The Wright Stuff

There was a time not too long ago when pretty much my entire travel mission in life was centered around visiting famous works of architecture. And by architecture, of course, I mostly mean modern architecture (with and without a capital M). Let's say 1870s and later, shall we? Not everything I visited was from that period but it was heavy 1870s to 21st century. Heavy. 

And admittedly, there may have been a little (or a lot) of beer travel in there too but pretty much it was all architecture. I was a bit obsessed, in love with the profession I chose way back when I was a child without any concept of what being an architect might actually mean. I chose well.

I know I've detailed this story in at least one other post on this blog but the first architecture-focused trip I ever took was during my spring break in my last year of graduate school. And it was not really intended to be that way. I had the opportunity to travel on a free plane ticket gifted to me by my parents and decided to go to Los Angeles to spend a week seeing whatever LA had to offer with my unemployed friend as my personal tour guide.

But then disaster struck (for me). Between the time I booked the ticket and the time I boarded the plane headed to LAX, she got a job and could no longer spend time with me. So I pivoted, bought a book about Frank Lloyd Wright's architecture in California and decided to be an architecture tourist. It was one of the best solo trips I've ever taken in my life.

Ginkgo tree leaves. Wright's favorite tree was the ginkgo.

Maybe a couple of words about Frank Lloyd Wright are in order.

For most architects in the United States, Wright is probably the greatest American architect in the history of this country. He moved architecture in our country forward from traditional space to modern space and he brought architecture to more people in the USA through the number of his works and the stature of just himself. If anyone out there who's an architect disputes that greatest American architect claim, they are either lying to themselves or they are confusing "greatest" with "favorite". There is a difference. 

In a complete non sequitur comment, if you need any more proof of Wright's greatness, how many architects out there have songs written about them by any artist that's really any good? Wright does. "So Long, Frank Lloyd Wright" closed side one on Simon and Garfunkel's Bridge Over Troubled Water album.

For the record, my favorite Amercian architect of all time is Ray Hood. But in terms of importance, Wright blows Hood away. It's not even close. In fact, for me, there's no other American architect that can hold a candle to Wright. 

Also for the record, Bridge Over Troubled Water is an incredible album. Not S&G's best in my opinion (I still prefer Bookends) but "Cecilia", "Baby Driver", "The Boxer" and the supremely awsome "The Only Living Boy In New York"...come on. And that's not even mentioning the title song. But I digress. This is about Wright.

Looking up at the laylight and lighting fixtures in the main space at Unity Temple.

My personal adoration of Frank Lloyd Wright started on that 1993 California trip. The very first Wright building I ever visited was the Freeman House in Hollywood and when I walked into the main room of that house with the missing corners, I was blown away. Everything they had taught us in school about how Wright contained and released space through his designs hit home all at once. It was absolutely incredible.

Over the next few years after that first encounter, I visited a lot of Wright buildings. Iowa, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Illinois, New York, Virginia, Arizona, Wisconsin again. I went everywhere I could to see Wright buildings that were and were not open to the public. It helps that there are hundreds of buildings by Wright out there.

One of the best places to see Wright buildings is in the town of Oak Park, just a few miles west of Chicago. It's where Wright opened his first office and secured many of his early commissions, whether they be residential projects through social connections or commissions just a bit or a lot larger. Walk around town and you can see evidence of Wright's work right on the streets of the town. 

I visited Oak Park in 1995 on an architectural pilgrimage through the upper midwest that was Wright heavy. I've been to Chicago a number of time since 1995 but have never gone back to Oak Park. I figured a Labor Day weekend trip to see the brand new Obama Presidential Center might be an opportunity for a day in Oak Park to see if I was still as impressed with Wright's early work as I was 31 years ago.

Stork panels outside the Frank Lloyd Wright Home and Studio.

My memories of that 1995 Oak Park trip have for the most part faded away completely. I have a few photos from the five Wright buildings I visited that day either in Oak Park or in nearby River Forest and I remember being absolutely stunned by the children's playroom in Wright's own home. But I don't remember much about visiting Wright's major public commission in Oak Park, the Unity Temple. I figured a refresher visit to the Wright Home and Studio and Unity Temple would (hopefully) prove out my love for Wright and keep me going for a few more years before I needed another Wright pilgrimage. 

We booked a tour of the Home and Studio (there's no other way to visit the interior) and signed up for the "in depth" tour of Unity Temple. I figured if we are going all that way and don't have anything else filling our Saturday morning, we may as well do Unity Temple right, particularly because I don't remember anything about the last time I was there. For what it's worth, visiting Unity Temple can be done on your own for free.

We started at Unity Temple, but I'm saving that for last. Let's start with Wright's house.

Wright moved into his home right after he got married in 1889. The original house (he added pieces and parts, including his entire studio in 1898, later on) was not a Wright design and it looks like it's not a Wright design. He used the home and later his studio as a base of operations in Oak Park until 1909. During that period, 125 of his designs were built. That's an astonishing number, even for a 20 year period. Wright was prolific. 

