Editor’s Note: This is the sixth post in Part IV of the Visual Cultures of the Circumpolar North series edited by Isabelle Gapp and guest edited by Jonathan Peyton.
The following essay is in two parts, reflecting on two small art projects that examine and engage with extractivism in northern Manitoba.
“What have we given in exchange?” at minute 10’25 is the crux of the 2023 experimental short film We Haven’t Yet Said Thanks. Through a commanding stare, the audience is asked to reconsider its understanding and regard for what rock is, and what is within.
In a collaboration between photographer Hilary McDonald and dance artist Kristy Janvier, this short film / moving poem examined the relationship between a Canadian subarctic community’s extractive mining and the massive natural structures lived upon, and taken from.
The rocks of this landscape are geologically defined as volcanic basalts with interbeds of sedimentary layers billions of years old (with younger sandstone neighbours), ore-bearing and idle. They are also the living Grandfathers. Around the world and within different Indigenous communities, rocks are sentient beings, slow-moving, Earth’s oldest witnesses. With guidance from local friends, Elders, and in memory of a beloved teacher and rock sculptor, we are told they are alive.
Having both of us lived and worked globally, we were careful about turning inward, focusing on our common hometown in mining-rich northern Manitoba. We were mindful with who the ‘we’ of the story was. To Kristy, of Dene ancestry, the relationship to rock as a being, and rock as an economic resource, was complex. To Hilary, a metallurgist’s daughter, it was important that the heaviness of industrial locales suited a poetic tale.
A nuanced story emerged. Rock has personhood and thus rock became the main character: feeling it all. Costumes were metaphors: a grey grandfatherly coat served as the exterior layer for what was within. Rock spirit was clad in protective steel-toe boots. A metallic party dress signified the revelry when high metal prices create an economic boom. Mining coveralls were repaired, made safe, by a beader’s careful needlework.
To appeal to an audience anywhere, a simplified dreaminess within a quotidian reality was the film’s aesthetic. What was on-hand was used, what was usual was done, all in available light. Prayers in a rocky basement, decisions in a non-descript office, preparing a healing in a workshop’s garage, hard truths in the snow. The industrial hum of the underground, or the sound of lake ice decaying, shape-shifting from a solid into columnar needles, and finally into water — collected sounds also enhanced the setting of the film and suggested change.
Rock-character walked through a mining landscape communicating emotion and the indirect aspects of extractivism such as progress, overreach, and reckoning. Industry declared the copper and zinc-rich volcanogenic massive sulfide ore deposits of the area’s rock depleted, and so it was shown, personified by movement, what rock’s exhaustion looked like.
In conclusion, rocks are alive, their full-existence often fails to be acknowledged. Here, both on Indigenous territory1 and mining land, we have taken; it was asked what has been given in return.2
When photographing a mine’s last day of production in June 2022, ‘thank you rock, for your strength’ was my singular thought from underground. Nearly a kilometre and a half of rock separated me from the surface.
Shifting perspectives and venturing beyond common tropes is the aim of photography. I was familiar with how my hometown’s major industry had been depicted by the many talented local image makers through the (nearly) 100 years of continual operation; I wanted to pay homage.
I was familiar with what was also online, professionally shot and lit, captured by outsiders. Communicating size, might, and longevity is what industry usually demands itself to look like.
I was also familiar with how easy it was to characterize the very size, might, and longevity of metal production as villainous in an environmental narrative. It is easy for bold images to casually criticize rugged infrastructure and external signs of wealth atop a forested paradise. Extraction has huge environmental repercussions in plain view right in our own backyard. And, that cost has brought great benefit: close to where we live there is abundant rock containing highly-concentrated ores, which we blast, remove, heat, and process into metal. We have made and sold what the greater world needs to keep itself connected.
All tensions exist. What did it all mean to me, on a mine’s last day?
Mike Korchinski, the mine’s foreman, paused under a single overhead lamp— the moment represented, for me, a hopeful portrait of extractivism.
Chiaroscuro-esque lighting brought forward both subjects from the darkness, as equals. A lone mining figure not up against a background of rock, not in domination over it, but rather in rock, with it.
The human components are just as important in stories of extractivism as the material culture created. We send everyone we know and love down below to work, we have for millennia. Humans put great trust in rock alongside all of the scientific engineering used to remove and alter it. Rock holds.
The mine closed its active operations the next day and has now moved into a post-extraction phase of maintenance. Workers who were once able to drive home minutes after emerging from a long shift underground, now work elsewhere, uprooting a week at a time. Moving to rotational-work life a two-hour drive away has meant numerous upheavals in local families; partners are left holding households together and change takes its toll.
A small-town’s industry chugs on through the years and simply adapts. Demographics change. Innovation and fresh expertise are increasingly hard to recruit to the north as the local population, with so much experience underground, ages and retires. Without familiarity of peoples’ long histories in an area, exploitation can quicken. Temporary workers or visiting consultants might have little connection; home is elsewhere. This entire mining belt region is home to multiple Indigenous communities whose ways of life, especially hunting, are affected by industry’s footprint, hand-in-hand with the possibility of good jobs nearby.
The social stories of connection and disconnection brought on by extractivism are felt all over northern Manitoba. Many of these were felt on the last day of operation. Industry might frame a landscape of rock solely through a lens of metal production; the reason for my journey underground and the making of a poetic film was to help communicate a different view.
Notes
[1] The mining community of Flin Flon, Manitoba sits north of 54 degrees latitude and some of its operations are found within the Territory of the Treaty 5 Adhesion.
[2] We Haven’t Yet Said Thanks was funded by a National Screen Institute (NSI) and Cinematoba grant for first-time filmmakers to explore the topic of gratitude within Manitoba.
Feature image: Detail of a local house’s jagged rock foundation of an unused basement area. We build our houses atop such rocks. Tiny crystals and cobwebs within the rocky cracks catch the light. Photo: Hilary McDonald.
Hilary McDonald
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