I have done this before, reversing into a blog! This time it is the picture. I usually write the blog and then get inspired and have fun doing doodle art to fit it! This time I had done a painting and it inspired a blog.
This all came about as I was given some gouache paints as a Christmas gift from my daughter. Gouache is a new medium for me so I signed up for a Domeskita course. These courses always end with a ‘final project,’ which you can post to the group site. Gouache is a water-based paint, I have been using watercolours for a while but wanted something with a bit more goo going on, less transparent, so I am giving gouache a go.
As it is the deepest winter, I was not going ‘plein air’ to sit around in the cold and have myself and my paints freeze, so I found a postcard of a scene and did a painting of the house in the picture. In real life, the house is wider and altogether larger. I know this as Lac La Biche is one of my favourite places. My picture is the mission at Lac La Biche. Lac La Biche is a town in northeast Alberta and it is interesting in so many ways, all flowing from its location on the shores of a large lake. It is on the flight path for migrating birds and a summer hang out for others, such as the colonies of pelicans nesting on the islands in the lake. There is a large provincial park with a campsite at this lake and you can go and hang out and canoe and enjoy the sandy beaches.
But what made Lac La Biche a go-to place is its relationship to local rivers. Archeological findings show that from time immemorial, this is a travel route, meeting place and home for the original people of Turtle Island.
To the east of the lake is an east-west water shed and flowing out of the lake is a north-south watershed. Coming from eastern Canada and the Hudson Bay the voyageurs, could come along and, as always, with some challenges, portage to access Lac La Biche. David Thompson, the great explorer and cartographer mapped the route through Lac La Biche in the late 1790s showing how from Lac La Biche there was access to the Arctic and Pacific watersheds. This was great news for the Europeans who with their voyageur canoes could travel and trade with the hunters to get the furs that were in such demand – such as the beaver pelts for gentlemen’s hats in London.
The Hudson Bay and the North West Company each set up shop on the shores of Lac La Biche and soon after this missionaries started to arrive. This was much to the displeasure of the fur traders who felt that this distracted the locals from their work for them.
In the mid-1800s the French Oblate missionaries set up a mission and finally settled and built the house in my picture. In its heyday this mission, Notre-Dame-des-Victoires was a busy place. It was the depot and supply point for the Oblate missions in the north. There was a farm, a water-powered saw and grain mill even Alberta’s first printing press and of course, the church. It was also a postal depot. From Montreal and other points east, you could post your letters to your friends and relations in the west and north, and eventually, it would come via those canoes to the mission. (When you visit you can see the postal cubbies. I don’t know what happened to the mail from that point on…)
Nuns were recruited to help out with running everything on the home front, and if they had time helping out on the farm. A school was founded for the European kids as well as First Nations kids and a few orphans. Despite the farm, life was hard and lean for all especially in winter when there was a shortage of food. There were also diseases to deal with such as smallpox and the Spanish flu.
I do not know if the conditions at this school were cruel beyond the conditions of the day. Mission educators and clergy felt it was their duty to replace First Nation culture and language with European culture. That was already a bad starting point.
In the mid-1980s I visited the Mission, only the church was still active then. I was producing a TV article about how the Mission was to be declared a historic site. Local First Nations people were there and I remember one of them telling me that this was “a good school, a good place, not like the others.” At the time I smiled and nodded politely, but since, with gaining more understanding of the deplorable conditions at “Indian Residential schools,” I understand, I think, more to that simple statement about a “good place”. More research will be done, but I would like to think that it was a good place for the children. I do so like this house on the edge of the great lake, imagining, how they would look out and see the canoes coming across the water to the mission compound and house.
Yes, your writings on Lac La Biche brings memories of the area, back to me.
One, a story told to me by my oldest brother who had the good fortune to spend time with our Dad on long excursions. My Dad was a bush pilot first, commercial fisherman, second, and many other things to which he worked at over his lifetime. After spending a day of fishing somewhere on this lake, the two of them (Dad and Garry, oldest bro’), packed up the foldable canvas boat plus the fish netting, and what fish they caught, into the webbing between the pontoons of Dad’s float plane. Yes, it is an experience that I would have loved to have had, but I was much too young at the time.
Anyways, all packed up and starting off with the float plane, they motored into the wind, which helps to lift the plane to fly. Taxiing for a ways, Dad could not get up to speed and lift, and so this was a lesson in flying on lakes. Winds change as one traverses a lake. Dad quickly turned the plane around to face the wind, and to use the ripples (waves) to bounce the pontoons off of, to reduce drag and to lift off. They did make it eventually off the lake after having to change directions a few times. The weight of the wet nets, the fish, and gear made the plane much heavier than expected.
What a lovely story. Luckily it is a large lake! Such a lovely camping place in the summer as there are all the birds.