse) (2010) pg. 97 24. "The Park and Us " Display (Logger) (2010) pg. 97 25. "The Park and Us " Display (Sketch)(2010) pg. 101 26. "The First Visitors" Display (2010) pg. 106 27. Brave Tears (2010) pg. 110 28. "Emile Huard" Mannequin (2010) pg. 116 29. " Three Indian Guides from Rama " Display (2010) pg. 124 30. Tom Thompson's Bust (2010) pg. 133 31. No Hunting (2010) pg. 164 32. Brent Road Crest (2010) pg. 169 33. Brent Road Log Cut (2010) pg. 170 34. More Brent Road Signage (2010) pg. 172 35. Muskwa Lake (2010) pg. 174 36. Adam Pitts' House (2010) pg. 190 37. Downtown Brent (2010) pg. 199

All photographs were taken by the author. All digital image manipulation performed by Jester Lind. All sketches were done with graphite on paper [block, pencils, touch]. Introductions:

Orienteering:

"The forgotten part of the Park."

Fig. 1 - Map

Background

In this work we take a trip to the campgrounds and former village site of Brent in the northern end of Algonquin Provincial Park. Brent, located on a finger of land that reaches out southward into Cedar Lake, was established in the 1820's by settlers and loggers as a lumber depot at a spot already in use by Aboriginal hunters during the

1 winter. Later becoming a hectic divisional point on the Canadian National Railway,

Brent has since become what one of the most prominent people of the place calls

"forgotten." Now a sleepy pace envelopes the "ghost town" where those headed to the

interior stop on their way through and those looking either for solitude, or for a sign of

belonging in the bush, come to make their memories.

In travelling to Brent, the so-called ghost town, and the museums on Highway

#60, the Visitor Centre and the Algonquin Logging Museum, we are able to come in contact with the ways that connections to the place(s) and the histories of the Park help

to establish this conservation area as an icon of Canadian national-cultural imaginaries and imaginaries of nature. Day-to-day life as well as tourism in the Park is inflected

with the traces of history and actualized through borders, passes, rangers and

reservations as an apparatus of socio-political control as much as personal escape.

These historical traces and efforts at control and surveillance find their counter-point in legacies of post-colonial relations and the differential representation of various stakeholders in the Park's management.

Algonquin Provincial Park, was established in 1893 (originally named a

National Park, but always administered provincially) and is Canada's oldest conservation area. While the most prominent image of the area now is that of a tourist attraction and lonely wilderness, the Park was first created in an effort to ensure that the watersheds of the area would be protected, as much as that the timber procuring

2 operations be continued with less competition from settlers, fanners, trappers and

Aboriginal Peoples, who all claimed the land in different ways. Contemporary management is accomplished through a loose entanglement of organizations: Ontario

Parks, the Ministry of Natural Resources, and the extra-governmental association named the Friends of Algonquin Park, who handle many of the tourism related operations. This complicated web of government, business, conservation, education, altruist and otherwise interested parties has made Algonquin Park a place that obviates how Canada is imagined as well as how the natural aspects of the nation are conceptualized and related to. Attention to these complications takes heed of the call made by Jonathon Spencer to investigate "quiet 'background' nationalisms" based on the question of whether there can be forms of nationalism that can tolerate diversity, or if nationalist discourse is "always and everywhere a source of intolerance that must be opposed" (Spencer 1990: 298).

Talking to visitors at the Museums and in Brent brings out the fears and desires related to making a visit to the Park. Talking with employees conjures other images that juxtapose themselves against the official history shown in the museums. The resulting voices are what I have sought to put into conversation, one with the other, as well as with various academic, and activist sources, in order to emphasize the ambiguous, contingent and often paradoxical relationships that come together to bring

Brent and the rest of the Park to life. This means that voices not often heard, or who often disagree, may have to share space with one another in an effort to paint a picture 3 of a place that has never been without conflict and dissent, although it hides this past as best as it possibly can. This also means bringing voice to the very different kinds of narratives that can be heard from the affected, and affecting, "natural and artifactual things" encountered in the places visited, as much as from interviews and eavesdropping for the local rhythms of talk (Bennett 2004: 349, Stewart 1996).

As such, this thesis employs diverse theoretical and authorial, artistic and scientific, styles, positions and ontologies, in order to affect the reader, conjuring feelings that are related to being there. This thesis seeks not to summarize a visit or the

'reality' of the current state of the Park but to evoke feelings associated with a desire to protect and preserve the natural world by attending more sensitively to our interactions with it and with one another, increasing our potential for sustainable living. Here I follow Massumi in the feeling that "vague concepts, and concepts of vagueness, have a crucial, and often enjoyable, role to play" (Massumi 2002: 13). Starting a fire to cook dinner might sometimes be interrupted by a hunt for sticks and kindling to get it started, or a walk might sometimes be distracted by the captivating view of a pond that follows a beaver back and forth from the shoreline collecting sticks to build its dam with. In a similar fashion, this style of ethnography takes joy in digressions "[bjecause that is where the unexpected arises. That is the experimental aspect." (Massumi 2002: 18)

Similar to the meandering, and unpredictable paths taken by many of the highways, gravel roads, rivers, streams, and hiking trails in the Park, this work takes

4 enjoyment from the occasional glancing sideways at something we find along the trail that may at first not seem to help us get to the end of the hike. That said, coming to this place to go hiking or to spend the evening means that we are here not to total up the number of steps or to check each different possible path off of our list of things to do, but instead to simply enjoy the stay for the possibilities it offers us to immerse ourselves in a feel for the place, familiar yet different from the one that we take for granted as natural. This makes the Park and specifically Brent an area that summons visits through the representation of history and a site for the production of authenticity in our pursuit of national-cultural phantasms; the characters of origin whose authenticity is appropriated in the effort to make ourselves at home (Ivy 1998). These characters are only ever caught at the edge of a glance, although it often feels that they are right there with us, in plain sight. The activation of images and narratives that make claims to the historical nature of recreation in Brent produce the apparition or spectral appearance of the 'settler,' the 'logger,' the 'naturalist,' and 'ranger' through the insistence on particular retellings of History, or what Kathleen Stewart describes as a "master narrative" (Stewart 1996: 96). The "master narrative" might also be described as the official language of History often framed and phrased through a discourse of evidence and accuracy, the effect of which "is the subjugation of a threateningly unruly history"

(Spencer 1990: 287). This alternate form of "history" (marked by a lower case h) is perhaps better understood as the language of memory, plural, personal and embodied, often subsumed or written off as anecdotal and unqualified, and just as often

5 appropriated to support the claims made by the "master narrative" (Lowenthal in Ingold et al. 1996: 238).

Through this insistence and repetitive structuring of historical representation the

"master narrative" of Algonquin provincial Park depends upon a form of what Gordon describes as "hysterical blindness" concerning the history and contemporary presence of

First Nations peoples and practices (Gordon 1997: 17). The elision of this presence affects day to day life in, and visits to, Brent, and to the rest of the Park, through discursive and embodied impacts always related to an imagination of what has come before and what has gone or been lost to progress and modern ways of doing things in the area. Thus, recreation in the Park is both haunted by the traces of the past and inflected by the desire to bring the past and the nature of the place closer.

Simultaneously, this imagined closure of distance between the visitor and the past (or the nature) of Brent, found in the generic and reductive categories used so often to describe people and which link directly to the capitalist project of the individual's involvement serves to put the visitor at a further distance from the actual lives and desires of the people who have gone from the place, either dead, displaced, or otherwise made to appear silent or invisible.

In Time and the Other Johannes Fabian identifies a "persistent and systematic tendency" in anthropological practice to insist on a separation between the

"intersubjective" experiences garnered during interactions in the field and the tone of

6 most ethnography (Fabian 2002: 30-31 [italics original]). Fabian argues that much ethnography is guilty of placing the "Others" being researched at a distance both physically and temporally, denying the "coeval" development of societies and their mutual contemporaneous evolution (Fabian 2002: 31). This runs contrary to the interventions of phenomenologists who "tried to demonstrate with their analyses that social interaction presupposes intersubjectivity, which in turn is inconceivable without assuming that the participants involved are coeval" (Fabian 2002: 30, see also Husserl

2005). Moving from phenomenological interventions, both Marilyn Ivy and Avery

Gordon draw on Derrida's formulation of "hauntologies" which focus ethnographic attention on the production of the "imaginary" and its interactions with memory, memorialisation and the refusal of certain pasts during the production of modern

"subjection and subjectivities" (Derrida 1994, Gordon 1997: 20, Ivy 1998).

Similar attention to the production of the modern subject can be found in the work of Agamben, Foucault, Arendt and scholars identified with the Frankfurt School such as Max Weber and Walter Benjamin who all identify linkages between the production of modern subjectivities and the development of the nation-state form

(Agamben 1995, Arendt 1968, Foucault 1978, Benjamin 1968, Weber 2002). In particular, Susan Buck-Morss has extended Benjamin's understanding of the

"phantasmagoria" (an immersive technology of projection developed in the late 1800's where images of people/things were re-presented through light and sound, overwhelming the senses of the audience) as an analogy of the fragmented 7 consciousness of the modern subject, demonstrating the coercive aspects of modern technologies of subjection and subjectivity and their entanglement in an aesthetic of progress and civilization (Buck-Morss 1992: 22). All of this comes together in understanding the way that the Park is instantiated through the discourse and actions of tourists and authorities as an apparatus of biopolitical control over the citizens and territory of the Canadian state through a materialization of the national-cultural imaginary (Ivy 1998). In Brent and at other attractions such as the Visitor Center and

Museum and the Logging Museum, this means taking seriously what people say about the past and how what they say expresses more than what might first be apparent, but also "listening out" for what the ruins can tell us about how this place speaks to authentic Canadian identities, often contradicting the "master narrative" (Lefebvre

2005: 87).

Foreground

The first chapter follows the trouble I had in attaining approval to do research, the troubles I found in how words and phrases might be misconstrued and mis- communicated in the process of building and executing a research project in anthropology and the need to attend to other kinds of data from the usual discursive focus found in much recent ethnography. In chapter one, "Access Denied," I encounter the difficulty of talking across disciplines involved in the management and protection of the area. At the same time I introduce the borders of the Park as they are instantiated

8 through the actions of people involved in its' protection. The difficulty that I had in attaining access to do research on Brent, and the trouble of interdisciplinary mis translations gives way to a theoretical intervention. Theoretical views of the relationship between nostalgia and the haunting feelings of loss and progress sought in visits to the place run up against the assertions of positivist science and official History that there is no such thing as a "haunting." Here the language of History and the language of memory compete with one another drawing attention to the appropriation of memory in the construction of the "master narrative" (driven by a plotline of progress), but also to the embodied and material aspects of anecdotal memories and remembrance, the haunting feelings of loss and their connection to assertions of belonging (Lowenthal in Ingold et al. 1996). The chapter then explores the notion of haunting in the context of recreation in the Park. Both the recreation thought of most often in terms of nature tourism, camping, hiking, canoeing, fishing, lounging, and other mostly physical activities, but also re-creation, a concept that foregrounds the ways that the experience of the moment is always impacted by an imagined position vis-a-vis the past, and the effects of these impacts on the way the Park is represented and managed.

As is typical for the rest of the chapters as well, rather than seeking a way to add up what was found into some feigned coherency, this first chapter re-appropriates some of the language used initially to deny my access to do research in an effort to find common understandings that add to what we know and care for about the place.

Following Marilyn Ivy, Avery Gordon, and Jacques Derrida, as well as Lisa Cooke, I 9 locate the Canadian national-cultural imaginary in the effort to re-create historical authenticity through immersive contact with an imagined Canadian nature. This means taking seriously the interventions of theorists (such as Anna Tsing, Brian Massumi, Erin

Manning, Nigel Thrift and Jane Bennett) who put forward a vital or lively sense of materiality as well as those (such as Michel Foucault, Bruce Braun, Chantal Mouffe and

Markus Miessen) who maintain that institutional firameworks must be developed that, through political agonism, work less towards the resolution of conflict than the ability to live with difference.

Chapter two, "Sketchy Ethnography," presents my 'artistic' efforts to depict moments and feelings associated with my visits to the Park. The doodles that I introduce are used as additive gestures towards my experiences that are performed on a non-positivist scale. The doodles make no effort to represent specific images. These gestures made sedimentary through the remains of graphite stand as monuments to my momentary experience of the Park, and are included in an effort to expand the possibilities for what might be considered as ethnographically valuable. Drawing connections between the experience of being in the various field sites as well as drawing out their differences from one another, these doodles present the materializing force of places while preserving the rhythms related to the moments/movements of their gestural sedimentation. This chapter is then a methodological rumination and a rumination on methods that accepts how "[t]he representation of value or difference is indispensible for understanding the cleavages that power's divisive work accomplishes" 10 (Gordon 1997: 16). This means maintaining an eye for the impact of modulating and mediating the rhythms of daily life on the representation of the "natural" environment and the Park as a protected area. The method I put forth follows the doodles in recreating an alternative account of Brent and Algonquin Park as a whole that connects

"the politics of accounting, in all its intricate political-economic, institutional, and affective dimensions, to a potent imagination of what has been done and what is to be done otherwise." (Gordon 1997:18)

Chapter three comes together in a fugue-like way with the two that follow it to explore the rhythmic construction and originary repetition of the Park's master narrative while it summons the national-cultural phantasm by gesturing towards how this singular

History might open to alternative forms of remembrance and how we might listen for other ghostly voices. The third chapter follows an exploration of the Algonquin Visitor

Centre & Museum, a single building and the most prominent tourist attraction other than the "nature" of the Park. Here the rhythmic traces of the "master narrative" found in the Park's official History come together in texts, images and the voices of guides to make politically charged assertions that serve to obfuscate the interests of those who share different understandings of the place, either as a traditional homeland or as a hard- won piece of personal property. The Visitor Centre & Museum becomes implicated not only in the erasure of contemporary Algonquin Peoples' and leaseholders' presence in the Park, but also in the immersive experience of the Park as a place of national origins.

This practical immersion begins to take shape through a relationship with the place 11 based on the reproduction of memorized and habituated, imagined and embodied, aspects of selves and subjectivities seeking to out-do the authenticity of the past/passed in an affirmation of belonging understood to be genuine and legitimate. Immersion ties bodies and imaginations to places through the moment to moment and day to day recreation of identifications that are found in relation to what is thought to be gone or what is made obsolete in an affirmation of progress.

Chapter four continues to trace the paths of the ghosts of the Park by taking a walk through the trail at the Algonquin Logging Museum. We meet visitors and examine the artefacts of the museum in an exploration of the complicated and intertwined histories of various peoples considered distinct either by their geography, ethnicity, race or gender, or even by their occupation. It becomes more apparent that the differences from the past enacted in the displays of technological progress serve simultaneously to make the abandonment and absenting of contrary pasts both necessary and desirable in a post-colonial tale of nation building. The celebration of the logging industry and some of its most prominent figures pre-empts certain counter claims to its legitimacy both from naturalists and from Algonquin People who have been displaced by the collusion of interests between the government, the loggers and some of those who stood to benefit from the Park's creation and maintenance.

Chapter five takes a meandering walk through Brent, meeting up with a few of the "locals" and interrogating the efficacy of pitting various stakeholders against one another. The entangled histories and personal narratives of people who call the Brent area home, and those who work to maintain the place against the efforts of some of the

Park's own affiliated naturalists, come together in a view of a place that allows for a type of politics that aligns divergent interests through collaborations that are sometimes less visible than conflicts. Some of the voices that are heard here, and some of the ghosts who speak up, insist that they stand against some "other" outside force. Whether they were Park authorities, campers, cottagers or tourists, capitalist businesspeople, or

First Nations Peoples, many of the people I spoke to chose to frame these competitive interests in binary terms. This means that in some cases the actions of people who are defending their interests serve to obscure the inadvertent benefits accrued by other

(third-party) stakeholders.

In often heard phrases, a generic "they" is put to blame for the trouble, frustration, or complication of the moment, and there is a ring of violence and neurotic fear in the common refrains that "My/Your Algonquin Park" is a "protected area".

Consider the voice of one camper in Brent who said, when pressed about the impact of the Algonquin hunters that come to the area during the winter months, that "[t]hey let them do anything they want out here." His notion that the government had somehow given in to the "unjust demands" of the First Nations people positions him as authoritative and knowledgeable about the effects of hunting, but also as vulnerable to the same kind of powerlessness that drew impoverished men to cut timber for the wealthiest of Canadians, men like J.R. Booth. At the same time, these expressions of 13 knowledge, frustration and disempowerment draw attention to the ways that claims made against the increasingly visible presence of First Nations in the area obscure how the interests of cottagers, campers and First Nations peoples might align, and sometimes unwittingly do. As well, the interests and efforts of governmental and non governmental organizations, protection and research, concerning all aspects of the Park and its histories often works in step with the political manoeuvres of one or another

"side" against its' "opponents," however imagined.

Patricia Williams' straight-forward, yet profound statement "[t]hat life is complicated" may at first seem hyperbole (Williams quoted in Gordon 1997: 3). But as

Avery Gordon points out, this is something that has been missed in too many ethnographic and sociological descriptions of people who are often denied what she calls "complex personhood" (Gordon 1997: 4). This complexity is something that is recognized by people in Brent, who, when confronted by someone such as myself, who asks too many questions that seem in some way to reduce experience to a banal description, respond with ironic or sarcastic quips and retorts that play along with the questions while playing with how they might be understood. This use of ironic humour serves to empower people, destabilizing the meaning of the questions posed. And as a result selves are confirmed as distinct and the borders of subjectivity are stabilized through the repetitive defence of internal or personal complexity then denied to the one who imposes categories assumed to be reductive, discursively recreating and insisting upon a binary distinction between the isolable self and the other. 14 In rendering this ironic humour in ethnographic descriptions of the people I met in Brent I use a rhythmic tone that works to conjure the nostalgic feeling of being there and laughing with these people, "conferring the respect on others that comes from presuming that life and people's lives are simultaneously straightforward and full of enormously subtle meaning" (Gordon 1997: 5). So the binaries may not exist per se, but they are insisted upon, as often in assertions of knowledge about the place and its past, as they are in assertions of who represents the greatest threat to personal or public interests. Attending to this type of collaboration "with the enemy" allows for a more complicated and complex rendering of the ethnographic encounter and of the binaries so often abused, and may open spaces to consider more ethical relationships with one another that help to protect the area, rather than simply positioning the place, or one another, as resources for either economic or personal affirmations (Tsing 2005: 245).

15 Chapter 1: Access Denied or "I ain't afraid of no ghosts!"

This thesis follows the reproduction of the Canadian 'national-cultural phantasm' through an investigation of the campgrounds and former town site of Brent in the north end of Algonquin Provincial Park. As a place that requires great physical, emotional and economic effort to get to, visits to Brent actualize the nostalgic longing for authentication of Canadian selves and subjectivities found in the representation of origins, and immersion in its wilderness and history. This is a haunted recreation because it instantiates spectral rhythms of presence encountered in visits to the place and in the official history of Brent as a part of the Park, enacting a post-colonial erasure of First Nations claims through the valorization of colonial heritage. Visiting Brent, in body or in imagination, brings together re-presentation and immersion in practices of re creation always inflected by the weight of the past.

Algonquin Provincial Park is a place with a very inviting image. For some, it remains a place that will only ever be reached in the imagination. For others, it is a place so familiar that it is impossible for them to imagine not wanting to return. And some others, never really leave. Let this stand then as both a complication and a caution for those who take these kinds of images at face value.

When I first started planning my fieldwork in the Park I was excited to go back to the place I remembered as being so much fun, and so carefree. But as it goes, so much of this feeling melted away while I was writing and re-writing the proposal for the

16 research. Although, I still felt that when I finally got to Brent, the campground in the northern end of the Park that I was planning to work in, that there would be a sense of relief and that the image of the Park as a place where recreation is all fun and games would return to keep me company. This image of a place that was so inviting was shattered for me though when I received my response from the person responsible for approving research in the Park; Access Denied!

I was stunned. After re-writing the proposal six or seven times for my supervisor before finally submitting it to the ethics approval board at York, I was quashed? After being approved by the ethics board the first time the paper crossed their desks, and after receiving an email from a representative of the board saying that she found my proposal to be "fascinating," the Park was refusing me entrance. And all of this after I had struggled for so long with theories that I then felt to be bulletproof?

Further contact with the Park Biologist confirmed that my approval would not come through based on the proposal that I had sent them initially. This is where my private frustration and outrage began to grow. Why was I talking to a biologist, as educated and eminent as they may be, about my approval to do research? But it was here that so many things became so much clearer to me as well.

When the email communications came back they were absolute in denying me access based on the language I had used. The exact words used to tell me why I would not be allowed to perform my research were as follows;

17 Dear Ian Puppe,

Thank you for your interest in conducting research in Algonquin Park. Several

staff have reviewed your application to conduct research on Shivering in Brent,

Ontario: Haunted Recreation in Algonquin Provincial Park. The consensus is that, as

is, your proposed research project is not appropriate to be conducted in Algonquin.

There are several questions and concerns raised regarding your proposed project. If

you are able to address these concerns through modification of your research we would

be happy to reconsider your proposal.

Please address the following:

* Why does this project need to be conducted in a provincial park?

* Please provide a copy of the survey questions that you will be asking the

interviewees.

* What is the purpose, hypothesis or main question that you are trying to answer?

* Your implication that Brent is haunted is unfounded and research framed in this

manner will not be permitted in Algonquin.

* Please clearly outline the benefit of your research to Algonquin. (Park Staff 2010)

I was a little offended to be frank; survey questions, why does the project need to be undertaken in Algonquin? After finding more than a few references to Brent that called it a "ghost town" I was now not only being accused of implying that the place was

18 haunted, but also that I was spreading "unfounded" knowledge and rumours (Lundell &

Standfield 1993).

I had been working through theoretical frameworks developed by Marilyn Ivy and Avery Gordon, which in turn drew from the ideas of Jacques Derrida (Ivy 1998,

Gordon 1997, Derrida 1993). Ivy's writing on the formation of "national-cultural imaginaries" in Japan includes the idea of tracking absence, or loss, in understanding the formation of modem subjectivities (Ivy 1998: 3). This aligns nicely with Gordon's project of attending to what is not there in a study of "social life" that "must learn to make contact with what is without doubt often painful, difficult and unsettling" (Gordon

1997: 23). In these theories, the production of modern "subjection and subjectivities," nationalities and cultures, takes place through the maintenance and conservation of places that "enact a difference from the past as they seek to reduce that difference"

(Gordon 1997: 20, Ivy 1998: 13). This is a reminder of the sometimes isolated preoccupation with upholding the motion and action, the agency, of bodies in the social sciences and humanities. The agency involved in the continuous re-creation of

Canadian "subjection and subjectivity" structures itself through an imagination of the past that can be characterised as a "national-cultural imaginary," an insistence on the authenticity and legitimacy of certain identities and practices and their connection to the origins of the nation (Gordon 1997: 20, Ivy 1998: 3). In this way I saw the ghost town as 'haunted' by the farmers, settlers, lumberjacks, rangers and the Aboriginal Peoples who were present in the area during early colonial contact, most obviously through their 19 apparent absence in many representations. My questions centered on how the images of these historical figures might come together to produce a type of authentic Canadian heritage that includes some, and excludes others. This activates the Park as a place for a form of official mystical communion with the past, and the affirmation of a personal connection to nature and to a Canadian "national-cultural imaginary" focused on a very particular relationship to the land and its protection.

How did these "ghosts" reach out to draw in tourists and campers? How did it feel to stay in a place full of these "ghosts?" And how did the production of these ruins as a tourist site expressing "modernist nostalgia" help to produce the feelings associated with "fetishistic disavowal" of an Aboriginal past, while simultaneously playing on it to create a feeling of authentic belonging (Ivy 1998: 13)? How are Canadian identities haunted by the displacement of the Algonquin Peoples while they celebrate the colonial

"master narrative" (Stewart 1996: 96)? Now here it may seem obvious why the response came back as it did. I was employing a type of language that while fun and fascinating in an academic context, can be thought of as "unfounded" in other contexts.

So after getting past the initial despair and frustration, I asked some friends and colleagues for some help with how to go ahead. My classmate and friend Andrew

Schuldt's response was "I ain't afraid of no ghosts," [personal communication] which only made me wonder more why scientists and conservation experts would be. And while I thought that my questions would have seemed apparent in the proposal that made its way through ethics so quickly, not to mention why I needed to go to Brent and what this would have to do with Algonquin, somehow there was a classic 'failure to communicate.'

The representatives of the Park and I did not share common understandings of some very common words; research, impact, risk. Their focus on conservation and the maintenance of certain biological relationships in the territory defined by the Park's boundaries supposed a certain level of protective behaviour. My proposal must have brought up the imagination of an Outdoor Life Network episode of "Ghost Hunters," where my main tools would be radiation dosimeters and other electronic gadgetry that would clearly interfere with the current ambience of the area. Likewise, if it sounded as if I was measuring the amount of haunting in one place or another, it was a failure on my part to be clear. So while my first and second responses to the authorities would insist that tales and narratives of the uncanny, the inexplicable or the supernatural were central to the practice of anthropology, and had always been, later my angle would alter.

The legitimacy of the Park's authorities comes partly from the reiteration of their power to control how and where research takes place, but also on what topics. The vast majority of research that takes place in the Park relates to wildlife and other ecological interests, and may occasionally be invasive. Here it seems perfectly reasonable that a biologist should be involved in adjudicating the impact on conservation efforts. I was sure, however, from statements made in the literature released by the Park staff that they were also interested in how the human history of settlement and occupation had impacted on the ecology of the area (Algonquin Eco

Watch 2005). So I was caught between theory, official Park terminologies, and the shared desire on behalf of the staff and myself to look into the past of the place. I sought more advice and eventually worked through the language that I had come across in the sources I had been using that were full of official narratives (Ontario Parks 2009).

While describing the significance of the project in the past I used the phrase "the haunting effects of modernity, dwelling and the conservation of the land." I would later adjust to using the phrase "nostalgia, stewardship and the protection of the land," as a clearer and less contentious explanation of my interests. In a similar fashion I found that asking for ghost stories would draw unnecessary scrutiny. Instead, I would attend to the monuments, memorializations and narratives that I heard, which summoned or conjured connections to the past as some form of justification or meaning-making, a way to try to explain things for at least a moment, holding on to what has been lost in the process of its slipping away. This meant that the proposal that was passed through the Park's offices was only a shadow of the original that had run through ethics so quickly. I had spent so much time worrying about theory, and now it would be the methods I chose to use that would have the greatest impact on staying true to my interests. But it didn't mean that my research was quashed only that it was compromised by my ability to work through a new way of talking about the place and what was happening there. 22 The change of language worked, and I got my approval to go to Brent and begin my fieldwork, and only three months after I had first requested permission. It was late

July, and Brent's latitude at roughly the same northern pitch as North Bay meant that I would be there well into the cooler months, very much limiting who I would be speaking to. And so I'm haunted by my feelings of loss as well, of lost time and opportunities to do more interviews, and more people watching at the Visitor Centre &

Museums, and in Brent. And also by my feeling that I should have known better than to send a proposal about the haunting effects of nostalgia and "re-creation" full of poetic language to someone with a background in the so-called hard sciences.

The assertion made in the answer that I received denying me access to the Park that "my implication that Brent is haunted is unfounded" demonstrates a particular view of haunting that fails to take into consideration other meanings of the word. The use of the term haunting to describe a supernatural event, in some sense seems confused with the use of the word to describe a "structure of feeling" that lingers on the past, supposing it has been lost, and insisting on it at the same time (Gordon quoting

Williams 1997: 18). The conflation of the supernatural sense of the term haunting and the use of it to describe a feeling follows along a tradition of natural science in the Park that finds its roots in positivism, and which denies the validity of personal or anecdotal evidence.

23 Much of the research that takes place in the Park is done so in the hope that the empirical findings will forward conservation science as much as help with the conservation efforts of the area. This means that in the Park, like elsewhere in Ontario and Canada, the "hard sciences," more often able to present data that is empirically positive, are able to garner more funding and undertake more research projects than the social or "soft" sciences (if they remain interested in claiming a scientific basis at all).

This equates to a more powerful voice in public debates and in the continued search for more funding, providing a competitive edge. In some ways it is the disciplinary power of certain authorities that allows them to maintain indifference towards nuanced terms which may put their authority in jeopardy. Here, it becomes more obvious how a real experience of haunting might present an alternative understanding of the past obviating the characteristic removal of certain traces from the representation of the official history of the nation and the Park, in the pursuit or expression of scientific authority.

There is a cross made of steel poles, and a chain partition painted white that marks a grave in the western end of the campground in Brent. The official story is that there are nine lumberjacks from the early days of the log drives buried there. A plaque was erected in 2010 that makes the same claim. In the Visitor Centre and the

Algonquin Logging Museum there are recreations and photographs of similar loggers' graves that might be found out in the back-country around Lake Radiant.

