as the mouth speaks

Transcript:

Soundwalks are invitations. They invite attentive listening while moving through a particular space. When I was here sparse remains of summer clung along the paved pathways through Biidaasige Park. Its cold but I am prepared, dressed in a long coat and weatherproof sneakers. You are listening at a different time but we are connected.

As you listen and our paths begin to overlap I invite you to move at your own pace, mine may differ from yours. Can you hold together the sounds from my time and yours. You may turn your headphones up or down, take one or both out, pause or start again, meandering is encouraged.

Practice listening without trying to grasp, take, control, know.

Transcript:

Walk to the water. Get as close as you can without touching it. Is the water still or in motion? If it is moving what direction does it flow?

Now look around you. What do you notice?

I can’t help but notice the array of dead trees mirroring the city skyline. Some stand tall like monuments to their own histories, others lay felled as their roots open up to view like storybooks. These trees did not stand here when they were alive, they have been carefully sourced and placed in order to replicate the natural cycles of wetland ecosystems.

An array of poles stand before me, brimming with more-than-human activity (much of it invisible to me), in the distance a pole to the east juts out above the Toronto Hydro Substation and another to the west emerges from the Hydro One Switching Yard (the inner workings of which also evading my knowledge).

Move as a guest towards the array of roots balls without disturbing what is around you. As you study the dense network of meandering tendrils. Follow one until you can’t any longer, then follow another. Keep getting lost in the roots of trees.

Transcript:

As my time and your time intersect imagine all the other tendrils of time that water connects us to. In the Pleistocene Epoch, also known as the "Ice Age,” the place where we stand was covered by the Laurentide Glacier which rose over a kilometre above us. Sheets of ice shifted and thawed over millennia becoming the prehistoric proglacial Lake Iroquois whose shores touched what is today known as Davenport Road. More recently, this place was marshland, known as Ashbridges Marsh. Settlers believed the marsh was an impediment to progress.

Not every place needs to be understood or accessed by humans. A colonial worldview saw the marsh as wasted land, when in fact it was rich with more-than-human life.

Look north to where the river intersects with multiple roadways. It may be hard to see but this is where the Don River splits in two. The 1886 ‘Don Improvement Project’ saw the Don River straightened and channelized, an attempt to harness the river’s utility and prevent flooding. It failed. In the early 1910s the Keating Channel diverted the heavily polluted Don River 90 degrees into Lake Ontario while the meandering mouth of the Don River was filled in along with the heavily polluted Ashbridges Bay Marsh where we stand.

Transcript:

Water levels rise and recede here. This island has been made to support seasonal and environmental changes. A coastal wetland ecosystem has been brought back to this place.

Toni Morrison said “All water has a perfect memory and is forever trying to get back to where it was.” Look around you to find a place where water’s memory is expressed. "Remembering like water complicates the colonial "past" and rescribes present and multivalent futures” (Céline Chuang, "what the river reveals: remembering like the water," 2022). Take in the sights, sounds and smells for a moment.

What will this place look, smell and sound like in 10 years, 100 years, 1,000 years? Begin to fabulate a story of the city’s future relation to water. Fabulation is when you imagine and speak about things as if they were real. Speak your story aloud, you may whisper if you choose. Let the sounds from my time weave together with your voice.

Keep walking until your story has ended.

I wonder, where do you end up?

Transcript:

The river’s mouth speaks, though settlers often don’t know how to listen. Remember, this is marshland, look across time for signs from the past and future. Like the meandering river, time doesn’t move in a straight line. Peat bogs and wetlands were buried under 25ft of dirt and gravel over a century ago.

Closer to this time heavy machinery excavates vast amounts of dirt and debris, much of it highly polluted. In those movements to remedy past mistakes the marsh ecosystem shares glimmers of its resilience. A bulldozer is halted. Thick green shoots jut up and block its movement. Sedges and cattails roar back to life after being trapped underground for over a century. Improvement was imagined as a straightened line, but water moved in cycles, retaining a history of all that it has encountered.

Breath in deeply through your nose, four, three, two, one. Now breath out slowly through your nose, five, four, three, two, one. Breath in, constricting the back of your throat. Emulate the sound of an ocean, hear your breath in your ears. Breath out, once again sounding the cycles of water.

Transcript:

The meandering mouth of the river was drawn into the land. Past relations with the Don River led by settlers showed that controlling water through channels and straightened paths does not work.

Sit down and close your eyes. Draw a meandering curving line, without interrupting this line drawing continue it straight, again keeping with the same line let it meander once again. You have drawn a map of the Don River’s trajectory from source to mouth. From meander to channel to meander once again.

A new mouth was drawn into the Land, its trajectory modelled after the pre-straightened Don River and the tentacular and marshy meanderings of the Rouge River.

Ookwemin Minising (Oh-kway-min Min-nih-sing) is the artificial island through which the new mouth flows. Following the Anishinaabemowin tradition of naming places after the Land itself the name Ookwemin Minising means ‘place of the black cherry trees’ which were once bountiful here where we stand and are now being planted throughout the Island.