Wright was also a professional exaggerator (particularly of his own deeds) and a philanderer and overall just not a quality person when it came to interpersonal relationships. The reason why he left the Home and Studio was that he had an affair with a client's wife while touring Europe. Quality, right? Oh and exaggerator might just be simpler said as liar.

After Wright left his wife, the home was divided into apartments. Today, it is restored to the 1909 appearance. 

Frank Lloyd Wright Home and Studio. Oak Park, IL.

If the exterior of Wright's home is traditional, he set about changing the interior of the home to a decidedly non-traditional appearance immediately. He dispensed with the traditional Victorian approach to interior design which often created a different room experience in each space and made the palette of materials and colors identical from room to room. This may not seem like a big deal today but in the late 1800s, this would have been pretty revolutionary, particularly for an architect who was making a living doing this exact same thing in residences for people of means who might expect him to match the current prevailing trend.

Today, the interior of the Wright Home and Studio looks anything but avant garde or modern. There's a classical frieze in the entrance hall; the ceiling perimeters in the entrance and adjacent room are dentiled (those are the small blocks in a row in the first and second pictures below); and there is a swirling leafy pattern in the corners of the ceilings in the first living space that look very much like something Louis Sullivan would use in one of his buildings (Wright worked for Sullivan before establishing his own practice).

I can't remember any of these sorts of details being used in any Wright-designed building I have ever visited or seen in a book. And that's sort of the point. Over the years, Wright used his own house (and studio) as a sort of test lab of sorts, developing and trying out ideas that may or may not have been used in independent commissions he designed for others. So whether that experimentation was about details or expanding rooms or adding whole new chunks of spaces as addition, there are failed and successful efforts all over the building. I love the development of laylights as a lighting strategy and the shades as an alternative to curtains in the kids' bedroom that would never see the light of day in a Wright building ever again. Not everything worked; ain't that always the case? 

The highlight of our time this late summer in Wright's Home and Studio for me was still the children's playroom. It's a fairly simple space. If you ignore the sort of theater style theater seating at the entrance end of the room, it's a barrel vaulted space which is rectangular in plan with the vault springing from a point below adult head height. But it's perforated all over the place to admit an amazing quantity of light and the spatial quality is defined enough by the geometry while simultaneously disappearing as a solid mass to be something way more than just a barrel vault on a rectangular prism.

The side walls of the room are there but they are not there. They are defined by the walls adjacent the fireplace and the strong beam that serves as the spring point of the vault. But the wall below the beam is gone. It's just pushed out a few feet to make a bench or bay window space and the quantity and quality of light is just enormous in a very good way. More light enters the space from the laylight above (it looks like a standard skylight but what's on the other side of the curved, translucent panel is an above ceiling space that is illuminated by an actual skylight to the exterior) and through punched openings in the vault itself. 

How Wright does this is astonishing and simple at the same time. But back in the day when this room was first constructed, there may have been no other space like this ever built. It still blows me away 30 plus years later. 

The space is so small and it's difficult to photograph without going completely wide angle and distorting the geometry of the room but there are a couple of the best photographs below.

As impressive as the children's playroom was and is, this year Unity Temple was better. I can't remember the last time I just sat for a while and marveled at how complex a space was or is. I did that in Unity Temple on Labor Day weekend. This Wright guy was pretty amazing.

Unity Temple is a Unitarian meeting house on a tiny lot in Oak Park. The whole project was built on a shoestring budget on land which was heavily discounted by a member of the congregation. The building is packed onto the block and consists of two main volumes: a larger, streetside block containing the main space for church services on Sundays (the Temple) and a smaller volume at the rear for church functions (complete with serving kitchen) and administrative offices called the Unity House. The whole thing is made out of concrete, which apparently is a reflection of the budget (we were told Wright would have preferred brick).

The "in depth" tour of the building took us pretty much everywhere people can go on a regular basis inside the Temple, including into service and mechanical spaces but not (regrettably) into the laylight levels. There are signature Wright touches everywhere in the building, from the leaded glass that he was using in his residential designs at that point in his career to the stylized plants used as columns on the exterior of the building to entry into low-ceiling spaces before releasing you into the two main spaces in the Unity House and the Temple space itself to laylights used to distribute uniform diffuse light into spaces in the building that he was experimenting with in his own house at the time. There are also Wright-designed light fixtures and seating throughout the building. Again, not unusual for Wright. 

The stylized plants on the building, by the way, look suspiciously like the hollyhock decorations that Wright claimed to have invented especially for Aline Barnsdall in her Hollyhock House in Los Angeles which was designed and built about 20 years AFTER Unity Temple. Wright often stuck to his own version of the truth when it came to...well, just the truth in general.

And apparently, Wright's design for the pews in the building were rejected and the congregation used someone else's design. So ALL the seating is not Wright-designed. Can't imagine how that would have sat with Wright's ego.

The third photograph above shows the Unity House, with a signature Wright fireplace.