24 Fig. 2 — Brent Grave Site (2010)

These graves and the master narratives that surround them celebrate the lives of men who represented corporate and colonial expansion and veracity, but also a kind of poverty that forced thousands of people in Canada to do the same kind of life- threatening labour in order to survive. Part of the uncanny attraction to the history of colonial expansion lies in the paradox that remains unresolved in the image of the logger as tough, strong and capable, but also a person of their time, unable to escape the forces of history which drag them along into unsafe and sometimes unimaginable conditions; not washing for months, sleeping in your boots, eating ashes and sand in

25 your beans as "pepper," dying in ice water or being torn limb from limb by runaway machinery.

It is this impossibility of imagining any alternatives that drives the responses of children to the calls of the tour guide at the Logging Museum. During the tour of the recreated "camboose camp," the anglicized French word for the early logging camps, the guide repeats the refrain that "only men stayed in the bunkhouses, two to a bunk, and they slept in their dirty work clothes." The repetition assures the crowd, many of them between the ages of eight and twelve, that nothing lurid happened in the Park, ever. Or at the least it removes the need to talk about or even to dig into any history of sexuality in the local past, an elision characteristic of Canadian patriarchy and racism.

The exclusion applies to women who were present in the area, such as the wives and daughters of some few railwaymen and early settlers, but also to First Nations men and women who are forgotten in the account.

"They found an area that was pretty much empty bush all around them, ready to be cut down, and who stayed in the bunkhouses?"

"Men!"

"And why was it only men that stayed there?"

"Because, there weren't any women in the Park!"

Somehow in this valorization of the logger the erasure of not only Aboriginal Peoples becomes accepted, their presence erased or collapsed as a part of nature, but Aboriginal women don't qualify as part of what is imagined as feminine. In reference to the Park, 26 the word conservation immediately summons the idea of a particular relationship between people and the ecology but it also refers to the conservation of particular traditions, often chauvinist and ethno-centric in their expression of a post-colonial legacy.

Contrary to the master narrative, though, a man told me another story about the grave site in Brent. While he showed his two younger nephews around, and while I followed, he told us that there "weren't no nine bodies in there... No. There's one though. He's my uncle. I know 'cause I buried him. This is all just memorial." So while I'm not interested in exhuming any graves, I am interested in how the language used in both narratives serves to create personal connections, and express personal relationships, between the place and the people who participate in this dialogue (Gordon

1997). Turning to his nephews, the man swelled, standing up straight and stretching his back upwards and his arms out low to the sides, he held his right hand tight, as if it was still holding some heavy tool handle. On one hand, there was his story, the discursive construction of connections to the place. On the other, there was the trace of hard labour present in his habits, the embodied retention of experience that stands as testament to a nonconscious form of memory (Massumi 2002). His hand opened with a jerk, his arm first stretching forward as if dropping something then raising up to direct the attention of his nephews to the poles and chains that he seemed to feel tied them to the place. His body told a tale that came before his words, which sat as the grounds from which they were cultivated. He had been digging. And, before the man said anything more, his nephews nodded. "That's your blood over there. That's my uncle and I buried him and you're my nephews so that's you over there."

These personal connections are drawn in both cases through ways of talking that valorize relationships of economics in the colonial expansion of industries involved in resource extraction. Richard Handler describes how,

for both anthropologists and nationalists, authenticity is a function of what has been called 'possessive individualism,' a dominant variant of modern ideology... which makes individual existence dependent upon the possession of private property. (Handler 1986:4) This same possessive individualism requires a "national collectivity" possess an

"authentic culture," "one original to its possessors, one which exists only with them"

(Handler 1986:4). Handler further posits that,

[cjontact with authentic pieces of culture in museums or, better, the possession of such objects in private collections, allows us to appropriate their authenticity, incorporating that magical proof of existence into what we call our 'personal experience.' (Handler 1986: 4) The idea that the Park has been created through the sacrifice of the loggers serves to justify continued occupation of the area through conservation efforts that memorialize them as "forefathers," (Guide at the Logging Museum [personal communication]) applying kinship terms in an effort to establish affective bonds between visitors and colonizers while establishing a sense of responsibility simultaneously in those who identify as citizens. And in the case of the man who says he buried his uncle under soil now considered a part of a memorial to logging, his reassertions of what really happened serve to counter the master narrative by connecting his bloodline to the place,

28 making a claim to personal ownership of the land and at the same time affirming an identity tied to the territory. The land takes on value through relationships with both the national-cultural master narrative and personal embodied connections that are themselves refracted through the phantasmic image of the self constructed in reference to the past. In one sense the familial ownership of territory and sanguine connections is affirmed and in the other, national pride of stewardship and the blood spilled in securing it; these bloodstains serve to obscure other narrative threads. Both refuse to affirm the body of the Aboriginal-as-Canadian. The protection of the land and the need to apply for research approval here comes full circle.

Any desire to "prove" an Aboriginal legacy in the Park must present habeus corpus, a body to judge (Agamben 1995: 73). This would include my own efforts to demonstrate the ways in which the Algonquin Peoples had been made to appear almost invisible to the tourists that visited one of Canada's busiest "wilderness," historical, and cultural heritage, recreation areas. This requirement of proof positions those responsible for adjudicating the impacts and benefits of research projects, and their approval or denial, as the voice of the state, expressing its interests by activating the mandates of their positions. Taken broadly, the phrase "body to judge" allows for an expanded sense of what constitutes a body and how they may be seen to interact. Body here may come to refer to any material evidence of an earlier presence, remains of course, but also artefacts.

29 Troublingly though, there is only one research application process to do work in the Park. Projects operating under different conditions, and collecting data of different types, are all judged on the same basis of threat and risk to the biological character of the Park and conservation efforts that focus on biology and ecology. And the need to apply to the Park to do research itself demonstrates an analogue to the work of rangers and the passes bought by campers. In these repeated gestures and measures, the stamping of papers or the denial of an application, there is a silent assertion that the authorities have total control over the area, and that its surveillance has been perfected.

Examining these "technologies of hypervisibility" though, Gordon paraphrases the words of Kipnis arguing that "[visibility is a complex system of permission and prohibition, of presence and absence, punctuated alternately by apparitions and hysterical blindness" (Gordon 1997: 15). Thus, surveillance justifies the further need to survey, and the more apparent the traces of the Algonquin People become, the more the representation of the area's history is struck by instances of this "hysterical blindness"

(Gordon 1997: 15).

In many ways the Park, as it is territorialized in acts asserting its nature as either

"protected," or managed through conservation, brings together several concerns, at once political and academic. In its treatment as distinct from the area around it, the geography of the Park becomes a "space-of-exception" (Minca 2006: 388). In its treatment as "exceptional," conservation of the Park's ecology justifies interventions into its interactions and into the behaviour of visitors, but also necessitates a 30 contradictory image of the Park. The contradiction lies in the need to assert both control and visibility of the nature of the area. This assertion is found in the numerous guidebooks, handbooks, and the authoritative "History" of the place, as well as in the boasts made in the bibliography issued by the Friends of Algonquin of the rafts of research that has taken place in the area, all stored in the archives of the Visitor Centre

& Museum. This assertion is also found in the presentation of the timber industry found in the Logging Museum, where an extractive industry is positioned as responsible for the future of the forest, while accompanying claims that contemporary forms of forestry have benefitted from years of experimentation in the area and are leagues beyond the methods of the past in their ability to efficiently capitalize on the resources the place offers.

These assertions are composed against the desire to conserve the "wilderness" as the last bastion of mystery, and mystical communion, left in the passage to a modernity that has "disenchanted" daily urban life (Buck-Morss 1992: 22, Gordon 1997: 8). The representation of the wilderness of the Park takes place on alternative registers that serve to counter-point the comprehensiveness of one another. In some publications there is an assertion that the nature of the area is almost pristine, making claims that some sections are still "virgin" forest (Ontario Parks Zoning Map of Algonquin

Provincial Park 1998). In other handbooks issued by the Friends of Algonquin there is an assertion that the area has suffered the impacts of human presence and use for thousands of years (MacKay 2002). Either way, there is little interest in disturbing the 31 forest. And any unauthorized physical research, most particularly digging, would interfere with conservation efforts; catch-22.

The popular image of the "anthropologist" who must in some way search for traces in bones or artefacts was playing against my interest in speaking to people and investigating the way that nostalgia and history interplayed during visits focused on recreation. It became awkward for me when it began to seem that this type of representation plays against the current land claim being made by the Algonquins of

Pikwakanagan (Golden Lake). The authorities would always want to adjudicate the possibility that research might affect conservation efforts, but the grounds on which some denials are made is less about the protection of the ecology than the preservation of images of nature and identity embedded within a national-cultural imaginary haunted by the post-colonial exclusions that constitute its dominance.

The claim encompasses most of the Kitchissippi-Ottawa Valley including the majority of the Park, but the effort to provide evidence to support the claim has been going on for almost twenty years now with little movement. And it also seems that the

Canadian public, many of them Euro-centric Whites, fear the possibility that the Park could pass under new legislation as Aboriginal territory. The formation of the group aimed at thwarting the land claim, and their advertising campaigns, work on some familiar and unsettling registers of race and ethnic difference, capitalizing on friction between the descendents of European colonists and those who claim First Nations heritage. The composition of the name of the group, with "SAVE THE PARK" always printed in all capital letters, does everything it can to catch attention, and summon the feeling of threat and immediate concern. The suggestion that there is a need for an "ad hoc committee to SAVE THE PARK" seeks to bring out the feeling that Aboriginal control would mean the disappearance of the place, or at the least, its transformation into a violent space of contact between Aboriginal hunters and everything else. This activation of the oldest of Wildman mythologies in relation to the potential of the land claim makes it almost impossible to imagine the return of the responsible stewardship of the past relationship between Algonquin Peoples and the place now called Algonquin

Park, which in so many ways remains uninviting for so many, for so much of the year.

Likewise, it seems impossible that a Ministry responsible for the place would be willing to give up the ability to market the space based on a mythologized connection between Aboriginal Peoples and spaces-of-nature. Further, the rational compartmentalization of labour that puts the approval of research in the hands of scientists and actuaries removes the possibility of alternative forms of dialogue during the negotiation of such claims. One hand is not responsible for the actions of the other.

And so the claims drag on, as do the old stereotypes. What then to make of the arrowhead I was shown in the Brent Store, or of the articles hung on the walls full of pictures of local Aboriginal leaders?

33 This brings me back to my point regarding the need to find more commensurate language in order to facilitate greater dialogue. The recent proliferation of

"[interdisciplinary" language still seems to have some serious limits. These are most prominently displayed by the conflicting interests of corporations, governments, and private citizens often identified through ethnicity, race or gender in ways that suppose opposition, which serves to exclude rather than invite more voices. In this case there seems to remain a barrier between the hard and soft sciences (biology and anthropology) that one side seems happy to maintain out of self-interest.

Interdisciplinary work must strive to adjust language.

Specialists such as anthropologists involved in public debates must put forth an effort not only to speak the language of the informant to gather information, as they may have in the colonial beginnings of anthropology, but also to translate theory into a vernacular understood by informants in order to foster greater communication of anthropological ideas in the public sphere/outside of academic conversations where they often are trapped. In some ways this reiterates Massumi's notion that "shameless poaching from science" may bring disciplines into conversation with literature they currently have the luxury of turning a blind eye toward while expanding how the concept might be understood outside of its home discipline (Massumi 2002: 19-20).

Disciplinary isolation makes it evident that in the academies, the bureaucracies, and the legislatures, specialized language has normalized competition to the extent that contemporary Western institutions would be impossible without it. However, it is the job of an interdisciplinary language to find common ground and meeting places, not to construct castles and barricades. Gordon quotes Barthes' assertion that

"[i]nterdisciplinarity consists in creating a new object that belongs to no one," and is still somehow everyone's at once (Barthes in Gordon 1997: 7). I follow her in taking this to suggest "that there is still some room to claim rather than discipline its meaning into existence" (Gordon 1997: 7). But again there is a haunting.

My friend Andrew Schuldt reminded me when I mentioned the idea of a history of the Park as a contact zone and meeting place that "[m]eeting places have Panoptic qualities" [personal communication]. The Park, conceived as a technology whose aim is to provide the illusion of complete surveillance, or "hypervisibility," seeks to banish even the possibility that there could be a haunting associated with the past of the place

(Gordon 1997: 16). Haunting requires reckoning with the unsettling. What the illusion of "hypervisibility" belies however is the organization of the Park as a modern

"phantasmagoria... a technoaesthtics" organized around the project of banishing the possibility of haunting and commanding the imagination to ignore the ghosts ["the sign, or the empirical evidence... that tells you a haunting is taking place"] by providing an immersive experience mediated through the comprehensively designed "phenomena of the 'tourist bubble' (where the traveller's 'experiences' are all monitored and controlled in advance)" (Buck-Morss 1992: 22, Gordon 1997: 8, 16). But in this pre-mediated,

35 and premeditated, construction of limits the idea of access being denied comes around again to haunt the day to day experiences of visits to the Park.

How does the phantasmagoria of the various tourist attractions (the Visitor

Centre and Museum, the Logging Museum, the campgrounds, and most importantly for my project, the ghost town of Brent) work to immerse visitors in an imagined nature that finds itself in relation to the colonial past of the nation and the attendant"complex system of permission and prohibition, punctuated alternately by apparitions and hysterical blindness" (Gordon paraphrasing Ellison 1997: 17 [italics original])? As

Buck-Morss describes, the phantasmagoria is also a means of social control through the application of technologies of hypervisibility and the illusion of actualization they provide (Buck-Morss 1992). This worries me now more than it did when Andrew first said it, and leaves me with another question. How to evoke different voices and bring them into contact without fostering an unhealthy and regressive surveillance? How might a place that is loved by so many become more common ground without putting it at further "risk"? And following Stewart, how might these voices open a gap in the master narrative, "a gap in which there is 'room for manoeuvre'" (Stewart quoting

Chambers 1995: 3)?

36 Chanter 2: "Mv Fineers Eat Graphite" or

Sketchy Ethnosraphv: The Abstract Sketch as Ethnographic Device

In this chapter I reckon with the difficulty of evoking the feel of being in Brent, or the other places that I visited in Algonquin Provincial Park. In mapping the haunting traces of the past and their weighty impacts on contemporary recreation in relation to

Algonquin's cultural heritage several troubles arose. I felt that I was without a formal method that could help me communicate how discursive constructions affected and were affected by nostalgia and feelings of longing for a valorized past during immersive practices of recreation. In following this need to attend to both discourse and embodiment and in keeping with the anthropological field method of participant observation I was reminded of how my doodles fostered my memories and how they foregrounded artistic forms of recreation common in the Park while privileging the haptic, tactile senses. This contrasts with the more usually elevated optic sense, as found in the museums, galleries and historical representations of the Park. In this chapter I introduce the doodles as ethnographic devices, helpful in decoding the subjective experiences that I present in the written portions of the ethnography, while elucidating how I produce and later decode the pieces in relation to the places of their production.

When I was writing the proposal for my thesis research and as I suppose is common for researchers in the humanities and social sciences these days, I was struck by several questions regarding my written representation of people, places, events and things. This is without mentioning the questions and methodological concerns that I would later develop during my notation of the everyday aspects of fieldwork and "being somewhereI was proposing to work in the Brent campground in the north end of

Algonquin Provincial Park, also used as an interior access point and summer home for cottagers. What is less commonly known is that this is also a hunting area during the winter months. Some of my initial questions centered on why it seems to be such a

"public secret," to quote Taussig (1999), that the hunters are First Nations Peoples? Or that the people of the Pikwakanagan (Golden Lake) Reserve and the Algonquins of

Ontario have been involved in a land claim for twenty years that encompasses most of the north and east of the Park, as well as the rest of the Kitchissippi (Ottawa) Valley?

The "facts" surrounding the land claim and the hunting are written in some of the guidebooks and publications issued by Ontario Parks and their affiliates in the management of the area (Ontario Parks 1998). But why is it that so many people were surprised to learn about the land claim or the hunters when I spoke to them during my fieldwork? Why were some who already knew about the hunting so bitter about its presence in Brent? And why was I so surprised to learn about how long the land claim had remained "unresolved"? What would a "resolution" look like? Is it a "resolution" that we as Canadians who identify so differently in so many ways are actually looking for? Further, if these things are public knowledge why do so few people openly remember the Aboriginal presence in Brent, historically and currently? And why has so 38 little been made of the statements from the Ministry of Aboriginal Affairs that the

Algonquin's land claim will be dealt with in 2011 when I heard so often about the impending end of the leaseholders agreement in 2017 (OMAF 2011)?

Turning then towards the need to address certain problems in the ethnography I was troubled by some personal concerns. If the goal of ethnography is understood to be

"to provoke an aesthetic integration that will have a therapeutic effect" how might my work do so (Tyler 1985: 125)? Open-ended questions such as these allow for an opportunity to add to our understandings of people and places, rather than forcing the issue and implementing some sort of framework for adding up so-called data obtained during fieldwork to find the essential 'Truth" or meaning of a culture (Stewart 2008:

72). Instead, Kathleen Stewart offers the suggestion that rather than ethnography encompassing a culture that it attempts in some way to elucidate, ethnographic writing involves writing as a cultural practice embedded in particular contexts and concerns

(Stewart 2008). In this way I take seriously the assertion made by Massumi that "[t]he balance has to shift to affirmative methods: techniques which embrace their own inventiveness and are not afraid to own up to the fact that they add (if so meagrely) to reality" (Massumi 2002: 13 [italics original]). So while at times there is a tone that emerges in my work that sounds close to the familiar debunking criticism of

(de)constructionist social science at other points there is a shift towards a Active, romantic or surreal tone of voice more attuned to the rhythms and intensities of Brent and the Park. 39 In my early reading and research I encountered the difficulty that most, if not all of the historical representation of Brent seemed to be found elsewhere (Ontario Parks

2010, Whiteduck 2002, Algonquin Eco Watch 2009, Atkins, Mackey & Mackey 2001,

Lundell & Standfield 1993). Pictures, stories and archival records were all kept in places other than the place sometimes referred to as a "ghost town" (Lundell &

Standfield 1993). And so, from the onset of the project my methodology would be influenced by some familiar characters from the anthropological crisis of representation that took place during the eighties and nineties. In the need to attend to the ways that different places both help to define and create one another in the Park, the multi-cited, and multi-sited approach taken by Gupta and Ferguson, as well as George Marcus remain central in this project (Gupta & Ferguson 1997, Marcus 1995). I went to the

Algonquin Logging Museum, the Visitor Centre & Museum, other campgrounds, walking trails and historical sites, mainly along the Highway #60 corridor that runs through the Park's "Development Zone," and also to the Mattawa Museum, in order to trace the official history, the "Master" or meta-narrative regarding Brent's past and present and the direction of its future (Stewart 1995: 97). These "other" places, and the people who visit them rather than go to such a remote area as Brent, would help me trace the links and nostalgic connections that helped to stabilize the meta-narrative and territorialize the Park as an area where certain natures are prized and where other developments become coded as unnatural.

40 While I was writing the proposal all of this seemed so daunting. However, the actual fieldwork turned out to have its own troubles both logistical and methodological.

Brent was an eight hour drive from my house with the last hour or so being travelled on a gravel logging road. Hard on my little Honda civic in ways that echoed the expense of new struts, shocks and suspensions of other vehicles that had been down this road before; a road that literally takes its toll on both the machines and the passengers that experience the intensity of violent contact with the road through the prosthetic extension of the body through technology.

Fig. 3 - Brent Road Curves (2010)

41 The Highway #60 corridor, the most densely developed and used area of the

Park was still a four to five hour drive from my home in London and it entailed a similar form of battle more familiar to the millions of commuters on the #400 series highways in south-western Ontario. After initial trips to each of the two areas (Brent and the Highway #60 corridor), I had the familiar feeling that I was not aptly expressing the ways that these areas maintained a feeling of difference from places that are not found inside of conservation areas to be sure, but also from one another. Apparent differences between places did not always seem apparent in my descriptions of them.

Differences such as those found between the Visitor Centre and Museum (a rest stop and information booth style tourist attraction that contains a gallery, a cafeteria and a theatre) and the Logging Museum (where the theatre provides the foreground for an immersive walking tour of the timber industry's past in the Park and its role in the

Park's creation), or between the campgrounds at Brent (at the end of a logging road and in the midst of a "ghost town") and the ones at Coon or Rock Lake along the Highway

#60 corridor (more heavily visited but still nestled down a short 5km gravel lane).

Differences expressed not only by the people who were present during my visits, or in stories about the past of the place, but also expressed by the places themselves through the haunting traces (some more apparent than others) of human actions often encountered in ruins and developments alike.

More questions; what about the unique and particular experiences I had in these places, how could I represent these feelings? And how, in such a limited form of 42 traditional academic writing, could I add to peoples' experience of the places I visited rather than simply participate in the long and storied effort to capture, "conserve" and unveil these so-called "spaces of nature" where often there was an erasure of social interactions and relationships, historical and current, that were so apparent to me? How, if I could not express the feelings I had about these places in the writing of the proposal or field notes I made, could I reach towards a different method that might better provide an entrance into the feel of the place?

This struck me as key in that the clearly delineated boundaries of the Park describe a "space of exception" where governmental forces collude with and coerce the ecologies of the land to produce "Conservation" and a viable tourist attraction

(Agamben 1995, Minca 2006: 388). In some ways the conservation area is the testing ground and first area of implementation for programs of biopolitical intervention into the ecology, or "nature" of the nation (Agamben 1995: 71, Foucault 1978). Agamben points out the links that he sees between Foucault's interpretation of a Panoptic structure of society and its focus on the biological existence of the people it claims to represent and the invention of the "concentration camp" (Agamben 1995: 71). But it is pertinent here to remember that biopolitical interventions were characteristic of the transition towards modernity found in the rapidly spreading technologies of the late- nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, and which ran coeval to the proliferation of conservation areas across North America. Conservation areas themselves may be understood in this formulation as technologies that operationalize the panoptic illusion 43 of the areas' nature and which are aimed at maximizing efficiency in resource extraction and in providing a comprehensively designed tourist attraction. However, rather than revealing nature as it claims, this phantasm instead offers a facade of nature as it is composed through the reflective capacities of the national-cultural imaginary. This political connection, between the biological constitution of the national-nature of the

Park and the bodies of "Canadians" who visit immediately directed my attention toward the need to attend to both how the Park was constructed in discursive manoeuvres, but also to how embodied interactions with the place helped to confirm feelings and imaginings of nature inflected by a socio-political economics.

In the inauguration of the Park as an exception, as a place where interventions into nature were not only justified but expected, and also as a Panoptic structure designed to ensure the surveillance of nature and those who may threaten it, the Park takes on a phantasmic image that is largely illusory but nevertheless affective. The illusion is found in the representation of nature as a bastion for communion with the

"other than human" or the "non-social"/"pre-social" that the wilderness is imagined to be. This activates the Park as a form of perpetual frontier where nature is played off against the civilized "self' in order to reify identifications with those who first challenged its wildness by clearing farms, trapping animals and dropping trees.

Alternately these identifications may also be reified in the post-colonial visitor by legitimating the usurpation of earlier First Nations presence through the re- appropriation of practices thought of as authentically "Indigenous," practices such as 44 sleeping in a tent, or paddling a canoe; the going-native of the Canadian Naturalist

(Wakeham 2008: 5-6). In the same way, the hunting that the Algonquin People undertake during the winter months can be seen as threatening to conservation efforts legitimating further surveillance both of the area and the people, serving to reify divisions between people differently identified.

Nigel Thrift, regarding the need to pay attention to embodied and affective relationships with the "natural" notes McCrone who states that "'not properly conscious impulses, inklings, automatisms and reflexive action' can no longer be regarded as trivial" (Thrift 2000: 37). Why is it that people spend so much money, time and effort travelling to and from the Park, as remote as it can be, when there is so much "nature" to be found elsewhere in Canada? Does Algonquin Park feel different than other places and if it does, how, and to what effects? Worse, how could I transmit these differences to an audience through words alone when the brochures, museums and other texts about the Park have found it absolutely necessary to include images?

So, I went to Brent and asked my questions, the ones from the questionnaire I was required to provide to Park officials before I was permitted to do any fieldwork in the Park. The ones like "What brings you here?" that would elicit responses such as "F-

150," or "Wrong turn," threatening to explain away experience but with an ironic literality that references its own impossibility. The threat is contained in the idea of a whole trip being summarized into a few words, or more importantly, in a few words that

45 knowingly refuse to offer any kind of logical answer to a question that they find no logic in asking. For the people that I interviewed who answered this way the reasons for coining to the Park are too obvious to state and too many for them to want to begin actually taking my question seriously. They came to Brent for a good time, for some recreation, and that meant enjoying distractions and diversions as well.

Fig. 4-RockLake (2010)

Doodles...

This led me to reconsider something I have used in the past as an alternative to more common notes and to the photographs that I have also included and something likely not uncommon to others who have found themselves with a writing utensil and nothing to say but who still feel moved by the urge to leave a "mark"; to mark the time, to trace the passing of time, or in the Art World "to doodle". Elizabeth Grosz argues 46 that "Art proper... emerges when sensation can detach itself and gain autonomy from its creator and perceiver, when something of the chaos from which it is drawn can breathe and have a life of its own" (Grosz 2008: 7). Here, rather than positioning Art as a testament to ability or as a sign of authorial legitimacy the concept of Art suggested by

Grosz accepts the non-Western but also both the untrained artist's works and the undervalued "doodle".

Fig. 5-NoShelter (2009)

By including my doodles I hope to expand the textual genres that might be considered effective in communicating experiences garnered during the participatory

47 parts of participant observation sidestepping the usual language and moving towards a way of 'writing' that may be termed "asemic," meaning without semantic content.

Johannes Fabian describes the tendency in anthropological practice to reify a semantic divide between "the field" and the writing of the ethnography, blaming the inherent

"aporia" of "participant observation" (Fabian 2002: 33). These doodles seek to avoid the temporal deferral inherent in a split project where participation always comes before observation or reflection (Fabian 2002). Some of them were produced before I visited and demonstrate the impact of the phantasmic image of the Park on the design of my project (Fig. 5 - No Shelter, Fig. 6 - Teeth). Some others were produced in an absent- minded way while I consciously watched what went on around me in a visit to the museum or to a campground (Fig. 27 - Brave Tears, Fig. 15 - Big Moon). Lacking in distinct or accurate visual representations, these doodles carry little to no information with them. Rather, these pieces transmit affective intensities built less from the act of the artist then from the interpretation of the receiver and their interaction with the pieces.

And so in the wake of these interventions and keeping in mind the desire to track the affects summoned by being in Brent, or any of the other places I visited in the Park,

I began to take seriously the haunting effects of the past/passed and the spectres of desire, fear and threat embodied by conservation efforts and areas. Much research in the social sciences has focused on the panoptic structure of urban life and the effects of daily urban living within the organization of society conceived as a technoaesthetic phantasmagoria (Foucault 1978, Buck-Morss 1992). However, the rhythms of mobility, the paces of the day, natural rhythms are no less varied or apparent in Brent, on the trails, at a campsite, the museums and restaurants, on Highway #60, the Brent Road, or in the j-stroke of a canoe paddle out on the waters. The casual stroll of a self-guided tour along the roads and trails of Brent, stopping to read the signs explaining the history of the place and waving at other campers and cottagers knowingly, although they are strangers something is shared. A languid inattention that recoils from verbal responses accompanies the building intensity summoned by a twitch in the underbrush, or a barking dog, another "becoming cultural of nature" (Massumi 2002: 10). Resonant intensity of shock echoes forward as anticipation, an expectation of the next sensation, which then fades again into the uncanny "background" that nature emerges as (Thrift

2000: 45).

However, being specifically attuned to these shocks and intensities while visiting places such as Algonquin participates in what allows nature to be back grounded, to recede from social importance in the urban setting. In this way the contextualization of the conservation area as a place-of-nature compartmentalizes the experience of the natural as distinct from social life, thus these places of nature become places of "recreation" where nature is re-composed in the imaginary of the nation.

Through a semantic removal, it is this setting aside of nature from society which frames nature as "other" defining it as the resource from which the "social/self' is drawn

(Massumi 2002). Visiting the Park becomes an assertion that there is not the same kind of nature to be found elsewhere and that this kind of nature is non-social even while it seems so apparently supervised, framed, monitored and controlled. Better, tourism becomes an assertion of a certain relationship between nature and culture that excludes, adopts and (re)invents the natural as the back-ground for social action, obscuring the affective immanence of the "nature-culture continuum" (Massumi 2002: 11 [italics original]).

Fig. 6- Teeth (2010)

This type of relationship seems evident in the classic landscape and animal snapshots of tourists and nature photographers so often found in the galleries and museums, and in the pictures taken by visitors to the Park. The effort to uncover the essence of an image, to document or purchase an accurate experience of nature, in some cases displays a compulsive desire to own one's experience as a commodity (Handler

50 1986: 4). Phrases such as "I got one!" in relation to the photographing of a moose, eagle or bear echo the hunter, the ranger, and the souvenir collector; echoes of success and providence.

