This is the fifth post in our Urban and Environmental Dialogues series, published in collaboration with The Metropole.
I used to study cities through their official monuments, statues, and commemorative plaques. In the process, I started to understand cities through natural elements, including stones, floodlines, buried rivers, and tree canopies, which contain historical information within their environments. A countermonument is a public memory form that keeps history active through traces, absences, and repeated return, inviting people to interpret a place through what remains visible, fragmented, and ongoing.1 The sites I identify as countermonuments of ecology display ecological memory through their combination of geological and hydrological elements with pre-existing living ecosystems.
“A countermonument is a public memory form that keeps history active through traces, absences, and repeated return, inviting people to interpret a place through what remains visible, fragmented, and ongoing.”
The sacred Cree stone, Mistaseni, sometimes called the Buffalo Child Stone, emerged from the prairie ecosystem before flooding and demolition reshaped its valley. The urban sites I examine include Raymore Park on Toronto’s Humber River, the flood markers at The Forks and Oodena Celebration Circle in Winnipeg, and the hidden Garrison Creek valley in Toronto.
I write as a white settler scholar and filmmaker who resides and works on lands that belong to Indigenous peoples. The research draws on publicly accessible work by Indigenous scholars, Elders, and community organizations, while this post explores how settlers like me experience these landscapes.
Mistaseni: Sacred Stone, Sacred Valley
A glacial erratic once protruded from the South Saskatchewan River valley in southern Saskatchewan. The Buffalo Child Stone, known as Mistaseni, serves as a sacred site where Cree communities perform ceremonies and treaties, and receive teachings about the land and the buffalo.
Construction of the Gardiner Dam and the Qu’Appelle River Dam, which created Lake Diefenbaker, began in 1959 and finished in 1967. In December 1966, federal crews packed Mistaseni with dynamite and blew it apart to clear the way for the new reservoir. Cree Elders, community leaders, archaeologists, and students had already organized campaigns to protect the stone, including a 1966 Operation Mistaseni rally and rock concert at the University of Saskatchewan that featured Buffy Sainte-Marie.
Mistaseni is an example that shows how ecological countermonuments create memorial spaces. The stone provides a sacred link between human beings, buffalo, and the area’s unique geological features. The stone fragments, reshaped shoreline, and ongoing ceremonial activities at the site create a distributed countermonument that transforms through water movement, sediment deposition, and storytelling.
The settler order framework that Fred Burrill developed helps me better understand this situation.2 Canadian history develops through a social formation that depends on organized Indigenous land exploitation and resource extraction. The framework enables me to study urban environmental history by analyzing how parks, sewers, and cultural institutions uphold the same social structure as streets, and how ecological countermonuments reveal their operational limits.
Mistaseni demonstrates the most extreme site deformation, as the reservoir serves as an energy generator and irrigation water provider, while Cree law and teachings continue to regard the stone and its location as sacred and tied to ancestral responsibilities. The combination of lake views, rock fragments, ceremonial activities, and infrastructure elements creates an aporetic sensorium, a lived awareness of unresolved responsibility where sacred law and state infrastructure occupy the same place, that sustains this ongoing conflict.
From Sacred Valley to City
The investigation begins with Mistaseni in order to study urban areas that display water, stone, and living vegetation, which collectively store multiple historical records. I study these features as ecological countermonuments because I examine their physical forms, historical significance, and their ability to attract people to these areas.
The four sites at Raymore Park, The Forks, Oodena and Garrison Creek demonstrate distinct patterns of this dynamic.
Raymore Park: Flood Memory on the Humber River
The Humber River bend at Toronto hosts Raymore Park, which became a flood disaster zone during Hurricane Hazel in October 1954. The floodwaters destroyed the houses on Raymore Drive when the footbridge failed to hold its position and struck the residential buildings. The floodwaters claimed thirty-five lives on a single street. The government expropriated and destroyed properties to establish a new park in the flood-prone region.
A new memorial bridge spans the river, displaying plaques that describe the flood and the lives lost. The river valley preserves the flood event through its natural processes. The floodplain slope, bridge distance from banks, absence of houses, and mature tree placement create a story that visitors can understand after learning to identify these signs. The Hazel flood event led to institutional changes, including the creation of the Metropolitan Toronto and Region Conservation Authority (now the Toronto and Region Conservation Authority) and the establishment of new river valley planning regulations for the city.
The Humber River, together with its floodplain, functions as an ecological countermonument within Raymore Park. Here, it counters the city’s older memorial habit of treating disaster as a closed past marked by plaques alone, because the cleared floodplain and its enforced absence of housing keep risk, loss, and regulation visible in the everyday landscape. The park environment unites natural water power with land confiscation, conservation management and public recreational activities. People use the space for dog walks, bicycle rides, and bench sitting, while the area continues to remember both flood disasters and regulatory changes, as well as ongoing flood threats.
