melanie garcia

Take a walk along the edge of Williston Lake on a clear winter day and you’ll hear the landscape speak. The faint groan of shifting ice on the water, wind blowing down from the mountains and whistling through the driftwood. This is Tsay Keh Dene territory, approximately 500km north of Prince George, situated at the northern tip of Williston Lake, an artificial body of water created by the flooding of ancestral lands for the construction of the W.A.C. Bennet Dam in the 1960s.  Tsay Keh Dene was one of the Tsek’ene bands that were displaced several times before settling in its current location in the early 1990s.  The flooding claimed more than 300 000 acres of forestland, traditional hunting and harvesting grounds and burial sites, while changing the wildlife biodiversity and way of life for the Tsek’ene living in the Rocky Mountain Trench.

In November 2017 I had the opportunity to visit in Tsay Keh Dene First Nation as an artist-in-residence with the N’we Jinan Integrative Arts Program.  I spent five weeks at Tsay Keh Dene School offering collage workshops to forty students, ranging from kindergarten to the grade twelve students who would become the first high school graduates of the community.

The images are part of a series of photos I took that November/December 2017, walking around the community as winter settled in. The quotes that accompany the images are from a video chat conversation facilitated in December 2018 by TKD School principal Reid Betts and myself, with three grade ten students, Aurora Pierre (13), Rayn Davies (16), Katana Davies (13).

The conversation was edited for clarity.

Aurora: I like the sky, [it’s] like a rainbow, pink and blue…

Reid: Lots of colours; is that something you see a lot here?

Aurora: Nope!

Rayne: I just like it!

Melanie: Have you guys gone up that mountain?

Aurora: Nope, I’m too scared!

Reid: -but they have, they’ve been in these mountains quite a bit growing up.

I don’t think they’ve been to the top but in the bottom area [base of the mountain]. That’s [Mount] Chowika- you’ve been there.

Melanie: What did you do up there?

Aurora: Catch frogs.

Melanie: What do you do with the frogs that you catch?

Aurora: (Laughing) Throw them in the fire! I’m joking!

Rayne: We just let them go.

Melanie: How do you catch a frog?

Aurora: Just catch it-just grab it!

Melanie: Aren’t they fast?

Aurora: They’re small-

Rayne: -and slow!

Aurora: I kept one once and kept it in a big jellybean jar and it died.

Melanie: Do you guys like winter?

Rayne: No.

Aurora: In summertime we’re like: “we love winter!”

Rayne: I’d like summer now, winter’s too long.

Melanie: What are your favorite winter or snow things?

Aurora: Skidooing! Sliding! Snowballs too!

Reid: Do you ever go ice fishing?

Aurora: No.

Rayne: I’ve been. […] We got a really big fish but had to put it back, because it was too big.

Reid: You couldn’t get it out of the hole?

Rayne: No, we got it out but-

Aurora: -you never take out fish [that’s] too big, because it has too much mercury in it.