What has become obvious to many involved in the production of photography

(and realist writing and even landscape painting) is that necessarily "Realist" representation fails in its effort to capture and collapse the essence of a thing, while nevertheless transmitting an affective intensity (Tagg 1993). This means that representation that claims to be realist nevertheless displays its production through experience, and that while it may not contain the 'reality' of what it represents (it may be posed) the image asserts itself in the viewer as real, affecting them with the visual impact of the supposed represented, or the phantasm of the object involved. This assertion is often made while the image simultaneously abdicates involvement in the production of the "regime of signs" related to the ocular-centricity of modern Western subjectivities (Tagg 1993). The continued capitalisation on such classic images of nature produced in the Park then works through nostalgia in ways that seeks to hide it own traces of production. The pristine images of nature found in photographs serve to obscure the presence of the camera, the photographer and the culture that they represent in opposition to the untouched nature sought in the commodity form of the image, itself an object of culture.

51 Fig. 7—Moose (2010)

However, following the understanding of "modern enchantment" employed by

Bennett, Edensor & Holloway, tourists and other consumers do not remain unaware or ignorant to the effects of human impacts on the land (Bennett 2001, Holloway 2006,

Edensor & Holloway 2008, and Holloway 2010, Graeber 2011). They are not simply dupes. Many of the tourists are themselves trained and highly educated artists and academics and many tourists know the history of the area and the Aboriginal presence.

Why then do so many of them continue to attempt to get a hold of everything they can in their photo-albums? "I just love going out there and coming back with all of it," is the answer I was given by a photographer in the Visitor Centre and Museum when I asked why he kept returning to the Park so often over the past thirty years. And, when I stopped to take a photograph of a moose that had wandered into a parking lot, the only 52 question that the passengers in the next car down the lane thought to holler at my open window as we passed was "[d]id you get him?"

In his essay on the "Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction"

Walter Benjamin discusses the changes in perception that are related to the transition from one technological form of art to another, namely the transition from painting to film as the dominant and popular arts of their time (In Benjamin Illusions 1968).

Benjamin suggests that there is a distinction to be found in the ways that a painting and a film are produced and received. While painting involves the ritual production of an image whose principle use is of contemplation, film instead works through the distraction of the senses and a more tactile or haptic shock rather than a strictly visual form of sensual affection.

The still life of the painting or the snapshot provides a space that opens the image to a temporal removal, freezing the 'real' while bringing the receiver closer to the representation. Film instead presents a barrage of successive images that distract the contemplative abilities of the receiver who is awash in the instructive and coercive power transmitted through the insistence of the next frame. The film will not stand still, refusing to present itself in its fullness to the perceiver, rather offering the novelty of the next image as a rewarding replacement for the depth of contemplation. Film then immerses the viewer in the affects it transmits, while a painting is brought into the contemplative faculties, received as much as imbibed. Painting, through the act of contemplation, brings the representation closer to the receiver while simultaneously 53 distancing itself from the object it claims to represent, making the act of representation an obvious gesture. Film brings the viewer in surrounding the senses, but through its insistent motion and its insistence on overwhelming accuracy of representation, it maintains a distance that touches intimately. This is important as film and photography have supplanted the paintbrush and easel as the prominent tools of the artists and tourists who have increased the profile of the Park over the years, from Tom

Thompson's work to the film now presented in the Logging Museum as part of the tourist attraction.

This coincides with the work of Deleuze and Guattari who offer an interpretation of art that describes both production and reception in terms of close- distant relations and visual-haptic distinctions. The "myopic" production of a work of art follows the maxim that it is a "bad painter who backs away from the painting" while still working on it (Deleuze & Guattari 1987: 493). In producing the doodles I rarely take a break or even look up other than to change to another form of graphite (pencil, block, finger smudges). I don't back away and as such the doodles result from a conscious immersion in the feel of the graphite in my hand and against the page, but also a "nonconscious" immersion in the locality of their production (Massumi 2002).

The doodles are a result of how the page and pencils feel, but also of the places that they are created in and the impacts of those distinct places on me while I work to make an expressive piece by remaining distracted by and from my surroundings. This allows for

54 an evocation of nonconscious perception through the expressive presentation of force and intensity embodied by the traces of my gestures.

Fig. 8 — Domed Tent (2009)

Instead of consciously taking in my surroundings, my attention focuses rather on each line or smudge, and allowing each sedimentary layer of graphite to have the space it needs to express the gesture of its origin. Each line remains, in isolation, as a testament to my gestures and each and every gesture is inflected by the conditions under which my body worked during the doodle's production. This means that the repeated impacts of habituated movements such as paddling a canoe, splitting wood with an axe, or even wiping debris off of a rough wooden picnic table with the now equally rough palms of my hands play themselves out as remembered in the lines and smudges of the

55 doodles. The embodied habits of the artist intimately connect to the way that the art emerges, presenting gestures as the habituated response of the body to its surroundings.

The line that remains then becomes a testament to the same texture of presence, to the wind in the tall grass and the needles of the evergreens, the call of the loons and the lapping of the waves on the uneven line of sand and rocks at the shore, or the flapping of tents and tarps under heavy winds and heavier downpours.

Fig. 9 — Shaking Tent (2009)

What Tom Thompson's abstract expressionism, or the doodles that I offer, make clear is the attempted collapse of distinction that the artists (myself included) perceive as inherent in nature. Both forms of art seek to destabilize the divisions between the

"surgeon and cameraman (as opposed to the magician and painter)," between the object

56 ['objective reality'] and its attendant image or representation in imagination [or subjective experience], and between memory and the presentation of history. In some ways the representation of experience through the "obscenity of accuracy" offered by the camera homogenizes experience. In contrast, the doodles foreground and make obvious the "intersubjective" confrontation inherent in any ethno-graphic project (Buck-

Morss 1992: 32, Fabian 2002: 30).

These doodles are an expression of ethnographic materiality, as they present the intersections between my productive force and the impacts of both natural and cultural traces while moving away from the temporal deferral so common to the "ethnographic present" (taken from Fabian's "ethnographic present" which allows some writing to suggest a degree of timelessness amongst the ethnographer's "informants") (Fabian

2002: 33). However, this may in some ways work alongside what Thrift calls the varied production of "mystical experiences," alternatively what Holloway terms "modern enchantment," in modern cultures through embodied contact with particular rhythms and intensities, many of which seem to coalesce in the form of nature tourism or camping (Thrift 2000: 45, Holloway 2010). And here is where the "fieldwork" becomes particularly sticky. My implication in the production of such images, and in the effect of tourism on/to the Park, becomes more obvious through a simple realisation.

My own feelings of enchantment and of mystification (present in the text and the doodles), the combination of not-knowing, of threat, wonder and the intrigue of "being there" participate in the production of these expectations and codifications of nature and

57 conservation in those who encounter the ethnography. But herein lie more open-ended questions and opportunities to participate in and to observe these immersive practices of recreation that work to ascribe a particular character to nature (Massumi 2002: 20).

The capitalization on these places of nature as tourist attractions plays into the production of the phantasmagoria that the Park is sold as. This means that the commercial nature of the territory is imaginatively composed to "the effect of anaesthetizing the organism, not through numbing, but through flooding the senses"

(Buck-Morss 1992: 22). The overwhelming of the senses that is found in visits to the

Park, in all their temporal finitude, helps to transform the visits into a form of haunted recreation; recreation of the self in relation to nature, and recreation of the image of nature in relation to the past of the nation, and in it, the origin of the authentically

Canadian subject. My doodles are an instantiation of this overwhelming synaesthesia and my participation in the production of "art" in the Park plays into a colonial tradition in Canada where nature is taken to be a muse, a source of inspiration, mystical contemplation and a self-affirming challenge (always in need of capture and the target of a civilizing mission). This understanding of nature as something always already in need of use directs my attention in several ways.

I am concerned with how both naturalism and tourism operationalize nature as a tool of the national-cultural imaginary while it seeks to identify and thus reduce individual experiences into a form of social or political capital. Recomposing the

58 concept of nature as a tool for national and personal identifications redefines appreciation of "nature" (in its culturally codified opposition to "culture" or human agency) as a technology of self-identification that in some ways insists on a separation between spaces of nature and spaces of culture (Foucault 1982). Therefore, the sensual impacts of this "technoaesthetics" immediately bring about the need to attend to the biopolitical dimensions of tourist visits to the Park (Buck-Morss 1992: 22). The compartmentalization or territorialisation of the Park as a conservation area has an effect not only on discursive constructions of the area, but also on how immersive practices are understood and felt, and therefore on how nature is related to on a national and personal level. If the phantasmagoria is a means of social control, how does the

"tourist bubble" contradict the factory-like atmosphere of the timber industry found in the Park, and how were these atmospherics compartmentalized and made to feed into one another?

Nigel Thrift suggests that if the "mystical qualities of the world remain in place" through the transition to modernity, they are sought in an imagination of nature as the backdrop for social actions (Thrift 2004: 35). A more nuanced understanding suggests that this transition might instead be seen as the transition towards post-modernity in a twist on the point made by Bruce Braun (2002) that in Canada post-colonialism describes what comes after the initial impacts of colonization. Here we may see the colonization of daily life by the transition towards biopolitics as analogous to the

59 transition to a post-modern consciousness that maintains enchantment by displacing it either into nature, or into the past, and most effectively by combining the two.

Fig. 10- Looming Over a City (2009)

This returns me to the question of why I am interested in reconsidering the doodle. This style, or practice, of doodling or sketching, is a rendering visual of touch,

60 of the kinaesthetic ("a sixth sense based on the interactive movement and subsequent awareness of body parts"), of the prosthetic relationship between my body, my hand, the page and the pencil as an instrument attuned to the gestural: not so much a sketching as the drawing out of relationships with the pencil and the page, between touch and passage (Thrift 2000: 41-42).

Fig. 11 - Deep Hill (2010)

Thus, following Grosz and Negri, amongst others, the ability or desire to judge art based on "quality" recedes, and instead we become able to understand these pieces as the sediment of gesture, a tracing of the body in movement. This gestural sedimentation of graphite expresses a "geomorphology... anything but stable. It is a dynamic unity of continual folding, uplift, and subsidence" (Massumi 2002: 10). As the

61 eye drifts across the lines, taking them in, their continual shifting and dodging, and the spaces that help to define them, vision gives way to touch, and the lack of semantic content requests that it be filled in by the imagination of the viewer.

While assumptions of photographic accuracy assume a certain homogenization of perception, confronting the receiver through a penetrative shock of recognition, the doodles presuppose differing interpretations, which demand a response from the receiver more akin to the contemplation of a painting, but still retain the tactile character of their production in the strikes, smudges and smears of graphite left behind by my gestures. A similar effort to gesture towards the connectedness of Algonquin's ecology draws attention again to the uniqueness of Thompson's painting, which in many ways prefigured the term that best describes it by expressing its subject in abstraction [hence abstract expressionism]. Although seemingly frozen these pieces refuse stillness. The lack of visual acuity encountered in the doodles (and likewise in Thompson's Jack Pine for example) gives way to a constant re-interpretive process, where what is "seen" is often not there, but instead is found in the insistence of the one who perceives it. In these images "the tactile, the haptic dominates" (Grosz 2008: 88). They dance and flirt with representation, but through their texture and tactility they instantiate "a becoming cultural of nature"; in a transitory or potential state of becoming imaginable while transmitting the affective rhythms of their formation: place, time, and my own proprioceptive capacities (Massumi 2002: 10).

62 Doodline...

"Doodling," as a term in the Western tradition of art/artistic critique often used to devalue or reduce the worth of the products, signals the devaluation of certain bodily techniques most often associated with distraction and enjoyment, and a particular

"uncivilized" sensuality in the post-colonial Euro-American appreciation of, and constitution of, "high" cultures. Rather, it may be supposed that the doodle represents, paradoxically, through a non-representational form of artistic endeavour, the same

"nomadic" thought emphasized in the work of Grosz, as well as Deleuze & Guattari

(Grosz 2008, Deleuze & Guattari 1987).

Grosz relates distinctions set out and accepted by Deleuze in which modern

Western art is understood as participating in three broad trains of style, "either abstractionism or expressionism, or the 'middle' position of the figural" (Grosz 2008:

90). And while each of these styles claims some sort of hierarchical status pertaining to its relationship to beauty and timelessness, the debate itself serves to obscure, elide and avoid the implications of these discursive limits in the elitism of the modern art world.

I suggest, in accordance with Grosz' understanding of Australian Aboriginal art, that the type of art seen in these doodles;

seems to occupy all three positions simultaneously. They share an obsession with a mystical code (or many) and a fascination with the geometrical forms and with abstraction. They are also concerned with the direct expression of rhythm and force, movement and embodiment that characterizes expressionism... the figure, alone,

63 coupled, boxed in, deformed, subjected to invisible forces, is as explicitly the object of sensation in these various works; in addition, while figural, they must also be understood as landscapes... spatializations of lived space that nevertheless can also be mapped, coordinated, can function also geographically. (Grosz 2008: 90)

As instantiations of the embodied rhythms and intensity summoned through proprioceptive relationships with one's surroundings these doodles resonate affect with the times and places of their creation; they echo their emergence in the re-production of movement and sensation, and in their transmission of excess.

Fig. 12 - Fire at Water and the Great Birds (2009)

64 Proprioception describes the articulation of the body in relation to itself, and in the doodles my proprioceptive relationship with the pencil as prosthetic becomes apparent, as do the exteroceptive and interoceptive dimensions of my experience. My touch on the page demonstrates not only the interaction of my body with itself (muscles perfecting desired and skilled gestures), but also with its surroundings (a cough becoming a smudge), and with its "insides" (a shivering cold hand leaving jagged lines).

These pieces are a raven's flapping wings; my wonder at the size and majesty of the great blue heron and the bald eagle that soared past the shoreline of my campsite; the crests washing up on the shoreline of Cedar Lake; the warmth of the golden beams of sunlight piercing through the birch leaves; the cold wind from the north that comes in gusts; Amanita Muscaria mushroom caps and moose dung, trampled; the flashlight reflecting off of the eyes peering back from the darkness; the slamming of the car or outhouse door; the chatter of a chipmunk or a group of red squirrels; the dew on the blades of grass in between toes; the smell of birch wood campfire smoke and the sting as wafts of it blow into eyes; the creaking as giant red and white pines negotiate the breezes; the call of twenty or thirty loons, syncopated, harmonized, counterpointed and counter-punctuated. "Art is the process of making sensations live, of giving an autonomous life to expressive qualities and material forms and through them affecting and being affected by life in its other modalities" (Grosz 2008:103).

Paying attention to the production of the work of art in this case may open up space to investigate the immersion in nature that characterizes so many relationships to 65 Algonquin Park. Following Benjamin's "Note on graphology" the doodles may become less a work of art than an account or recording of sensual experience made into textual sediment through gestural relationships and particularities (Benjamin 1968). What the

"Note" suggests is that the mode or form that an author chooses to use in the production of a text, more than simply applying to the choice of style, words or phrasing, applies directly to the embodied form and the gestural sedimentation of the text. In other words, how the text is written impacts upon the incidental meanings that the text accrues. And the doodles are, for me, an alternative to textual notation in that they allow for a type of recording process to occur while foregrounding the ambiguity, distraction and confusion of my experience of the Park.

Here it becomes apparent how the sedimentary gestures of the graphite left on the pages become analogous to how the ethnographic process of concretizing the conditions it describes, participates in and instantiates the culture that it claims to explicate. In some ways, as a Canadian investigating Canada and writing about it, the product of my research becomes "Canadiana," a colloquialism used to refer to art produced in, for and by Canadians. This allows my ethnography to resonate with self- descriptions of Canadians who emphasize essentialist characterizations of authentic belonging, but not without risks. Following Jonathan Spencer's understanding, anthropologists are not exempt from "writing within" nationalism and nationalist discourse and often ethnography is picked up by those who make arguments about their imagination of the essential character of the nations and cultures they concern

66 themselves with (Spencer 1990). My work (in some ways unwittingly) participates in a long tradition of exploring, writing and art in the Park that has helped in some ways to substantiate the claims made by the state about the need to conserve or protect this place. Thus, the presumed essence of Canadian settlers is extrapolated and extracted from the wilderness by visitors during the haunted immersive practices of a portage down the Petawawa, or a stroll down the old path of the railway through the bush around Brent.

Fig. 13-A Walk in the Park or a J-Stroke (2010)

67 The memorials of the past found in the Park (in the museums and on the plaques) and in texts that construct an authentic history surrounding the conservation area work to conjure images that link authentic belonging to reductive characterizations and identifications, creating a phantasmic "real" Canadian that exists only in the imagination. Therefore immersive practices of recreation that summon memories of the

Park's History appropriate gestures and actions of the past in an affirmation of "being there" that rests on appropriating the authenticity of the past in an act of contemporary self-identification. The phantasm of the authentic Canadian is first sought through extreme efforts and then refused in a self-affirmation that rests upon a denial of the past's return and a replacement of the past with the legitimacy of an experience of the present.

The official form of the typed manuscript differs from handwritten notes (that the doodles might be considered an extension of) in that the different gestures involved in their production affect the choices the author makes, as well as affecting the receiver in myriad ways. The percussion of the keys against my fingertips creates a different relationship between my body and my words than the feel of the edge on paper in the midst of the unfolding field site. When typing I sit in my office and I choose different words and phrases, sanitizing my grammar. My textual handwritten notes, full of information, inevitably lack in complexity compared to the minute attention to detail that the doodles betray. And while one person's handwriting might summon a feeling of grace and mastery that leads the reader through a garden of enchantment, another 68 might leave the reader perplexed, guessing what the words could mean in the order they appear as much as which words the scribbles could be trying to stand for (my own notes are often illegible). This ethnographic text then in the final typed form stands to benefit from the augmentation available through the direct touch of the author, literally.

Although this may confirm a romantic image of authorial privilege, if there is a difference to be found between and amongst field sites and the various assemblages that they may allow for/insist on, then the materializing force of "being there" (or "being here"?) takes on a new intensity. Here the involvement of the researcher in the presentation of ethnographic material is in some ways inseparable. Explicitly communicating the implication of the researcher in the collection and presentation of ethnographic materials helps to remove the romance while demonstrating biases the researcher brings to their interpretations and providing more space for alternative readings of cultural "texts," the literal sediment of culture.

By including these pieces that I alternately refer to as Rorschach, oracles and drums, I hope to offer alternate possibilities of interpreting sensual data, the harmonic and dissonant tones of everyday life, and the tempo, pace, and rhythm of life-making in process. As Rorschach these doodles express what I have trouble seeing or feeling consciously, they allow a sense of awareness related to the feeling of being involved in their creation, and they allow me an opportunity to recognise what has gone past through reinterpretations, vistas of subjective experience. As oracles they emphasize my feelings of love, hope, fear and dread, both for and of my subject matter and the 69 feeling of doing fieldwork, as well as making me aware of these feelings, they alter and re-align my trajectories. As drums they are sounding boards for the propagation of rhythm, they conjure rhythmic impulses, tempos, "polyrhythmia, eurythmia and arrhythmia," immersive intensity (Lefebvre 2004: 16). In each way, they invoke the

"nonconscious," those sensations both too small to register to my consciousness while in the field, or while going over written notes, but also too large to be summarized, captured entirely, and explained away (Massumi 2002: 16). While the Rorschach and the oracle often participate in the act of criticism, "uncovering something it claims was hidden or as debunking something it desires to subtract from the world," the drums play on the mystical, the unknowable, and the "shift to affirmative methods... it is a question of dosage... Foster or debunk. It's a strategic question" (Massumi 2002:12).

Rather than offering a facade of completion or the illusion of holism these things, alongside writing that pays careful "inattention" by taking "joy in... digressions," offers a participatory "polyphony" of bodies, and an example of "affirmative augmentation" (Massumi 2002: 18, Tyler 1986: 127, Kenneth Little [personal communication] 2009). The doodles seek to decompose the image of the artist and in this case the author as well, as an "isolable identity," a body that somehow stands apart from society and experience as might a genius or demigod (Buck-Morss 1992). Instead, these doodles redeem immersive experience through a valorization of the nonconscious and of distraction. Rather than emerging from an imagination that finds itself in an

"artificially isolated nervous system" the doodles betray the intensive character of 70 interactions with nature that take place during recreational activities in the Park (Buck-

Morss 1992: 13). So in attempting to perform an evocative ethnography I feel it is helpful to invoke the multi-sensory and the synaesthesia of emerging sensation through these sedimentary gestures, and to include the pieces as additive references to my embodied experience as Ethnographer; the one who graphs the ethnos [culture].

Fig. 14 - Layback (2010)

Tremblingly though, this seems to confirm the old elitism, as it is after all, my body, the so-called privileged expert and authority whose even most off-hand and worthless products become prized. And worse again, as these things become transformed from rubbish into valuable ethnographic devices they enter into the cliche cycle of art nouveau and become infinitely capitalist in my employment of them (I do 71 write at least partially for my own well being and I have chosen to display these pieces as "Art proper"). Sometimes I comfort myself by wondering if the same graphite that will no longer go to waste might have come from the graphite mine in the West of the

Park, near Tim Lake, or if the trees downed along the Brent Road might go into some of the paper, although they more likely end up as wood chips in the forest and food for the mushrooms (Algonquin Eco Watch 2009).

However, this allows for the re-entry of a figure I mentioned earlier, that is the

Tourist, or more generally the Consumer, as non-dupes. People make what they want, or not, from these kinds of artistic efforts and the innumerable acts known as

"consumption" are never simply focused on the fulfilment of needs (Graeber 2011).

Through the adoption of similar methods it may become possible to expand beyond the doodles of the ethnographer to include other visual and visceral "data" into the final polyphonic ethnography and other types of voices. Kathleen Stewart relates how in some moments "an assemblage of discontinuous yet mapped elements throws itself together into something" and in the ensuing resonance and shock life is made (Stewart

2008: 73).

I twisted the block of graphite, and the layers began to look like the full moon. I glanced up as I reached for a pencil, and while the twenty or thirty loons called in the distance I let each new sound become a change in the direction of my hand, back and forth, gradually layering the graphite on the page. When the page was full, the loons stretched out around the full moon into the clouds that hid the hills and their blanket of

72 white pines and cedars despite the brightness of the evening, and the raven's wings flapped off into the darkening sky.

Fig. IS-Big Moon (2010)

When I returned home from Brent for the last time, after drawing the moon's light and the loons, I came into a very quiet and 'empty' space. In a habit repeated since my childhood after coming home from school I flicked on the TV. I found an old favourite of mine on the movie channel. They were playing 'Enter the Dragon.' My

73 excitement swelled into notes however when I considered the admonishment Bruce Lee delivers to a young student;

Don't think! Feel! It is like a finger pointing at the moon;

Concentrate on the finger and you will miss all that heavenly beauty. (1973)

74 Chapter 3: The Aleonauin Visitor Centre and Museum:

uAnd to the rieht.."

This chapter follows a walk through the Algonquin Visitor Centre & Museum, an attraction that combines a restaurant with a theatre, small gallery and the museum, the most prominent historical display to be found in the Park, besides the Algonquin

Logging Museum, just a few kilometres down Highway #60 towards Whitney and the

Park's east gate. The Museum is made up of a collection of artefacts, images, tableaux and texts that explain the History of the area, the official narrative of Algonquin Park's origin story. During the walk what becomes apparent is the characteristic avoidance of certain retellings of the past in support of a singular account that valorizes colonization and makes the traces of the Algonquin People, the area's first inhabitants, invisible as anonymous "human impacts" or appear as threatening, imagined as a part of what the

"protected area" must be protected from. This plays an important role in the representation of Brent as an interior access point, thick with History, and also intimately connects with the official representation of the Park as a bastion of

"wildness/wildemess" and pristine nature. Contrasting with the representation of

History and memory I found in Brent, the rhythm of the Visitor Center & Museum comes out as in some ways appropriating the experience of nature touched by History and in others offering the comfortable image of an untamed nature held at bay.

75 The pattern of this piece in part follows the lead offered by Donna Haraway, who suggests that a "dead literal" manner of examining historical representations may open up ways to critique the cultural constructions that lead to the official retellings of

History found in these institutions (Haraway 1989: 58). This attention to the "dead literal" summons a connection to the weighty ghosts that haunt the shadows of historical representation, elided through the violent transition towards modernity that characterised early Canadian nationhood and colonization. Attention to a "dead literal" reading of representations brings forth the absence that characterizes reductive and homogenizing versions of History, making categories that appear to be sound (such as logger or farmer) crumble under scrutiny and allowing a form of biographic remembrance to emerge that challenges much of the Park's "master narrative" (Stewart

1996: 93-96). Stewart describes how this "un-forgetting," (Stewart following

Heidegger 1996: 71) or

history with a difference... arises out of moments of loss and threat without benefit of hindsight, and it draws close to its objects, fragmenting master narratives into images, 'meanings' into haunting signs. Where a master narrative cuts through a swath of extraneous detail and gathers the 'objects' at hand to the broad outlines of History as a sequence of events, local practices of re-membering follow the dense fabulations of luminous fragments and ruins that hit the place and leave it reeling. (Stewart 1996: 96) This also foregrounds the effects of the phantasmagoric architecture of the Visitor

Center & Museum by avoiding to some degree the overwhelming effects of the place by maintaining a momentary attention to detail and to the voices that emerge through the images and displays (Buck-Morss 1992). This does not mean abandoning a concern with materialist theories of embodiment or vitality but instead taking the paradigm of

76 the "imaginary" beyond the constraints of idealism and grounding it in moments of encounter between bodies and the architecture of the Park, constructed, managed and otherwise de-signed. Summoning the density of the sedimentary gestures present in the doodles (presented in Chapter 2) this literality reads the "haunting signs" found in the

Visitor Centre & Museum as the script of a master narrative but also as the texture of

signs to be plumbed for significance. They stand not as a specifiable meaning but as a landmark or sign in which life trembling in a scene appears petrified, spellbound (Nagele 1988). Through them, a setting speaks to people, haunts the imagination, whispers an audible lamentation, trembles in expectation. (Stewart 1996: 93)

A Guided Tour...

Pulling off the road from Highway #60 and onto the lane leading up through dense bush towards the sprawling building that holds the Visitor Centre and Museum two signs stand out immediately amongst the leaves and brush. The first directs visitors towards the laneway up the hill and to the main building, and beside it marking another lane, the second reads "Employees Only." Closer to the Visitor Centre a clearing lays bare a parking lot as vast as the ones that dot the big box stores along the highways, usually with fewer than twenty or thirty cars, and several Ontario Parks trucks parked in the spots with the most shade during the afternoon.

To the right, peeking through the forest stands the main building, its long covered awning stretching out to offer inviting shade or cover from rain, or sometimes snow. The beams and posts, reminiscent of the timber from log cabins stand in symmetry, an image of carefully manicured order that helps to bring the surroundings

77 into focus. First asphalt, then paving stones, then concrete slabs sloping upward into the mouth of the structure. Along each side lawn, torn from shoe and sandal treads on a boulder hidden by soil, lichens in their fullest bloom still a deceptively dancing blue- green that adheres both physically and visually to the grey-green granite; a congruence of almost pastel tones. And all along the edge of the edge, ornamental barriers in the form of native plants and other organisms, mushrooms, insects, buzzing from bloom to decay, feign then attack. Coming up the hill to the parking lot one moves away from the seeming contradiction offered by compartmentalization in the vehicle, bringing the nature of the Park closer while it holds it always at a distance too far to touch. The automobile offers a seamless streaming of colour that shocks and dulls, thrilling in its fleeting disappearance.

Cresting the height of the laneway the view brings the experience of nature so close, yet it maintains such a distance while it whizzes past the window. Culminating in a feeling of usurpation and a sense of relief from struggling to grasp it all in its immanent chaotic seething, a subversive and dangerous wild is summoned from memory. The first view of the square walls offers a "civilized" refuge, a site of conquest over chaos and the buzz and sting of the black flies and mosquitoes are the final refrain of nature before the door swings open to air conditioned hustle bustle, the smell of French fries, and soap. No. Not soap, hand sanitizer; perfume and alcohol.

78 Now it isn't so much an outside nature that threatens, but an internal one. The supposed bestial weakness of humanity and the threat of disease, illness and contamination swell into prominence as memories of the latest swine or bird influenza surge forth, bringing to mind the need to maintain a certain social distance that can get lost while alone in the woods. The visit to the Park offers a way of escaping all of the dangers of modernity, and the increased threat of contact and contagion represented by the increasing pace of urban life. The imagined purity of a nature barely touched is framed, reproduced and sold en mass in the Visitor Center and Museum; a nature that is made to counter-point the image of the urban.

Fig. 16- Booth's Rock View (2010)

79 Insomuch, the brisk pace here seems to disorient the visitors, in some ways recharging the drive to "get back out there," echoed in the refrain heard from the doorways as people go to their campsites for a snack or head to the next attraction for more recreation. Stepping out the door a grey haired woman in running shoes remarks to her friend, "[o]h, I just love Booth's Rock trail. The view is amazing, and there's no one there. It's so beautiful all alone."

