Excerpt from
People of the Watershed: Photographs by John Macfie
John Macfie (1925–2018), a settler trapline manager who worked in Northern Ontario in the 1950s and 1960s, travelled with a camera, recording life in Anishinaabe, Cree, and Anisininew communities during a period of intense and rapid change. The people of Attawapiskat, Sandy Lake, Mattagami, and other places across the Hudson Bay watershed are revealed through his lens in ways that emphasize the warmth and continuity of Indigenous community life.
Paul Seesequasis, a nîpisîhkopâwiyiniw (Willow Cree) curator, writer, journalist, cultural advocate, and commentator, came across Macfie’s photography while conducting image research at the Archives of Ontario. Building on his acclaimed Indigenous Archival Photo Project and a years-long correspondence with Macfie, Seesequasis presented his exhibition of Macfie’s photography at the McMichael in 2024, and it is currently travelling on a seven-venue tour across Ontario. The following is an excerpt from Seesequasis’s essay for the accompanying catalogue:
Macfie understood from the beginning of his time in the watershed region that this way of life was passing into history, and this realization inspired him to capture it in photographs—to make a record not just of the way things were done but, importantly, the people who did them. The longevity of this extended project, a full decade, is also remarkable. That and his sense of vocation created a connection to his subjects that would not have been possible were he just an outsider passing through. After a time, people knew who he was. He developed friendships. Macfie was interested in everything, and was always curious to know more about the people he met.
People of the Watershed is the first exhibition focused on Macfie’s photographs. Seen together, they form an ambitious, wide-ranging visual account of the people, the lands, and the life of the watershed. Yet there is an intimacy here. This is the product of an attachment built over time: it feels less like an investigation and more like immersion, as if the photographer were trying to explore not only the community but also his own sense of belonging. “I do not propose to depict a time that is either better or worse than any other,” Macfie writes with a typical lack of sentimentality. “The collection simply represents one moment in the continuing evolution of the lifestyle of the northern Algonquians of this region.”
One might call Macfie a journalist of the people. He had no wish to write about politicians or the powerful, but rather about working people and the land that shaped their lives. After a decade in the northwest of the province, the Macfies finally settled in Parry Sound. Macfie wrote popular columns for the Georgian Bay Beacon and the Parry Sound North Star. “Wherever John went, whether working with First Nations in Northwestern Ontario or with people here in Parry Sound, he not only listened, he specifically engaged people and sought their stories,” his friend Andy Houser recalled.
John Macfie
Henry Kechebra calling a moose, Mattigami Reserve
1959
photograph
John Macfie fonds, C330-14-0-0-22, Archives of Ontario.
John Macfie
Miss Gray, daughter of Duncan Gray, Fort Severn
c. 1955
photograph
John Macfie fonds, C330-14-0-0-75, Archives of Ontario.
John Macfie
Man sitting against a building with a church in the background, Sandy Lake
c. 1952
photograph
John Macfie fonds, C330-14-0-0-103, Archives of Ontario.
John Macfie
A Cree boy at Weenusk with a caribou skull
February 20, 1955
photograph
John Macfie fonds, C330-14-0-0-148, Archives of Ontario.
People of the Watershed: Photographs by John Macfie
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