Peter Raymont is a filmmaker and co-founder of White Pine Pictures.
It’s a peaceful morning as we paddle across Lake Wakimika, beyond the northwest arm of Lake Temagami in northern Ontario. On an island near this small lake’s eastern shore, our paddling companion Wayne Potts, from the Teme-Augama Anishnabai First Nation on Bear Island, shows us images of creatures carved many thousands of years ago into the hard granite.
We make out a bull-moose and calf, a goose, a thunderbird and what appears to be a turtle morphing into a human. These petroglyphs were scored into the grey rock and are now just faintly visible. It’s thought that images of other creatures may be hidden beneath the crusty green lichen that adheres to the rocky surface. You need a learned guide and a skilled eye to see these images from the distant past. And you need patience to look carefully until the creatures’ shapes emerge from the smooth rock that forms much of the island.
Touching these images with closed eyes, one is transported into the past, long before contact with outsiders. One wonders what the artist was conveying. Were they telling a story? Imparting a vision? A dream? Why did they want to record and share these images?
Our canoe trip is organized by my old friend, documentary filmmaker and author James Cullingham, who knows these waters. We’re here, with family and friends, to commune with the greater forces, to feel the spirits of the past.
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We paddle into Lake Obabika, where Wayne’s cousin, Alex Mathias, shows us pictographs of thunderbirds painted in ochre on the rocky shore just above the waterline. “Lasts longer than Tremclad,” jokes Alex, a gentle man who’s been living in a cabin on Obabika for 28 years. Alex spends much of the summer leading canoeists to a grove of 350-year-old white pines and to the extraordinary Spirit Rock on Shish Kong Lake nearby. This dramatic limestone cliff has been a place of pilgrimage for Indigenous people for thousands of years. Recently it’s become a magnet for spiritual seekers from around the world.
Gazing at the 120-foot cliff, bathed in the yellow glow of late afternoon sunlight, Wayne tells us that originally each Ojibwe family had their own shaman or healer. The family with the most powerful shaman ran things back in the day. Wayne shared a story he’d heard that some elders in a fly-in-community further north had buried their knowledge – bundles and teachings written on birch bark scrolls – on an island. Some people had been misusing this knowledge, and so the elders gave strict instructions no one was to go there.
Wayne was also told by a Temagami elder that a rock with copper traces brought into the shaman’s shaking tent for healing and divination is no longer very effective, as there are now too many electronic signals in the atmosphere from TV, radio and cellphones.
It’s good for the soul to travel quietly, smoothly by canoe. The Temagami people were originally known as “The People of the Canoe” as they were especially skilled at fashioning them from the bark of birch trees particular to the region. The birches on Maple Mountain, or Chee-bay-jing, (the place where the soul spirit goes after the body dies), were particularly suited for canoe-making. Wayne remembers seeing stands there of birches with few lower limbs, like white pillars against the cobalt blue sky.
It’s the Bear Island people who stood so resolutely against the plans to expand the logging of the old growth forest in Temagami. Wayne’s brother, the late chief Gary Potts, along with supporters from the south including future Ontario premier Bob Rae, were arrested in 1989 in an act of civil disobedience, blocking the Red Squirrel Road to protect these sacred places.
In our few days in Temagami with Wayne, we are honoured to learn so much: how loons fly and make a particular call when high winds are expected; how green birch logs make perfect coals for slow cooking fires; how the bone dry wood of a red pine stump – a “sheeko” – can create quick heat, helping one survive a cold winter’s night. Wayne worries about the growing effects of climate change, with ice on the lakes breaking up almost a month earlier than normal this year.
On our last morning, after an early breakfast, choosing to get on the water before the inevitable wind, we stand in a circle, sharing memories of our days together, followed by warm hugs.
We return to the confined world of dusty roads, asphalt highways, cellphones and masks. It feels strange, at first, to move so quickly without paddling.
Images of those animal creatures and sacred spirits carved and painted on granite are now forever inscribed in my mind. I am so grateful for the opportunity to sense their timelessness.
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