Stepping into the brisk pace of a wide foyer a man with tanned, dry skin, white stubble, and keen eyes, dressed in greens, olive, tan, beige, not black or white, and a fisherman's bucket hat, smiles. Was it in return or did he initiate the contact? Here strangers are somehow familiar, seen as other camper or visitors. People in the Visitor

Centre seek to escape what they claim to be visiting, looking for nature in a building foil of strangers, private retreats to public places. Or they may be looking for directions to get away from each other and civilization itself. People asking people how to get away from each other to a place where no one else goes, where they might find some solitude.

There is bright light here. Moving past the smile and to the right, into the washroom, flush toilets and running water pulse, and this time it does smell like soap.

Here the artificial light is even more intense, pulsing forth from fluorescent tubes reaching into comers to find crumbs and lint, sometimes a torn bit of toilet paper. A symphony of swirling and slamming sounds, bright lights and pungent smells brings to memory the quiet and contemplative atmosphere of the campground outhouses.

80 Running water is nice, but solitude and privacy have a more important place in many of the visitor's plans for their trips.

Back into the lobby and straight ahead is the gallery, orange and red peek through from the frames, but this is an awkward path across the threshold of the busiest door. A further shift right, always right, and intrigue piques as a glance of the dioramas down the ramp disappears behind a crowd and into shadow. More to the right, the entrance to the theatre, and below that, in the centre of the lobby, and how did they not seem more evident at first, signs with lists on them.

Wildlife sightings;

11:30, Coon Lake Campgrounds, 2 Chipmunks.

8AM, ROCk Lake ROAD, Bear (Black?)?...

More to the right again, a hallway, and at its end a glass wall, and a view of forests, muskeg, hills covered in greens and browns, and streams passing through, birds resting on drafts in the sky far off in the distance. Always right, the bookstore and souvenir shop, customers, visitors, campers, refugees from the wilderness, collectors, step carefully through aisles, glancing at pictures, titles, sometimes reaching out to touch a piece of leather keychain, or wood sign, or to flip a book. People behind the counter wear uniforms; are they the same uniforms as the ministry's rangers? Not quite,

81 not brown enough, too tan and beige, no badges, just patches and stitching instead; more inviting.

Closer now to the glass wall and the view of nature from God's eye (or is it simply bird's eye?), the smell of food again. Where is it coming from? Moving down the hall, the view growing more and more demanding of full attention, the cafeteria on the right, foil of chairs and tables of light coloured wood, people sitting and eating, checking cellular telephones and computers for email. The sounds that make up the background now start to take on another tone. The jingling of coins, transmogrified loon calls from the back of the one dollar coin, the loonie, sing along with Queen

Elizabeth II, and the nickels, dimes, quarters, pennies, and the toonies too, sound out chewing beavers knocking down another tree, while a clipper-ship cuts through waves, a bull-caribou calls rushing a bear under the clamour of maple leaves, and here and there Lincoln claims that even in Canada, we too trust in God. Feet throb now, sore from moving about. A sign above announces victory over the challenge of distance, remote-ness, and the idea of being no-where; Free Wireless Internet... and on the stand across the room, bags of chips and a Pepsi co. Sign.

Stuffed Animals

Back to the ramp now and moving downward. Embedded in the walls, diorama of scenes from a perfected nature imagined to exist outside of the museum. The light is dimmer here than in the rest of the lobby, a feeling of intimacy and at the top of the

82 ramp a display announcing the geological history of the Park catches a glance; three signs tell the tale in three parts. The highest point of elevation according to the Zoning

Map that accompanies the Algonquin Provincial Park Management Plan issued by

Ontario Parks is in the central area of the Park's territory and from there the orientation of how things fall into place derives, fanning out as these matters find themselves paced in relation to the rhythmic pitching of "difference through repetition" (Lefebvre 2005:

71, Ontario Parks 1998). A stream: the water folds in some debris, singing hills and skies as much as improvising banks and sediment. To listen to these songs requires a

"listening out" rather than the meaning oriented listening in to a conversation more familiar to ears attuned to modern information transmission (Lefebvre 2005: 87).

Fig. 17 - Eagle's Feast Display, Algonquin Visitor Center & Museum (2010)

83 The darkness calls out beckoning all of those who look in its direction to see what's back there. And so people move onwards down the ramp into the shadows. A window in the wall opens onto a scene; an eagle eviscerates a deer, clutching it, while ravens fight for a morsel and another eagle painted in the background seems at attention, ready to spring forth from the walls behind. A fox with a mouth full of something and a marten slinking along a branch in the background, a scene of reproduction and harmony amongst flowers, insects, rodents, mushrooms, all stuffed by a taxidermist, prepared and posed by curators, entomologists, biologists and botanists, with loving care and put into motion as still life. Others depict scenes from the side of a swamp, turtles, a salamander and a newt, beaver, frogs, loons, ducks and the odd large insect seemingly frozen yet full of motion, shaking with intensity behind a window.

The messages begin to come together as the tangibility of these animals remains available only to the eye of the beholder, forever escaping the other senses, and yet touching them as the hair on the back of the neck brings tactility to memory. Bodies swarm towards windows that open onto perfect visions and drift away again pulled towards another window as the illusion contained by the first seems to break down under scrutiny. All along the rails to the left there are more stuffed corpses; a bear, no, three bears; moose and deer; a pack of wolves, teeth smeared with blood. One of the accompanying texts that sits beside a display of a mother moose and her calf states

"Heads you live, tails you die," emphasizing that it is chance, and not the actions of the state or other responsible bodies, that leads to any violent death in the Park. This also

84 semantically reconnects the wilderness with unpredictability and danger, confirming the need for the authorities while summoning the passionate desire to explore a chaotic nature brought to order in the museums by the scientific clarity of the Park's naturalists.

Fig. 18- "Heads you live, tails you die..." Display, Visitor Center & Museum (2010)

Memory: I woke and stoked the fire, put on the kettle and waited for it to boil as

I emptied the contents of a pouch of oatmeal into a bowl on the picnic table. The scent of maple sugar and campfire smoke punctuated the breeze blowing from the west. I was reading A Thousand Plateaus, standing a few feet from the table, when I was suddenly tuned in to the chipmunk on the other side of the bench, making a move for my breakfast. I was distracted from the book by the rhythm of his claws nicking the wooden bench. And, startled again, a small bear twenty feet away, contemplating a 85 move on the oatmeal or on the chipmunk while it was distracted. For a breath we trained our eyes on one another's, and I saw him turn to run from me. I slammed a nearby hatchet on the table and in a flash the bear became part of the underbrush, invisible. Healthy black fur echoed in the sparkling water to my left.

I told Jake. Jake runs the store in Brent and looks out for the campers. He told me to watch out for Momma. His friend Rob who works in the store with him asked about the bear's size; hip high when on all fours, maybe two and a half feet at the haunches.

Fig. 19- Teddy Bear Display, Visitor Center & Museum (2010) 86 "Don't worry about Momma. He's on his own."

There's a small pile of stones by the tent, and by the fire now.

The Friends of Algonquin Park issued a series of handbooks pertaining to the wildlife and natural features of the area. In the Mammals of Algonquin Provincial Park the entry for the American Black Bear describes how,

On extremely rare occasions Black Bears attack humans with the intent to kill and eat their prey. About 37 people in North America have died this way (many fewer than the number killed by dogs, lightning, or bee stings) in the past 100 years. To many people's surprise, these rare individual bears that prey on humans are almost never mothers defending their cubs or habituated 'campsite' bears that are already used to getting food from humans. Rather, they are almost always large males with little or no previous contact with people. In Algonquin Park there have been three predatory attacks, all by large males. In May 1978, one predatory bear killed and partly ate three teenage boys; another killed and partly ate an adult couple in October 1991; and a third in July 1997 dragged a 12 year old boy from his tent - but was then beaten off with a paddle by the boy's camp counsellor. Note that predatory black bears do not make huffing or 'popping' sounds, beat the earth with their forepaws, or bluff-charge as campsite bears sometimes do. Instead, they stalk, or press closer and closer to their candidate prey, apparently assessing whether it is safe to attack. Confronting, and being aggressive towards, a campsite bear is important but it is even more essential with a predatory bear. If ever faced with such an animal, leave the area if there is a practical way to do so (e.g., by canoe), but never turn and run. Do everything in your power to make the bear think twice about attacking you. Be aggressive, yell, throw rocks, hit the bear with sticks and, if you have it, use bear spray (pepper spray with a strength, and a propellant, specifically formulated to deter bears when it is sprayed in their eyes). Finally, in the vanishing remote circumstance that a predatory bear does make contact with you, do not play dead. Fighting back with everything you have is the only chance of persuading a predatory Black Bear to desist from its attack. (Mammals of Algonquin Park 2002: 28-29) "Mom!" Oriented again towards the right, a young boy points towards a display that outlines the impact of brain lice on moose in the Park, while he shouts to gain someone else's attention. Turning towards the display, a brain in a box, small, plastic?

87 Is it a model? Is describes the effect of brain worms on moose. Another section describes how after contracting a large contingent of ticks in their coats, moose may scratch their sides and rump against trees so vigorously that they tear out the insulating hair that warms them through the winter months, leaving them vulnerable to hypothermia. The description states that the ticks can swell to ten thousand times their original weight, and that as many as one-hundred thousand ticks might latch on to the same moose.

There is, below this tale of suffering and plenty, a flip top lid over the answer to a burning question. The display asks the visitor, after stating that there is no practical way to intervene, if they would choose to do something about the ticks and worms that attack the moose here in Algonquin Park. A telling statistic perhaps, but a statistic nonetheless; while six thousand and fifty people voted 'not to interfere,' those who voted to destroy the ticks and brain-worms numbered eight thousand five hundred.

Over fourteen thousand votes have been registered at this station since January 1st and suddenly looking down it seems as if the industrial carpet has been worn a little thin by all of the foot traffic. Glancing around again, the well worn carpet spells out the paths of past visitors taken most frequently.

Besides how the visitors to the Park have answered the question, the act of requesting an answer has several effects. This display has a potency that allows an empathic communion with the suffering of the moose. The leftover exchange from the

88 bite of a mosquito reminds the body of what it feels like to itch, and in a moment my whole body is enveloped in irritation, exhaustion. Diurnal habits stutter. The unimaginable, and yet the uncanny familiarity, rubbing oneself raw for relief, summons rhythmic resistance to suffering, and a desire to overwhelm pain in thought, that is embodied in the decision to interrupt the life cycle of the tick on behalf of the moose.

Here the question of whether or not to interfere with the ticks is framed in a way that suggests "interference" as a failure of rational understanding and action. The desire to help, motivated and mobilized "incorrectly," puts eurythmia at risk, but it also presents the decision to not interrupt this parasitic entanglement of tick-moose-blood-larvae as enlightened stewardship (Deleuze & Guattari 1987: 505). The difference in how the visitors and authorities perceive the issue is telling in how it represents the authorities as rational, able to remove their empathic desire to "help" the moose, and represents the visitors as irrational, and in need of "guidance" that only the proper authorities can provide. All of this comes together to position the authorities as not only in the know, but also in control, as the author's of the experience of nature as much as its continuity, summoning the feeling that this place is threatened by an internally chaotic nature in need of rational management.

Stepping away from the display a voice whispers "I knew it'd be wrong to get rid of the ticks, but I don't want to let the moose just rot." Here the authorities are confirmed in their control through the modulation of personal feelings of empathy for the animal presented as irrational, semantically de-valuing the emotional experience of 89 the Park as it pertains to conservation efforts, positioning the authorities as always already legitimate stewards regardless of the particular or unique outcomes of various interventions not mentioned. Simultaneously, the authorities are positioned as allowing the "natural" course of events to take place, eliding the massive impacts of past stewardship and management projects in the Park.

Imaee Captured

Fig. 20 - Cedar Lake Sunset (2010)

90 All along Highway #60 you can see cars stopped, and the passengers disembarking to capture images of moose foraging in the swampy ditches. Some cars just speed past. Snapping shots from the edge of the road the angles that the pictures are taken from often obscures the moose against the green-brown mossy mud and young shoots of the muskeg. The camera tilts downward and again the bird's eye view takes over, owning everything it surveys.

In a conversation with a photographer who sells his work in the gallery I was told "[t]hose shots with the camera pointing down at the moose from the side of the highway are so amateur. I don't even bother stopping anymore because they're not really nature shots when you take them that way." I was forced to wonder, what was so natural about the digital camera he kept making reference to as his "weapon," regardless under what circumstances, remote or otherwise, the trigger might be pulled? What did he see as so natural about the Photoshop touch-ups he had done on several of the images he was selling? It would seem that for him it was the context under which the photo was taken that qualified it as authentic, or as art and that transformed it into a commodity, a vision of nature worth owning.

In an echo of the way early explorers are represented as having suffered through murderous winters and hateful mosquitoes, this photographer's claims to having braved the bush in January served to create an aura of authenticity around the prints that transported them into a realm beyond the average tourist snap-shot, legitimating the price tags by mythologizing, rather than erasing, the traces of the photograph's 91 (reproduction through emphasis on narratives of embodied efforts rather than making obvious the technological means through which they are created. Here, recreation is haunted by technology in ways that reproduce the image of the Park as pristine or untouched nature, while interplaying with the immersive practices associated with hunting for the next great shot, ensuring a continued human presence, and further contributing to the phantasmagoric effects of tourism in the Park.

The excitement of the moment and the later nostalgia of the photo enhance the desire to return to nature through a feeling of mastery over the place. The photos then serve to position the camera as the technology of remembrance, par excellence, framing shots for and from memory as they frame the "reality" of the Park's nature through archival citation of iconic images such as those of the Group of Seven, Tom Thompson and others. I watched some "photographers" carefully tilting their lenses away from the crowds and cars, and even the roadways that sometimes snuck into the background of the pictures, doing all that they could to remove the traces of civilization from the image of the Park for their memory archive. Expecting to see a crowd of people in their forties and fifties or older, or perhaps some parents with small children, I was surprised when I whizzed past four young men in their twenties wearing concert t-shirts walking back towards their car, hidden under a huge canoe, after a photo-shoot with a bull moose, two of them high fiving with the hands that weren't carrying cameras. These photographs often come to stand for authentic encounters with the nature of Algonquin Park, reifying the image of the moose as the iconic totem of the highway. This also construes the 92 memory of experiencing the nature of the Park with the "imaginary" nature of the nation (Ivy 1998: 3, Cooke 2009). As an icon of Canadian nature the image of the moose collected on the side of the road serves to authenticate the experience of the Park as definitively Canadian, reaffirming the identities of those who take these images while reaffirming the "nature" of the area. A sign passes by the window, the yellow distracting the eye, shifting away from the green of the leaves to the black silhouette of a charging moose. A common sight in some parts of Canada and the northern United

States is the moose, driven from the underbrush out into the clearings of the highway by the incessant attacks of the mosquito and the black-fly that hide under leaves waiting to be disturbed by the grazing of the large animals.

Another turn and now a fish tank bubbles not far off. The walls down here are rounded and curves shape the direction the designers (the Friends of Algonquin Park and Ontario Parks) intended for visitors to travel. There doesn't immediately seem to be any order to the displays of spawning fish, dioramas, and placards to explain it all.

The consistency of the sound brings back the memory of the stream, trickling past the edge of a trail. This is underneath Lake Opeongo. Noise, and yet, it seems to compose itself into a tune that was already part of the background. There are birdsongs coming from the speakers in the ceiling, and these refrains come together to conjure a feeling of consistency with the outside. The light streams in through glass ceilings in places where the displays require an aura of clarity to do their work. Spotlights take over when clouds pose a threat. 93 "The Park and Us"

Around the bend, and this time a turn towards the left and ascension as the ramp gives way to a view of five images. The four photographs are as clear as can be expected for the age of the images they were reproduced from and focused on four figures, and the fifth, on the far right, is a sketch. First, she catches my imagination.

But I can't stop seeing him, on the right.

Fig. 21 - "The Park and Us" Display [anonymous woman], Visitor Center & Museum (2010)

She is all in white, wearing glasses, looking down at a line of well-fed fish between her hands. She knows well how to hold the line taut, her hands are familiar

94 with the tension and the weight of the catch. But she has no name. I could go to the archives in the basement if I could get access. I could try to find her name. If there was someone close I could ask them who she is. I could look in the bookstore for the same picture again in a book, probably about the establishment of Camp Tanamakoon, or

Northway, or Arowhon Lodge maybe. But that particularity would "ruin" the image of her as an icon the way that she is employed here, simultaneously elevated to the status of exemplar (skilled, confident and independent), and still reduced to a nameless image that serves to confirm the identity of innumerable women as sharing characteristics then imagined/identified as Canadian in source. Her fingers, comfortable holding the fish, provide the image of a capable, and knowledgeable person, familiar with the outdoors, and at ease in a "natural" setting. And her anonymity allows her confidence to be appropriated in the identification of women who demonstrate similar qualities of independence imagined as Canadian and reconfirmed through the visit of women that recreate an analogous presence.

To her right there's a face I've seen before. He is a ranger with a rifle. His name is Mark Robinson and the picture was taken in Brent in 1928. In the book

Algonquin: The Park and Its People, author Liz Lundell describes some things about him that stick to memory (Lundell & Standfield 1993). Robinson came to work as a ranger around the age of forty after his doctor advised that he gain employment that would keep him active and outdoors (Lundell & Standfield 1993: 53). In March of

1909, an infamous character attempted to cross the Park with a rifle, undetected by the

95 rangers. Archie Belaney, [to some Archie "Baloney" as the Museum in Mattawa would have it] who later came to be known as Grey Owl, had fallen into the water below a thin sheet of ice, "and his feet were badly frozen. Ranger Mark Robinson nursed the trapper until his feet were healed." Later on in his career the same ranger would become Park

Superintendent (Lundell & Standfield 1993: 54).

Fig. 22 - "The Park and Us" Display [Mark Robinson], Visitor Center & Museum (2010)

To his right, a settler, a farmer standing with a workhorse. One of the people who came to land that was hard to farm, and ended up finding it even harder to stay than to start a crop. And again my attention drifts towards the sketch, but I keep my eyes off

96 of it and stay focused on the photo directly to the right of the fanner. This man is a logger, his axe gives him away. The axe, his beard and the felled trees that lay near his feet "stand" as testimony to his labour and the conditions under which he works.

Fig. 23 & 24— "The Park and Us" Display [farmer and his horse] &

[logger and his axe], Visitor Center & Museum (2010)

Each in their own way, these photographs come to represent the authenticity of particular "Canadian-ness" in the arrangement of the History of the Park. While it

"labours to recover the past and deny the losses of 'tradition,' modernist nostalgia must preserve, in many senses, the sense of absence that motivates its desires" (Ivy 1998: 10).

Here layers of remembering and forgetting come together to represent modernizing progress as both loss and gain, and always inevitable. Loss, in the sense that the images of the past displayed in the museum demonstrate nostalgia for these identities and ways of life while insisting that they are gone, forced out by advancements in technology and

97 business and the "need to protect the area" (Killian 1993). And gain in the sense that the current state of the Park is guaranteed by the continued absence of some of these identities and the contradictory appropriation of certain characteristics composed as authentically Canadian (specifically certain relationships towards the nature and the wilderness of the Park) in acts of self-identification that reconfirms Canadian-ness through a personification of a pioneering spirit. But this reconfirmation of the pioneering History of the area speaks in the voice of the master narrative, drowning out alternative remembrances and other ways of listening to voices of the past, in some sense homogenizing the experience of the area's past and curtailing other ways of identifying the self in relation to this past.

Beyond what the pictures show, in the images of the logger, the ranger and the fanner what is made to disappear are the traces of the lives lived by their families, often struggling at home in a poverty that drove their parent and partner to risk their life in the bush all winter. The proud stance of the ranger betrays the invisibility of the haggard poachers, driven to hunt by conditions that go without description in land that meant they risked their lives and liberty to pursue fur that could only have been sold at cut rate prices on the dwindling black market (Whiteduck 2002). The same pride occludes the troubling impacts of these men's actions, some of which ended up being the most invasive and destructive the Park has seen. Of course these impacts are obvious in the wasteful logging practices employed in the "square cut timber" days and in the massive fires set by settlers in order to clear farm land, both destroying habitats and wildlife. 98 Less commonly known, however, was the impact of policy driven rangers on the population of wolves in the area, almost hunted to extinction as vermin.

And hidden behind the dress of the woman in the photo are the women who were never offered the opportunity to visit a place that, compared to the factories and mills of the urban centres where many were employed during the first and second world wars, was in many ways considered luxurious. The Park offered the comforts of urban life such as running water and prepared meals in the form of lodges and hotels, "a phantasmagoria of textures, tones, and sensual pleasure that immersed" visitors in both a luxurious vacation, and an air of authenticity (Buck-Morss 1992: 22). In its connection to the art and lives of Tom Thompson, Grey Owl, and other famous people such as the concert pianist "Mrs. Fletinger," (who used to visit the wife and daughter of

Herb Nolan, "the first locomotive foreman and the boss of Brent," during the summers between 1912-1916 to practice on the family's piano in their boxcar home) a certain allure brought an air of sophistication to tourism in Algonquin (Atkins, Mackey &

Mackey 2001: 8, 32). This sophistication worked to confirm the success of development efforts throughout the province and the nation, presenting an image of a civilized society to the outside world that conflicted with the popular representation of

Canada in many of the newsreels of the time as a backwater forest full of natives and provincial colonists (Killan 1992). As an exceptional place-of-nature inside the territory of Ontario, Algonquin Park represented the need to conserve certain resources in a capitalist society but expressed something else as well. It expressed the desire of 99 Canadian politicians to position themselves as part of a developed and technologically modern nation and culture and to represent the "wild" Canada of popular imagination as a part of the past.

This atmosphere of luxury also played itself out in the railway cars, the predecessors of the "plugged in" atmosphere of an airplane, or family vehicle, and the only way that many of the early lodges could be reached (there were no passable roads until the mid-thirties) (Buck-Morss 1992: 22). Likewise, visits to the Park required vacation time from work, and the means to pay for the vacation itself, which was often beyond affordable for many Canadians who were not a part of a certain social class hailing mainly from Toronto who were the most frequent visitors before the opening of the highway in the mid-nineteen forties. Before this, for many Canadians and Ontarians alike Algonquin Park was little more than a description and a set of images in a brochure or newspaper, the traces of the place on the lumber it provided them having been long since washed away with the labour of the loggers and the rocky rapids of the

Petawawa.

But, standing at the top of the ramp facing the display of photos of the woman and the three men the sketch of the Indian next to them stands out as one of the most direct forms of juxtaposing different kinds of images in the museum. The sketch is five or six feet tall, the same height as the other standards that hold the photographs, but in its composition more visually imposing. The stark contrast between the white

100 background and the clear and solid black of the lines brings a brutality to the representation. This is a sketch that accomplishes a task both in line with and directly opposed to the valorization of certain authentically Canadian traits that is carried in the choice of photos.

Fig. 25 - "The Park and Us" Display [Sketchy Indian], Visitor Center & Museum (2010)

In contrast to this sketch, the photos are so vivid. They carry fantastic qualities of limited focus summoning the indistinct character of memory but in contrast the sketch insists on itself as a harsh reality. The photos work to capture what has been lost

101 in a transition away from the settlers', loggers', and rangers' dangerous, back-breaking labour, or in the progress assumed by the difference enacted in the performance of fashion that has allowed the dress to seem so quaint and awkward. Representations of hard work confirm the project of Canadian colonization in the management of the forests and by inference the whole of the Park's ecology and beyond. Meanwhile, romantic representations of capable people of the past constrained by their conditions serve to confirm modern progress in its constraint over the same people who visit the

Park at such expense and effort. Visitors encountering these images are haunted by the similarity between the people in the pictures and their own actions, confirming the conditions of their visit through recognition of the need to move along, but at the same to bear witness to the weight of this former presence while effacing any possibility of its return.

Different from the photos, the sketch makes a deeply political statement about exclusion and the deployment of concepts of race in the design of the museum. Rather than mourning the loss of an authentically Canadian figure, the sketch presents a desire to move away from this kind of past and these ancestors. And more, it presents these characters as absent and in some ways as never having been here at all. The photos define reality, while the sketch presents a fantasy and the phantasm that haunts the

Canadian imaginary of wild nature and of soiled origins; the Indian (Ivy 1998: 13).

This character exists only in the space of whiteness, the imagination of the colonist and post-colonial visitor who comes face to face with an image that they are forced to take 102 as either evidence that there are no more Indians, or that the only 'real' Indians are long dead and gone (Wakeham 2008). The photos present a hint of context, backgrounds, a natural and social world intertwined by the actions of real people. The sketch demonstrates the desire to remove the Indian from the bush, or from the bank of the stream that they may still fish from. This runs against the views of the Algonquin

Peoples themselves who argue that they have an immutable connection to this land

(Whiteduck 2002,2009).

The plaque next to these five images at the top of the ramp is titled "The Park and Us." The text that it contains makes reference to the popular views of the territory known as Algonquin Park, and also to how the curatorial staff and designers want the museum to be seen. It says;

Many people imagine that the Park is an untouched wilderness. In fact, we humans have been associated with the Park area for thousands of years. We have both changed it, and been changed by it. The remaining exhibits, from here back to the lobby, will touch on our history of involvement with Algonquin. (Algonquin Visitor Centre & Museum 2010) Here there are some interesting assertions that run contrary to the image of the Indian, sketched out so hastily next to it. The idea that this place is not an "untouched wilderness" comes up again and again on the signs at certain attractions and in the guidebooks for the trails and museums. This aligns too, with the efforts of the

Algonquin Peoples to assert a connection to the land by demonstrating the changes they had wrought on it (Huitema in Lemieux et al. 2005, Whiteduck 2002 & 2009).

103 However, there is a rhetorical trick pulled here whereby Aboriginal Peoples and colonists/settlers are simply mentioned as people, eliding the distinctions between various ways of relating to, and taking responsibility for the stewardship of the area.

This carries on the same type of erasure based on epistemological concerns that the work of Professor Tarmo K. Remmel, York University Geologist and the author of a chapter in Algonquin Eco Watch's book Algonquin: The Human Impact, makes obvious when he mentions the colonization of the area by forests, but then elides the later

European colonization of the place by suggesting simply that there was an "increasing human presence" since the first influx of Aboriginal Peoples that would test the

"countenance of Algonquin Park" (Remmel 2009: 32). The disciplinary isolation that

Remmel displays in his assertion regarding the view of time he purveys as a geologist troubles me. His focus on certain evidence allows for a kind of "hysterical blindness" to be maintained, eliding the vastly different changes that European colonization brought in comparison to Aboriginal occupation (Gordon 1997:17).

In this sense, Remmel's discursive construction of time in geological terms expressly disavows any real interest in human impacts, framed as inconsequential in the long term and also elides the vast differences in the approach to stewardship that the colonizers took from that of the First Nations peoples. It is through these frameworks that positivist sciences such as geology work to banish the ghosts that haunt their disciplines and simultaneously disavow the possibility of reckoning with the past and the present differently. The construction of time found in Remmel's geological 104 discourse phantasmatically hides its own traces of production by attempting to speak from "outside" of time therefore obscuring the discipline's position as embedded within

Western discourses of positivism and empiricism and implicated in the redeployment of a particular politics (Fabian 2002). Johannes Fabian calls this perspective "Physical

Time" and argues that it is implicated in the transposition "from physic to politics one of the most ancient rules which states that it is impossible for two bodies to occupy the same space at the same time," under the illusion that it is a "value-free... measurement of physical duration" (Fabian 2002: 29). In fact, this way of describing time positions the presence of First Nations in the area as a less evolved form of life and denies the

"coeval" existence of "both" First Nations Peoples and settler-colonists while insisting on a firm separation between the two "kinds" of people (Fabian 2002: 28-29).

"The First Visitors"

At the top of the ramp now and turning away from "The Park and Us" display with the photos and the sketch, and this time turning all the way around to the left, there is a tableaux. Three figures near a river of hard plastic, they sit and one picks at its feet, frozen, still, like the taxidermies. They have long dark hair in braids, and wear buckskins, and there are fish on a wooden trestle drying, there are fur blankets, and a canoe, and beads. Are these the Algonquin Indians?

105 Fig. 26 — "The First Visitors" Display, Visitor Center & Museum (2010)

Pauline Wakeham discusses the poetics and politics of taxidermy and racial display in a Canadian context in her book Taxadermic Signs (Wakeham 2008).

