Banff National Park, AB

Banff, Canada

Sound on for baby gosling chirps!

past snow capped mountains.

Fairmont Hotel Banff Canada

let’s meet at the confluence is a suggestion to all Calgarians to consider the site where the Elbow flows into the Bow river and question how settler-colonial history is privileged in public and site specific art. The piece references the different histories of gathering at the confluence of the waters, histories that long predate Calgary, Alberta. Despite histories of Indigenous uses of the land, queer cruising, sex work, trade, the arrival of the railway, and the North West Mounted Police, the site of the confluence is often overlooked and rarely used as the great meeting place that it once was. The simple map and text invites an audience of all backgrounds, Indigenous and non-Indigenous alike, to make their way from the The New Gallery along the Bow river to the confluence viewpoint and to consider their proximity to one another. The text is in English and the word confluence is repeated in multiple languages including Blackfoot, Cantonese, and Cree to honour the artist’s Michif roots and the specific location of the billboard on Treaty 7 and in Chinatown, pointing to the history of many different people living along the rivers.

The Sounds of Waters Flowing By (Banff National Park) by Mark Stevens Via Flickr: While taking in views of the Bow River at Castle Mountain Viewpoint with a view looking to the north. This is in Banff National Park. With this image, I pulled back on the focal length to include as much of the Bow River as I could from the shoreline. I also wanted to have Castle Mountain more or less in the image center as a focus point.