First Touch

          Through a week-long self-directed backcountry expedition, I sought to document what happened to one of the first places in western Canada touched by colonization. In 1778, the British captain James Cook was rescued by the Mowachaht/ Muchalaht Nation members on the shores of Nootka Island off the northwest coast of Vancouver Island. Since this time, unimaginable cultural and ecological keystones have been lost.

         Within only two hundred years, local otter (Enhydra lutris) population were hunted to extinction for their fur and later re-introduced only to rebound in such a way where the ecosystem thrives but the original stewards of these lands and waters remain extracted both physically and politically from these spaces. These images depict a collapsed timeline, the vestiges of which coexist on the same temporal plane. I am curious to understand how collapsing the past through interacting with landscape can teach me to become a more attentive ecological steward in the future.