Frank Lloyd Wright fundamentally changed how architects in the United States (and the rest of world, I suppose) conceived of and contained space. Wright's architecture was about just that...space. Not rooms. Space. And space was not a thing to always be contained or defined in a singular way. Before Wright, buildings had rooms with walls and doors. With Wright, space was rarely contained or constrained or defined with six planes or something slightly more complicated. With Wright, the possibilities were greater. Unity Temple is fascinating this way.

Now, to be fair, there were some folks over in Europe messing about with this whole space vs. rooms thing at the same time Wright was starting to do his thing over in America so it's not like he was the only one with these ideas. And to be super fair to Wright, some of the folks in Europe were thinking about this idea because of Wright.

We were told on our tour that Unity Temple is more or less a perfect cube. I asked where the cube was. Not to be a smart aleck architect or anything. I genuinely wanted to know because exactly where the space starts and stops in the Temple is a matter of perspective that can constantly be changing. Is the edge of the space the edge of the balconies? Or the corner of the "columns" in the corners of the space? Surely, it's not the outside walls of the space (it wasn't)?

In the end, for me, it doesn't really matter where the almost cube is, although my bet is on the front of the balconies. The Temple space at Unity Temple is a rectangle in plan, maybe even a square. But it's really not, it's really a cross in plan. But then that cross also has a square (or almost square) within it. The space can be read on so many levels. More, in fact, that is articulated in this paragraph. But that's just an architect's perspective.

I am sure the first congregation of Unity Temple that walked into the space one Sunday to worship would not be thinking about space the way I've written about it above. But they must have been astonished by the character of the space. What Wright did in that space must have been mind-blowing. 

Basically, he designed a traditional space with four walls, a floor and a ceiling (bear with me here, I know I just wrote something that really contradicts this idea...) like a traditional box. Admittedly the ceiling is a grid of crossed beams with glazing to diffuse exterior light into the Temple but it can read as flat. Then he effectively tore off the roof, raised it up a few feet and filled the space between where the ceiling might have been and where he decided it should be. Effectively, he's supporting the ceiling / roof on nothing at all and allowing light to pour into the space from what seems like a continuous ribbon of glass around the entire building.

That's not what's actually going on (the structure is in the corners) but spatially, that's exactly what's going on. Who on Earth in that congregation would have ever seen anything like this before? The answer is probably "nobody" because it was absolutely brand new.

There's more to the Temple space than just space itself, of course. The design is super functional. The acoustics are near perfect, requiring no amplification for the speaker at the focus of the space and we were told there is no seat further than 45 feet from the podium. Honestly, if it didn't function well despite all the light and debate about where the corners or edges of the space are (by architects), it wouldn't be very successful at all. Wright was better than that. 

This trip for sure recharged my love for Frank Lloyd Wright. Other than the Guggenheim Museum in New York, I can't remember that last time I was in a Wright building. We stopped by a church he designed in Redding, California in 2018 but couldn't get into the building. How long before that? Maybe 10 years? More? Too long.

A couple of last notes. 

OK, so actually three last notes. The first one will make me sound old.

The last time I was inside and outside Unity Temple, I took 21 photographs. Back then, I was using slide film. I am sure I was super methodical about taking pictures to (1) make sure I didn't use all my film on pictures I didn't like; (2) minimize swapping out rolls of film; and (3) make sure I didn't run out of film. In the Home and Studio, I came away with just 8 pictures. This time? At least 100 pictures in each building. And all with something that fits in my pocket. I definitely appreciate the advances in photography technology over the years. I never would have wasted a slide on the shot immediately above. The sun is really in the wrong spot. But I love that picture.

Second, the cover photograph of this post is a concrete sprite from Wright's now demolished Midway Gardens project. Sprites pop up every now and then in Wright properties. This one is outside the Home and Studio.

Finally, over the fireplace in Wright's Home, there is an inscription reading "Truth Is Life". Look immediately above that inscription and you'll see that there is space above the fireplace where the chimney might ordinarily be. The space flows out of the fireplace nook, over the fireplace and into the corridor behind the fireplace. Except it doesn't. There's a mirror that makes it seem like it's that way. Whether the actual chimney flue splits and traverses upwards like it appears from the fireplace front I have no idea but the space above the fireplace is a trick. It's not truth. But then again, the truth was often a negotiable subject with Frank Lloyd Wright.

White Whales

I'm no veteran kayaker by any stretch of the imagination (just three times as of the writing of this blog post) but I'd wager to say that it's rarely a good thing when you feel contact on your kayak from below. It's not another kayaker, after all. 

But sure enough, we are paddling on the Churchill River in August of this year and that's exactly what happened. Thump! Contact. The kayak wobbles a little.

"What are you doing back there?" asked my wife (we were in a double kayak, sometimes known as divorce kayaks), like I'm intentionally rocking the kayak for fun or something. "It wasn't me." I replied. "It was a whale."

Welcome to summer kayaking in Churchill, Manitoba.