Taxidermy, as a semiotic system that works by maintaining a hierarchical and racialized relationship between nature and native-ness in support of, and in the wake of, Canada's colonial heritage, is employed in the Algonquin Visitor Centre and Museum to the effect of announcing that authentic Indigeneity is a thing of the past, and that today's

Algonquin Indians have no authentic connection to the place if they don't behave as their ancestors did. Worse, the positioning of the tableaux of frozen Indians at the top of the ramp positions the Indian as the rhetorical pivot between the animal taxidermies

106 as perfected nature and the active agency of the White colonist as the peak of civilization, in control of the animals and the Indians. (Wakeham 2008)

The text beside the tableaux answers some burning questions. "The First

Visitors";

Successive native cultures have lived in Ontario for about 9000 years, including the Algonquin nation that Champlain met along the Ottawa River and some of its tributaries in the early 1600's. In fall many of these people dispersed for the winter to individual family hunting territories farther inland, including up in these rugged highlands now occupied by the Park. Here is a brief description of their life and this display by one of their modern day descendents. And the plaque then continues with the words of Chief Whiteduck;

With the wisdom of our elders we knew where to go, to find shelter and food. Winter starvation was always a possibility in the time of the long snows. We knew this, and there was an acceptance that this was the way of the circle of life. Our mother, Mother Earth, knew what she was doing. The beauty of this land, her many lakes, her bounty of animal life drew the native people as it draws you here today. Here you see a family encampment near a lake trout spawning bed in the month of October. Fish are being dried for use in the long cold months to come. Megwich (Thank you) The use of "we" reaffirms a claim to heritage, to belonging to the same group, and states again the feeling of an insurmountable difference between what the natives did

(we), and what the colonists do (you), that plays itself out through the failure of sameness inherent in haunted recreation; the pursuit of nostalgia and the desire to out-do it in authenticity, to do the impossible. There is some recognition in the earlier statement by the museum's curatorial staff that the place is "occupied." This is obviated by the Chiefs reaffirmation of territorial "stewardship" of the area but also by the need to introduce the Chiefs words. The placement of the textual voice of authority and the 107 design of the placard helps to establish the image of indigenous peoples as unable to entirely speak for themselves, and simultaneously, the subtlety of the texts' elision of

Algonquin claims to the land can be heard in its use of obfuscating language. The text states that "natives" have used the Park for 9000 years. The text also states that the

Algonquin peoples have lived in Ontario since before contact. But the text carefully avoids identifying any particular group as having been present in the area. Echoing the discursive construction of time employed by Remmel, this follows the logic of connoting "Physical Time" with the ability to periodize cultures and peoples through the application of "Mundane" or "'''Typological Time," allowing for the construction of technologically distinct categorizations of Indigenous peoples, excluding one from the other's History; Woodland Era, Post-Contact, etc. (Fabian 2002) And this form of exclusion carries through in other plaques as well.

So, it would seem there is still a voice of the Algonquin Indians to be heard in some way, even if there are no modern faces to be seen in the Park. From the perspective of some visitors, this invisibility of the Algonquin People is shrugged off; "I guess there's none of them left," a woman said out loud to herself (and perhaps for my benefit) while she stood alone in front of the display. The texts contain no reference to the reserve at Golden Lake, to the history or memories of the people who live there, or that for a long time the major source of "poaching" trouble was with the people of

Pikwakanagan.

108 Memory: I was confused by the display. I felt jolted, but at the same time, stuck in place. I wanted to stand there, un-distracted, and try to figure out what was being said by the display of the "The First Visitors." I sat down on a windowsill at the top of the ramp with a vantage of both the photos and the tableaux. I pulled my notebook from my pocket and began to draw nothing in particular. While I sat, as many as forty or fifty people went by. I couldn't always hear what they said to one another. People spoke in quiet, low tones. The atmosphere had changed while they were coming up the ramp. Something was different up here. A large group of German tourists went past. I heard one woman ask another while looking at the display "I guess they're all gone?"

[translation mine]. A man responded to her, dropping his eyes to the floor with a rueful shake of his head, "So schoen. So freidlich." I translate this to mean "So beautiful. So peaceful." And for me it suggests that for many tourists the tableaux does nothing to dispel the image of the noble savage so deftly indentured in the Euro-North American imagination in the service of semantically elevating Western civilization to the top of the evolutionary ladder it clings to.

I drew Brave Tears in about twenty minutes. I had the page turned awkwardly upside-down while I was working on it. I turned it around when the page was full and the face stared back at me. During the time that I was working on it I was more interested in how sitting there and looking at the displays my eyes were drawn upward towards the ceiling. Something about the design of the space gave an air of brutal honesty. The beams were exposed as if there was nothing to hide, and the skylights let 109 in the sun. But then I noticed the false tree standing behind the Indians in the tableaux.

Why not a maple I wondered? And then I noticed that it was a birch.

Fig. 27-Brave Tears (2010)

Usually the first place you begin to recognize birch in the campgrounds is in the bags of firewood sold by the Ministry of Natural Resources (MNR), eight dollars a bag.

It takes some time to place the yellowing leaves of a fall birch for most urbanites, and it usually the bark, white and papery, that gives them away. I know them because, even on a rainy day in Brent, if you can't get your firewood to bum because you've left it overnight on the ground, or because it's been rained on directly, you can scour

110 campsites and find shreds of birch bark left by less conscientious campers that, even when soaked, will burn like a torch.

Looking between the two photos and the tableaux and beyond what appears to be an entrance, there is a display case, wooden, flat on top, about three and a half feet tall. It has a glass top and displays in orderly fashion, row by row of stone arrowheads.

This manner of display presents Indigenous artefacts as already classified, catalogued, and displayed in the disciplinary habits of the one making the representation, common in many Canadian and other "Western" museums (see Haraway 1989, Kirshenblatt-

Gimblett 1998, Mitchell 1988, Wakeham 2008). The orderly presentation belies the condition under which the artefacts were discovered and in the order and the maintenance of distance represented by the glass lid the things made by a people are metonymically made to represent their presence, standing in for their absence and simultaneously by the logic that establishes such a regime of truth making any other traces remain invisible (Wakeham 2008).

These pieces of hewn stone and knapped flint tell other tales from the one most obvious in the display of these things as of the past. Under the glass, the various arrowheads, this one woodland, that one pre-woodland, demonstrate a change in time from one material to the next and to the trained eye, an obvious change in the technique of manufacture. Contrary to the master narrative of the Park and the presentation of

Indigenous tools as primitive in contrast to the later tools and machinery, artefacts and

111 pictures of colonists found in the museums, the arrowheads tell stories of people teaching each other how to do things and of people learning new ways of doing things by trying new techniques and innovations. But they speak quietly amongst so much other stuff. Instead they are offered as proof that this place has an antique past connected to it and as is made evident by the mastery of their display, that this past has been righteously superseded by its proper lords, semantically indigenizing the colonists by removing the indigenes following a frontier-style logic discussed by various authors

(Cooke 2009, Wakeham 2008). This logic requires the discursive erasure of Indigenous title through assertions that at best the land was underused and at worst that there were no people on the land at all, as in the doctrine of "terra nullius" (Findlay 2000: 309).

"Why a Park?"

Another turn and there is a wall to the right foil of pictures that directs people left towards the tableaux. This wall yields more images on its back, farmers, and settlers; homesteaders. The texts say things like "Why a Park?" "Feeding the Men and the Horses," and "Farms and Villages in Algonquin?"

With the advance of logging into the Algonquin Highlands came a need to feed hungry men and horses. Here and there the companies cleared 'depot farms' to grow basic crops and, by the 1890's, a few families of hardy settlers were also growing food for themselves and the neighbouring camps. Even entire villages began to develop around sawmills constructed by the logging companies. Mowatt, at the top of Canoe Lake once had a population of 600, and many miles of railroad siding. Today the farms and villages of Algonquin are just memories. The houses and barns are long gone and soon even the clearings will be reclaimed by the forest.

112 The text labelled "Feeding the Men and Horses" explains that six depot farms were in operation along the Petawawa River by the 1860's. But then what about Brent? This museum was only built in the early 1980's. Why would they have ignored Brent when it was still active at the time?

During the only interview I was granted with an employee of the Park I was told that travelling to Brent, after the railway tracks had been lifted, had lost its novelty.

While the bookstore manager told me about how much people loved the displays and how fond everyone is of particularly animated characters, she made an off-hand comment regarding Brent that shed some light on why Brent is so often forgotten. She said that most people come for a wilderness experience, but that the reason why so few visitors go to Brent is because "unless you were on the train and sight-seeing, there really is no other drawing feature up there, other than trees and rocks and water, so."

For naturalists there seems to be little interest in visiting a site that has so many obvious traces of human presence, and for those interested in history, the museums along

Highway #60 are aimed at directing their attention away from places that may be adversely affected by too many visitors by providing a more comprehensive account.

The focus for each seems to rest on visibility, either too much or too little to see, and in the case of Brent, both.

Many of the "cottagers" in Brent had been there for generations, and remembered attending school in the small building that still stands next to the store.

113 Some people in Brent that I spoke with said that they had worked in the logging industry most, if not all of their lives. Some had also worked for the railroad until it stopped coming through. Some told tales of riding in company trucks, and even in huge timber cutting machines, when they were still wearing diapers. Some talked about being scolded for walking on the tracks and messing with the apple trees near the

'Mayor's' house. Some people I spoke to who had never lived in Brent, but who had visited, did so only because they were logging. They had never visited for pleasure, only business. But they all said they thought the area was beautiful, and full of huge trees. Some who had worked for the companies had been employed to plant trees, and to add more complications and entanglements, some who had worked planting or cutting trees were full-status natives of Algonquin heritage. The museum mentions none of this. The villages are "only memories." And the loggers and the natives are presented as in some ways receiving equal treatment as stakeholders in the maintenance and management of the area, listed as one of many in the Management Plan, disguising past inequity (Ontario Parks 1998, Tsing 2005).

Following Bruce Braun these "[e]pistemic erasures are not innocent; they justify political and territorial erasures" (Braun 2002: 8). In order to maintain the current situation in the Brent area the number of tourists must be closely monitored. The timber industry in part relies on its invisibility to continue as it does. This means keeping clear cuts away from people, and people away from clear cuts. The same surveillance and desire to maintain the remoteness of the place applies when considering the ambiance of 114 the campgrounds as well, with many cottagers expressing their desire to see fewer people "Comin'in here and parking on the beach." These calls for solitude and privacy echo the much earlier pleas made by the Algonquin People to the Governor General regarding their loss of land and livelihood to the relentless influx of colonists

(Whiteduck 2009). And the ravages that these colonists brought with them became the justification for the need to set the area aside in the first place, erasing Aboriginal interests in favour of a tactic of colonial expansion, the creation of a national Park and its attendant supervision and management (Hodgins & Cannon 1998, Tsing 2005:

283n.7).

The text on the plaque labelled "Why a Park?" states that the idea of a conservation area was supported by the loggers because they thought that it would help keep the settlers out of the way, leaving more timber for them to cut, and that it would also decrease the trouble with forest fires. Another text, this one a contradictory story though. This plaque is titled "How Did Logging Affect Algonquin?" It explains that the slash and the waste cut from the square timber sent out of the Park area that had been left to rot on the ground amongst the smaller, and less desirable trees had led to massive fires, so widespread that conditions opened for the white-tailed deer to move into the newly created niche, and partly displacing the moose. The more recent logging techniques used in the Park, so says the text, have helped to create conditions similar to the original pine stands that supported moose and beaver, and it claims that the deer population has begun to decline in proportion to the moose. But the earlier plaque

115 stated that the brain disease and the bugs were introduced by the rising deer populations and that there is likely no chance to make the ticks and diseases go away.

Jolted out of a daydream I find a tall figure standing on a block of false wood.

He's wearing a brown cotton jacket, a grey-green turtleneck, and grey pants, rubbed with soil, and he has a black wide-brimmed hat on top of his false brown hair. Or is the jacket red? Jolted again as the figure goes face-less for a moment, a pink plastic form with no eyes, mouth or nose, and he's holding an axe! And then he begins to speak in

English and he has a French Canadian Accent. I'm stunned. So stunned I miss what he's saying trying to understand why a projected face is speaking with such a pronounced accent.

Fig. 28- "Emile Huard" Mannequin, Visitor Center & Museum (2010)

116 His face comes together as the projector catches up with the sound. He has a moustache and what are often referred to as "kind eyes," he has pronounced wrinkles that lead out in "crow's feet a Hollywood actor might have a plastic surgeon look at"

(Overheard during a conversation between a passing woman and man). His story is about living in the camboose camps (from the French word 'cambuse' meaning a sailing ship's storage area), logging the old giant white pines, and trying to survive through the cold winters. His name is Emile. While he's telling his story about dirt and ash in the beans cooked for the loggers and having to sleep two to a bed, in your work clothes, for months, turning to the right, I notice that there are two women sitting on a bench made of rough cut timber. Behind them are pictures on the wall of the logging outfits, horse carts and, lower down and a little to the side is a picture of a grave marker, a simple wooden cross driven into the earth. This is Emile's grave on Lake Radiant, downstream on the Petawawa River system. He died in a log drive that came through Brent and was buried on the bank near where he passed away. Now he has become the immortalized icon of the square-cut timber era in the Park. Many Park aficionados know the name of

Emile as if he was someone they had spoken to several times. During an interview with the manager of the bookstores I was told that Emile "Is like an old friend." Emile has been dead for one hundred years or so.

The women sitting on the bench start to talk about the quality of the projection, and that "It's so lifelike!" "That is cool! Love that!" After he reaches the end of his speech, Emile's face flickers again, all of the expression disappearing for an instant and 117 exposing the pink plastic underneath. As soon as the facade reappears the woman sitting on the right stands up and grabs her small purse. She slings it over her shoulder, looks at her friend, looks back at Emile and exclaims "It doesn't look anything like it does back there." Is she talking about the pink plastic behind his face?

I catch her eye and she motions towards the figure with both hands, the back of her left hand held still towards the mannequin, and her right moving slowly over and in front of the left in the same pose. Her eyes drift back towards the one's being projected onto the plastic and she cocks her head slightly, as if she's trying to see if the projected eyes might follow her motions.

Listening to Emile again for a moment as he repeats his story the two women glance around, avoiding any further eye contact with me, and then slowly wander out of the room and off to the right. As they move behind the pictures, and attention drifts back towards Emile, there is an uncomfortable feeling that there is something else here.

Turning around, there is a woman standing in a circular cage with a curtain hanging around her. There is a round bar leading horizontally like a railing, but it seems more as if it is there to make you keep your distance from the woman. There are headphones hanging on the rail, and after pressing the button, the curtains draw away to the side and she come to "life." The two women left without ever looking in her direction.

As the women walk by, the picture behind them comes into view. It is a picture of Brent taken from a plane flying over the lake and shooting from the south. The text

118 below says that the picture was taken in 1972. The water tower was still standing, but the shoreline has an eerie familiarity to it; the canoe launch is still in the same place and the back of the schoolhouse and the cottage attached to the back of the store are right where they were when I saw them. A map points out where Brent sits along the north edge of Cedar Lake and it also labels the now defunct Hawkesbury Depot Farm just to the west of the town site. But the text here makes no mention of the cottages or even the campgrounds. Brent does seem to have been forgotten in this case even by the curators of the museum.

The "animatronic" figure is Mrs. Dennison and she tells a tale about settling the highlands of Algonquin, the coming of the Park idea and the loggers who bought food from the farm near Lake Opeongo she had worked with her husband. She tells of the hardships of trying to eke a living out of rocky, hilly earth, and of the trauma of losing her 82 year old husband Captain John to an angry and vengeful bear he had trapped

(MacKay 2002: 8). Her dress is very similar to that of the one worn in the image of the woman fishing on the other side of the wall. She wears a type of bonnet and wire rimmed spectacles. And unlike Emile, Mrs. Dennison's whole body moves when she talks. She is "animatronic," a popular style of robotic marionette from the 1980's that were prominent in tourist destinations such as the Disney theme parks.

The curtains swing closed, veiling her figure as she finishes her hard-luck story.

There is pride in her voice when she mentions how hard she and her husband worked to

119 keep the farm alive. But it isn't her voice. This is a voice-actor telling a tale written by an author. The animatronic and Emile's projected face as well are theatre. This is nation-building. The fabled work-ethic that is so loudly and consistently reiterated in both of the tales told by the techno-presences helps to conjure the phantasm of Canadian national-cultural imaginaries that haunts current practices of logging and mining in the

Park (Ivy 1998: 3). And these two moving figures, different from the immobile taxidermies and the tableaux of Indians, confirm the haunted connection between whiteness and agency. The stillness and silence of the "First Visitors" tableaux contrasts with the excited voice of Emile and the controlled movements of Mrs.

Dennison. A scale is presented where the Algonquin Peoples are composed as a part of static History, while the French Canadian logger is connected to a vibrant moment in the past that has been left behind by progress and the inability to be flexible (Emile's body is immobile). Mrs. Dennison, with her quiet voice and demure motions tells a tale of choice constrained by conditions outside of her control, but remains defiant in her tone and is the only figure in the museum who actively mourns her own losses, providing a template for visitors to follow by remaining active in a very real sense.

But the phantasm haunts the tourism even more so. Here is the instantiated presence of History, the master narrative in the form of the two figures, the pictures, the mannequins, taxidermies and artefacts (Stewart 1996: 97). Tough, focused on ignoring pain and "emotional outbursts" both Emile and Mrs. Dennison summon a pliable labourer, who is somehow self-sufficient. Mrs. Dennison insists that the hard work of 120 very few people can remake the land in ways that allow it to become "useful." Emile's tale on the other hand subtly suggests that the truly back-breaking labour of settlement was done largely by French Canadian people.

Wolves.

More of Braun's "[e]pistemic erasures" become apparent in these representations of the past (Braun 2002). Mrs. Dennison's story of loss and effort that comes to nothing, helps to comfort tourists about the decision to let the farm slip into ruin, a site of stuff left in the Park, but not worthy of the "Heritage" or "Historical" designation, or even of being termed archaeological. Emile's jovial voice emanating from an inactive frame serves to obscure the violent effects of labour and poverty, while the next image to the right on the way out of the enclave humourlessly announces who really did the hard work. A picture of a man with a coat, a cane, and a long, full, white beard, and underneath it;

The Man Behind it All Almost unknown today, the great timber baron J.R. Booth conceived and built the railway across Algonquin as part of his huge business and financial empire. He is shown here in 1924 at the age of 97, beside a special load of pine timber salvaged from a bum near Shirley Lake. The text continues with no mention of the loggers who did the timber cutting, no mention of the forest fire fighters and rangers who maintained the sustainability of the forestry trade for so long, and certainly no mention of the people who actually did the construction of the rails. Booth is to blame, or he is to be cheered, but it was "all" him

121 according to the texts in the museum. In this narrative of entrepreneurial success Booth is held up as a model of individual effort playing into a mythic Canadian "meritocracy" by devaluing certain forms of labour, while valorizing capital accumulation as a sign of individual worth.

J.R. Booth was a wealthy man who made his fortune from meagre means as a carpenter, investing his money in a shingling factory and later, in "timber limits" (the legal term for official stewardship of licensed logging territory) in the area that would become Algonquin. He was short, and stocky, and although he is remembered as extremely demanding, he was also responsible for shortening the work week and providing improved conditions in the camps. In many ways it was the weight of

Booth's financial wealth that allowed him to put pressure on the provincial government to establish the Park's boundaries helping protect some of his own timber limits. While he avoided politics, he was not above using his money to help secure his interests, building railways and bridges throughout Southern Ontario that would become integral to Canadian sovereignty. It was the food grown on his farms in western provinces that allowed the railroad to become profitable, maintaining the timber industry and the

Park's income for years with associated railroad tourism. More pictures show diners on the side of the railway at tables set up in the grass, while other pictures have folks feeding deer from their hands near cars parked on the side of the highway. A change in tourist practices over time related to the infrastructure that allowed access to nature in varying ways. Booth's railway became a matter of national security during the First 122 World War when guards were stationed at bridges and the very few tunnels the rails went through, the guards protecting the most precious cargo sent east, soldiers bound for Europe. (MacKay 2002)

Many of the immigrants to Canada during the time that Booth was operating in the Park area came from Eastern or Northern Europe. Ukrainians, Greeks, Italians,

Germans, Hungarians, Dutch and Danes, as well as religious communities such as the

Mennonites came to benefit from relatively cheap, fertile land and often found themselves toiling for a rich man like Booth. Besides these new immigrants, the labourers who built the railway were often French Canadian, American, Irish, Chinese, and Native American. Later, Finns and other Scandinavian Peoples arrived, often brought in under conditions similar to indentured labour. So it would be more accurate, and more respectful of the lives lived by those who did the labour to say that Booth's fortune motivated the effort, and behind his fortune stood many more labourers involved in many more business interests (Mattawa Museum 2010). Booth's financial conglomeration of grain, timber, rails, and political lobbying provided him with the ability to ensure that he would not soon be forgotten, although now, many Canadians wouldn't recognize the name. The labourers were not so fortunate. Now it is seen as perfectly reasonable to say that Booth was "Behind it All," participating in the continued erasure of the workers.

123 Connections that Booth's money had helped him establish would eventually lead to the greater growth of Algonquin Park's allure internationally. An extremely wealthy man named George B. Hayes made visits from New York to the Park in order to go trout fishing. While there he employed "three Indians from the Rama Reserve" near present day Orillia as his guides. I haven't been able to find their names in any of the histories of the Park I've looked through. Now instead of people with names and stories, their stories have been dematerialized and embedded in the confirmation of

Hayes legacy as an important early explorer and proponent of the benefits of the Park idea.

Fig. 29 - "Three Indian Guides from the Rama Reserve" Display, Visitor Center & Museum

(2010)

Hayes is remembered in the name of a library in Buffalo, N.Y. Booth's Rock Trail is near the Rock Lake campgrounds and goes past a set of ruined foundations, and a tennis

124 court, the leftovers of Booth's estate. I wonder if the three men in the pictures are remembered by name by anyone. If the names are known they are not seen to be important enough to list, as if for Indian guides there was no individual identity necessary; the "important" part of their story is told in their connection to Hayes. Here labour practices rationalize the representational erasure of their individual involvement through a collectivizing racial identification of the guides, which similar to the three mannequins representing the Algonquin Peoples in the earlier tableaux suggests that the racialized other lacks agency.

The labour that is written out of the construction of the railway by writing it as a tale of Booth's wealth at work hides the violence associated with an assault on nature found in development. But it also hides the traces of the deaths his money and business acumen, caused, as many of those who wandered into Booth's "limits" (the term used to describe the expanse available to a landholder for logging purposes) to cut timber never came back out. In some ways the labourers who worked Booth's limits and the

Algonquin People who were evicted from them are both made invisible in the valorization of capital and its pursuit. This is not to say that the violence experienced by the workers and the displaced Algonquin People is in any way commensurate, but it is to point out that in the manner of telling the tale, the violent traces of Canadian colonialism and Booth's part in it are erased.

Confusion again, as another sign, this one echoing the display of the wolves, suggests that the Park has been "Playing Favourites" since its inception. A tradition of 125 trapping or destroying animals judged troublesome meant that the wolf population in

Algonquin Park was almost obliterated. Many biologists now support the theory that the Grey or Timber Wolf, a native of the area only two hundred years ago, may have given way to what is now known as the Eastern Wolf, or a variety of the Red Wolf found in the southern United States. It is suggested that during the early periods of

European colonization that the Red Wolf was "extirpated" from the "mid-latitude" of the continent, splitting two separate populations, one north, one south, who later became more distinct from one another (Friends of Algonquin Park 2002: 23). This possibility shows an inverse potential along the nature-culture continuum employed by Massumi

(Massumi 2002: 11). The impact of human action on the wolf populations, as well as the continuity of the divide between the two groups instantiated by human presence, brings to the fore a becoming-natural of culture in a way not that is not usually so obvious, and at the same time is all too familiar (Massumi 2002:10).

And it is not only the wolves that were sought by the rangers at earlier points.

They also took beaver pelts and other furs during the Depression era in the 1920's and

30's to sell for profit. This has given way to the more contemporary practice of trapping game wildlife for the purpose of research and in rare cases, for relocation to other places in North America and elsewhere. Another picture displays Mark Robinson with a pelt and snowshoes. And another has the pelts of loons stretching across wooden frames in order to be made into the waterproof linings of moccasins and boots behind the same three Indians from the Hayes expeditions and a pair of rangers. 126 Moving forward again, there is a railing and on the right is a small model of a ranger's station or cabin and in the window sits a ranger immobile. Apparently he is a similar kind of animatronic to Mrs. Dennison, but when the button is pressed, nothing happens. The ranger doesn't speak up. Instead the voice of the ranger is easily minimized to the singular by an unrepaired malfunction, and spoken on behalf of by the master narratives of the images, texts, and the guides who bring through small groups, punctuating the walk through the museum with anecdotes and tales that help to establish the legacy of heroism around the rangers and fire fighters, and a mystique around the experience of the natural world, and "national-nature" to be had in the Park (Cooke

2009). These Heroes are then placed in historical counter-point to their adversaries, the reckless poachers, loggers and settlers who threatened 'our' nature. This has the effect of placing the Algonquin activists who poached as an assertion of 'rights' as always already in a position of being criminalized, thus affirming the need for greater surveillance, and the legitimacy of policies targeted directly at Aboriginal Peoples-as- criminal. These typologies resonate with the images of news stories and the tales of

Oka, Ipperwash, and Caledonia, still fresh in the memories of some naturalists and cottagers who felt the impact of displacement and disenfranchisement themselves during the us-them conflicts that became associated with these names. I asked the bookstore manager if the ranger animatronic display was going to be repaired and she responded by asking "is it not working?"

127 The layers of information begin to scramble one another and the stories of the

Indians, the rangers, the settlers and the loggers, all begin to attract the layers of history that slip by in the presentation of each image as iconic and authentically part of the past of the Park. They seem to slip by, but they never do, instead building like sediment.

Legs grow weary and feet begin to step back and forth moving away from the bruises built by days of standing and walking after years of couches, chairs, desks, car seats, cushions. But the irritation announces success. It affirms the desire to visit by presenting an intense resonance with the imagination of running up hills, paddling for hours down streams alone, or walking through trails with friends and lovers, and by affirming the sense of discovery, both of nature and of self, that is expected from a mystical experience.

The Museum is no simple architecture. Instead it is a machine for the production of subjectivities that relate themselves towards the Western Naturalists' panoptic Utopian dream in varying and contradictory patterns. This is a dream of nature, as known and understood, entirely surveyed and interminably protected, guaranteed to the future by the patriarchal actions taken by important men of the past.

The machinery is visible in the way that the photographs, texts, artefacts and other displays in the museum side of the building come together with the various other immersive tourist attractions in the building. The smells from the cafeteria, the sounds of children playing and people discussing the next move they might make in an effort to

'recreate' while they can, to make something else from what they have brought of

128 themselves to the place, the dazzling array of books, maps, souvenirs and the films and performances of the theatre, all coalesce in an overwhelming wash of sensual information leaving the visitor shocked and distracted and by remaining so, remaining open to the next distraction.

The repeated barrage of gravity, present as the sensation of pressure on the bottoms of feet, sore necks and shoulders, trembling with the intensity of time spent standing and wandering through the museum begins to resonate with the montage of text, images, taxidermies and other statuaries. The embodied experience of the weight of History comes together in the sedimentary memorial of the authentic History of the

Park as a whole, producing an immersive effect where recreational practices and memory collide with the re-creation of a master narrative linking local experiences with the more general image of the conservation area as an exemplar of "national-nature"

(Cooke 2009). And it is here that the museum speaks its most dear assertion; that it is the nature of the nation that has allowed, and in fact, has required a particular relationship towards it, and towards one another, that segregates and capitalizes by positioning the Park as the source of both artistic pinnacles and scientific triumphs.

The literal reading of the museum suggests in part that there is a linear progression from nature towards culture represented in its displays. Following a similar pattern to that described by Pauline Wakeham in her work regarding the Banff Museum, in the displays of the Algonquin Centre and Museum there is a tendency to position

Aboriginal bodies as closer to nature and therefore as closer to animal bodies 129 (Wakeham 2008). This hides the traces of current Indigenous presence and maintains the phantasmic image of the authentic Indian as both of the past and lost to it.

As one rises up the ramp from the lower section full of "natural" artefacts, it is impossible to miss the connotation that the Aboriginal People and their artefacts are segregated from the rest of the displays, and placed at the architectural mid-way point between the stuffed animals and the life-like colonists. Further, while the placard at the top of the ramp between the two levels uses photos to depict the early colonists, the

Indian is a simple sketch next to them. In the contrasted use of the photos and the sketch there is an assertion that there is an incommensurable difference between the

Aboriginal and the colonizer, and this carries through other displays as well. While the tableaux of the Indians is frozen in the bush, this directly contrasts with the moving figures and expressive voices of Emile and Mrs. Dennison, found in the furnished enclave protected from the Indians who lurk at the threshold. And beyond this, traditional Canadian racialized and ethnicized distinctions continue with the

Francophone Emile's lively face and frozen frame unmistakably connected to labour through the axe in his grip and the dirt on his clothes. While Anglophone Mrs.

Dennison is protected behind a veil, and while her whole frame moves, none of it touches anything, her voice does the work. This also displays the attendant longing that accompanies these nostalgic romps "into the past" as the bookstore manager put it during our conversation.

130 These displays demonstrate a longing on behalf of the Museum's curatorial staff to capture the essence of Algonquin and to make it visible, eliding memories seen as inauthentic or contrary to contemporary conservation efforts. And in visits to the museum, the campers and other tourists display a longing to reach into the past and pull out what connects them to it. In this way current claims made by the Algonquin People are displaced through a supposition that they are not the same Indians as the ones of the past or that their practices somehow threaten the land and conservation efforts in ways that are incompatible with the master narrative of state managed conservation. But what is even more threatened by this obscured Indigenous presence is the continuity of post-colonial practices that seek to appropriate "authentic" Indigenous practices as an affirmation of settler-colonist belonging.

