Michelle Wilson
On this map, we, The Coves Collective, illustrate the land we traced with our bodies during walks and workshops and recorded with GPS apps (see the white-on-white stitches). We create images with threads stained and dyed with plants from this place. Soils with long memories nourished these plant beings. These soils remember the relationships that played out across their surfaces, the toxins that leached down or were born through groundwater, and the bullets and chemical tanks embedded in their depths.
The Coves Collective, Tracing CareFull Paths, 2022-2023, Linen and cotton fabric, merino wool thread, black raspberry, goldenrod and black walnut dyes, time and community. Image courtesy of Michelle Wilson.
Before human memory, a retreating glacier formed the river known to its Anishinaabe stewards as the Deshkan Ziibi or Antler River. Later, some of the Deshkan Ziibi’s flow split off from its mother and, seeking a path of least resistance, formed an oxbow meander, creating what is now an island of land nestled in the crook of a horseshoe of muddy ponds.[1] Settlers had yet to sever this meander from its mother when the Deshkan Ziibiing Anishinaabeg signed McKee Treaty No. 2 and London Township Treaty No. 6.[2] As deceitful as those treaties were, written in the barely decipherable legalese of land transfer and only vaguely resembling the minutes and memories from the negotiations they emerged from, one thing is clear: the Deshkan Ziibiing Anishinaabeg never surrendered their rights and responsibilities to their traditional land, which London, Ontario, now occupies and never ceded title to the bed of the Deshkan Ziibi.[3]
Following the ponds’ banks today, we have found that only one trickling finger stretches toward the Deshkan Ziibi. The severing of the Deshkan Ziibi and the meander began over a century ago when railway embankments blocked the river inflow. Still, we understand this place, known as the Coves, as part of the watershed that the Deshkan Ziibiing Anishinaabeg nation never ceded. But what does ownership mean when we understand that this area also falls under the inherent Indigenous rights of the Minisink Lunaape (Munsee- Delaware Nation) and the Onyota’a:ka (Oneida Nation of the Thames)? The waters that wore away the banks that define and protect this place also mark it as a place where we can feel what should be palpable throughout this town, province, and country; we are on Stolen Native Land.
So, who does this land belong to?
The Coves Collective, Tracing CareFull Paths (detail), 2022-2023, Linen and cotton fabric, merino wool thread, black raspberry, goldenrod and black walnut dyes, time and community. Image courtesy of Michelle Wilson.
This answer, again, returns us to the river. In 1937 the Deshkan Zibii crested its banks and swamped much of London, Ontario. In response, the city instituted flood control measures that arrested the seasonal submerging of the lowlands held within the oxbow. Thus, on the eve of the Second World War, the Canadian government, which had been operating a rifle range and training ground here, offered up this land for agriculture.
At the same time, the increasing danger posed by Nazi Germany led the Wolf family, who were Jewish, to flee their home in Czechoslovakia. In 1939 Henry Wolf purchased nearly all the land we have mapped in this piece, Tracing CareFull Paths. He planted a fruit orchard, built a house, and quietly continued his centuries-old family trade, mixing paint in an old washing machine in the basement.
Henry Wolf and his family established the Almatex Paint Company within a decade, the buildings multiplying, and the land smothered in concrete. The business thrived in the forties and fifties, developing a unique plastic finish paint specifically for the Canadian contribution to the war that had displaced the factory’s founders. Before anyone could raise alarms about the environmental impact, Almatex became a significant employer in the city.
The factory closed in 2001. Its warehouses, laboratory, and factory are gone. However, the chain-link fences topped with barbed wire, cement pads, and blocks of concrete threaded with rebar remain, marking where men mixed heavy metals, solvents, and binders to make paint.
Throughout the hot, dry summer months of 2022, The Coves Collective led walks through a hole in the fence to this site. We poured water gathered from the ponds onto a living artwork: a ring of goldenrod planted into a trench we cut into the cement with a circular saw. This goldenrod removes lead in the soil, one of the many invisible presences Almatex left behind. In the center of the ring, we marked our presence by stacking rocks and chunks of concrete to form a cairn. In August, the former factory site is similarly ringed with four-foot-high goldenrod, nourishing swarms of bees, vibrantly declaring that these plant beings are already working to heal this place. The Coves Collective’s work humbly draws attention to what these plant beings have already begun.
Bee pollinating golden goldenrod at the Coves, 2022. Image courtesy of Michelle Wilson.