Would this guy ever rock the boat while kayaking? I don't think so.

We have been flirting with a visit to Churchill to see polar bears for years now. Two things constantly swirled in our yes or no debate to visit or not visit: (1) the certainty around seeing wildlife that we can't see anywhere else and (2) the cost. Late last year, we finally got over the cost thing and decided to plop down the cash for a trip to the shore of the Hudson Bay. That left one decision to make: when to go?

There are basically three different seasons to visit Churchill: winter, summer and fall. Fall is bear season, when the chances of seeing polar bears are their highest. We really, really wanted to see a polar bear in the wild but we didn't want to put all our eggs in one basket. I mean what if we didn't see a polar bear? What else is there in the fall? Winter is aurora borealis season, when the skies are dark and the solar wind lights up the sky in all sorts of colors. But the bears are out on the ice in winter. No bears, no trip for us.

So we looked at what we might see in the summer. There was still the opportunity for bear watching. Not guaranteed but then when is anything related to nature and wildlife tourism guaranteed? But something else happens in the summer in the Hudson Bay right next to Churchill: beluga whales populate the Bay in the tens of thousands (like 50,000 plus) to breed and give birth. Summer offered maybe bear sightings. But it we didn't get bears, we'd definitely get belugas. Summer won.

Beluga tail. Churchill River.

We've been whale watching before. I'm not sure I've ever whale watched with my wife and ever come away super excited. Whale watching is most times (at least in my experience) an exercise in limited engagements with things that generally spend a lot of time invisible below the water and then pop up for a few seconds before dropping back down below the surface of the water. Sure, we've seen some humpbacks lunge feeding off the coast of Boston and we've seen a couple of full body breaches (also humpbacks) in Hawaii but a breach takes like seconds so unless the whale is repeatedly breaching (ours were not) then it's again seconds of excitement.

Mostly, for us, whale watching has been water watching. Lots of nothing punctuated by seconds of possibility that rarely pay off.

But 50,000 whales in one location? Seemed too good to be true. I know the Hudson Bay is big. Like bigger than Texas big. But 50,000 seemed like we should be in for a whale watching experience like we'd never had before. We had two whale watching outings on our itinerary: one fairly large boat that would take us from Churchill to the Prince of Wales Fort National Historic Site and one six or seven or so person rigid inflatable boat (RIB) that got repeatedly referred to as a Zodiac because of the company that makes the boats. Neither trip, by the way, actually made it out into the Hudson Bay proper. We'd spend all our whale watching time on the Churchill River, which I assume has decidedly fewer than 50,000 belugas in it at any one time.

The larger boat was probably a smaller version of the type of boat we'd been whale watching on before, meaning elevated a bit off the surface of the water. The Zodiac was a lot closer to the River. Like we could have dipped our hands into the water. I was excited for the Zodiac ride.

Belugas surfacing next to a Zodiac with all the people looking the opposite way.

So let's skip the suspense here, if there really was any to begin with. There were a lot of belugas in the Churchill River no matter what sort of boat we happened to be on. On a typical ocean-going whale watch trip, maybe there are double digit numbers of whales in view at any one time. Maybe. And that would be an extremely good trip to watch whales. I'm not sure I've actually ever seen double digit whales on a whale watching trip before. With belugas? Easily possible to see 20 or so at a time by looking out over the water. And there is likely a lot of opportunity for close up looks.

Two things help here. First, the whales surface a lot. I don't know whether it's just the species in general or the fact that there are new babies involved but belugas surface frequently. More surfacing equals more looks. No waiting 10 or 15 minutes for a single whale to surface hopefully somewhere near the boat for seconds and be gone again. Lots of arched backs with the belugas. It's almost more like dolphin watching more than whale watching. 

Second, they are white. Well, the adults are white at least (the babies are sort of a dark gray color). And that body tone combined with shallow dives means you can see the whales even when they are under water. 

Take a look at the picture below. I know it's difficult to tell in some spots whether a splash on the surface of the water is a wave or a whale and it's also difficult to tell if a whitish spot is a breaker or an underwater cetacean but there are legitimately between six and twelve whales in the picture below. And that's just looking out one side of the boat. I know it's not 50,000 but this is more whales than I've ever seen in one spot in my life. We chose summer in Churchill hoping for polar bears with a pretty much guaranteed safety net in beluga spotting. Beluga watching ended up being better than polar bear watching.

The three whale pictures to this point in the post were all snapped from the bigger boat on our way to the Prince of Wales Fort. The Zodiac blew away that boat.

Before we get to the up close beluga encounters we had on the Zodiac, let me say that by and large, we had pretty good weather in our week or so in Canada, including when we were on the water in boats of all sorts of sizes and shapes and occupancies. Except when we were on the Zodiacs. It was cold (like mid-50s) with wind and rain. 

