LISTEN TO EPISODE HERE
Music by Podington Bear; 'Kitten' and 'Solidarity' from the album, Background
freemusicarchive.org/music/Podington_Bear
Audio Script
Imagine yourself standing on top of a high hill, looking down across forested slopes towards the shoreline of a wide beckoning bay. The sound of the wind rushes through the low lying spruce and birch that hug the rocks and surround the area. You watch the distant horizon of rolling hills as the glowing sun drags a shimmering cape of gold and orange across the water. You inhale deeply. And exhale slowly. Distant crows begin to caw and gather as the hill is awash in golden light. Your senses awaken with the smell of the cool salt air, the crunch of spruce needles under your feet, the warmth of the setting sun upon your face. You are here now, on Crow Hill.
Hi,
my name is Glenn Gear and I was born here, on Crow Hill, in Corner Brook Newfoundland. Well, not actually born on this hill, more like at Western Memorial Regional Hospital, but you get the idea. I am a filmmaker, animator, and interdisciplinary artist of Inuit and settler descent from the Nunatsiavut region. I currently live in Montreal.
Ever since i was a kid, Crow Hill has been a place I would regularly go to, a clear vantage point in Corner Brook Newfoundland overlooking the beautiful Bay of Islands, also known as Elmastukwek by the Indigenous Mi’kmaw of the region. Nowadays its better known as Captain James Cook Monument, or simply Cook’s Lookout, a re-branding that took place about 12 years ago with the installation of the statue.
As a young boy of about nine or ten, Crow Hill, or the Rockies as we often called it in the 1980s, was a place we went to on warm summer days, when school was out and we were allowed to make our own adventures. We walked along the winding dirt road up to the lookout and skirted along the cliff-face, moving between the steep jagged rocks to find a landing half way down towards the infamous bat cave. I never managed to find the bat cave nor see any bats, but I was assured by my friends that they were there and that the bats came out around dusk, in search of people’s hair in which to get entangled. We spent time following the small trails through the trees, across the small boggy areas that were dotted with vibrant pink clusters of sheep laurel. We would stand on the highest rocks and look down into the bay and we might see a sailboat or two, tiny cars meandering through the undulating hills; hills and valleys that made their way to the water’s edge. I imagined giant people and animals sleeping just below the blanket of the trees, moving and shifting slightly when you weren’t looking. And as the sun slipped below the distant hills separating sky and water, the world itself seemed to crack open with bands of electric orange, pink and purple. The sun would set and the evening would sigh to reveal the first stars in the twilight.
My memories of Crow Hill collide with Captain Cook.
Crow Hill rises 161 meters or 528 feet from Crow Gulch and is home to the Captain James Cook Monument. Offering a panoramic view of the Bay of Islands on one side and the pulp and paper mill upon which the town was founded on the other, this lookout point is a popular tourist destination. In the daytime and evening, many make their way to take in the view and to watch the sun set, walk the short trails, or have a rest at the single picnic table there. When night falls, it also becomes a local meeting spot for more adult recreational activities.
The lone statue of Cook now stands at 7 1/2 feet and holding a quadrant, poised in the middle of a circular platform, surrounded by large slate stones and crossed by a wooden walkway. The curved railing nearest the statue holds five information boards with select maps, pictures, and descriptions outlining Cook’s travels, with particular emphasis on his contributions to accurately surveying and mapping the Island of Newfoundland. Omitted from this brief history are his exploits in traversing the globe, the sometimes violent confrontations between his crew and the local Indigenous populations (particularly of those in Australia, New Zealand, and Hawaii). But the most striking omission of all is of his death on February 14th, 1779 at the hands of many angered Native Hawaiians during Cook’s attempted kidnapping of the island’s in order monarch to reclaim a small boat or ‘cutter’ stolen from one of his ships.
Captain Cook is often cited as putting Newfoundland on the map, arriving on the island in 1762 and being the first person to accurately chart the rugged coastline, all under the banner of the British Royal Navy. For the Indigenous Beothuck and Mi’kmaw of the island, however, his arrival would herald the beginning of an encroaching colonial tide that would bring about the subjugation, displacement, and in the case of the Beothuck, the complete annihilation of a culture and people. And while Cook alone did not bring about this annihilation, as a colonial icon of the Age of the Enlightenment, he did lead the way in mapping its shores, making it easier for subsequent explorers and settlers to exploit the natural resources of this (already occupied) territory.
Today, Cook’s presence lingers not only on Crow Hill, but in the form of statues around the globe, continuing to be a point of contention with many folks, Indigenous and non-Indigenous alike. Public statues such as these are invariably of white men and actively uphold colonial ideals, rewriting history in their image. All too often, the ugly, violent, racist histories are downplayed or buried all together. False narratives and half-truths mean that marginal voices such as Black, Indigenous, and People of Colour are left out, forever cloaking the full truth. The growing controversy of such statues, and indeed of the recent wave of their removal and toppling, points to our collective need to reexamine these historical figures and to place them not on pedistals, but in context, within the complexities of history itself.
Here on Crow Hill I feel the need to decolonize this space. And all our shared public spaces.
I need, we need, more Indigenous land knowledge that is visible, shared, and celebrated.
As an adult, Crow Hill remains a site of personal connection to the land and water, a place of reflection even as I pass the tourists, occasional clumps of teenagers, or Cook’s withering bronze spectre. It’s my go to place when I visit my parents as they still live just a 15 minute walk away. I will travel along the same dirt road, along the same worn paths through the woods and thickets of bush. Only this time I might find myself taking hundreds of photographs of the setting sun to process into a time-lapse when I get back home. Or I’ll stay overnight and camp out with my photo equipment, have a small lunch and some coffee, and aim my camera towards the milky way, tracking the twinkling constellations during their sleepy movement around the north star. The sounds of the creaking, moaning forest against the shifting winds will fill the night air, and play upon my imagination, but I will know that I am safe in these small spaces on top of this hill; a hill like an old friend, a sleeping giant just below the soil.
This is my lived experience of this hill, this magic place. I am imprinted by this land through my own sensory knowledge before words, or maps, or cartography, or Captain Cook.
At this very moment, I look out across the bay - from my computer screen in Montreal linked to the live feed from the three surveillance cameras placed close to the statue of Cook on Crow Hill. The images update every three seconds, recording the comings and goings of tourists and the ever-changing play of light and shadow. I feel a strange mixture of longing, displacement, and voyeurism; of not being able to get back to Newfoundland due to COVID travel restrictions, and finding comfort in these strange surveillance images from the hill. And I imagine that in place of a statue of Captain Cook, the city of Corner Brook commissions a local Mi’kmaq artist to create a sculpture atop Crow Hill. It could be a symbol of our connection to, and not mastery or mapping of, this place. It would acknowledge the Indigenous people who were here first, and perhaps pay homage to the crows who were here before the people.
About Glenn Gear:
Glenn Gear is a filmmaker and multidisciplinary artist of Inuit (Nunatsiavut) and Newfoundland heritage currently residing in Montréal. His work often explores personal and cultural connections to land, people, and animals through theuse of animation, archives, craft, and research-based investigation. His films have screened in festivals throughout Canada and around the world.
