On a major archeological site, the Mantle Site—named after its last farm family occupants—hundreds of flags and drinking straws mark post moulds, hearths and other obvious remains of more than 60 longhouses representing several village incarnations that must have been home to thousands of aboriginal …

Six Nations (the Haudenosaunee people) occupiers watch smoke rise from a wooden bridge allegedly burned by protestors in reaction to an Ontario Provincial Police raid earlier that day as they attempted to break a 7 week-old occupation of a 40-hectare housing development site called the …

Vaughan, Ontario. One Grave: Four Hundred Souls
Approximately 43°52’6.47″N  79°32’23.53″W, facing East, circa August 15, 2005
In the days immediately following the discovery of an apparent mass grave exposed by a road grader that was widening the roadway to service a new housing development, archeologists work …

Newmarket, Ontario. New Sod and a lone Maple on the banks of the East Holland River.
Approximately  44° 4’35.87″N  79°27’30.06″W facing East circa May 1 2005
From this former field, topsoil has been removed for commercial redeployment elsewhere leaving a parched canvas of clay and weeds upon …

Near this place where workers lay sod on top of the snow on Staines Road in Markham, a crime that Ipperwash Inquiry Commissioner The Honourable Sidney B. Linden describes as “A particularly significant instance of the desecration of an Aboriginal burial site”, occurred. Bones fragments—from …

During a regional cross-country meet, several of the hundreds of participating local public school children race past the house where my Scottish ancestors settled in the 1830s. Since the 1950s that house has operated as a public museum, and its surrounding 225 hectares of farmland …

Nearly a century before this project—Elegy—a forestry graduate, Edmund J. Zavitz, toured southern Ontario much of which was succumbing to desertification as a result of colonial clear-cutting. Topsoil blew away threatening its inhabitants with local food shortages, and meanwhile massive sand dunes blocked roads and …

 
“Greenfields”—literally green, undeveloped farm fields—are the preferred substrate for developers because greenfield development is cheaper and simpler than the development of already built environments that need retrofitting and demolition. When immersing oneself in a project examining human impact on the land, snow brings both a …