I decided I'd wear a rain jacket, a fleece, hiking pants and boots (I wore more than just that but go with this for a couple of sentences). The rain jacket and boots were waterproof. When I got off the boat my socks were warm and dry (other than the bit that poked over the top of the boots) and my fleece below my rain jacket was also warm and dry. Everything between those two points on my body was soaking wet and cold. I can't remember being so cold and wet in recent memory. My teeth were chattering I was so cold. But the whale watching was just excellent.

Beluga watching from the Zodiac.

Zodiac appreciation time.

The difference between being on a deck of a large boat maybe four feet above the water level and leaning against a let's say 3-1/2 foot high railing and being inches above the Churchill River with an inflated perimeter on a boat about 2 feet high is huge. You can see the water better but for sure you can see the whales way better. You almost feel you can reach out and touch the belugas (although no touching the whales please; zero touch policy!).

The difference between being on a boat with about 20 people is also way different than being on one with about seven. The Zodiac was stable enough and big enough to stand up and walk around with a little holding on (although maybe "shift position" rather than "walk around" is more accurate) but it is also so small that seeing from one side of the boat to the other was never an issue. And when there are so many whales at times surfacing all around the boat, seeing 360 degrees is important. You never know where the next one is going to and that's a good thing. 

If you've ever ridden on an RIB before, you'll understand that one of the extreme advantages they have over other craft is that they are way, way faster. We blue whale watched on an RIB off the coast of Los Angeles years ago and the pilot could react instantly to wherever the whales surfaced. At Churchill, other than the initial trip out into the body of the water, us needing the RIB speed to pursue whales quickly wasn't really an issue for us here since there were so many whales all around us.

But, there was one feature of the Zodiac's speed that helped the whale watching for us. Belugas like to chase the wakes of boats and it seemed to me that the faster the boat was going, the more they chased. It was like having your own whale entourage right behind the boat. And when that entourage was a mother and baby and they kept both popping their heads up again and again, it made this experience very worthwhile.

If you ever make it to Churchill in summer and have the opportunity to go beluga watching, go on a Zodiac. And I hope that it's warmer than our trip; it took about 15 minutes in a hot shower to mostly warm up. But even if it is cold, it's worth it. Bring rain pants. Lesson learned there.

Belugas in front of and behind the Zodiac. The best baby head picture is the last pic. Mom is underwater.

If you are proofreading this post as you are enjoying my excitement about whale watching, I suppose you might be thinking "hey, what happened to the kayaking?" and you'd be right to wonder. We weren't supposed to go kayaking on this trip. We were supposed to take two boat rides to see belugas. Somehow kayaking got squeezed into the agenda. We ended up with three different beluga watch experiences. What a bonus!

To be completely clear here, kayaking with belugas may be a top ten travel experience for me. I'm not sure how many top ten travel experiences I would identify in my life so maybe I'm a bit too bullish on this being better than all but nine other travel days. Maybe it's top 25. Suffice it to say that it was incredible. Having a whale bump your kayak is one of those things I never thought I'd experience. Forget whales as close as 20 or 30 feet away or even like 5 or 6 feet away like in the Zodiac. We are talking whales inches from us.

Kayak safety briefing (top) and getting to the kayaks for launch.

Some folks on our kayaking adventure managed to paddle fast enough to create a wake so belugas would follow their kayaks. We didn't. No way on my third ever kayaking journey can I make a double kayak cut through the water that fast. Fortunately, if you are getting belugas to follow your speed, it's not like you can even see them. And...belugas are naturally curious like most whales. If there's something on the surface of the water, eventually they will likely want to take a close look.

So the pictures below are just a curious beluga cruising by and then underneath our kayak just to see what's up. This whale passed literally maybe a foot below where we were sitting and we could see how close it was as it passed below our kayak. A few minutes on one side or another of that swim-by look, a younger beluga popped its head above the water literally right next to my hip, looked at me (at least that's what I think it did), exhaled with a little spray and then dove back under. 

Other than maybe the elephants at the Sheldrick Wildlife Trust in Kenya (where we were allowed to touch the elephants), that surfacing was as close as I've come to a real wild mammal in my life. And you could even debate if the elephants at Sheldrick are truly wild when they are being cared for and fed every day by humans. This is not something that happens regularly. 

I don't know what else really to say here. Kayaking on the Churchill River for maybe 90 minutes or so was an experience that connected us to wildlife right up there with the best and most intimate experiences we've ever had. Right up there with elephants and chimpanzees and mountain gorillas. And if there's a common thread there, it's exceptional intelligence. 

We are so lucky that for whatever reason, someone at our tour company decided to add kayaking with belugas as a freebie experience onto our agenda. The Zodiac ride was in many ways better than kayaking (particularly considering the work required to paddle the kayak around) but the kayak inches from the water was the most supremely intimate way to see the belugas. 

And that divorce kayak thing? We are still married. We figured it out. Coordinating paddles and turning is way more difficult as a twosome. If we just had one person (me) just do all the paddling, it was way better. While it might be easy for me to view that solution as less than equitable, I didn't see it that way. Me paddling changed our kayak dynamic from one of conflict and focusing on each other and what we were doing to one of calm and focusing on the whales. And that's exactly what we were supposed to be doing. 

