This week’s hike, and thinking about landscape contexts

Earlier this week, I packed up my day pack and drove over to one of the trailheads for the Rideau Trail, which runs straight through Perth on its journey from Kingston to Ottawa. I didn’t have much of a plan or timeline in mind for this hike beyond “get outside,” so I threw the snowshoes in the car just in case conditions demanded them. Conditions did not demand them, which was kind of nice, so I was able to easily traipse my way along the Tay River heading southeast out of town. 

It was a beautiful day, and other than a couple of trail volunteers at the start, I didn’t see a soul—which makes sense for a Tuesday in February. I did see a couple deer, who engaged me in a very intense staring contest before bounding off the trail into the woods, and that was very nice.

I’ve been hiking and snowshoeing a lot lately, which has been doing wonders for basically every aspect of my health. It’s also been giving me a lot to think about, and one of the topics that’s been on my mind a lot is how we situate ourselves in landscapes. I don’t mean that in a wayfinding sense, but in a spiritual, historical, and contextual sense.

I recently read Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer, and as I mentioned in a previous post, it kind of rewired my synapses a little bit. It has changed—or maybe more accurately, has brought to the forefront—the way I think about how I fit in the landscape history of a place. 

I was first exposed to the concept of landscape history when I was in university studying archaeology. Landscapes are vital to the archaeological understanding of a site—an inarguable part of the context. Landscape archaeology is in fact a practice all of its own, and I’ve been fascinated by it ever since I first learned about it. Some of it is common sense—humans like to settle beside water, even (and maybe especially) nomadic humans, so understanding how the waterways of a landscape have changed over thousands of years can help pinpoint likely settlement sites. But some of it is more esoteric, ranging from questions around socioeconomic status to technology to cultural practices to the small matter of religion, and beyond. The landscape exerts on us, and we in turn exert on the landscape. It’s a reciprocal relationship.

In Braiding Sweetgrass, Kimmerer writes of the Indigenous understanding of nature having personhood, and how healthy relationships with nature require recognising that inherent personhood and engaging reciprocally with it—in other words, treat nature the way you’d want to be treated. This isn’t just a nice idea: the Magpie River in Quebec, known as the Muteshekau-shipu by the Innu, was granted legal personhood in 2021, with all the associated rights and protections that entails.

Back to my hike. When you’re in the woods and no one but deer are around, it’s easy to imagine that you’re in some kind of untouched (or maybe rewilded) landscape, but that’s simply not the case. This landscape and humans have been in a reciprocal relationship for thousands of years. The landscape exerted and was exerted upon. Perth was originally a British military settlement, and this area has been logged and farmed heavily. This area is also the traditional territory of the Algonquin, Huron Wendat, Anishinaabe, and Haudenosaunee peoples, who prior to colonisation managed and stewarded this land according to millennia of accumulated knowledge.

So walking in the landscape now, all those things are in my mind, all the way back to the last ice age. Situating myself in the contexts (plural on purpose, as it’s so multifaceted) of this land, grasping for a little bit of understanding of how I fit into its history, and how I can be a good visitor to it, is really important to me. It’s forcing me to look outside of the standard lens I’ve usually viewed landscape through, and helping me learn to be a bit more reciprocal in my land usage. And I think that’s a good exercise for all of us, whether you’re outdoorsy or not—take a look around, and think about how your existence fits into the wider story of the ground beneath your feet. It may shake you up a little.

Until next time.