Tobique Rock 360 degrees
There is a profound “spirit of place” where the St. John and Tobique Rivers meet in New Brunswick, Canada. It is the “spirit” of the ancestral home of the Maliseet Nation at Tobique. Tobique is still their home and it is where I was born. Maliseet oral traditions have described how the Maliseet culture hero- Klohskap- transformed the landscape to provide everything his people would need to live fulfilling lives. The river valley still emanates the spirit of those past transformations. However, more recent transformations such as the construction of hydroelectric dams have erased much of the evidence of Klohskap’s work. This is a common problem for many American Indian landscapes. Wisconsin’s “spirited” landscape is grounded in all the effigy mound sites. Unfortunately, they are also vanishing. In these landscapes, I have experienced the profound spirit of ancestral places but I also experienced the pain of loss over the diminishing of that spirit. These experiences are the driving forces behind my drawings and paintings. I am compelled to recreate and evoke American Indian “spirited” landscapes so others may participate in the spirit of ancestral places.