For some reason, I love kayaking pictures with our paddles in them. It's a symbol for me of the freedom that those oars give us. Those things powered by our own strength moves us through water. No motors or anything else, just one stroke after another. When there are whales in the pictures they are that much better.

I like the calm of the picture below. How could we imagine a better way to spend a couple of hours on a summer evening?

The Treaties

Canada and the United States have a lot in common. It may not seem like that today in the year 2026 but they do. For sure. And "a lot in common" may be selling the situation way short. It might be "a whole lot" to "a ton" in common. And yes, a ton is more than a lot or a whole lot.

Shall we review a little? Think about it. Both nations were former British colonies that achieved independence from that nation. Both countries had Atlantic Ocean to Pacific Ocean nation-building ambitions that were ultimately quite successful. Both countries courted the British colony of British Columbia to join their nation in the mid-1800s (although only one was ultimately successful). And both countries absolutely decimated the livelihood of those people who were on the North American continent before Europeans started landing on these shores and started taking every piece of land for themselves.

Didn't see that last one coming, maybe? Didn't think Canada and the United States had that in common? Oh they did. There's no doubt about that. There can be no understating just how brutal the conquering of this continent was by the white man both above and below the current Canada-United States border. The lives of those who were here before Europeans arrived in what is now North America were completely upended in absolutely the worst and most destructive way. 

Can't quite wrap your head around that one? Think about it this way. What if a heavily armed group of people with skin color a lot different that yours showed up at your door today, took possession of your house and all your belongings and money, handed you a snow shovel and told you that from now on you just needed to figure out how to survive with the clothes on your back and your snow shovel. Oh...and you can't sleep or take up residence on any public lands. How long would you last? Not too long, I'm guessing. I know I wouldn't. 

I don't know why I picked a snow shovel by the way. It just popped into my head. It could have been a set of andirons or a rechargeable leaf blower or anything, really.

The Forks, at the confluence of the Red River and Assiniboine River, Winnipeg.

Let's do a quick (and I do mean quick) historical overview of relations with First Nations (yes, I know that's typically a Canadian-only term) peoples north and south of the United States / Canada border, shall we?

Both the United States and Canada gave their federal government the right to regulate indigenous affairs. The United States did it through the Constitution; Canada did it through Royal Proclamation. That's cool, right? Countries passing laws and rules to allow them to govern people who happened to be living on land "owned" by the newly established nations without the say so of those people. Sounds good to me.

Both the United States and Canada negotiated treaties with indigenous peoples to define land owned by people of European descent and land designated for indigenous use. The catch on most of those treaties was that the governments of the United States and Canada either just didn't honor the conditions of the treaties or called for the treaties to be renegotiated when the government "made a mistake" in the original treaty (like not realizing there was gold in the Black Hills in what is now South Dakota when the original Treaty of Fort Laramie was signed).

Both the United States and Canada tried to systematically destroy indigenous culture particularly by (1) imposing western notions of land ownership on indigenous peoples; (2) causing the near extinction of the bison to remove food, shelter and meaning from indigenous life; (3) introducing deadly diseases into native communities for which there was no protection; and (4) forcibly removing indigenous children off reservations to attend special schools designed to foster assimilation into western society. These schools (called Residential Schools on both sides of the border) removed traditional clothing, required western haircuts and conferred western names on children while also prohibiting indigeous languages and religious practices. 

Know when indigenous people were granted the right to vote? In the United States, it was 1924. In Canada, it was 1960. 

Dog sledding with Wapusk Adventures, Churchill.

Having said all that, there are some differences between how those two countries view that history today.

I can't remember ever traveling within the United States anywhere and being apprised of how the land I was standing on was ceded to the United States government by treaty with an indigenous tribe. Maybe my memory is faulty here. I know I've seen land acknowledgements written in National Park properties and (of all places) in multiple buildings in downtown Chicago. But the specific treaty? And talked through it? Don't think so.

In Canada this summer? Different story. Our tour that took us to Churchill and Riding Mountain National Park started off with a spoken land acknowledgement and we talked about the treaties that conveyed the lands we were visiting pretty much every time we went somewhere new. Maybe it was the specific places we visited. Maybe it was our tour company's choice to emphasize this information. Maybe it's that we were traveling for a time with someone of First Nations ancestry. Maybe this sort of thing only occurs in Manitoba and not in other parts of Canada. 

But all that's not true. Because last summer when we were in Alberta we ran into the same thing, particularly at the Calgary Stampede and the Elbow River Camp set up at that event. We heard speeches listing various treaties (all numbered) acknowledging just how land was removed from First Nations control and handed over to Canada. It all seemed very civil but to me, it was somewhere between eye-opening, shocking and refreshing. Although after this year, I'm not sure it was as healthy a history as it was portrayed at the Elbow River Camp.

Elbow River Camp, Calgary Stampede. 2025.

