This post is part of Sasha Carney’s 2022 Yale Farm Summer Internship Independent Project.
I have a longstanding academic, creative, and personal interest in the specific ecology and plants of the Ottawa Valley region, a swathe of unceded Algonquin Anishinaabeg land that straddles from the country’s political capital in anglophone Ontario to the quasi-rural communities of southwestern francophone Québec. I was raised in the city of Ottawa, a sleepy bilingual city of a million that is notable for two things: its strong outdoors culture and investment in the Canadian “wilderness,” and the construction and maintenance of a national Canadian political identity in a city whose primary employer is the federal government.
For my independent project, I looked at the particular ways in which maple tree, and the associated sap drilled from its trunk and refined into a food product, serve as a metonymy for “Canadian identity.” In particular, my final piece, in the form of a creative short story looked at the regional phenomenon of the “sugar shack,” a semi-commercial establishment that operates both the production of syrup and syrup products, and the hosting of guests who are given the opportunity to eat maple-based meals in pioneer-style cabins, boil their own syrup, and feel a “part of” the production processes themselves. Every Ottawa public school student is taken on a yearly field trip to the space; in working on this project, I began the process of digging through and beyond my own affective emotional and memory-based ties to “the sugar shack” and towards their wider cultural and political meaning(s).
Here is a link to my powerpoint presentation on my independent project.
Here is the link to my short story (a work in progress).