Alicia J. M. Colson: Rock Paintings in the “Wilderness” – “Savaged and Shared.” A Discussion of the Rock Paintings of the Lake of the Woods, Northwestern Ontario, Canada
Abstract
The contrast between the experiences of those who are not indigenous but live in Canada and the Indigenous experiences is often missing from the literature on pictograph sites, red ochre images, found throughout the Boreal Forest, in the Precambrian Shield. These places, when one reads the academic literature predominately written by those who are not Indigenous, appear “stuck in time,” in voids of their own: impassive witnesses to the transformation of a landscape. Archaeologists, usually with a Western European worldview, working with rock paintings, pictographs are on the horns of a dilemma. At least two or more world views are in operation. This landscape, the Boreal Forest, has at least two different groups of meanings: to largely former European settlers, and to the Indigenous peoples, hunter-gatherers/foragers.
[Ontario, Indigenous, worldview, hunter-gatherers, European settlers, Lake of the Woods]
