For the third iteration of River, Shore, Land: Ecological Futures at the Jardins de Métis, a three-year thematic series facilitated through the CCA Master’s Students Program, participants of the 2025 cohort engaged in collaborative research to explore and support how the Jardins de Métis/Reford Gardens are contending with a changing local climate. The Jardins de Métis is a landmark horticultural laboratory that for decades has set an agenda for international landscape design. This series focuses on the site’s changing local conditions through its connections to the Mitis River, the shoreline of the Saint-Lawrence River, and their surrounding territorial ties to what is now known as Gaspésie.

Over the course of the summer, students developed a collective project anchored by this state of ecological flux, occasioned both by the effects of global warming as well as the short- and long-term consequences of farming, mining, and other local extractive industries. Grand-Métis, Quebec thus became a microcosm to reflect on the broader ecological futures of shoreline erosion, depleting aquifers, soil exhaustion, and other manifestations of a rapidly changing ecology. The focus for this third year was on the land management practices created and led by the Jardins de Métis, particularly with a view to understanding the emergence of new models of ecological restoration premised on the resurgence of biodiverse futures. Participants collaboratively built a research project that explores what land-management practices consist of, their contested histories, and what the future holds for their capacity to generate understandings of postcolonial territoriality.

The aim was to better understand how the Jardins de Métis affects and enters into dialogue with land management projects, policies, and tangible land-based places with its surrounding communities, including the Wolastoqiyik and Mi’gmaq Nations. The group of students focused on histories of agricultural nationalism and experimentation in the region, particularly through the role played by the Commission de protection du territoire Agricole du Québec; the consolidation of the forestry industry; and/or the need for introducing practices of rewilding to regenerate and support soil, plant, and animal biodiversity. The intent was for participating students to explore and foreground ways of reading the layered histories of land use, both settler and Indigenous, that contemporary zoning bylaws, forestry management regimes, and land use planning surface at the interfaces of the Jardins de Métis. Guiding questions included: what do productive agricultural lands both reveal and conceal? Does rewilding appropriate and promise a false “return” to Indigenous forest management practices? Who should be involved in practices of land use planning, particularly on sites with contested histories of Indigenous dispossession? Should biodiversity be the guiding principle in regions dependent on agriculture and other land-based extractive industries?

Located on the eastern shore of the Mitis River, and so on the ancestral territories of the Wolastoqiyik and the Mi’gmaq, the Jardins de Métis served as a space of dialogue and community engagement hosting the students for a one-month research residency. At the end of June, a gathering event was organized by the students at the Jardins de Métis, to collaboratively map with visitors and community members how people have lived, worked, and settled in the region, embracing diverse perspectives. In July and August, the students were in residency at the CCA to pursue their collaborative research project and participate in events and conversations with other researchers.

Amra Alagic
University of Waterloo

Hannah Whitlaw
University of British Columbia

Hiba Zubairi
University of Waterloo