Historical recreation in the Visitor Centre and Museum is then haunted by its attempt to both claim the past as known and visible, but also to hide certain pasts in an effort to affirm contemporary practices of stewardship and tourism. This is evident in the ways that certain stories are told such as those of Booth and Hayes and how others are left out of the master narrative in decisions that reflect political as much as aesthetic choices. The political ramifications of the displays are found in their phantasmic imbrications of race, class, language, and gender. Through the appropriation and counter-position of various identifications the master narrative is able to represent

European settlement/colonization as a movement of people into a place mostly empty and in need of improvement, at the same time insisting that these "authentic" early

131 Canadians have in some sense disappeared. This removes some responsibility for colonization from contemporary visitors, simultaneously creating a semantic gap between the contemporary leaseholders in some areas of the Park and their family members who have been appropriated as the authentic early Canadians who made the

Park possible. Similarly, by presenting the image of the authentic Indian as a thing of the past and then representing the current claims of both the Algonquin Peoples and the leaseholders as threats to current efforts to protect the land the master narrative suggests that only state involvement can guarantee the Park's protection.

In each image and the fragmented captions that accompany them, a singular representative is made to stand in for the identity employed to describe them. In some, the impoverished father and husband who follows his friends into the bush in search of meeting ends is reduced to the identity of a logger, the unique and particular character of each life washed away. At the same time the descendents of these loggers are often the same cottagers and leaseholders concerned that they may lose their right to return to a spot they have always felt intimately connected to. In some others, an Algonquin

Indian is referred to as a farmer, their heritage and connection to the land obscured by the identification of them as technologically different from an authentic Indian (as is the case with the way the museum does not deal with Amable Du Fond's heritage, instead choosing to mention only that there was a farm in the area of the river named after him).

This, while some of their descendents are referred to as Algonquin Indians/Peoples and involved in a land claim that has not been resolved since its first register with the

132 Government of Ontario more than twenty years ago. Many of Du Fond's family now reside near Maynooth, Ontario and are registered as members of the Algonquin Nation of Ontario (ATNFT 2009). And when I mentioned the Algonquin People's land claim that is currently under review by the Ontario Ministry of Aboriginal Affairs to a

Cottager in Brent I was told in a frustrated tone that "most of us here are Indians."

"At last..."

Fig. 30-Tom Thompson's Bust, Visitor Center & Museum (2010)

133 Moving towards the exit, there is another re-created grave marker that sits beside a bust of the man who is perhaps the most famous visitor, employee and victim of this

Park; iconic artist Tom Thompson. The marker says;

To the memory of Tom Thompson Artist Woodsman And Guide Who was drowned in Canoe Lake July 8th, 1917 He lived humbly but passionately With the wild It made him brother To all untamed things of nature It drew him apart and revealed Itself wonderfully to him It sent him out from the woods Only to show these revelations Through his art And it took Him to itself at last The plaque also says that he was born in 1877, making him 40 years old when he passed. Other text on the marker proclaims his genius and character. His bust sits next to his most famous painting, The Jack Pine. While Town & Silcox argue that a short life and career cut even shorter an artistic evolution still in its infancy, Grace has pointed out that any biography of an artist is tinged with as much of the authors' nostalgia and longing as it is History (Town & Silcox 1977, Grace 2004). Tom

Thompson and his "character" have become matters of national concern for Canadians who visit the Park, or who take art and art history seriously. For some there is the pride they take in the belief that 'Tom Thompson invented abstract expressionism," and for others there is the intrigue of his unexplained death on the waters. Each imagination confirms a form of subjectivity that counter-poses itself against nature as threatening 134 and in some sense beyond individual capture. Stories of Thompson's life and death through their incorporation into national narratives have become part of personal experience recombining with the national-cultural imaginary to spur the continued fascination with the artist and personal connections to nature composed around challenging the self (Ivy 1998). This is evident in the longing to reproduce not only his work but also his ghostly presence by re-creating even his memorial as a tourist attraction and signal of Canadian feelings towards what is viewed as nature and how it might serve to inspire Canadians further.

The Visitor Center & Museum becomes a literal sign of Canadian modernity in its expression of progress. Along each step of the journey a wild nature is composed as a threat to both individual well-being and conservation efforts. But, what the literal reading of the place brings forth and what the master narrative of Canadian modernization attempts to obscure is how this image of a wild nature "is not nature per se but the construction of spaces of visibility in which nature - and our economic and political investments in nature - is constituted" (Braun 2002: 16 [italics original]). And what is also drawn out by the rhythmic pacing of the representations is how current counter-claims to the states' stewardship of the area are rendered illegitimate through a form of Historical forgetting or "hysterical blindness" towards both the presence of the

Algonquin Nation and the leaseholders and towards contrary remembrances (Gordon

1998: 15). "Modernity constructs a continuum through the idea of progress, employing the tools of inattention, distraction, erasure, and silencing" (Shami 2000: 190). And it is

135 here that the work of Thompson (and my doodling) takes on radical potential to destabilize official narratives that depend on "erasure and silencing" by drawing awareness to how "inattention [and], distraction" help to bring certain images into resolution or hold others out of view (Shami 2000: 190). Braun suggests that modernity too easily presents an image of worldly order "discovered in the passive act of observation," but the art of Tom Thompson (and the doodles I present) foreground an active remembrance situated in time and in space that draws out the importance of

"being-there" and of historical contingency in the formation of national-cultural imaginaries (Braun citing Heidegger 2002: 16).

Passing by the bust of Tom and the re-created memorial stone the corridor opens back onto the lobby. The exit from the museum tour leads directly back to the geological display, providing the solid ground of science that affirms the Truth of the

History spoken by the master narrative's "war of positions" that brings the Park together, wrapping the area in boundaries made of tales and actions as much as of the lines on the maps (Stewart 1996: 97). And the positioning of the iconic artist and the science of the earth as the final voices presents an image of Algonquin Park as a source of Canadian heritage and innovation, providing a ground from which to move, but also construing a primordial connection to nature instantiated through recreational endeavours (like painting or paddling) as the source of contemporary post-colonial

Canadian claims to territory. These performances are then haunted by the traces of a past from which visitors seek to recreate themselves without memorializing those traces

136 made invisible through the expansion of colonization. And now the desire to see what s back there is replaced by the desire to see what's out there.

137 Chapter 4: The Aleonauin Loeeine Museum.

The Algonquin Logging Museum is the second most visited attraction in the

Park that makes use of historical recreation. This form of haunted recreation is based on official representations of the past and the appropriation of certain aspects of past identifications considered authentic through immersive practices that work to recreate selves in accordance with the national-cultural imaginary. Following the pattern of the meandering stroll through the Visitor Center & Museum (in Chapter 3) this chapter presents a walk along the trail at the Logging Museum, stopping at the stations and interrogating the representations. Conjuring the feel of the place and providing contrast with patterns of local remembrance encountered in Brent, this chapter draws attention to the force of the master narrative of the Park (and the nation). The method then continues to follow the haunting absences produced through an insistence on national progress and the ghostly traces of lives subsumed in the construction of official History.

This is also brings out the mobilization of fear and awe of nature found in images of those identified as early Canadians which seek to sublimate anxieties about contemporary logging practices in the Park and the efficacy of conservation efforts.

Located on Highway #60 down the road from the Visitor Centre and Museum and near the main office in Whitney, a town on the southeast edge of the Park, the building is known to staff as the "new Museum" after it was moved from the original site. Now the old site is overgrown with brush, and the concrete traces of the first

138 attempt are hard to pick out from among the dense wildflowers and scrubby trees that have overtaken the area. The new Museum is found just beyond the railway bed leftover by the Ottawa-Arnprior-Parry Sound line, itself a line of blackened gravel through the bush ever since the tracks were ripped up.

Pulling into the massive parking lot next to tour buses and minivans, sedans and even a few motorcycles, the museum itself remains hidden down a pathway. There is no place to get a full view of the whole building at once. The forest swallows it as if it belonged there.

Approaching the building there are two huge timbers laid down to edge the path.

They stand almost three feet by three feet, and almost forty feet long. The railings lead into the front doors, but there are paths that follow off in both directions to each side of the building. A map describes the trail taken by the walking path around the various stations along the tour.

Entering the building, there is a desk, and almost always during opening hours, there are two teenage or twenty-something attendants there to answer questions about when the tour starts, or where to find a washroom (which just happens to be an eco- toilet style outhouse that sits on the other side of the parking lot). The doorway leading to the bookstore is off to the left, just beyond two tables, on top of which there are two glass boxes containing models of the older styles of logging that used to take place in

Algonquin Park. Another of these models sits to the right of the entryway, this model is

139 of more contemporary techniques used in the area, and between all of this there is the door to the theatre.

The first model displays the oldest style of clear cutting. The wasted slivers of wood from the axes hewing them straight are strewn across the floor of what used to be the forest. The men operate massive trolleys, carts and sleds, often pulled by workhorses while the camboose camp rests off in the distance nestled between smaller woods. A barge called a "cadge crib" with another horse walking around in circles on top of it drives across a small body of water towing a huge raft of logs behind. The model next to it shows a similar operation in winter, the snow carefully air-brushed onto the plastic slopes painted green and brown to match forest and earth tones. A railway brings timber out of the park after being loaded by tall stationary crane rigs called

"jammers" counter-weighted by more timber. Large plastic or fibreglass model workhorses stand at the ready. More machinery sits nearby, all mechanically operated and all very dangerous looking. A thing called a "Barrienger brake" helps slow the descent of a horse cart full of wood. In the model next to the first, the cadge crib is replaced by an "alligator," a Canadian invention that was the first amphibious work machine used in the timber industry. The model on the other side has several small trucks and larger equipment such as backhoes and "skidders" for loading timber onto trucks to be brought to the mills closer to urban centres; North Bay or Petawawa.

140 There is a smile and a "Hello" from the people at the desk. "The show begins shortly," pointing to a red lit sign above the theatre doors. Several tourists stream into the intimate theatre, filling the seats in the air conditioned darkness. The doors close and the film begins with scenes from photographs that hang in the Visitor Centre's museum, and others that can be seen in the books sold in the bookstore outside in the lobby. Techniques of how trees were taken down and prepared for transit across the

Atlantic are spoken of in terms that highlight the risk, wastefulness, and the

"undeniably" skilful, work of the loggers. A short biographical history of Booth, but more so what Booth owned, is covered, again placing the responsibility of the railroad construction, and the success of the railroad, at his feet. The film also emphasizes the role of Algonquin Park in providing resources both in the form of recreation, and in the form of "materials needed for the betterment of Canadian society"; timber, fur, water. It suggests that the Park is a place to be used as needed and although it also presents more contemporary patterns of logging seen as less destructive, it ultimately frames the area in terms that require it either be used or lost. This pattern echoes in the work of Gerald

Killan who offers the similar sentiments expressed roughly a century apart by the

Wildlands League in 1993 who called for the removal of Algonquin from the list of

Provincial Parks if logging procedures were not addressed and "the Conservative MLA for West Kent, James Clancy" who argued in 1893 that logging in the area "would mean that 'the park would exist wholly on paper'" in his opinion (Killan 1998: 36).

141 The film quickly makes its way into present times, valorizing the efforts of forestry workers and others who have made "such tremendous leaps" in the technologies, techniques and strategies used in logging the Park now, as well as the positive impact of shutting down the railways. There is also a great deal of language used that emphasizes the direct connection between logging and the existence of the

Park as it is. The film credits Booth with pushing for the idea of the Park, while it strangely manages not to mention that by displacing the settlers, Aboriginal Peoples, and some other less legitimate timber-miners from his limits, Booth helped to establish the patterns of surveillance used to control the Park today. This elision hides the outlines of the work done on behalf of Booth's money, the alienation of individual labour and effort in the pursuit of profit by the Capitalist. On one side, while the history of certain individuals under the employment of the Park authorities is celebrated and while the memory of Booth is kept alive in the film and the Museums, the traces of individual loggers and farmers are often subsumed by the voice of the national-cultural phantasm, their labour and lives written off as the movement of Capital (Ivy 1998: 3).

When I was in Brent I heard about the other side though. From some I heard about the poverty of loggers who in many ways became "stuck in the Park" after taking a job where they couldn't earn enough to move away again. From others I heard about how ripping up the rails had "killed more than a few" of the former residents after they left for cities and towns they had only visited for an afternoon in the past. And I heard about one man who stayed after they drew up the railway and turned off the power and 142 who died in the depths of winter alone, covered in coal oil. But the film is a production

that does not dwell on the negative aspects of the forestry industry, rather choosing to

accentuate how the impacts of the loggers and specifically of Booth's interests in

"preservation," had led to the Park's mandate.

*Hold on. let me erab mv axe."

As the film ends, the screen itself lifts and automated doors open onto the trail

around the logging museum. Part of the trail follows the old railway bed along the edge

of a stream according to the map that sits on the wall beside the exit. Below the map

pamphlets prepared by the Friends of Algonquin sit by the doorway to be taken and

paid for on the honour system; "Please place your payment in the box at the end of the

trail if you plan to keep the guide."

A booming voice that emanates from the body of a tall, strong looking man of

about thirty or forty years old wearing an oddly fitted cotton cap, glasses and a red and

black checked flannel jacket (sometimes jokingly referred to as a "North Bay dinner

jacket") that beckons the tourists to follow him to the first station on the guided walking

tour, "But hold on and let me get my axe." Recreated camp houses, stables, and

cookhouses stand just beyond the threshold. The guide begins by telling tales about sand and ashes in the beans, sleeping two to a bunk in your work clothes, and how the cook wouldn't allow any talking in the mess hall in order to prevent fights, and to keep a handle on a camp full of young men with no women around for distraction. In fact,

143 the guide repeats over and over that just before, and even just after the establishment of the Park, that "There weren't any women in the Park." This seems all wrong though, as the pictures in the Visitor Centre clearly show women at farms and villages throughout

Algonquin's history. Why is it so important to emphasize that there were never women in the camps?

In the Visitor Centre there is a plaque that explains how Irish immigrants had settled an area where they farmed "Potatoes and 'High Wines'";

Starting about 1870, four families of Irish immigrants cleared farms along the Bonnechere River. They managed to feed themselves and sold the surplus to the logging companies. Still, to make ends meet, the men had to work as dam-keepers in spring, fire rangers in summer and loggers in the winter. Dennis McGuey, and his wife, also did a good business at their 'hotel' where they sold 'high wines' and places to sleep (25c a bed, two to a bunk) to farm boys walking in to lumber camps farther up the valley. None of the families had deeds to the land and they all had to leave when the Park expanded east in 1914. This means that not only were there women in the Park at the time of its creation, but that it has been seen as perfectly reasonable to list some women as only their husbands wives and to not list others as women at all. The wives of Ignace Du Fond and all of the other displaced Algonquin Peoples are forgotten to the master narrative. These women of the Park's past are not given names. The names come only when the women sought to establish some kind of training for naturalists, and almost always this meant young women being trained by older women. In fact, the first camp in the Park was called the Northway founded by Fannie L. Case in 1908. But the children on the tour at the logging museum answer back every time the same way, "Because there weren't any women in the Park!"

144 Down the hill and to the left around a curve and up to the place where the timber sleighs rest. In the winter these huge vessels would have been loaded up and sent behind horses. There are more samples of logs here and it starts to become apparent just how big the trees that the loggers were after would have been. Some of the trunks are almost four feet thick, but the guide keeps repeating to the expressed astonishment of several tourists that "These were just babies. They got way bigger ones back then.

Let's get going, but hold on, let me get my axe."

Alligators in the Hills.

Following the path around another bend and a clearing opens onto a view of a shallow, but wide lake. The green and brown of the plants and the blue-black of the water reflect the sun, drawing attention to the shorelines. On the right a path leads out around some bush, and just beyond that a strange looking riverboat sits idle in the swampy edges of the lake. Reminiscent of the steamboats made famous in cartoons, the

'alligator' is two stories tall with huge water wheels on either side. As it comes closer it becomes visible that white paint crackles in chips off of some lower points, and that there are stairs into the hull in places that don't seem functional. Children charge up to the top deck, and older men and women fumble down stairs trying not to hit their heads while some marvel at the machinery, and some feign interest for the benefit of their friends and family. I watched one man, likely seventy or eighty years old, kneeling with his camera, trying to take a picture of the underside of a set of gears, while his

145 female companion of about the same age made "ooh" and "uh-huh" sounds in reply to him, staring out the window across the bay. Some do marvel, but it seems most just

"Ooh" and "Ahh" in familiar ways, snapping a picture and wandering away to try and get a photograph from outside where they will frame it as if the steps aren't there, and no one else is around. For some the machinery is fascinating bringing to life the practical concerns of logging, but for others the tour begins to lose a connection to the people they are interested in here by remaining focused on the tools of the trade obscuring the skills of the people who used them and the lives that they made possible.

This alligator, says the text written by Dan Strickland, Park authority, "steamed around Cedar Lake on the Park's north side in the 30's and 40's but in 1946 hauled itself out of the water for the last time" (Strickland 2008: 17). These steamboats were called alligators because of their amphibious ability to steam across the waterways and to winch their way over land while hauling massive log booms. According to guidebook another one lays just across the lake from the town of Whitney at the Park's east gate (Strickland 2008: 17). And I remembered that another was marked on the

Zoning Map as being ruined somewhere on the shore of Catfish Lake, just south of

Brent, up-stream on the Petawawa River. I wanted to go to the interior to find the ruins, but it never worked out. All this ruined machinery reminded me of the words I had read in Bruno Latour's work about how social scientists might somehow allow things to come to voice, "to make them talk" (Latour 2005: 79). I wished that I could ask some

146 direct questions of the machinery, but the alligator, as they tend to, remained quiet. I listened more closely.

This was a sign of progress and modern innovation that could only have come together through the concerted efforts of people and things. Wooden decks nailed together, steel chimneys up top and heavy iron boilers below deck, gearing, belts, and teeth all fitted together and ready to gnash up more timber in its fiery stomachs. So it would seem that the alligator was speaking, but I wasn't hearing it clearly at first. It was telling a story of what happens to a body that runs up against the forest in a quest for profit; it dries up, weakens, dies and ends up finding new life on display as a sign of progress; a re-appropriation of the dead by the master narrative in a refusal of loss already sustained by labourers and their families and friends (Huyssen 2006). Those victims of the timber drives, the men who died in neck deep water so cold that only the incessant flow of the river kept it from freezing over, or under fallen trees, are now reduced to a set of statistics and a story told to justify change in the industries practices and to justify the losses these individuals took. And similarly, the alligator, past its prime use, is re-deployed in the story of progress told by the linear pathway and numbered stations that ends with in the present.

I struck up conversation with several people while I walked the trail more than a few times. Some twenty-something man-woman couples just said they felt like "Doing something. We were bored at the site so, whatever." Their expressions were

147 unimpressed, bored almost. One young woman told me that "The trip wasn't a waste

'cause we got the field guide about mushrooms and were gonna find some." She laughed, and tilted her head almost winking. Next to her, her young male partner tapped the image of the Fly Agaric (Amanita Muscaria) in the guide book with his index finger absent-mindedly (Thorn 2006: 10). When asked what brought them to the

Logging Museum one woman, part of an older couple, perhaps sixty, said that they had come "to reminisce about my Grandpa. He was a logger here, you know," she informed me. "We're retired so we have all the time in the world." I didn't ask what they had all the time in the world for, but her husband began to laugh, saying "Rigjit," with a sarcastic tone, letting me know he didn't think they had as much time as she suggested.

Some of the answers became eerily familiar the more that I heard them from different people.

A few sixty-something women walking the trail asked me if I knew how long the path took to walk. I said "Roughly 45 minutes, or so, depending on stops." Two hours later we finished talking, still standing beside the lake. One asked if it made more sense to keep going on or if it was shorter to head back. Her friends all said that they

"hadn't come all this way to hear about hard work," and decided that they would stroll with me, in effect transforming me into a representative of the Park as they continued to question me about my research and what I knew about the displays. Now I'm not sure if they meant that they wanted to do some hard work of their own by walking the trail,

148 or if they wanted to see something other than what was being presented to them as the official history of logging in the Park.

Sometimes trailing a guide, sometimes self-guided I strolled the trail many times during my visits to the Logging Museum. During another visit I met a group of about thirty tourists from Quebec, one of whom spoke to me. He asked the same question about the trail that the group of women had asked me earlier. I gave a similar answer and a minute later all but five from the tour group had turned back. Those who remained grumbled about the trip being a hassle.

Around the corner from the alligator there is a plaque standing by the edge of the trail, and beside it, a small wooden cross stuck firmly in a mound of soil. The text says;

River driver Emile Huard died June 12, 1903 on the Petawawa River, one noile below Cedar Lake. The text is repeated in French. On the plaque there is a picture of the original grave which stands at Radiant Lake. Or which used to stand there, but due to Park management policy, and the efforts (and in this case a lack of effort) of the Friends of

Algonquin, the recreation is likely all that still remains of the grave, as it has been left untended for years with the hopes that such human impacts will "return to the forest.

Does anyone have any questions?" the guide asks, looking around at the people walking the trail. No one speaks, expressionless faces look left and right at one another, some shoulders shrug. "Alright then, let's go to the slide, but hold on, let me get my axe."

The guide repeats this every time that he is ready to head to the next stop on the tour.

Some of the children's attention seems to have been grabbed by the comment, while a 149 little girl with glasses and blonde pigtails asks "um, was the water cold when he fell in it?" Her mother pulls her shirt from the back and tugs her daughter towards her in a protective and somewhat scolding way before bending forward and whispering something in her ear. The guide looks her in the eye and says nothing, he just looks at her. He seems frustrated and a little tired. Perhaps this is the fourth or fifth tour of the day? He turns, nods at the child's mother and grabs his axe, heading off around the bend in the path. His response echoes the cold water that the loggers died in leaving a chill in the air on a hot summer afternoon.

Is this Emile Huard the same Emile made immortal by the machine-mannequin- projection-face being that holds the attention of so many visitors that they forget to even glance at Mrs. Dennison in her dark shroud? How could it not be? How did this

French-Canadian man who died in icy waters near Brent become an iconic symbol of the old loggers and, by connection, to the nostalgic phantom of the national-cultural imaginary; the hard-working immigrant made Canadian by directing their efforts towards the land (Cooke 2009, Ivy 1998)? The official emphasis on his tale in the museum constitutes an epistemic erasure of other stories and allows Emile's narrative to stand unchallenged, and uncomplicated by alternatives, as an official history, while maintaining its air of authenticity through its placement as somehow simultaneously personal and familiar. It would seem that this multiple feat has been accomplished in a very obvious and direct way; the rhythms of repetition. The recreated grave combines with the figure in the Visitor Centre to accentuate the identity of the logger with an 150 otherness that rests in sound. The representation of Huard, or Emile as he's known to so many returning visitors, is an act of appropriation by the nation where his body and even his remains are used to justify the retelling of a past full of violence, poverty and suffering in terms that present it as "necessary" or "essential" to the creation of Canada as a nation. This obscures the impact of other economic and political factors that led people to take up these jobs that held so much risk and the contingency of violent appropriation of labour and labourers by industries through their alienation and transformation into capital.

There is nothing "authentic" about the Emile people meet in the Visitor Centre, or of the grave recreation on the trail at the Logging Museum, but they conjure images that link themselves to the embodied experience of being in the Park and doing things that are spoken of again and again by the guides; chopping wood, starting fires, cooking, looking after garbage, trying to stay dry and warm. These are simple things that serve to make gestural and discursive linkages with the past, tradition and which work to manufacture the authentic experience sought after by visitors. The reiteration of terms that correspond with personal sensual immersion in the imaginary of the Park's nature works to establish connections to practices understood as more exotic, an uncanny immediacy that transports the imagination of the visitor into the "real"

Algonquin, one that doesn't exist, per se. While the encounter with nature to be had in the Park is always understood to be actual, the phantasmic image of this national-nature as the resource from which social action may be drawn erases the traces of the social 151 from the landscape, and imagines immersion in this national-nature as a form of pure and unadulterated communion with the divine, or the essence of the universe. This affirms the project of Naturalism by legitimizing the nostalgic longing for immersion in the space of recreation that the Park is expected to be. State sponsored conservation efforts therefore confirmed, the Park as a place of divine inspiration and national- cultural identification(s) calls out to people, beckoning them to the place to experience its mysteries.

Crazv Wheels.

The next stop on the tour is the Barreinger brake, used for slowing the descent of heavily weighted down sleighs of timber. Without noting the cold irony of how the nick-name came about, the Logging Museum booklet says that the brake was;

affectionately referred to by loggers as the 'crazy wheel.' Some men were so fascinated by its inner workings that they whittled little models of crazy wheels in the evening - and then 'went crazy' trying to thread them with string! (Strickland 2008) Rather than reading the word "fascinated" here as summoning some kind of attention that stemmed from an interest in the innovative technology or the complicated workings of gears and teeth, I'm reminded of an alternative definition of the word that brings out how fascination can be a form of captivation, imprisoning. I think of men wrapt by trauma, unable to escape paralyzing memories. Known as an extremely dangerous piece of machinery, it's not hard to imagine a man watching a friend being torn to pieces by the wires and wheels of the Barreinger brake, an event the Guide kept saying

152 "happened all too often," without offering any particular instances. I took his word for it, as did most of the visitors. But my imagination drifts towards a fiction; two friends separated by such tragedy, the one who lives, still haunted by his memories, spending his evenings whittling a model, and then threading it, and then wondering and rethreading and wondering again if there was anything he could have done to stop the machine from taking his friend's life, or how he ended up in a camp full of men he didn't know in the woods far from his family in the depths of winter. I think of a man left to anaesthetize his somatic response to the image of dismemberment by cutting his fingers on threads and splinters. While this is a story that probably happened, I'm left to imagine what it would have been like and in my imagination it still happens, playing out again and again. I still think of the traces of pain and anguish, sadness and loss that the loggers, their families and their friends must have experienced. And then I think of the smiles on the faces of those older women I spoke to who were so pleased to see the recreations of history. Their grandfathers and great-grandfathers pain was effaced by the expressions on their faces and any extended mourning on their ancestors' behalf was displaced upon sore joints and aching muscles accrued through the course of the trail.

The next station on the tour has logs marked with the old stamps of various companies, Booth's 'B' most prominent among them. The stamps were put on to help keep track of the logs after they had reached the mills downstream often being jumbled together with the timber cut by other companies. After the sleds had hauled the logs down to the ice, and the ice had melted allowing the timber to flow along with the

153 currents, the cadge crib was used to bring log booms across open bodies of water like

Cedar Lake. A recreation of one sits along the trail just before the alligator. These barges had a winch in the centre turned by a horse (or two) and would use guide lines to pull across the lakes. After being sorted by stamp, the logs would be counted and the

"timber barons" paid accordingly (said the Guide).

Dropping the chains around the logs was done, at first and rather inadequately, from a canoe, and later, from pointer boats designed by an Ontario engineer named John

Cockburn (Strickland 2008). Strickland notes in the Logging Museum guide that the pointer boat was "immortalized in one of Tom Thompson's most beautiful canvases,

Batteaux, painted on Grand Lake" (Strickland 2008: 19). No 'gators in Tommy's portfolio. Not scenic enough. And likewise no fields of downed trees with wasted splinters of bark and good wood for a bedding. These scenes were not the nature that

Thompson imagined as beautiful or worthy of representation. Viewed as spoiled landscapes after the logging companies were through with them, stands of trees not recently disturbed (and the kind of scenic images of nature effectively overcome by technology that Batteaux represents) assuage Canadian (post)colonial anxieties about the modem industrial overuse of land and resources by confirming an imagination of pristine, defiant and transcendent nature. And as Thompson's work has come to be held so dear in Canada as a sign of national achievement what he presented as worth appreciating has maintained, and in some cases gained value, through the connection

154 with his life. Now you can make a trip of visiting his grave site at Canoe Lake, or of going to see the Jack Pine at Achray that he made so famous worldwide.

Just before reaching Emile's grave there is a huge log dam and chute that allows the lake to slowly drain. The guide says that this is a small example of the chutes that were built to help flow the timbers smoothly over sections of the river full of rocky rapids and places where the logs might tangle up creating dangerous log-jams, responsible for the deaths of many. Strickland's text states that "130 men died on 20 tributaries of the Ottawa, including the Petawawa and Bonnechere rivers" (Strickland

2008: 22). And while the casualties accumulated by the loggers mounted, on the other side much of the forest was devastated and some areas still have lasting scars.

Next along the path are tools of iron. Lengths of chain, spikes, and gears all combine into a cacophonous clanging in the hands of young visitors. A sign further up the road says not to try to ride the horses, and then more of the large plastic or fibreglass models begin to stand out against the forest background as the corner is breached. Up the hill and around another bend in the path and a "sawlog" camp stands in the midst of another stand of pines. More advanced than the camboose camp, with "skylights" and some furniture besides the bunks, these sawlog camps operated until the early 19th

Century in the Park. Beyond the buildings, a "donkey-engine" named for the way the gears bob up and down at its front, sits at the top of a hill chained to a sleigh of logs further down the slope, mocking a lift it might have made in the past. And past this, the

155 stations have trucks and mechanical "skidders" for hauling logs that replaced the older ways during the 1930's and 40's.