We told those who accompanied us on our walks about Mrs. Ayshi Hassan, who wrote to the city in 1971 and informed them that all the birds had left the area, driven away by the stench of noxious fumes. We told them about the “paint pit” that children set on fire in 1966; creating a column of smoke that rose hundreds of feet above the land we stood on. We told them about the two towering evergreens that were felled in 1981 when a labour strike turned violent; the Almatex management replaced the trees with a giant pole topped with a CCTV camera. One day as we were sharing these stories, two deer raced around the interior perimeter of the fence, circling us before escaping through a gap known only to them. One of the youths with us that day asked, “What is the opposite of traumatized?”
Through mergers and acquisitions, Valspar, a subsidiary of Sherwin Williams, now holds title to this land. Their contractors only visit the site to test the groundwater through locked bright blue rectangular wells that dot the land.
But does the land belong to them?
The Coves Collective, Tracing CareFull Paths (detail), 2022-2023, Linen and cotton fabric, merino wool thread, black raspberry, goldenrod and black walnut dyes, time and community. Image courtesy of Michelle Wilson.
We walked the trails made by humans and animals and picked up the small apples that still grow on the trees planted by Henry Wolf. Decades ago, kids used to raid the orchard, collecting garbage bags full of apples to take home to their mothers, who baked them into pies. Someone from the factory once protected their property by shooting one of the kids in the ass with a shotgun packed with rock salt. On the path that weaves between the gnarled apple trees, we found half a ginger cat; consumed by the resident coyotes. A child left behind tobacco and the whispered words, “Rest in peace.” The Coves is a complex environment where care and violence, contamination and reclamation coexist. Even the youngest amongst us are negotiating their place in this complex entanglement.
As recently as the 1920s and thirties, the ponds that circle this land still flowed with water from the Deshkan Ziibi. They were so clear and clean that settlers set up ice-harvesting businesses on their banks. Now the only water that flows into them is runoff from streets and neighbourhoods, kicking the natural sedimentation process into overdrive. The water has become nearly opaque in places.
In the spring of 1970, almost all the fish in the East Pond died. Today there are thriving populations of turtles and Common Carp. The carp, a non-native giant in these small waterways, stir up the silt, keeping sunlight from penetrating the water and aquatic vegetation from taking root. Their large scales reflect bright sunlight as their golden heads break the surface of this low-oxygen water to gulp the air. Most of these carp are too big to be prey for the herons and egrets that have returned to nest on these banks. So, as the Coves Collective, we have tried to establish better relations with this place by harvesting carp. We honour their lives by eating their flesh (when it is safe), tanning their hides and transforming their scales into sequins. Carp leather and scales have been worked into the Tracing CareFull Paths map, marking the waters they call home.
We do this work because we attend to this place; as we walk here, harvest clay and plants here, and attempt to enter reciprocal relationships here. Not because this place belongs to us but rather because we, the Indigenous and non-Indigenous members of the Coves Collective, are in the process of belonging to this place.
The Coves Collective, Catching and caring for carp, 2022. Images courtesy of Michelle Wilson.
[1] Later the French called it La Tranchée. Most recently, Lieutenant Governor John Graves Simcoe called it the Thames River.
[2] The Deshkan Ziibiing Anishinaabeg are commonly known as the Chippewa of the Thames First Nation today.
[3] This is a brief and simplified interpretation of the treaty relationships in London, Ontario. For a thorough and more nuanced understanding, we urge you to read “London (Ontario) Area Treaties: An Introductory Guide” (2018) by Stephen D’Arcy.
Michelle Wilson is an artist and mother currently residing as an uninvited guest on Treaty Six territory in London, Ontario. She earned a Ph.D. in Art and Visual Culture from the University of Western Ontario and is currently a postdoctoral scholar with the Conservation Through Reconciliation Partnership at the University of Guelph.
Wilson is a founding and organizing member of the Coves Collective, which imagines an imbricated flourishing amidst the remains of an industrial ruin. Through the collective, artists, educators, community members and activists work together to attend to their responsibilities and relationships with the Coves. Through a focus on direct action, accessibility, collaboration, and justice, they reveal how the Coves Environmentally Significant Area is a beloved community destination, a rich biodiverse habitat, a site of environmental degradation, and a space of resistance, imagination, and bold ecological visioning. For more information about the Coves Collective, including current members, workshops and actions, visit the website.