Blanket toss under midnight sun : portraits of everyday life in eight Indigenous communities

Summary: "Blanket Toss Under Midnight Sun consists of approximately 80 archival black-and-white and colour photographs of Indigenous family life from 1925 to 1985, a period of sixty years. Thematically, like Paul's social media feed, the images will portray the resilience and resourcefulness of Indigenous communities across Canada, and will illustrate a way of life that has been diminished or lost in modern times and is little known today. The book will focus on five communities. The high-resolution photos will be selected from the works of 12 photographers who spent significant time in each region. Paul will clear permission and collect prints. Paul will select the photos according to their relevance to the geography and history of each of the five communities. The communities are: Cape Dorset (Kinngait) in Nunavut; Lake Superior Region in Ontario; Plains (Medicine Line) in Southern Alberta, Southern Saskatchewan and Northern Montana; Fort Rae (Bechoko) in the Northwest Territories, and Teslin - Old Crow in the Yukon. The narrative essay for each community will focus on exploration of its history, its families, and its cultural characteristics; including anecdotal stories, profiles of significant individuals, and analysis of how the community adapted to change. The essays will avoid an academic or anthropological approach, showing rather than telling. They will focus on the human dimension and allow the sensual aspects of the photographs (the stories within) to speak for themselves. That sensuality captures the beauty and humanity of the subjects through the hardest of times and through tumultuous changes, while retaining the optimism and resilience of the human spirit. To counter the current preponderance of stories about oppression and misery, the narrative will be comprised of positive stories celebrating indigenous experience, as well as the stories of the photographers themselves, when they are relevant and interesting; see the attached Brick essay for an example of the latter. A Foreword will explain that this book is not meant to be an all-inclusive record of the over 65 distinct First Nations, Metis, and Inuit cultures in Canada, but a selective exploration based on the work of the photographers. At the back of the book will be the Acknowledgments and Links for those who want to look deeper into a particular photograph, as well as a Glossary, and very brief Bios of the photographers."--