WE HAVE LAAAAAAAAAAAAANNNNNDDDD!!!

Super exciting pre-season 6 announcement!

In a truly mind- and dimension-warping turn of events, our projected 2-3 year timeline for securing some land for the Métis in Space: 2Land 2Furious Land Back project shrunk down to 3 months about seven years ago, with an anonymous sugar settler fronting the cash for a quarter section (approx 160 acres) of beautiful mixed ecology (prairie! wetland! forest! lake!) in Lac Ste. Anne county near the historic (and contemporary!) Metis community of manitow-sâkahikan (Lac Ste. Anne). We are DEEPLY PUMPED to have secured some land, and have set things up so that the state can’t take it away from us no matter how broke we get! Take THAT Scrip fraudsters and tax collectors!!

Much of Lac Ste. Anne county is hilariously unsuited to farming, with muskeg, dense forest, and flooding being commonplace throughout the area. This also means that the county (and even our small piece of it) is absolutely bursting with ecological diversity. The lake is blanketed with ducks, geese, loons, and swans; the forest is full of deer, elk, and moose sign; medicines and food like mint, cattails, wild roses, lowbush cranberry, and raspberries grow everywhere. We hope to work with Indigenous Knowledge Holders and scientists to create an even more healthy and welcoming environment for these relatives.

If you want to know more about what the process was like, and what pitfalls we encountered, check out this short piece in the Briarpatch Land Back issue here: https://briarpatchmagazine.com/articles/view/back-2-the-land-2land-2furious

The Land Back issue is also just jam-packed with incredible writing from Land Back thinkers and practitioners, and we highly recommend you read the whole thing here: https://briarpatchmagazine.com/issues/view/september-october-2020

We already love everything about the land (and we’re excited to work towards finding its name and a name for the lake), and we can’t wait to make it ready to bring people out to do the kinds of cultural and relationship-building activities we have been dreaming about. The land has absolutely no infrastructure (or structures of any kind) - it doesn’t even have road access right now! So even though our biggest expense has been met, we continue to need funds to ensure that people can access and engage with the land.

Our biggest priorities right now are getting a road put in so that we don’t have to wade through (sometimes sloughy, sometimes icy) bush from the road to the field, and installing a freshwater well so that people can spend some real time out there without having to haul in gallons of water.