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James Raffan’s biography of Craig Macdonald and how the Historical Map of Temagami came to be is a remarkable tale. In the mid-1960s, Macdonald began interviewing and travelling with Indigenous trappers and travellers. He became familiar with Anishinaabemowin and built a lasting bond with the traditional knowledge holders. Returning year after year to map the land, Macdonald painstakingly plotted traditional placenames, original shorelines, elevations, and traditional summer and winter travel routes — including the documentation of more than twelve hundred canoe portages and winter snowshoe trails. His map is unique in the Canadian cartographic canon, and its genesis is a story that has never been told, until now.
Craig Macdonald learned at a young age that Indigenous map making is not simply about producing a two-dimensional piece of paper. With a deep respect for Indigenous ways of knowing — Anishinaabemowin, ancient spiritual practices, and empirical knowledge gained over thousands of years — Macdonald, collaborating with an exceptional community of knowledge keepers, created a living archive. This map is a bagajigenan - a gift embodying the true spirit of the treaty relationship.
With a creative blend of oral history, radio archives, court records, interview transcripts and personal recollections, James Raffan leads us through a multidimensional landscape of time, space and cultural memory ... Part geography, part anthropology, part memoir, part author introspection, Echo Maker charts a course through rugged lands, waters and ice that have defined the lifeways and pathways of a people much older than Canada itself.