John Macfie: People of the watershed

J Walters — Tue, 07 May 2024 13:03:00 +0000

An exhibition of rarely seen photos offers a candid and intimate portrait of life in Indigenous communities in Canada’s Hudson Bay watershed in the 1950s and 1960s.

Henry Kechebra calling a moose, Mattigami Reserve, 1959, photograph, John Macfie fonds, Archives of Ontario

The exhibition at the McMichael includes more than 100 photographs taken by John Macfie (1925–2018), a settler trapline manager who worked in Northern Ontario in those decades. He recorded life in Anishinaabe, Cree, and Anisininew communities far north of Lake Superior, in the territory along James and Hudson Bay.

Seal blubber hanging to dry in Attawapiskat, August 29, 1963, photograph, John Macfie fonds, Archives of Ontario.

Employed by the Ontario Department of Land and Forests, Macfie spent more than a decade traveling across lakes, rivers, forests, and tundra, becoming familiar with both the land and the Indigenous communities, capturing with his camera the activities, warmth, and resilience of the people he met.

Child in a tikinagun, Lansdowne House, 1956, photograph, John Macfie fonds, Archives of Ontario

Curated by nîpisîhkopâwiyiniw (Willow Cree) author Paul Seesequasis at the McMichael Canadian Art Collection, the exhibition is titled People of the Watershed: Photographs by John Macfie.

Miss Gray, daughter of Duncan Gray, Fort Severn, c. 1955, photograph, John Macfie fonds, Archives of Ontario

The exhibition is part of the Contact Photography Festival (the Macfie exhibition runs May 11-Nov 17 at The McMichael in Kleinberg, Ontario)

Archives of Ontario fonds description of John Macfie’s 1390 photographs, negatives and slides.

John Macfie – Canadian Art Junkie

John Macfie: People of the watershed