John Macfie: People of the watershed

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.