In this, our final episode of the ten-part series, we present this epic and extra special piece which comprises a series of interviews recorded by Maria Hupfield, who worked with us in Tkaronto over the long duration of the "People's Map" project. Maria collected these interviews over the summer and fall of 2022 with Sylvia Plain, Chris Mendoza, Anong and Lux Beam, and her father, master boatbuilder John Hupfield, Sr.

An extra special thanks to Sonia Rivera, who edited the episode and wove together these very special in-the-field and on-the-water interviews which happen to take the form, together, of a meditation on craft, making, Indigenous knowledge, and ways of being in and with water.

Anong and Lux Beam, recorded July 28, 2022 over breakfast
Chris Mendoza, recorded July 17, 2022 in the Don Valley River
John Hupfield Sr., recorded July 16, 2022, at my kitchen table Toronto
Sylvia Plain, recorded July 13, 2022, outside on St. Clair, Toronto

Guest Bios

Anong Migwans Beam is a painter, mother, paint-maker, and curator, living and working in her home community of M’Chigeeng First Nation on Manitoulin Island. After studying art at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts Boston, OCAD University, and the Institute of American Indian Arts, she returned home to be a studio assistant for her father, Carl Beam. Her painting practice is in large-format oil on canvas. She is the founder of Gimaa Radio, Ojibwe-language radio CHYF 88.9FM. She maintains an independent curating practice, and served as director of the Ojibwe Cultural Foundation before leaving to focus on her own practice and the art of paint-making. She is the founder of Beam Paints, where she combines an early education in Indigenous pigments from her parents Carl and Ann Beam, with a lifelong interest in art and colour.

Maria Hupfield is a transdisciplinary maker working with Industrial felt at the intersection of performance art, design and sculpture. She is a 2020-2022 inaugural Borderlands Fellow for her project Breaking Protocol at The Vera List Center for Art and Politics at the New School and the Center for the Imagination in the Borderlands at Arizona State University, and was awarded the Hnatyshyn Mid-career Award for Outstanding Achievement in Canada 2018. She has exhibited and performed her work through her touring solo exhibition The One Who Keeps On Giving (organized by The Power Plant) 2017-2018, and solo Nine Years Towards the Sun, at the Heard Museum, Phoenix, 2019-2020.

John Hupfield Sr. is a master boat builder, owner of Lost in the Woods Boatworks (1991 – currently retired), and Maria Hupfield’s father. He provided restoration and construction of small boat crafts in Carling Township, Ontario Canada. He is Anglophone Canadian born in Montreal Quebec from Southern Ontario and husband to the late Peggy Miller, Anishinaabe belonging to Wasauksing First Nation, Ontario Canada. He is a graduate of the Media Studies at Sheridan College, Oakville, in 1973, and worked security as a resident of Rochdale College, Toronto, 1969-70.

Chris Mendoza is an artist and educator whose work moves between performance, sculpture, image-based work, and writing as affective inquiries into belonging, inheritance, and embodied relations to place. Chris values presenting work and performing both in and outside of formal art spaces—the former of which include the FOFA gallery (Montreal); University of Toronto Art Museum; Craft Ontario; Crutch Gallery (Toronto); and the Icelandic Textile Center (Blönduós).

Sylvia Plain, from Aamjiwnaang First Nation, is a community ambassador, water walker, researcher, birch bark canoe building apprentice and founder of the Great Lakes Canoe Journey. Plain is the owner and operator of the Great Lakes Canoe Journey Education Program, which was founded in 2014. Sylvia has been a Research and Policy analyst in the environment sector for ten years working for First Nations communities and political organizations in Ontario.