David is perhaps best known as a professional Indigenous artist who is a member of the Mississauga Anishinaabe Curve Lake First Nations.
He is also a geographer, historian and instructor at the Continuing Education Program at Trent University. Last week came to the Millbrook Legion to provide an entertaining and educational presentation about some local Indigenous history to an audience of forty at an event hosted by the Millbrook and Cavan Historical Society.
Johnson completed an Environmental Studies and Geography degree at Trent where he studied old portages and trail routes in the area, including the portage between Peterborough and Bridgenorth. He explained that some of these trails are more than 10,000years old and began as paths across a tundra landscape after the last ice age. He describes a personal connection to these trails, as some of them were created by his ancestors. Slides exhibiting the routes of these historic trails were presented, illustrating local examples as well as one crossing through modern-day Manhattan.
Eventually these historic trails evolved and new vegetation allowed them to be identified by trail marker trees. The markers began as saplings that were cut and intentionally bent into an unnatural, deformed growth habit. This careful transformation was implemented to ensure the sap-ling survived and flourished so it could provide a navigational tool to help those who understood them find their way through wild, forested landscapes. Because the horizontal bend is several feet off the ground, the marker is visible from a distance. Many of these trail marker trees can still be found in North American Indigenous settlement areas including along the west coast. Today they are sometimes used by modern hunters stalking deer and moose.
Johnson also explained that most of the First Nation people in this area are organized by clans with animal-based identities. He is a member of the turtle clan, which is charged with looking after the earth. Others include Pike, Eagle, Bear, Otter, Deer, wolf, and Sturgeon. The Clans, or totems, and their animal symbols are like family crests that are passed on through the generations. Johnson presented a slide showing one of the large rocks at the Petroglyphs Provincial Park demonstrated embellishments of Indigenous rock carvings depicting clan symbols such as turtles, birds and animals, abstract images from the spirit world and recognizable images from the natural world.
Another local trail leads to Salt Creek near Warkworth. As its name suggests, the water in this creek is loaded with salt, a vestige from before the ice age when this body of water was connected to an ocean. Johnson explains that when water from this creek is boiled down, one third of its volume is salt, a critical preservative for Indigenous and other historical populations, which explains the significance of this particular trail.
Last fall, Johnson participated in a project that combined his artistic talents with his appreciation of an ancient local portage route in Peterborough. In a project called Right of Way, he and six other Indigenous artists created artistic works that cover traffic signal cabinets and electrical supply boxes along the Chemong Portage route in Peterborough. Each work represents a traveler along the route. The project provides a visual acknowledgement of the enduring legacy of Indigenous people along this historic route and reminds us of the depth of knowledge and experience they have with our land.