Recollect: River w/ Colin Smith

Stretching from Appalachian mountains to the northwest shore of the Bay of Fundy, the Wolastoq & Saint John River of New Brunswick sits as a silent witness to progress, commerce, migration, and memory. It shapes the traditional territory and cultural influences of the Wolastoqiyik First Nations and greater Wabanaki Confederacy; provides nourishment through fishing, hunting, and agricultural reliance; seen its share of strife by colonial powers; and undergone modernization thoroughfare of trade, millwork, and hydroelectric engineering. It remains the essential artery to all who call the province New Brunswick home, and its channels have been engrained in memory like birds tracing their migratory routes. This collaborative tunnel book between Natt Cann and Colin Smith seeks to document this river as it exists in 2025. Colin’s stylized birds denote the variety of forms that inhabit the water, from west to east, with all manner of feathers, while Natt’s location-based monotypes capture the river’s bridges, ferries, dams, and means of commerce that economically direct the province. Placed together within a paper-engineered perspective, these elements propose a witnessing of the river from the mouth of the Saint John port to the hydro electrical dam of Grand Falls, and beyond. The river is not without ecological turmoil. Springtime flows are drastically detrimental, as surface runoff worsened by ice jams and spring freshets raise waters well beyond their normalcy. Estimated damages from the 2008 freshet exceeded $23 million and reached $75 million in 2018. The province was tested again in 2019, but keen preparation lessened the impacts and costs of the event. The severity and rate of flooding is expected to increase as climate breakpoints are surpassed. What stories will this tunnel book tell in twenty years’ time?