So how many treaties were signed between Canada and First Nations people? 11. Treaties 1 through 7 were negotiated between 1871 and 1877 and the other four followed from 1899 to 1921. On our August trip we traveled over lands covered under Treaty 1 (1871), Treaty 2 (also 1871) and Treaty 5 (1875). 

Negotiated may be a term that's very generous to the Canadian government.

Know what Canada got out of all those treaties? A whole lot of land, that's what. And some other strange things like guarantees around violence towards Canadians and restricted alcohol use and control of all schooling on First Nation Reserves. Those last two things are just control measures, right? They are just oppressions. In exchange for all that land, the First Nations got a whole lot of land taken away, a little bit of cash, farming tools (for people who weren't generally farmers), the right to fish and hunt on lands they gave up and some schools. But they only got schools when the government of Canada decided it was appropriate.

So what does this effort to inform us about various treaties do? There's not really any context around the Treaties described when we are told what land we are standing on. We are just told we are now on Treaty [insert number here] land. The exact conditions of each Treaty aren't really described to the visitor. But at least it's a start. At least there's an acknowledgement that at one time, the country we are visiting negotiated an agreement (likely one-sided) with the people who were here before European people where the Europeans got the land in exchange for something which really ended up being nothing much.

Canadian history seems to be full of retroactive actions around the treatment of First Nations peoples and I guess from a certain point of view, it's better late than never. In 2008, the Canadian government launched a Truth and Reconciliation Commission to research and document the effects of the Residential School system. The finding of the Commission was that the Residential Schools amounted to cultural genocide and they issued recommendations to apologize for and correct the effects of those Schools. 

Of course most of the recommendations really amount to nothing much more that promised apology. There is nothing the government of Canada can do to un-do what they did. They can't go back and populate the plains full of bison; they can't un-kill all the people that we were wiped out by disease or just killed by white people; and they can't un-destroy all the culture that they tried to eradicate along the way. Apologies, unfortunately, are about all these are or can be.

The interior of the Itsanitaq Museum, Churchill. The Museum collects Inuit carving and artifacts.

Even if all of this stuff is an apology. I believe talking about all this is important when we travel. Even if we don't get into all the details. Even if we get biased versions of the truth, at least we are discussing it. We can go research the history on our own later if we want to, which is exactly what I have done to write this post. At least it's something different than we do in the United States. 

On this trip, we deliberately engaged with places and people that have been affected by the Numbered Treaties. A lot of this was decided by our tour company on an agenda which was handed to us. But we also visited other spots that maintained the same theme and we did it before we started our tour. This is something we care about engaging with so we appreciated our tour company's efforts to supplement the themes of our one day on our own in the Winnipeg area before the tour started.

All told, our engagement with the First Nations of Manitoba in Winnipeg, Riding Mountain National Park and Churchill included two museums; two historic properties; two cultural talks or activities; a couple of walks around towns or parts of cities; and some time on a dog sled. If the dog sled based on the picture above seems like just a ride in the woods on a sled pulled by a team of dogs (which it was on some level, and all rescue dogs by the way),  the business is First Nations / Métis owned and that's how First Nations people got around at one time. I mean it's not like there are roads all over Manitoba even today (it's actually impossible to drive to Churchill). Dogs pulling sleds over snow is far safer and more efficient that pretty much all other methods of transportation. 

We spent time listening to or in conversations with Anishinaabe, Sayisi Dene, Inuit and Métis peoples and we probably learned something from absolutely every talk whether it was who the Métis people were and are or how many calories a sled dog burns or how long it takes two men to build an igloo or something else. Horizons were broadened, which for me is most of the point of travel. 

And 12,000 calories per day is the answer to the dog question and less than an hour to build an igloo. But only if its the right kind of snow.

It is likely impractical to relay everything we learned talking with First Nations people so I'm picking one thing each from the three places we visited, starting with Riding Mountain National Park.

Pemmican

On one of our two afternoons in Riding Mountain National Park, we ventured over to Turtle Village, an off-the-grid camp which offers overnight accommodations and afternoon and evening storytelling sessions, including one to introduce visitors to pemmican, a kind of bison jerky that was created by drying out meat from a hunt; pounding it into powder; supplementing the powder with melted animal fat, fruit and spices; and then consolidating the mixture into what was described as the first ever power bar. If stored right, pemmican could last years (the timeline offered here was "decades") and was essential for survival during times when hunting wasn't possible.

We didn't actually make pemmican (that would have been a longer process than the hour or so we spent at Turtle Village) but we did each cook up a customized, personal mixture of dried fruits, nuts and spices based on our selection from a buffet table of local ingredients or ingredients that would have been available to First Nations people through trade, including dried saskatoon berries, peppercorns and maple syrup. I guess we ideally would have fashioned our personal concoction into a bar of some sort and taken it with us on a hunt but since we weren't hunting elk or bison or anything else on this trip, it became an afternoon snack eaten out of a tray. 

