Process: Stirling Steward #1
On the day we arrive Jeanne recounts a story from when she was in the far North of Quebec living with the Inuit. At the beginning of winter a man returns to the house after being the first to walk out onto the lake that year. He tells those gathered that "someone walked out onto the frozen lake today". He does not use the word "I". The experience was his & yet he shares ownership of it with a community, with the collective.
As I begin to find relationship with this white land, with the extremes of weather & temperature, this sense of collective experience & responsibility pervades my thoughts & feelings. This is a place where the original peoples have been cut out of the land, where the original forests are being felled yet there's a spirit of resilience - in the silence, the wildness, the enormity.
Stirling Steward