The centre piece of the tour is the next station. A large black and green locomotive engine sits on a section of rails left for just this display. The guide climbs up the steps at the doorway of the engine to begin his story about Booth, the railway, and lines that were all shut down and the towns that followed suit. While he talks he makes off-hand references to "ghost towns like Daventry and Brent that don't have any residents anymore." He also makes a point of saying that because of the railways, not only was logging made easier, but tourism to the Park increased dramatically. This, he says, "led to the creation of the interpretive programs like this walk that we're enjoying right now. Any questions, anyone?" "How much wood would the engine burn?" a large man in a black t-shirt asks the guide. "Lots. I don't really know but it would have taken lots to get the thing all the way across the Park as many times as it went."

The positioning of the oldest technologies and techniques at the beginning of the tour presents what the bookstore manager called "a walk through history, or a walk through time" that confirms a very techno-centric and industry oriented story of the past. This past aligns nicely with the ways that the various organizations such as the

Friends of the Park, the Algonquin Forestry Authority (AFA), and Ontario Parks try to capitalize on the place. During the rise of environmentalist discourse in Canada in the

1960's protestors lobbied governments to stop the logging of protected areas such as

Algonquin Park. Prominent voices spoke out in major urban newspapers against

156 logging (Strickland 2008). The rhetoric used by the environmentalists has a ring all too familiar to those who are involved in the land claim made by the Algonquins of Ontario, as the protestors often used terms such as "your land" in reference to protected areas considered public property (Killan 1998: 39).

It is in the logging museum that the difference between conservation and preservation begins to emerge most clearly. When Alexander Kirkwood proposed the idea of the Park in the late eighteen-hundreds, his major effort was to ensure that "utility and profit will be combined: the forest will be of great benefit as a producer of timber, and will add to the provincial revenue" (quoted in Killan 1998: 35). The rise in environmentalist discourse centered on preservation in the 1960's "successfully jostled aside the utilitarian conservationists" although it would seem from the current Park management plans that the desire to maintain a use drives most of the planning and management (Killan 1998: 35). As historian of protected areas and Parks Gerald Killan notes "the 'use and profit' philosophy extended beyond timber and wildlife management to encompass recreational and tourism development" (Killan 1998: 37).

This becomes obvious in the collapse of industry, tourism and re-creation (both the walk, and the "walk through time") found in the Logging Museum.

One of the women I spoke with on the path asked her friend about the pictures they had seen of Emile's grave, and of the re-creation. "My grandfather did this, in this area," was the response. "Yeah?" "Oh yeah." "It's looks cold to me," she responded with a shiver. Again, I could hear that ring in their words, familiar, although I had

157 never met them before. And I somehow expected that they would ask about Brent, although I hadn't yet mentioned where I was doing my research. The first woman turned to me and asked if I knew where Cedar Lake was. I pointed it out on a map I had with me and she shrugged. Then a curious look came over her face and she looked at me and asked if Brent, which was marked clearly on the map, was a town in the Park. I said that it was a town until the railroad shut down and the authorities turned off the power. One man stayed for two more winters, but that was "pretty much the end of the year-round settlement, unless you include the people who use it in the winter, or some of the people might hunt around there." "People hunt in the Park?" she asked. "There are some areas in the southern portion of the Park that were added later after the Park was first established that hunting is still allowed in for anyone with a license, but in the east and north parts of the Park the Algonquins still run trap lines and hunt." "Oh, of course the Aboriginal People can hunt. They always have, haven't they?" She said this with a smile that said she sympathized with the Aboriginal hunters, but the frown I saw when I mentioned the southern portions told me something else.

"Do you think there should be hunting in the Park?" I asked. She told me "[t]he

Aboriginal People should be allowed. This is their land. But I don't see what the hunters need to use Algonquin for, the guys from Haliburton with trucks, I don't know."

I wondered if there were any Algonquin People living in Haliburton and smiled to myself wondering what they might drive. I asked what she thought about logging in the

Park and she said "I think the people who live near here have to have some industry to

158 keep them going so it makes sense, but I wish we didn't have to cut down the big nice trees all the time." I asked if she had been to the Big Pines trail to see the "giants" there and she responded by saying that herself and her companions' walk around the Logging

Museum trail had taken away their interest in doing any more hiking.

The museum trails' geographic situation, amongst gravel and hills, bush and bugs, strikes me as an interesting metaphor for the situation that I found myself in. I was soon involved in the thorny predicament of describing a place that I felt had been inadequately treated by the Park staff and volunteers in many cases, but, I was being asked to do so by visitors who expected me to deliver the official history. The woman I had been speaking to said "[n]o. No trails for us old broads." And then she turned towards me again and reaching out to touch my arm she asked "[t]his Brent, is this what they call a... my son said that there are, is it towns in the Park? Are they ghosts? Is this

Brent one of these ghost towns?" I told her that since no one stayed all winter "It might be called that by some people," and she chuckled. "My son visits the north end of the

Park, he said, well, he just loves these ghost towns. He loves ruins."

Andreas Huyssen discusses the nostalgic connections to architectural ruins that have been established as characteristic of the subjective experience of modernity

(Huyssen 2006). The attachments made between expectation and memory that play out in the continued visits to tourist sites based on history, or historical re-creation come together through charges of rhythmic intensity. Repeated phrases that point to the origin of the Park as a resource serve to justify current uses of the place, both in the

159 extraction of materials, and in the extraction of memories and self-affirmation found in tourist visits. "[RJhythms are architectures of sensation, narrative and embodiment", affective assemblages (Edensor & Holloway 2008: 499, Latour 2005, Deleuze &

Guattari 1987). From the castle tours of Europe to "ghost tourism" and the 'coach tour' of the Ring of Kerry, which Julian Holloway discusses, the rise in attempted 'visits to the past' have made for a fertile tourist soil from which keen entrepreneurs cultivate a profit (Edensor & Holloway 2008, Holloway 2010: 634). But it has also made for a tourist-public that searches for both removal from, and immersion in, the moment in complex and contradictory ways.

Rather than allowing the history of the Park to be told exclusively in some book, the recreation of historical artefacts and their representation works to standardize the understanding of the places' past, as well as making clear that 'history' is not something of the past, but instead is what is pre-sent and encountered in the now. This comes together in the Logging Museum and as well, in the Visitor Centre and Museum, where the representation of an official past serves not only to obfuscate the violence that led to the Park's creation, but also maintains the popular 'hysterical blindness' towards the traces of the Algonquin Peoples and their continued land claims, layering one version of history over another's. And again, the willingness of one Ontario government ministry to deal with the Algonquin land claim hides the unwillingness of another ministry to deal with the impending renegotiation of the lease-holders arrangement. All the while the Logging Museum ignores Canadian implication in the current unprecedented global

160 threat to the sustainability of the boreal forest, disavowing any responsibility beyond the mandate of the Algonquin Forestry Authority or outside of the Park's borders.

The re-built and renovated buildings and attractions of the Logging Museum, and the cottages and collapsing structures of Brent and other parts of the park serve to establish romantic connections tied directly to personal fantasy, and to the impact of the national cultural phantasm (Ivy 1998). The rhythmic representation of the past, in repeated images of those coined or identified as loggers, settlers, naturalists and even bureaucrats, re-establishes [or re-instantiates] connections between memories and the feeling of the moment. This frontier-style romance plays out in the imagined strength, endurance and force of will that the early "visitors to the Park" embody. Imagined, as it always escapes the moment, sneaking its way into concrete and after-the-fact

"architectures of sensation, narrative and embodiment," the left-over of the event tied to the encounter with ruin, the sediment of history that is fantastically pre-sent for the now to contend with (Edensor & Holloway 2008: 499, Massumi 2002:11).

Huyssen suggests that;

Indeed, romantic ruins guaranteed origins and promised authenticity, immediacy, and authority. However, there is a paradox. In the case of ruins that which is allegedly present and transparent whenever authenticity is claimed is present only as an absence; it is the imagined present of a past that can now only be grasped in its decay. (Huyssen 2006: 12)

In the ruined alligator, the machinery and the represented ruins of the recreated camps the image of progress emerges, present only in the obsolescence of the technology. The romantic tour through the bush, the scene of the same log drives the tour remembers,

161 seeks to hide the devastation wrought by the forestry industry in the past by recreating a scene of primeval wilderness, a frontier emptied of Indigenous traces and a master narrative always ready to subsume the latest innovation in an affirmation of successful modernizing colonialism. These traces of Indigenous presence are replaced by the repetition of the Park's origins supposedly found in the actions of legislators and entrepreneurs who embody Canadian myths of meritocracy. Here remembrance of men such as Booth works to assuage the guilt of the nation in having sacrificed so many to take part in the log drives by celebrating his efforts as singularly impacting on the

Park's history, denying the involvement of labourers by denying the individual impacts of their labour. In this way the hard won successes of the loggers, farmers and rangers who have ensured that "Algonquin Provincial Park" and not just a parcel of land, has been handed down to current stakeholders become part of the story of nation building and modernization.

The narrative structure of repeated references to nature that position it as a resource serve to confirm state sponsored conservation efforts while placing the responsibility for their undertaking in the hands of agents deprived of agency or at least constrained in its use. The reiterated authority of "conservation" might actually pre empt alternative ways of conceiving efforts to protect the land. And the repetition also serves to obscure the labour done by the guides and other employees and all the other

"friends" of the Park as well, insisting that the hard work was done in the past, when the hardest work, that of reckoning with our over-weight impact on the land, has only

162 begun in some quarters very recently and in others has yet to begin. Most importantly, this insistence that hard work was done in the past means that it is just that, done, and that no more extended mourning than a visit is required to reckon with the violence of the Canadian past and post-colonial pre-sent. Historical representation and Naturalist tourism as they are presented in the Park each serve to occlude the violence of colonization while Park Visitors appropriate characteristics identified as authentically

Canadian in acts of self-affirmation.

"On your way back to the main building feel free to stop and check out the last couple of displays set up in the old ranger cabins and administration offices along the path. There are more posters and a few videos if the TV's are working. I hope you had a good walk, and if you have any questions I'll meet up with yon back at the main building to talk. I'm headed back there. What's that? Hold on and let me grab my axe."

163 Chapter 5: Brent, the Brent Store, and the Brent Road:

"Shirt comes off, shorts eo on. and that's how it stays."

Fig. 31 - No Hunting (2010) "Are you lost?" Marie Joyce asked as I stepped from the vehicle and began walking towards her campsite on the beach at Brent. I'd later learn that this was her favourite way to greet strangers, with more than a hint of irony. This kind of ironic humour is common in Brent and much of the time my questions were met with answers that really were not answers at all but instead sarcastic or farcical evasions and resistance. As such, this ironic humour is one of the key discursive sites that I evoke and analyse in this ethnographic rendering of my time in the area. And as this humour often either "tickles the funny bone" [one of Marie's favourite pastimes], or leaves you with a cold shiver of refusal or recognition [like most of her husband's comments left me], I have found it essential to try and carry through the sense of joy or solace that people so often seek in Brent through an attendant interest in both the embodied and performed feel of the place and its discursive construction. This means attending to narratives of the past and to the fears and desires that motivate further attachment to

Brent while firming up the repeated histories that people attach to the "ghost town." At the same time this means taking stock of the way that the local ruins touch visitors as often as they remain a romantic phantasm, an effect of the commodified phantasmagoria the Park is sold as.

This sense of humour takes its time in developing and in many ways will not be rushed. Its force comes through the rhythms of talk and the rhythms of talk are sometimes forced by it as it takes on a phantasmic character of its own in my prose.

This means that we have to take the time to look sideways at the brush, at just the right 165 time to catch a glimpse of the raven, the trickster, hijacking a bag of stale buns while someone jokes that the bird could have done better. And also that we have to take the time to attend to the ways that these comments express longing and desire in what they leave out, that the speaker might feel they could have done better somehow as well.

This is a longing both for a life they cannot have and for a life that they will not let go of, nostalgia effaced upon every approach. These attachments become felt in the body, layering themselves as sediment, and are expressed in the gestures that accompany a performance of good-humoured recreation haunted by a past at once personal and a phantasmic apparition of the national-cultural imaginary.

Donna Haraway points out that "Irony is about contradictions that do not resolve into larger wholes, even dialectically, about the tension of holding incompatible things together because both or all are necessary and true. Irony is about humour and about serious play." (Haraway 1991: 1) I can think of no more legitimate expression of the kind of stories and narratives I heard about, and in, Brent. From mocking answers to one-liners that wash up on ears like waves the majority of notes I collected from the people of the area contained some kind of ironic threat of explanation that always knowingly refused itself in a retreat towards the absurd or the self-effacing. Cottagers, employees of the Park and tourists alike all emphasized their care for the place while firmly insisting on the limits of individual impacts on the place and its management.

166 Marie and Jim, her husband, are the 70-something year old "hosts" of the campgrounds, and have been serving the role since the ranger's main post in the area was moved to the "new cabin at the beginning of the road." The road is a 40 Kilometre long twisting, undulating stretch of loose gravel and baseball sized rocks that attempts to take the life of any vehicle that dares to challenge it. Although its main purpose is as a logging route the road has served as the main entrance for all since the railway was shut down in the 1970's. Along the road there are other routes leading off into the bush marked with the signs of various logging companies or the names of small lakes where some people have cottages, locally called "camps," almost all marked with an accompanying "Enter at your own risk" sign.

While I was turning onto the Brent Road from Highway #11, which runs roughly along the northern border of the Park, I noticed a set of buildings with a huge hand painted "Keep out" for a welcome. The first building was a house with a huge sign on the yard that there was "No Trespassing" permitted, including turning vehicles around in the driveway. The signs were hand-painted and expressed as much frustration as they did reclusiveness. Imagine spending most of the winter seeing only the occasional logging and ministry vehicles and then watching several small cars and pick ups with licence plates from New Brunswick, Idaho, New York, Texas, or vanity plates from Toronto, back in and out of the driveway all afternoon on a hot, sunny day, breaking the quiet and solitude that so many seek when they choose to live on a route that serves as a barrier more than an invitation. 167 The next set of buildings had similar "Keep Out" signs, these more official.

These buildings were part of a contemporary logging operation, a set of bunk houses, an administration building, lots of machines parked in the yard, and at least one building with smoke pouring out of a chimney that looked to be some kind of milling or testing station. The next building is the office and ranger cabin. This building is made of light coloured timber, likely white pine, in the old log-cabin architectural style, in keeping with the historical motif of the buildings along the Highway #60 corridor and throughout the Park. This architectural style has a quaint-ness and familiarity from photos and paintings of relaxation and romance as much as History in the national sense. Signs hanging on the door display the operating hours and beside the door is a pop machine. On my first trip I arrived after the five o'clock closing time and I was stuck in a bit of a panic for a moment. The drive had taken over seven hours already and with the logging road still ahead of me, the sunset threatening and no one else around that I could find, I decided on the strength of an on-line reservation that I would venture down the road, set up my tent, sleep the night and drive out in the morning to talk to the ranger and if necessary, to apologize.

After stopping in at the ministry's Brent office I was off down the road. Every few minutes though I passed the signs of steady and heavy human presence, the modern version of the clear cut. Huge fields with a few tall, lonesome trees swaying unprotected in the breeze. Many of the open spaces still had large slivers of wood, piled up sawdust and even whole trunks and smaller trees tossed about the sites. The views 168 over the forest along the side of the road when cresting some of the taller hills took my breath away. I felt alone and immersed in the forest. Passing the clearings though my feelings changed. The openness, the shredded wood and leaves and the destruction left me feeling like I might be in the wrong place. The historical representation of interior access points like Brent work through a nostalgic pull that conjures images of long ago destroyed forests now re-establishing and growing more and more out of control again.

But the clear cuts and the logging lots instead suggest that there is no escape from the destruction and not an unspoiled time to get away to, only temporary reprieves and moments of forgetting.

169 Fig. 32 - Brent Road Crest (2010)

As I first began my trip down the gravel lane I began to feel the tires sliding around the comers, which continued although I maintained a speed well below the recommended 40 kilometres an hour. As I became more accustomed to the lack of grip

I began to take some time to look around at the scenery. Cresting the tall hills I caught glimpses of forest that went on so far into the distance that it melted into the clouds.

170 The road tells a story of people losing track of their vehicles each time distraction takes hold. There are spots along the road where the unmistakable traces of a crash are present in the scuffed bark and broken underbrush. And as the roadway often disappears from visibility below the hood of the car, the pilot is compelled into an act of faith by the momentum of the vehicle, left with no choice but to hope that the road doesn't take a curve before the gravel becomes visible again.

Fig. 33 - Brent Road Log Cut (2010)

I came around a bend in the road and found myself shocked to see a clearing that stretched out for acres. Throughout there were branches, heaps of soil and roots, and some small broken trunks splayed out across a hilly terrain with a few small stands of tall trees here and there casting long shadows. I didn't expect to see the evidence of logging so obviously, but there it was leaving me impressed with its magnitude as much

171 as bringing about feelings of sorrow and guilt for all the wasted sheets of paper I'd thrown out while practicing my writing. It might have been the first sight of these logging clearings that brought about my desire to include the doodles I'd made that otherwise might be wasted paper and graphite.

I leapt from the driver's seat and snatched my camera from the passenger seat and my keys from the ignition to run back and take some pictures of the log-cuts after I found a spot to pull over where the road widened. After preparing my little digital camera, I had two thoughts in quick secession; the first was wondering how many other tourists had leapt from their cars to take snapshots of the leftover ruins of the forest and the second was wondering why I had brought my keys with me when there was no one else around and I hadn't passed any cars in either direction since turning down the logging road. I glanced at my hand and saw that I wasn't so wrong for keeping them with me, noticing the small plastic bear whistle, flashlight, and the tiny Swiss Army knife, and feeling the weight of the metal and hard plastic in my hand. There may not be any people here, right now that is, but that would make it prime territory to meet a bear with all the hiding places for small animals, bugs and plants that might be tasty for the big critters. It wasn't to be though.

I snapped my shots, and quickly walked back to the car, remembering that I had left the windows down; bear bait. Apparently the guidebooks that I had read and the cautions of classmates and my partner Lesley had made me a little nervous to meet up with one of the largest mammals in the Park unprepared. I passed another clearing 172 though and a little black bear bottom crashed into the underbrush running away from the clamour of small stones ringing off the undercarriage of the car.

Another widening of the road and two brown and yellow signs became obvious against the background trees and brush, and although the larger of the two announced that I was about to breach the Park boundaries, the smaller no hunting sign stood out to me first. The next sign I'd see on the side of the road would be a little more jarring though. It was the same colours, brown and yellow and the sign read;

Fig. 34 - More Brent Road Signage (2010)

I hadn't noticed the name of Wendigo Lake when I was reading over the maps and choosing from the places in the Park that I might want to focus on. I immediately got a chill remembering the stories of giant monstrous cannibals who haunted the forests of the Algonquian Peoples and many other Aboriginal communities

"imaginations." The booklet of place names published by the Friends of Algonquin Park states that Alexander Sherriff called the lake "pretty enough, but all around denotes barrenness" (Quoted in Garland 2008: 59). I had exactly the opposite impression from looking down the road that led to the lake, as the road split at a stand of spruce and tamarack in a boggy pool full of insects flitting about, birds chirping and singing and squirrels chasing each other through the branches like they were acrobats on high-wires. Thinking about it more though, as the fall approached over my several visits the area became more and more pale and animals seemed to appear rarer at this part of the road.

Stopping at another widening of the road I wandered down a trail looking for somewhere to go. Just in case of an event, I brought my camera and key-chain again, and I was happy to find that the trail opened first onto a campsite (one of the interior access sites), and a little farther along, opened onto the shore of a lake that had no apparent signs of occupancy. I snapped some shots of the view and of the rare carnivorous plants that grew on the fallen logs along the banks. At first I was proud of some of the shots, for the framing, or for the way that a friend of mine had been able to

"enhance the colour and resolution" of some of the more blurry and "less powerful" photos.

Later though, while reflecting on the snaps I took and the politics of taking these kinds of Naturalist photographs I was horrified to find one of the pictures of Muskwa

Lake in a digital portfolio staring back at me. A virtual gynaecology of Mother Nature, it presented a view of a lake obscured by branches and extending banks on either side

174 that shaped the water into an hourglass figure, a hilly mound of trees standing in the distance capping the spread and a mass of tangled branches and protruding stones formed in a triangle below. I felt a little ill.

Fig. 35 - Muskwa Lake (2010)

But it would seem that this type of naturalist photography and the gendered implications of the hunt and capture mode it enforces on Western societies in the pursuit of pure and unadulterated wildness is common (Haraway 1989). Too common as many of the critiques of these modes of capture have fallen on ears too familiar with accusations of chauvinism to have much effect. So many of the "Nature photographers" that I met or whose names I saw at the art gallery and the visitor centre, were men. 175 Later I would use this picture to shock an audience with the supposed untouched beauty and "virginity" of the Park, making me guilty of perpetrating an act of violence on the traces of people left in the area as well. I did this to emphasize the difference found in the doodles and the modes of attention that they summon in contrast to the realist attempt to conserve the real experience of the Park with accurate, high-resolution technologies. This forces me to take seriously the assertion made by so many anthropologists whom I admire that ethnography does not only communicate the intricacies of a culture (or at least purport to), but it also participates in the making of culture and spaces (both dialogical and rhetorical) for the production of new understandings (Spencer 1990).

It was partly for this reason that I chose to introduce the doodles I had worked on during the design and field-work components of the project as much as during the attempt to write up something important about the place that I and so many others care so much for. The production of most (and here I must emphasize that by most I mean to suggest the most popular and most purchased) naturalist photography requires a particular style or way of seeing, a "technique of observation" to follow Jonathon

Crary's work, that forces the artist to stand back and take in the view from a distance

(Crary 1990). The standardization of vision that accompanied the development of various photographic (applying the term loosely) technologies referred to in Crary's writing applies as well to the visions produced having been standardized to a great extent, most evident in the proliferation of portraits and "mug-shots" but also present in 176 the ways that nature became objectivised and imagined, in magazines, on TV, and through the internet over the past one-hundred and fifty years (Crary 1990).

In contrast, the paintings of Tom Thompson, famed painter of the Park, work on another register and through different techniques of seeing. His most famous effort, The

Jack Pine, depicts througji the contrast of colour and tone, rather than through resolution or outlines, a windswept evergreen on the shore of a river, evocative of the feeling of cool wind on skin, the smell of cedar and fresh running water full of life and the sound of the brushing needles against the air's movement. Thompson's work set the precedent for the fame of the Group of Seven and other Canadian artists who found their fortunes in captivating audiences with views of the natural. Deleuze and Guattari suggest that any artist who wants to produce evocative work should maintain a keen interest in the differences between "close-distant" and "haptic-optical" distinctions

(Deleuze & Guattari 1987: 496). This means employing the abstract curved line or a line of declension, rather than the straight, or point A to point B type line that enforces rigid logic. Following Latour this may be termed a "myopic" attention to details of relation that refuses to explain away "matters of concern," instead evoking the feel of contact with the other present in aura alone (Latour 2005:171). Avoiding summation in either ethnography or in art is advocated as well by Massumi's additive "Inventionism" as well as in the pursuit of Kathleen Stewart's "Ordinary Affects... an experiment, not a judgement" (Massumi 2002: 12-13, Stewart 2007: 1).

177 Thompson experimented with colour and with the indeterminacy of form, a key element of which is the abstract line. This is a little incongruent with the positioning of

Thompson as one of the great lures for tourism to the Park, and for luring youth's and other's towards a tradition of naturalist and landscape art claimed by Canadian heritage.

By avoiding a realist depiction however, Thompson's work shares more with the etchings of William Blake than naturalist photography; indeterminacy, reaching- towards, an effort to touch the natural world and be touched by it, "[t]ouch and undecidability go hand in hand" (Manning 2007: 76). Aligning with the "Deleuzian or

Spinozean body, where life is understood not simply as form, but as a complex relation between differential velocities, between deceleration and acceleration of particles"

Thompson's paintings of Algonquin Park articulate the feeling of the place rather than depicting an accurate image; quickly rushing water and branches pulled by an invisible breeze counterpoint the apparent immovability of the rocks that the roots cling to

(Manning 2007: 78). And the similarities are deeper in that both Blake and Thompson painted their approach to the theological, Blake through feigned portraits of "God-like" figures and Thompson through feigned portraits of nature; for each the subject represents the pinnacle of and source of divine communion (Manning 2007: 78-81). As

Deleuze and Guattari insist, "[o]ne can back away from a thing, but it is a bad painter who backs away from the painting he or she is working on" (Deleuze & Guattari 1987:

493).

178 Writing ethnography, the artistic depiction of real, tangible and concrete experiences in words, is a failed effort in so many ways from the perspective of "hard" or positivist sciences. How can this lack of testability provide anything tangibly useful for an economically minded aesthetic of existence that refuses to recognize the interplay between the virtual and the actual? All of this requires again recourse to the rhythmanalyst of Lefebvre's imagination who substitutes "speculation in the place of analysis, the arbitrarily subjective in place of facts" (Lefebvre 2005: 5 [italics original]).

This means beginning with "concepts, definite categories. Instead of going from concrete to abstract, one starts with full consciousness of the abstract in order to arrive at the concrete." (Lefebvre 2005: 5) Not exactly a reversal of Massumi's assertion that

"Concrete is as Concrete doesn't," this suggests in alignment with Gordon's project that beginning with the image of the "definite," attending to the weight of ghostly presence might constitute a methodology for describing the shape of a presumed absence. So in order to take seriously the claim that some places in the Park are "ghost towns" I first had to take seriously what a ghost might be composed of, what materialities are present in the experience of a ghost or haunting. And even though "hard" science (and I as well) may understand ghosts as metaphysical or imaginary it would be imperative to consider the ways that re-creation of all types in Brent and in the rest of the Park was haunted by expectation and desire. It is this haunting intersection of shifting assemblages, historical contingency and productive forces that structures the production of art and other forms of recreation in the Park, as the expressive potential and abstract

179 indeterminacy of Thompson's work (and my doodles) attest to. Rather than trying to

prove the existence of ghosts or haunting then, this effort provides a form of testimony,

bearing witness to the weight of historical representation on the emergence of subjective

experience and the formation of subjectivities in relation to the national-cultural

imaginary of heritage, identity and nature.

Jim Joyce usually chimes in right after Marie's question about being lost with a

question of his own. "Where are you trying to get to?" And always on the perfect

rhythm to cause a confused moment in the mind and eyes of a visitor he quickly adds

that "[i]t doesn't matter 'cause, you can't get there from here," laughing to himself and

tipping the brim of his baseball cap down toward the earth as he finishes his joke.

I explained my project a little bit to the Joyces and during the conversation I was

directed towards the store where "there's lots of history" and told that I could go to

occupy my reserved site, and that they would talk to "Gant" in the morning for me, and

that there was "no need to drive all the damn way back out there just to say you're

coming back in." It would be unfair of me not to say that in the short time I spent with

them, I grew very fond of the Joyces. As we talked during another afternoon of hazy

humidity on the beach full of parked cars left by visitors to the interior a motorized boat

whizzed past the shoreline. Jim huffed to himself and scoffed that a person would

"[c]atch cold before they catch a fish at that speed." I said that I thought the water felt

nice and his answer was right on beat, "I'm surprised it's not steaming off right now.

180 It's too hot in the boat. You'd be in a fish fry." Before driving away to put up my tent and start a fire to make some dinner Jim, waved and hollered "[d]on't do anything I wouldn't do," and the seventy-something year old giggled into his sleeve as he headed back to get a beer from the RV.

I would later learn that the Joyces had been coming to Brent since the seventies,

"before they fixed the road." Jim told another tale,

I once drove in about two clicks, and lost a spring. I thought about stopping but I remembered that the spare spring I thought I brought was back in North Bay in the garage. We kept going, and at about the fifteen-K mark the other one went. I got out and found one buried under some other stuff in the trailer, so I guess I had two spares, and then we decided that we'd come so far that we'd just keep going with the broken springs. Once we got in, we stayed the night, and then I took a ride back to North Bay with a friend, picked up the spare, came back to Brent and fixed'em both while we were here. He looked me in the eye over the rim of his sunglasses, the first time I saw his blue irises and he said one word; "Hot."

Marie told me that 'Gant' was the ranger, but that if I had questions I should speak to Dave or I should head down and talk to Jake and Rob at the store. "Dave" is the regional manager who carries the reputation of keeping the Brent campgrounds as a bit of a personal project or as the regulars say, "Brent is Dave's baby." I took from this repeated comment that he not only cares for the place, but that he has been involved in fostering the positive changes that might have come about in the area over the course of his tenure. Although I wanted to ask him a few questions it never seemed to line up that we would be in Brent at the same time. I'm left haunted by my feelings that he might

181 have explained why he does so much that isn't expected of him from his position. Why he gives away "free labour" to his employer? It strikes me that he may have personal connection that I haven't yet ferreted out, or that he sees a way to make an impact on a place that deserves to be remembered by investing himself so folly in the maintenance and representation of Brent's history and present.