I'd never had saskatoons (which are blueberry-like) and I was surprised how soft both hazelnuts and peppercorns become when cooked quickly over a high-heat open flame. The demonstration emphasized the point of the necessity for drying out ingredients when plentiful to preserve foods for times when nothing was available. But it was also interesting to think about how First Nations people would have ingredients like cinnamon and peppercorns from far away available to them. It was also probably the healthiest food we ate all week.

The Métis

One of the differences between the United States' persecution of indigenous people and Canada's persecution of the First Nations people was that Canada managed to do their southern neighbors one better and extended their discrimination not only to First Nations, but anyone who actually interfaced with them in a positive way. Enter the Métis, a group of intermarried First Nations and European settlers with a distinct and unique national culture. 

The Métis became a thing when early fur traders in the new world (mostly French and Scottish) married First Nations women (primarily Cree). Over time, the descendants of these first marriages evolved into a community of people with their own language, music, flag and system of farming. Their farming was unique. It was based around long, narrow lots providing each property both with river access and close proximity to their neighbors. The Métis settled on land in Manitoba which was part of a massive area called Rupert's Land, which was basically the drainage basin of the Hudson Bay over which the Hudson's Bay Company had exclusive trading rights.

In 1868, the entirety of Rupert's Land was conveyed to the Dominion of Canada which then set about dividing the land into settlements, including the land already occupied by the Métis. The Métis leader, Louis Riel, led a series of resistance efforts to hamper the Canadian government's efforts to enforce various Proclamations, including those around land redistribution and (perhaps unbelivably) the sale of pemmican. Yes, there was a war waged over pemmican and restrictions on it's distribution. Insane, right?

We learned a little about the Métis at the Riel House National Historic Site in Winnipeg (shown above) including the events of the Pemmican War and the hanging of Louis Riel by the Canadian government. The Métis are still around today as a distinct and proud part of the population of Canada. They are remarkably visible if you look, which I guess is encouraging.

English, French and First Nations syllabics. On a commercial airline flight. 

Broken Promises

Our conversations with First Nations and Métis people in Manitoba was littered with acts of ethnic violence and promises by the Canadian government that were never fulfilled. We heard these stories in Riding Mountain National Park (the Anishinaabe were burned out of their homes by white settlers) and Winnipeg but we heard them most notably in Churchill from Florence Hamilton in a cultural presentation one night in Churchill. 

The thread of our discussion with Florence included a serious lack of personal cultural identity, pretty much all at the hands of the Canadian government. The Dene were forcibly relocated to the Churchill area and prohibited from participating in their annual caribou hunt starting in the in 1950s. The land they were assigned was leftover land and by the mid-1970s it was abandoned by the Dene. By that time, their ties to their past way of life was destroyed. As if that wasn't bad enough, Florence's mother was a Residential School survivor and she took the teachings to heart, raising Florence without connection to her people's background. I think that sometimes, we think people can recover from something like forced re-education. Apparently not.

It is difficult for those of us who are in the majority to understand these types of concepts sometimes but it's important to listen and see that other perspective. When asked if there was anything that the Canadian government could do to make things better going forward, she pretty much acknowledged that there was no fix. But she did hope that the government would just stick to the agreements that they already negotiated rather than ignoring them. It's not encouraging when your only hope for things not to get worse is for people who have historically broken promises to start keeping them.

An inuksuk, a traditional Inuit landmark, in front of the Itsanitaq Museum, Churchill.

I believe there is value in preserving what is unique and special about every place on our planet. I don't want everything to be the same wherever I go. Sometimes I feel I'm being selfish about this issue because I usually think of it in terms of food. By that I mean something like...I don't want KFC to be in every neighborhood in the whole world that I travel to but if people in Japan or Botswana or wherever it is want KFC, who am I to deny them?

It's a little more complicated for me when I move off the food analogy. But if our time in Canada this summer taught me anything, it's when the United States and (in the case of this post) Canada, imposed their sameness of dominant culture from coast to coast, it almost or completely destroyed some things that are valuable to not just tourists like me but others as well. And in this case, those others are the people who actually still remain from the culture that is conquered or overwhelmed or bypassed or whatever you want to call it and still feel there is value in being different.

So maybe everyone doesn't need access to pemmican so they can survive the winter when there's no hunting. Although with this summer's outbreak of diseased produce of all varieties here in the United States since we stopped apparently inspecting food, maybe I should be eating pemmican. But there IS value in being connected to our ancestors and the past whether that manifests itself in dog sledding through the woods or being able to hunt caribou or being able to farm in a way that's different than most people farm or even gathering fruits and nuts. We shouldn't destroy things just because they are not important to us personally. Eventually, it will matter to all of us.

The cover picture of this post is a detail from a painting called Arctic Apocalypse #2 by Abraham Anghik Ruben, an Inuvialuk Canadian artist. We found this work in the Winnipeg Art Gallery in downtown Winnipeg on the first full day of our trip. I think it makes a good cover post.

Eating healthily. Saskatoons, hazelnuts, peppercorns, maple syrup and a few other things.