Buoyant Cartographies: Alternative mapping practices of the Detroit River

Buoyant Cartographies was a three-day collaborative mapping workshop that took place on the Detroit River from August 30 - September 2, 2018. The event was co-organized by three art-research collectives: The IN/TERMINUS Research Group (Lee Rodney and Michael Darroch, Windsor ON), Float School (Justin Langlois and Holly Schmidt, Vancouver, BC), and the Hamilton Perambulatory Unit (Donna Akrey and Taien Ng-Chan, Hamilton ON). Each group researched and led a walking tour of one of three shorelines on the Detroit River: the Detroit Shoreline, the Windsor Shoreline, and Peche Island, which sits in the middle of the Detroit River. Fifteen artists, historians, and urban researchers participated in the event providing maps and notations that reflected their expectations and observations about the river itself: what it facilitates, transports and connects, both in the present and the past. The workshop led to three publications and an exhibition by workshop organizers and participants.

Our workshop began with the premise that the Detroit River serves as a point of connection rather than one of division.  The workshop aimed to trace the historical and cultural relationships between water, practices of transit, and histories of migration before the Canada-U.S. border was established in this region, working against the grain of the borderline to observe the river as a space of migration and mobility. 

As the Canada-U.S. border has become one of the dominant and dividing narratives in this region, we were focused on the “art of noticing” (Akrey, Ng-Chan), exploring what kinds of narratives are told and repeated, and which ones are left out. We made use of the commonplace infrastructure of tourism to access the uncommon channels of a 21st-century borderscape that has limited and structured movement in and around the Detroit River. To guide our explorations we made workbooks to locate what is ordered, dominant and visible, and more importantly, to sense what is no longer available to be seen. The resulting maps, images, and videos collected here speak to the poetics of the river.

This space of the Detroit River has been multiply colonized: by the French and the British, by Canadians and Americans, and by transnational industry and surveillance structures. The Anishinaabemowin place name for the region of the Detroit River is Waawiiatanong Ziibi or, where the river bends (Russell Nahdee). This is the traditional home of the Three Fires Confederacy of the Ojibwe, Odawa, and the Potawatomi, as well as Huron/Wyandot. However, we did not hear or see a direct reference to ongoing indigenous presence in the region in the public monuments that dot the riverfront pathways, or in the place narratives that have shaped each city’s claim to the river. Our maps often noted the ways in which these national-colonial narratives are celebrated and performed, crafted into an uncomfortable sense of local pride that overlooks the environmental destruction, and built into waterfront plazas that offer competing visions of the river and its histories.

As water has traditionally posed problems for geographic surveys and boundary demarcation, we were attentive to mapping the ways in which water has facilitated (and continues to facilitate) the movement of people, animals, and plants in the region that surrounds the Detroit River as one of the oldest continuously settled areas in North America. The French colonial outpost Le D’Etroit has been described by historians as a “frontier metropolis” (Dunnigan) and recent historical accounts have woven together a more complex understanding of the nature of trade and slavery within this region. In The Dawn of Detroit ( 2017), the historian Tiya Miles describes the Windsor-Detroit region in the 17th - 19th centuries as the “straits of slavery” pulling together histories of the French fur trade and the American slave trade into a continuous and overlapping narrative in the middle of the continent that weaves together indigenous and black history into a transboundary account. Historical projects like this are essential to understanding the Detroit River and the Great Lakes region as a significant passage that has enabled many forms of migration, casting new light on the legacy of the underground railroad and histories of slavery that extend into Canada.

We also took time to mark critical points of ambiguity in the official Canadian and American narratives. We were directed to observe how indigeneity was mythologized into a “curse” on our visit to the “ruins of Peche Island'' and how the present-day “Freedom Monument” in Windsor stands on the site of the former McDougall Corridor, a predominantly Black neighborhood that was cleared to make way for Windsor’s city hall campus of the 1960s. While no public history can ever claim to be complete, these absences are sensed in the authoritarian scale of the concrete plaza surrounding the world’s largest Canadian flag on the Windsor riverfront, or through the General Motor’s plaza on the opposite Detroit shoreline, where a granite map of the world of GM operations provides a permanent walking surface at the gateway to the Riverwalk. We see Buoyant Cartographies as part of an ongoing conversation on how to decolonize borders and how to think beyond the limitations of Canada-US border.

in: Intermédialités

Numéro 34, automne 2019 ressentir (les frontières)sensing (borders)

(ed. Michael Darroch, Karen Engle, Lee Rodney)

Publications: Essays and Artists Projects emerging from Buoyant Cartographies

Taien Ng-Chan, “Strata-Mapping the Detroit River Border with the Hamilton Perambulatory Unit”

The Hamilton Perambulatory Unit (HPU)’s strata-mapping framework is an experimental research-creation practice that focuses on how spatial meaning is created through a performative “stratigraphic” sensing and researching of a site. The international border between Detroit, Michigan and Windsor, Ontario makes an especially compelling site for experimental cartographies in light of the conflicts over borders and walls in the current political environment. At the southernmost tip of the Great Lakes system, we focused our attention on this river border as a material site and geopolitical space: it enabled us to investigate alternate possibilities for sensing and envisioning the layered and conjoined histories of this fluid space. The Ojibwe name for this location is waawiiatanong ziibi, “where the river bends,” suggesting a radically different spatial imaginary than the divided space that has been established through colonial and national histories. Experimental cartographies can thus help to develop alternate ways of experiencing such sites, an initial step towards decolonizing the spatial imaginary through a project of delinking. In September 2018, we conducted a workshop entitled Buoyant Cartographies, focusing on a performative and intermedial investigation into spatial meanings and their construction on Peche Island, which sits in the middle of the Detroit River. This was one of three Detroit River sites investigated in the workshop, with contributions from workshop organizers and HPU co-conspirator Donna Akrey.

https://id.erudit.org/iderudit/1070880ar

Talysha Bujold-Abu, Unnatural, This Step (2020),

In research, I examine the cross-border relationship between the Black communities of Windsor, Ontario and Detroit, Michigan during the “International Miss Sepia” contests held from the 1930s to the 1950s as part of the Emancipation Parade and Freedom Celebrations of Windsor. I’ve understood the term sepia in its objective capacities; themed photo booths at amusement parks—using costumes and sepia tones to transport middle-class families into quaint western saloons. I never liked them. Or my childhood understanding of a ghost, something fleeting, brown, and murky. (Similar to the experience of marginalized bodies, which only ever exist in our collective periphery vision). Sepia had never existed in my body in this way. As a Woman of Colour and as Women of Colour, where do we find autonomy in the language of our difference? The series Unnatural, This Step is a collection of manipulated Polaroid photography, found objects, and natural material: abstracted documentation of trophies and crowns, the racialized borderlands between Canada and the United States as they remain, a nod to my internal trepidation in owning (and understanding) my sepia body. Remember: a pageant created for and by sepia bodies (Black Excellence) is an exceptionally well-dressed protest; a copper-hued wave to the judges, the crowd…a poltergeist salute to our continued search for freedom.

in: Borders, Culture and Globalization: A Canadian Perspective

(ed. Victor Konrad and Melissa Kelly)

University of Ottawa Press, 2021

Lee Rodney, “Sight and Site on the Line: The Cultural Imaginary of Borderlands in North America”

https://press.uottawa.ca/borders-culture-and-globalization.html