Echo Maker: James Raffan on the people and stories behind the Historical Map of Temagami

“To be in a relationship with a place is a very complex and beautiful dynamic.”

Bestselling author, explorer and master storyteller James Raffan returns to Explore to discuss his new book, Echo Maker: Craig Macdonald and the Lives That Produced One of Canada’s Most Significant Historical Maps.

The book tells the remarkable story of Craig Macdonald, a quiet and determined ethno-geographer who spent decades travelling through the Temagami region of northern Ontario and learning from Teme-Augama Anishnabai elders. Through hundreds of conversations and journeys by canoe, snowshoe and dogsled, Macdonald documented traditional place names, portages, winter trails and patterns of land use that had never appeared on conventional maps.

The result was the historical Map of Temagami, which showcases the traditional travel routes, campsites, and geographical names of the Indigenous Anishinaabeg before 1900.

An extraordinary record of Indigenous knowledge, the map has helped preserve language and culture, strengthen connections between generations and support an ongoing land claim.

Raffan and Explore host David McGuffin discuss what drew Macdonald to this work, why he learned the language of Anishinaabemowin, and how a landscape often described as “wilderness” was revealed to be a deeply known and inhabited cultural landscape.

They also discuss James’s new documentary, Signs of Life, about a music-and-storytelling project with Inuit youth in Kugluktuk, Nunavut, and reminisce about an unforgettable #CanGeoPolarPlunge through Arctic sea ice at −38C.

James Raffan is a cultural geographer, bestselling author and Fellow of the Royal Canadian Geographical Society. He has spent more than 50 years travelling, researching and telling stories across Canada and the circumpolar North.

Purchase the Historical Map of Temagami.

Learn more about James, Echo Maker and his touring one-man musical show, The Accidental Canadian, at jamesraffan.ca.