Harmony McNish

Trapped in Williams 1923 Treaty

Sculpture

2023

printed and ripped Indigenous Treaty document made into paper mache using flour and local pond water to cover a found fox trap

A fox trap permanently fixed closed and covered in ripped layers of the Williams Treaty document that claimed the trapping, fishing, and hunting rights of the Kawatha (Kawartha Lakes) area.

“The Williams Treaty of 1923 enabled the provincial Ontario government to control and “regulate” the fishing, hunting, and trapping rights of the Kawatha (Kawartha Lakes) region. Indigenous people endured starvation, financial burden, dangerous harvesting situations, as “conversation” regulators brutality enforced the laws informed by the alleged revised Williams Treaty.I admit sorrowfully that my settler family benefited from the treaty as we once made a livelihood from trapping and selling mostly muskrat pelts. I found this forgotten fox trap dated to be made around the 1930’s on my family’s homestead a hundred years after the Williams treaty document was written.I acknowledge that this trap and the Williams Treaty continues to cause pain, suffering, and violence on the land. In an act of making I try to reconcile the violence by closing the trap and paper welding it closed, to open conversations about the pain and suffering that has gone on between the Michi Saagiig Nishnaabeg community, the Indigenous communities and the settler populations. ”