The Forks and Oodena: Floodlines and Constellations in Winnipeg
The Forks in Winnipeg is a sacred meeting point where the Red and Assiniboine Rivers converge, supporting Indigenous travel, trade, and spiritual ceremonies since ancient times. The site combines its ancient historical significance with modern market spaces, skating facilities, museums, and public art installations. The Market Plaza canopy features colored bands on its columns that mark major flood levels, including the 1826 and 1950 floods and a modelled 1997 level without the Red River Floodway.
People gather under the canopy to shop and attend outdoor events while experiencing the floodlines as architectural elements. The columns function as indexical matter because they connect all people in the plaza to previous water incidents and engineering decisions, which determined future flood patterns. The flood markers use architectural elements to create visual records which show both the unpredictable water cycle patterns and different flood management strategies.
The Oodena Celebration Circle features a shallow amphitheater facing the confluence of the rivers. The design team excavated through fill material to access an ancient archaeological site, while the site serves as a ceremonial area for community gatherings. The project demonstrates how public institutions, together with Indigenous communities, can defend their land and water connections through joint efforts.
The flood-marked columns together with Oodena create an intricate ecological monument that serves as a countermonument. The site combines Indigenous ceremonial design with tourist routes, flood-control infrastructure, river sediments, ice flows, and hydrological risks. The Forks creates a single experience through its floodplain management system, which integrates Indigenous cultural practices with commercial operations within its redesigned floodplain space.
Garrison Creek and Arbor Alma: Buried Waters, Living Canopies
The entire course of Garrison Creek operates as an underground system through sewer and conduit networks. The early twentieth century brought about the complete encasement of the creek, while engineers transformed the valley into multiple streets, schoolyards, and parks. The Lost Rivers maps, Discovery Walk routes, and community-led walks guide people to track the hidden watershed by using topographic features and maintenance access points to identify the creek’s path.
People visit sites where old bridge supports, wall structures, and unusual road depressions exist. The surface infrastructure demonstrates Toronto’s water management system’s evolution from open creeks to combined sewers, and its current plans for creek exposure. The creek exists within underground pipes before revealing itself through subtle signs that walkers can identify once they learn to recognize them.
My short film Arbor Alma (2008) shows how urban tree canopies and green spaces function as ecological countermonuments in regular city environments. The tree canopy functions as a historical archive because it reveals its past through its placement, health status, and lifespan. The tree canopy serves as a living archive that develops from hydrological and planning choices, providing residents with shade, colour, and seasonal changes.
The buried creek channel influences stormwater management and flood protection expenses, and surface vegetation affects property values and habitat preservation. The experience of walking through this corridor creates a distinct aporetic way of noticing—an embodied awareness of buried hydrology and its everyday consequences, which appears in Canadian cities built on modified water systems.
A Typology of Ecological Countermonuments
The four interconnected components that describe urban ecological countermonuments include indexical matter, archival traces, living relations, and ritual routes. The elements of these sites help people understand the existing records that land and water surfaces display.
Indexical matter
Indexical matter consists of physical elements which directly link to particular events or extended processes. The Lake Diefenbaker shoreline contains Mistaseni stone fragments, Raymore Park shows Hazel’s bridge abutment, The Forks displays colored flood bands, and Garrison Creek features its slopes and retaining walls as indexical matter. The physical elements of rock, concrete, and ground materials enable people to experience past events through their current material presence.
Archival traces
Archival traces include written texts, maps, plaques, and digital guides that connect historical information to specific locations. The sites of Mistaseni, The Forks, Oodena, and Garrison Creek feature archival traces through their treaty stories, flood hazard signs, conservation reports, interpretive texts, and Lost Rivers maps.
Living relations
Living relations maintain ecological memory through their continuous operations. The sites of Mistaseni, kihcihkaw askî, Oodena, Raymore Park, and Garrison Creek support ongoing preservation of ecological memory through their ceremonial activities, seasonal events, community walks, and daily park use.
Ritual routes
Ritual routes describe specific urban paths which people use repeatedly to follow the paths of ancient ecological systems. The three sites, Raymore Park, The Forks and Garrison Creek, qualify as ritual routes because they follow the paths that people use regularly.
Learning from Indigenous Urban Ceremonial Grounds
My research on Canadian urban ecological countermonuments grows through their connection to Indigenous-designed ceremonial sites that protect land and water resources. The Edmonton site kihcihkaw askî – Sacred Land is an exemplary model. The site occupies land that Indigenous communities have used for traditional practices of medicine gathering, ceremonial activities, and social gatherings. The City of Edmonton collaborated with Elders and Indigenous organizations to establish cultural and ceremonial areas, including sweat lodges, fire circles, medicine gardens, and learning spaces for intergenerational knowledge sharing. The design elements follow the natural creek valley shape, vegetation patterns, and soil conditions, while Indigenous laws and protocols guide all decision-making processes. The project demonstrates how public institutions, together with Indigenous communities, can defend their land and water connections through joint efforts.
When I studied Raymore Park, The Forks, and Garrison Creek through kihcihkaw askî and Mistaseni methods, it shows that these sites already contain ecological countermonuments that use sacred geographies and Indigenous knowledge systems, despite official signs promoting engineering, disaster management, and recreational activities. The land itself also carries treaty relationships, ceremonial histories, and ongoing responsibilities that shape how people move through these spaces.
