Skinnerboox, Jesi, Italy, 2024. 112 pp., 9¾x11½".
The collisions between Western Civilizations with Indigenous communities have never been pretty. Too often, colonialism resulted in outside powers exploiting distant lands for the commodities needed back home – sugar, oil, rubber, coffee, and timber. When I was a kid in school, we learned about Manifest Destiny and about the genius engineering that allowed trains to traverse the Rocky Mountains and the building of the Hoover Dam, but we did not learn about the deforestation of the Pacific Northwest and Leonard Peltier. It seemed all that might change when Joe Biden appointed Deb Haaland as Secretary of the Interior, but then we heard about the Supreme Court’s recent ruling on Chevron. It’s a bleak history, and one that unfortunately is easier to ignore.
Photographer Lucas Olivet splits his time between Michigan and Switzerland, but his new book Medicine Tree looks at Prince George and the painful legacies of its indigenous people and the remarkable destruction of a major timber industry. Prince George is a rural community in British Columbia, the Canadian province part of the Pacific Northwest region between Oregon and Alaska. Medicine Tree offers insight into the bleak histories of colonialism and environmental destruction. Olivet doesn’t dwell on the physical scars of timber production, but rather the psychic ones, the individual and social trauma inflicted by the Canadian conquest of the Pacific Northwest.
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British Columbia became part of Canada in 1871, twelve years after Oregon joined the United States. Prior to European conquest, native populations like the Salish, Kwakwaka’wakw, Gitxsan, and Tsimshian called it home. At one time boasting over 30 different languages, expansionist ideologies driven by railroad, timber, and mining interests quickly dominated the region, “unifying” it under the English language and Canadian flag. Today, when most of us think of British Columbia, we imagine the most incredible landscapes and cities Canada has to offer, not acknowledging that it was founded on genocide and continues to provide timber products around the world.
Medicine Tree is divided into two parallel narratives. Olivet’s is the strongest voice, creating a portrait of the region in pictures developed by 2014-2018. Interspersed throughout the photographs is an essay/story by Lauren Haddad, which is fragmented and works as both a social documentary and a personal narrative. Developed by wandering and talking with the people on the fringes, she relates stories heard from native artists and outlaws, people slinging meth and carving beautiful mandalas into birch bark to sell to tourists.
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Olivet’s narrative is comprised of two different types of pictures. Most of the photographs are straightforward, made in a documentary style and with a handheld camera, quick and intuitive but also with great self-awareness and control, perhaps similar in style and content as Ron Jude’s Lick Creek Line (made just across the border in Idaho). There is also a small selection of pictures that have a fuzzy, dreamlike quality, reminding me of an effect analog photographers achieved by rubbing Vaseline or leaving breathe condensation on the front of the lens. These pictures lend the book a slightly different feel, perhaps revealing spiritual scars instead of physical ones.
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The book’s production emphasizes its objectness; Medicine Tree was obviously developed with material metaphors in mind, using the physical production to mirror back elements of the story. Haddad mentions two Cree artists, both named Angelique Merasty, who make bitings, exquisite mandala-like carvings on birch bark. Similarly, Haddad’s story is printed on a paper chosen to resemble wood or bark, a heavier weight paper than the bright white one used for the pictures, colored and textured like the inside of a birch.
At the end of her essay, Haddad tells about the medicine tree at the heart of the story: “It’s a black spruce, a tree that’s found in every one of Canada’s provinces, a tree with a preference for harsh environments. Randy calls it his medicine tree in the middle of hell. ‘Maybe it weeps so much because it has to work so hard for the poison here,’ he says.” This is a remarkably concise expression of all that unfolds in Medicine Tree, but it also served as a source for the book’s cover. If Haddad’s pages represent the soft side of birch bark, the cover is made to resemble a harsher exterior. It is dyed with burnt sienna and raw umber tones, like the rough skin of a black pine, and with a picture of Randy’s medicine tree pasted on top. Interestingly or strangely, I am not quite sure which, the cover is also varnished to resemble Randy’s tree, varnished with shiny, thick blotches like sap oozing from the medicine tree, offering both its tears and a tonic for all our poisons.
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