Mr. Smith was responsible as well for being involved in both the approval of this project, but also in the original denial that I had received regarding my application to do research in the Park. If it was his baby, I could see how my application might have been construed by him as "implying" that Brent was haunted and how it might have struck him as troubling to stir up the old ghosts that he might have spent so much time and effort putting aside. Reminding me of my friend Andrew's response when I told him that I had my access denied, it strikes me that the critical thinking of positivism had rubbed off on the authorities. Instead of leaving them afraid of ghosts, the authorities had assumed the position of "ghost busters," employing technology to compartmentalize and capture the unruly entities that disturb the official story.

However, the one day that we were there at the same time, we missed one another by moments at the garbage bins and again at the store. I even thought I saw the ministry's truck near my campsite, but for me "Dave" remained a ghost, the invisible hand of the apparatus of control. And I suppose for him I remained a ghostly figure in the woods, uncannily familiar as just another shirtless camper seen from a distance

182 wandering back and forth from the car to the fire to the tent and again. Uncanny, as I remained at a distance from him through my investigations and likely retained a character of strangeness and threat through my identification as a researcher, summoning in his imagination the possibility that I was placing his efforts to look after

Brent in jeopardy by voicing questions better left unsaid and making claims that couldn't be substantiated.

The cross and chained area at the west end of the campgrounds is said by some to be a "memorial" to the loggers rather than an "authentic" gravesite. But the grass around it gets cut and during the summer that I was conducting my fieldwork a set of plaques was installed that made the grave site the first stop in a six-station "self-guided" walking trail formed from the remaining paths, roads and ruins of the old town site.

Until the plaques were installed the only way to hear memories of Brent was to speak to lease-holders or other "locals." Before the plaques, the place had an indeterminacy that made it difficult to orient oneself in relation to the mostly hidden ruins and buildings that marked the limits of the town-site. This brought about a certain sense of anxiety regarding the difficulty of judging the density of the surrounding bush and what to expect from its depths, but allowed for a less structured experience of the past of the place by allowing a place for less organized patterns of local remembering. Strange then that so many of the texts in the Visitor Centre and Museum claim that the town is only just a set of "memories" now when instead it seems to have finally gained an official History. 183 After collecting some other stories from other campers, cottagers and regulars to the area I found that stories about putting in effort by maintaining a presence were ubiquitous. Part of the attraction of coming to Brent for Jim Joyce is the annual battle with the road, although now "Marie drives and I navigate." And although she said that the challenge was getting to be too much, Jim ensured me with a smile and a laugh that they'd be back again next summer, "[i]f we don't die first." I spoke to a cottager named

Roger who told me a story I didn't expect after his initial statement that when he arrives in Brent at the beginning of the summer, "[t]he shirt comes off, the shorts go on, and that's how it stays." He recounted a tale of pulling a capsized canoe and the paddler who "shouldn't have been out in those shitty conditions in the first place" out of Cedar

Lake in October, swimming from his cottage's dock to the boater in distress. After finally making it down to the store I heard many other stories that brought about a similar sense of personal investment and care for the place and the people who come through, if not stay. Stories are told about those whose presence is felt in the place even though they've long since left Brent.

Rob told me about how Jake and he had each and together been out to rescue a number of boaters who needed a hand, or more. After hanging around for a while I caught a glimpse through the window in the door at the back of the store of a spy-glass they use to keep an eye on people who leave to cross the lake on their way to the interior. One windy afternoon a group of four, two young women and two young men, set off across the choppy waters of Cedar Lake and apparently Jake watched for two and 184 a half hours. He complained to me that "only one of them has any experience." I asked if he thought they would be alright and he told me that he thought "[t]hey'll be fine if they listen to her... if." While he said it though he looked me straight in the eye, which I took to be him judging if I would be capable of making it across the lake on a day like that one. Another story he told me was about a French couple "from France; French, not Canadian. I couldn't talk to them," Jake said. I asked if he spoke French and he said "[w]ell no, I said I couldn't talk to them." The couple had set out from upstream and arrived in Brent several nights later, cold, wet and hungry. They told Jake that they left carrying only a few omelettes with them and that they thought there would be a cafe every once in a while along the river. Their canoe had capsized several times in dangerous points along the Petawawa River according to Jake and they "were lucky, real lucky" to have made it to Brent at all. Another story he told recounted how a man lost on the rivers and lakes for a few lonely, rainy nights, arrived in Brent begging for water. Jake asked why he didn't drink something and the man said he didn't bring any water with him. Jake asked the man what he had been paddling on and the response left him with the "felling that the guy really shouldn't have made it."

Later, after reading these stories in the work of Lundell and Standfield (1993) I felt a little slighted that the stories were old standards for him. And then I thought that he must have had a rehearsed set of tales he liked to reiterate after having returned every summer since 1987, tales which provided a counter-point to the image of the camper as self-sufficient and capable and which instantiated a reason for his own presence. At the 185 same time, Jake's tales assert that while the Friends of Algonquin claim to speak for the area in many texts and historical representations in the tourist attractions "down south," and Ontario Parks is often represented as responsible for conservation in the camp grounds at Brent, without him and his friend Rob and the unpaid work of the cottagers and others who spend time making Brent live-able even the campgrounds would be allowed and encouraged to rot away into the forest again. These images counter the popular representation of human impacts on the forest as always being negative and the often expressed desire for serene and pristine nature found in the advertisements and representations of the Park, emplaced through recreation as much as preservation.

After hanging around a little longer I caught a few glimpses of some things seen even more rarely, the ghosts of a place that keep a hold of the people who love it because of their attachments to what has gone. After looking through Lundell and

Standfield's text I became interested in a man named Adam Pitts who had lived in Brent and had been the last one to remain through the winter when the railroad shut down

(Lundell & Standfield 1993: 116). Pitts was Brent's last "resident" according to most people I asked. The interview that Lundell & Standfield conducted with Mr. Pitts before he passed away in the late 90's, while he was in his late 70's, talks about how he got the title of "Mayor" but it quotes him as saying something about how some kids made a joke and it just stuck with him (Lundell & Standfield 1993: 116). I asked Jake and Rob if they knew Mr. Pitts and Jake told me a story about how he used to come in during the depths of winter to bring the old man supplies and to check in on him. "He 186 used to get pretty strange come January," said Jake without qualifying how he meant the word strange. I assume that cabin-fever and being cooped up mostly alone (with his cats) in a small house with no running water, electricity or telephone, might have allowed Mr. Pitts' fiddle to lose some of its sweetness, issuing an off-beat and off-key tale of loneliness and longing for "how it used to be." It must have been so quiet after the rumbling of the trains stopped rolling through the village. As Mr. Pitts said, "[a]ll you do in Brent during the winter is just live with it" (Lundell & Standfield 1993: 114).

And thinking about Mr. Pitts' provisions for the winter I'm reminded of the comments that I heard from Jim Joyce about how the last loaf of bread that they had taken out of the freezer in August after arriving in May had to be "hit with a hammer to get the slices apart. Just a little bit firm, eh?" Jim said, giggling again.

Roger told a story of how as a kid, he and a few friends would take the "long way around home" and go past the old man's house, sometimes messing with his roses or snatching a few apples from his trees. Roger said that he couldn't remember, but he might have been one of the kids who gave Mr. Pitts the ironic title, but it was the winter that froze it to him like an indelible ink stain. Or maybe more akin to the coal oil that

Rob said Mr. Pitts would soak rags in before wrapping them around food, cigarettes or money to help preserve them and deter the animals. Rob said, "[everything he had was black."

I asked if his house was still standing and Rob said,

187 sort of. You can go check it out if you want to. It's just behind that cottage across the rail bed from here, just go through the yard, don't worry they're away right now, and go to the right as you come around the house. It's pretty wrecked. Lesley and I walked around to the back of the cottage after leaving the store to cross the rail bed. Looking across from the store I noticed a small cottage facing the gravel path that marked the old railway sitting only forty or fifty feet from where the rails would have laid. It was rectangular, a long box laid out on its side, and it occurred to me that this was one of the old boxcar houses that had been used in the early nineteen-hundreds by the employees of the newly established railways. I found a small book in the Brent store later called My Childhood in the Bush: Growing up in Brent on the CNR in Algonquin Provincial Park (1913-1919). The book follows a biographical narrative of Rebecca (Nolan) Atkins, who arrived as the daughter of the railway boss when she was three. Mrs. Atkins attended school in the old schoolhouse that still stands beside the store, the same one that Roger went to when he was young, and that Jake and

Rob keep maintained now. Looking through the book, I was reminded of the insistence in the Logging Museum that there were no women in the Park in the early days, and in a way Mrs. Atkins supports this saying that she and her mother were the only women to stay year round in her first few years at Brent. The boxcar house that she describes sounds very different from the one I saw. She describes tongue and groove, hardwood, and for the time, a fairly luxurious home, if not very large. The boxcar cottage in contrast has a few small patched holes near the corners, some exposed plastic sheeting to help keep out the rain and snow over the long and unattended winters and instead of

188 the old steel walls still being visible there is asbestos shingling in the form of false

brickwork.

Walking around the other larger, two-story cottage that looks well maintained

with board and batten wood siding painted recently, we noticed the mounted head of a

caribou beside a Canadian flag hanging on the back wall. Caribou were introduced to

the Park long ago by the rangers, but it's said that they simply couldn't compete with

the deer and moose for food stocks and died out. I doubt though that this head is from

near here, but I never found out if this was Rob's cabin, or if not, who's it was in order

to ask about the head. Behind the cottage was a collapsed shed in the midst of a small

stand of untended trees, and off to the right, what looked like a telephone pole with a

birdhouse mounted above a sign that said "Dirt Road". All around the post the grass

was overgrown to two or three feet tall. I couldn't see any road, but after nosing around

through the grass for a few minutes I found a small piece of concrete curb jutting out of

the earth, and beside that a small cross overgrown by the grass and weeds that marked a

pet cemetery. Thinking about it now, it's likely that someone had to break the law in

order to provide burials for family members who passed during summers in the Park,

which seems oddly extreme in its judgment. And it feels just as strange that

"cottagers," the leaseholders who almost universally come by their leases through

inheritance, and are therefore often the generationally separated kin of the same settlers

valorized by the Park authorities, should be forced to commit crimes in order to do right by their conscience in a place that they spend so much time looking after. 189 While I reflected on this, I saw one of the cottagers, with whom I had not spoken before, running the lawnmower around the store for Jake, cutting the grass. It seems that while the leaseholders are restricted mightily in what they are permitted to do, as the land remains the property of the Park, they are still expected to be the primary care takers of the land that they are not technically permitted to alter without layers of approved paperwork. And I was struck by how the labour performed by these cottagers and visitors had added up through hours of personal vacation time "sacrificed" and how this sacrifice would layer memory on activity, making the most familiar chores into chosen tasks and thereby serving to gratify the one making the choice.

Rounding the edge of the tree line behind the cottage I saw for the first time the ruins that remain of Adam Pitts' cottage, his house, the Mayor's house. Trees form an umbrella over the skeletal structure allowing only thin streams of sunlight through, which accentuates the darkness of the guts exposed by the collapsed front entrance. An old empty oil drum sits tipping to the side, shifting on the uneven soil below under the duress of the summer-winter freeze-thaw cycle that does so much damage to the roads in Brent and the rest of Canada, weakening the bonds of the pavement and allowing massive cracks and craters to form where smooth asphalt had once been.

190 Fig. 36 — Adam Pitts' House (2010)

The wire fence wrapped around posts that lean in every direction, none standing straight, hold up the struggling rosebushes that must have been the prize of the old bachelor's garden. A few small, insect riddled bright pink buds stand out against the dreary browns and greens of the house and the fallen siding. Shattered windows reflect the light irregularly, conjuring the illusion of movement inside the ruin, and the historical traces of the architectural remains come together in the feeling that "there's something in there." Silently, a remnant of the past sneaks out through the locked gate and begins stirring up our imagination.

The ruin touches us through the impact of historical awareness; "Awareness always dawns as a fright, surprise, pain, or shock, of varying intensity, from the mildest

191 (most habituated) to the severe" (Massumi 2002: 231). Standing in front of the roses and the collapsed dwelling, now a heap of rubble that stands as proof of the lack of life here and as the evidence of a haunting, I was moved. The ground beneath my feet unsettled, I was literally shaken. I glanced at Lesley to see if the wind had made her eyes water as well and as I looked at her I realized that it wasn't the wind at all, but the thorns on the rosebushes that had summoned the intensity of feeling effected as tears by piercing my own memories and cleaving them together with the remaining traces of the

Mayor's life here. The tangling of the roses with the fence and with one another began for me to express the vitality and complexity of the Brent that was already playing itself out in the relationships between the various actors and actants, living and dead. The

Mayor, even long after his passing, Jake and his family, Rob and his wife, Rob's son the ranger who first visited Brent as a child and kept returning, making a living of it, Marie and Jim, Roger and his family, Rebecca Atkins and all of their various relationships with the other cottagers, Park managers, tourists and even researchers such as myself keep this place alive in memories and as everyday ordinary scenes of human/non- human interactions and affections; as a place to be lived, not just remembered, but then lived through the layers of memory as they become sediment over time. And so it is in these processes of remembering the past that certain memories become prized and others intentionally forgotten as a form of anaesthetic relief from the trauma of historical awareness and the feelings of loss entailed by the delimitation of the overwhelming experience of synaesthesia as consciousness.

192 It is the people of the place who bring it to life as much as the place allows people to "make a living" through interactive potentials. But this is elided elsewhere in the Park, in places like the Visitor Centre & Museum and the Logging Museum through patterns of originary repetition that find their recourse in a master narrative of progress.

There, claims are made that places like Brent only live on in memories now. The emphasis on tourism and the constraints of a vacation in the Park work in tandem with the phantasmagoria the Park is sold as, recreating an official History of the place haunted by the absences it depends on to sustain it. And in this way the constraint on vacations to the Park such as the inability to go to the interior or the short length of many peoples' stay is pre-figured by the earlier displacements of First Nations and later loggers and cottagers, as it would seem no one is allowed to "live" here, justifying the further protection of the place from the threat that leaseholders and the Algonquin

People each come to embody in this formulation.

Hugh Raffles notes that "[i]n the very whirlpool of their origin, place and nature were marked by collaboration, dissent and deceit" (Raffles 1999: 349). In the character of the leaseholder or cottager there is a collapse or minimizing of difference that occurs that runs parallel to the way that the identity of tourist does little to tell us who a person is. In the official museums on the Highway #60 corridor there is a valorization, through a style of Capitalist frontier logic of utility and profit, of the settler as a hard-working and independent icon of Canadian identity. The lives lived in the Park by these

"originary" figures and their representation in the official History of Brent emphasizes 193 both this endurance, but also the constraint of the times on their place in the Park's past

(Ivy 1998). Loggers and settlers are represented as impoverished, head-strong and

driven to the Park by need and through a slippery transfiguration of the phantom they

are "known" as into the phantasm of the "original" their endurance is made personal

and transferred to the visitor simultaneously confirming the limited length of the stay

and assuaging the guilt related to such abbreviated periods of mourning and

remembering (and forgetting) that this haunted recreation in the Park entails.

In the Brent store the picture emerges differently. It becomes more obvious that

the leases have been passed down mainly within families, suggesting that the same

cottagers are just as often the children and grandchildren of the original settlers, or the

settlers claimed by the actions of the state as original. These increasing numbers of

settlers in the area became one of the main reasons cited by the loggers and bureaucrats

for creating the Park. And now this originary repetition found in the official museums

serves to justify the further elision of leaseholders, as something other than the

descendents of the settlers and as nothing but a memory.

Most of the residents of Brent arrived as loggers and so the entanglement grows

more complicated as the children of loggers, loggers themselves fight to retain their

leases in the Park while working for a company that fights their right to lease. Worse, many of the Aboriginal Peoples of the area found employment with the logging and railway companies, putting them at odds with band members who worked towards

194 furthering the Algonquin Peoples land claim. I heard from one man of Algonquin descent who worked in Brent planting trees who said that he spent most of his time there (in the mid-sixties) trying to find ways to get rid of his share of the planting without digging any holes. He said he used to throw the trees down banks and sand dunes and then bring his supervisor to the opposite side of another person's planted plot through a confusing and circuitous route that would ensure he got the same pay as someone who had emptied their bags legitimately. He felt he didn't owe the logging companies anything since he had to work for them to be able to afford to live in his traditional territory. And without degenerating into some tired tirade about the need for anthropologists to attend to "forms of resistance," it is far more helpful to remember that people, not the collective identities we pin to them, build connections and relationships in ways that may run against our expectations without jamming the hope of finding common interests.

The title of official "hosts" that the Joyce's hold serves to obscure the joy they take as pay from their "free labour" of talking with strangers and reacquainting themselves with the people and places they have met before and built such attachments to. And while the labour may be "free" to some extent it does guarantee their free stay in the Park for the summer. Simultaneously, the presence they represent through the official title instantiates the presence of those responsible for conservation efforts, guaranteeing the protection of the place, its animal inhabitants and its ecology, not only for those who visit in the summers, but also for those who hunt in the winters, the same 195 Algonquin Peoples that Jim showed little interest in speaking about when I asked him his feelings on hunting in the area. "Yeah, they hunt," he quietly said, tipping his hat's brim towards the ground again with a smile I took to be somewhat rueful.

And, in the representation of hunting as either the misguided actions of rangers who sought to eliminate the now loved wolves of the Park or the illegal actions of poachers whose life-histories are reductively disclaimed by their identification as criminals, the conservation efforts of hunters and anglers elsewhere are dismissed. And in yet another turn, the work done by groups of hunters and anglers who seek to thwart the land claims of the Algonquin People elides the discursive roots of conservation efforts in the Ottawa-Kitchissippirini Valley that began with the Algonquin People themselves (Whiteduck 2009).

Anna Tsing offers a definition of collaboration that comes in two parts. The first says that collaboration is "[u]nited labour; co-operation; esp. in literary, artistic or scientific work" while the second offers the more evocative idea that collaboration entails "[t]raitorous cooperation with the enemy" (Tsing 2005: 245). I imagine that this is something that has been going on the Brent area since the first influx of humans, and only increased with the influx of European colonization and global contact. Aboriginal guides from Rama first brought the explorer Dr. G.B. Hayes through in the late eighteen-hundreds taking money to help the enemy explore a rival groups' territory.

But even then it was insisted in the words of the colonists that one Indian was little

196 different from the other and that "savages" had no conception of the land as a resource in need of "improvement" (Huitema in Lemieux et al. 2005). Again, it is obscured by these distinct categories that not all colonists felt this way and that many of them married and had children with Aboriginal Peoples (Saul 2009). Some of these "mixed" marriages ended up with the "inter-ethnic" or "inter-racial" children working as loggers or even for the government ministries, compounding the complications of heritage when they may very well also hold leases that might be taken away should there be trouble with either the 2017 negotiations or the handover of the Park to Algonquin Peoples

(who may very well be kin).

A man came into the store one day while I was on my way out the door to grab two bags of firewood and a block of ice from the porch. He spoke loudly, and moved quickly, and Jake's eyes followed him closely while he walked around the place. He asked if Gant was around today. "Isn't it garbage day today?" he questioned Jake.

"Yup."

"Is Gant drivin'the truck then today, I guess? So he'll be back in the morning then? I got these three damn Poplars that are killin'my view and they're chokin'a little

Birch that I want to grow nice. I was gonna cut'em but I don't wanna... how long does it... it's gonna take forever to get a permit so I just cut'em eh. I don't want to get in trouble for runnin'the chainsaw but nobody can hear it if he's not here." The poplar trees he was talking about were the ornamental Black Poplar native to Europe that

197 colonized parts of North America along with the influx of European people since the late sixteen-hundreds. The White Birch though is yet another colonist, native as well to

Europe and with a similar history having been transplanted to North America first as an ornamental plant.

The conflict between the two species plays itself out in ways that seem mimicked by the conflicts between various people who may be identified as sharing

"colonial" heritage in Europe or elsewhere. And what is so often forgotten in the discussion is the native species left to struggle without a niche that it has become adjusted to, as I imagine a honeysuckle vine choking and dying without the spine of the poplar to climb and the Ruby-Throated Hummingbird becoming a distant memory in the area as it loses its source of sustenance. It would seem that surveillance is not enough to ensure the protection of biodiversity, because while it was mentioned in the store that the poplar was not only invasive but a clone and that there was no harm to the species in downing three clones, the naturalized birch escaped memory as a post- colonial remnant and perhaps gained undue protections in the process (Algonquin Eco

Watch 2009). But to cut any of the trees first requires an aesthetic sensibility, a choice of intervention in the most bio-political sense (Foucault 1978).

The hubris of Canadian post-colonial settlement patterns has allowed more than plants to become naturalized, as the choice to weed or not to weed, or to classify one plant or another as a weed often goes unquestioned, assumed as the imperative of

198 belonging attached by people to various places, differently understood and treated.

Here the impact of a post-colonial national-cultural imaginary, and the composition of national-nature that it entails, come around to justify the interventions of people in nature in ways that they may not be properly prepared to even see the impacts of. This forces a radical rethinking of the image of nature that Canadians often take for granted by making visible the biological impacts of choices affected by politics and written off as simply or strictly aesthetic. I see an uneasy similarity in the treatment of the settlers/cottagers, the logging interests, and Aboriginal Peoples, of the government, but also of one another. A complex and intertwined ambiguity of interests that play themselves out through everyday interactions in a pattern that re-inscribes traditions in haunted recreation. Here a story of the shoreline and understandings related to the place and its ecology demonstrates the impact of a conception of national-nature that refuses to come to terms with the traces of colonization, instead reiterating the need to further colonize by erasing the political dimensions of actions taken to be purely aesthetic. This pattern of re-appropriation and refusal haunts visits to the Park, and official representations of the Park, by hiding the ways that power operates to dismiss the claims to belonging made by some, in favour of those more easily controlled, monitored, and most pertinently, capitalized upon.

199 No Conclusion:

Torch Sons

Fig. 37—Downtown Brent (2010)

It should be obvious that no single text can do an adequate job in summarizing all that there is to know about Algonquin Provincial Park, or all of the things that the various places in the Park can mean to the different people who have or haven't visited them. It should, but this doesn't seem to be the case at all, as so many of the book titles sold by the Friends of Algonquin Park make reference to the grand, global or summary idea of the Park-as-a-whole. Strickland and Lundell's 1993 photo-biography of the

Park takes the authoritative title "Algonquin: The Park and Its People," while

Algonquin Eco Watch released 2009's "Algonquin Park: The Human Impact" as if a

200 collaboration between different disciplines could fully capture all that has been done in and to the Park and all that could come of the place in the future.

My understanding of the Park and of the time that I spent in Brent getting to know some of the people who visit the ghost town or who still claim "resident" status suggests that it has more to offer than these reductions can ever hope to summarize. By framing visits (and life) in the Park through the twin lenses of authentic tourist experience and conservation, possible directions for fixture efforts to protect the Park and its People are occluded as people become part of the composition of threat. In this ethnography I have sought to show how the reproduction of social inequality takes place in part through representations of the past and of nature, which reconstitute a Canadian national-cultural imaginary that is haunted by the denial and erasure of contrary identifications and ways of belonging in the place. The sustainability of relationships structured around this imagination of nature and of one another must be interrogated further. The cooption of ideas of nature and of cultural or ethnic difference has allowed the state to make claims to territory through appropriating the lives of people who care for the area, while insisting paradoxically that only state sanctioned ways of making a life are in harmony with efforts towards ecological sustainability.

Similarly, the complex and intertwined roots of the Park's history and the geography that it is layered upon have directed my attention to how certain claims regarding the nature of place, such as those of the Algonquin Peoples or the Ontario

201 Federation of Hunters and Anglers work to thwart one another while simultaneously obscuring how collaborations might be more beneficial for both parties. In this way I have sought to problematize the historical representation of the Park and more specifically, to draw attention to the historical traces that are present and often dismissed concerning the past of the Brent area and Indigenous occupation. This draws attention to the disenfranchising operations of the state in the formation of certain identities and the territorialization of the conservation area, but also brings awareness to the contrary claims of title and responsibility made by First Nations people from the

Algonquin Nation of Ontario and to those claims made by the lease-holders as well.

In following these complex interconnections I try to guide the attention and concerns of those who read these gestural sedimentations, the concrete examples of culture that I and these words and images are implicated in re-producing. Conjuring the complicated and paradoxical relationships that help to both continuously re-territorialize the place as a conservation area and to maintain personal attachments, this ethnography attempts to destabilize the state's efforts to instil a sense of anxiety surrounding encounters with the natural and with racially coded "others" imagined as somehow closer to nature. Unsettling visions of the natural helps to draw attention to the continuation of post-colonial relations in Canada, as well as to the collusion between

(post-) colonialism, capitalism and naturalism in reproducing the national-cultural imaginary and the stratifying effects of fixed historical identifications on Canadian society. I hope then that this effort is not taken as a thrust to capture and conserve the

202 Park or its People as has been so familiarly done in the past, but instead to help open space for the Park to make more contact, to increase its potential to relate and be related to and to foster opportunities to find more ethical grounds in the territory upon which to stand together in our approaches both towards nature and towards one another.

Agonism may be such an approach, remaining open to the negotiated indeterminacy of shifting identities, foregrounding how attachments to places are constructed and sustained through the force of the national-cultural imaginary and gesturing towards how things might be done otherwise. Rather than either lamenting the loss of the past or living in fear of the failure to conserve through forms of haunted recreation, recognizing the need for a settler colony to continually re-negotiate relationships toward the place and toward Indigenous "others" could give rise to a form of ecological agonism. This concept might be more able to deal with the constantly shifting geo political terrain that dances under post-colonial feet and with the need to unsettle colonial trajectories in relation to the land and to one another.

The Brent Run

There's a competition amongst Canoe Lake "locals" called the Brent Run where a pair of canoists make their way "from the middle of Canoe Lake to Brent and back, and times are measured to the closest hour" (Lundell & Strickland 1993: 128). The reason why they don't measure to the minute or second is because, in the words of one competitor, "[t]he Brent Run is not done for public recognition... There is no reason 203 why you would want to take someone's twenty-seven-hour paddle and beat them by ten

minutes; it's the kind of race where both teams can claim the twenty-seven-hour

accomplishment." (Lundell & Strickland 1993:129)

I think this is the kind of example that I'm looking for in explaining how it is

that "being-there" helps to foster not only appreciation for the land, but also for those

who work so hard to make their lives from places they prize and who work at the same

time to increase the sustainability of their presence (Braun 2002: 16). "The rules of the

race are all unofficial... there are people who keep time... but the rest is up to the

paddlers. I suppose that doesn't make it a legitimate affair in a lot of people's eyes, but

that's the nature of the race and that's one of its charms." (Lundell & Strickland 1993:

129)

The rules of the Brent Run draw out how this kind of challenge to one's self can

engender an appreciation of other's efforts based in the feeling of shared accomplishment, rather than single-mindedly celebrating the results of individual

ability. At the same time, the rules suggest that keeping track of the effort can be done

without losing track of the possibility that in any attempt there is always room for improvement. And, as I come to the end of this paddle I hope for a few more things; that others appreciate the effort and that they may want to put in some of their own, but mostly, that I get a chance to better my own efforts on the next Brent Run.

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214 Tyler, Stephen A. (1986) "Post-Modem Ethnography: From Document of the Occult to Occult Document." In Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography.

James Clifford & George E. Marcus [eds.] Berkeley, C.A.: University of California

Press.

Wakeham, Pauline. (2008) Taxidermic Signs: Reconstructing Aboriginality.

Minneapolis, M.N.: University of Minnesota Press.

Weber, Max. (2002) The Protestant Ethic and the "Spirit" of Capitalism. Toronto,

O.N.: Penguin Group (Canada).

Whiteduck, Kirby J. (2002) Algonquin Traditional Culture: the Algonquins of the

Kitchissippi Valley: Traditional Culture at the Early Contact Period. Pikwakanagan

(Golden Lake), Algonquin First Nation, O.N.: The Council of the Algonquins of

Pikwakanagan and Kirby J. Whiteduck, B.A. (Hons.) Anthropology, York University.

Whiteduck, Kirby J. (2009) "Our Majestic Forests: An Aboriginal View of Algonquin

Park" in Algonquin Park: The Human Impact. David Euler [ed.] Espanola, O.N.: OJ

Graphics Inc. & Algonquin Eco Watch.

Wilton, M., Euler, D., Wilton, M., Banks, H., Campbell, H., Gamble, L., Hogg, E.,

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215 Films & Television Programs

"Enter the Dragon" (1973) Robert Clouse [dir.]

"Ghostbusters" (1984) Ivan Reitman [dir.]

"Ghost Hunters" (2004-publication) Pilgrim Film & Television Productions.

"The Loggers of Algonquin Park" available at

http://www.algonquinpark.on.ca/virtual/video_gallery/