Aporia, Settler Order, and My Own Position
The described countermonuments exist within the extensive Canadian aporetic condition, a historically produced field of tensions that organizes public life in Canada around land, water, extraction, and institutional responsibility.3 State entities promise reconciliation and climate action and Indigenous partnership, yet they continue to operate dams that destroy sacred sites, build fossil fuel infrastructure and authorize flood-prone urban development. The ongoing pattern of conflicting actions creates a defined pattern which shapes how people experience their urban environments.
The settler order framework developed by Burrill helps me better understand this situation by examining how streets, sewers, parks, and cultural institutions operate within the same social system, and by foregrounding the “structuring influence of settler colonialism” and “the ongoing theft of Indigenous lands and resources.4 Ecological countermonuments make those systems’ operational limits legible in place. I exist within the aporetic condition I describe, which I analyze from within these institutional arrangements. The research infrastructure and institutional systems that I rely on provide me with benefits, and my work focuses on developing new land-water relationships. By drawing on the knowledge of Indigenous scholars, elders, and activists who operate within their traditional legal and ceremonial frameworks, and by employing the settler order framework and reading these sites through aporia, I keep these conflicts visible and treat them as an ongoing responsibility for careful, accountable practice.
Reading Your Own City
Exploring ecological countermonuments begins with a simple practice and leads to complex questions. Walk along a local river, through a floodplain park, or across a buried creek valley. Notice slopes, bridge piers, seams in pavement, clusters of older trees, and sudden changes in ground texture. Ask which storms, projects, and decisions these features record. Ask whose stories appear on plaques and whose teachings live in land and water without an official marker.
In teaching and public history, this practice can shape field assignments, collaborative maps, and creative projects. Participants can trace local ecological countermonuments, connect them to planning histories and Indigenous place names, and imagine how public institutions might support long-term care for these sites. In community settings, this work can link floodplain justice, tree-canopy equity, and treaty responsibilities in ways that grow from particular places.
“Ecological countermonuments keep the Canadian aporetic condition visible and call for careful, situated work in response.”
Fragments of Mistaseni rest beneath Lake Diefenbaker. Floodlines climb the columns at The Forks. Trees along buried creeks lean toward light and water in patterns that echo older hydrology. Each site raises questions about how people might live with land and water in ways that recognize sacred histories, acknowledge structural violence, and support more accountable futures. Ecological countermonuments keep the Canadian aporetic condition visible and call for careful, situated work in response.
Notes
1 James E. Young, “The Counter-Monument: Memory against Itself in Germany Today,” Critical Inquiry 18, no. 2 (1992): 267–296; Quentin Stevens, Karen A. Franck, and Ruth Fazakerley, “Counter-monuments: The Anti-monumental and the Dialogic,” The Journal of Architecture 23, no. 5 (2018): 718–739.
2 Fred Burrill, “The Settler Order Framework: Rethinking Canadian Working-Class History,” Labour/Le Travail 83, no. 1 (Spring 2019): 173–197, https://doi.org/10.1353/llt.2019.0007.
3 John Bessai, “The Aporetic Condition in Canadian Public Policy: Cultural Resurgence and Ecological Transition,” Études canadiennes / Canadian Studies 99 (2025): 93–103, published online December 31, 2025, https://doi.org/10.4000/15g1r
4 Burrill, “Settler Order Framework,” 174.
Further Reading
Bessai, J. (2008). Arbor Alma (“The Giving Tree”). https://johnbessai.com/media/
City of Edmonton. (n.d.). kihcihkaw askî – Sacred Land. https://www.edmonton.ca/attractions-events/parks-rivervalley/kihcihkaw-aski
Cree Literacy Network. (2014, September 7). Blown up and 21 meters down, Mastaseni is still sacred. https://creeliteracy.org/2014/09/07/blown-up-and-21-meters-down-mastaseni-is-still-sacred/
Lost Rivers Project. (n.d.). Garrison Creek. http://www.lostrivers.ca/points/GarrisonCreek.html
Red Power Media. (2015, September 9). Sacred Buffalo Child Stone, blown up in 1966 for a dam project, lies underwater. https://redpowermedia.wordpress.com/2015/09/09/sacred-buffalo-child-stone-blown-up-in-1966-for-dam-project-lies-underwater/
Saskatchewan Indigenous Cultural Centre. (n.d.). Buffalo Child Stone: Interpretive Booklet (English). https://store.sicc.sk.ca/products/buffalo-child-stone-interpretive-booklet-english
Saskatchewan Indigenous Cultural Centre. (n.d.). Buffalo Child Stone. https://www.sicc.sk.ca/buffalo-child-stone
Toronto and Region Conservation Authority. (2024, October 3). Hurricane Hazel’s legacy. https://trca.ca/news/hurricane-hazel-70-years/
Feature Image: Bridge at Harbord Street over Garrison Creek in 1917, an example of how the buried valley still shapes contemporary circulation routes. City of Toronto Archives, public domain via Wikimedia Commons.
Latest posts by John Bessai (see all)
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