In northeastern Canada, a bend in the Ottawa River is home to powerful natural circular shale wat... more In northeastern Canada, a bend in the Ottawa River is home to powerful natural circular shale waterfalls once heard in the approach from more than two leagues. An Algonquin heralded sacred site, it was a place for gathering, ceremony and ritual for indigenous dwellers and continental river travellers going east, west, north and south across North America. Known as Akiko in Algonquin, Chûtes des Chaudière, Chaudière Falls, and Great Kettle of Boiling Water, the natural sacred site in the great river served ancients seeking communion involving earth and sky. Today the waterfalls can be heard but not seen, hidden under hydro turbines, crumbling industrial infrastructure and skyscrapers for Federal Government workers in electrically-generated vistas, a precarious situation given our age-old reciprocity with the many-voiced landscape, and a problematic human disconnection from nature. Using a phenomenological approach, this dissertation examines the landscape from the perspective of sacred geography, history and culture in the search for the characteristics of contemporary sacredness. The research data derived from a literature review and ethnographic material, questionnaires and reflexion, validates that sacred experience is possible at Akiko today, although vastly challenged by collective appropriations and vagaries of individual belief. Today, visibility of the sacred site appears to be in upwards flux due to changing cultural factors.
SPICA Postgraduate Journal for Cosmology in Culture, 2015
This essay discusses whether Kumik Lodge is a sacred space. Built inside a skyscraper that headqu... more This essay discusses whether Kumik Lodge is a sacred space. Built inside a skyscraper that headquarters Canadian government aboriginal affairs administration, it overlooks the sacred waterfalls Akiko or Asticou also known as Great Kettle of Boiling Water or Chaudière Falls, in the Ottawa River landscape. French explorers met Algonquin hunters and gatherers here four centuries ago. Indigenous cosmologies are complex but typically held all nature as animate. Today the dominant paradigm of scientism is evident in the surrounding office towers and hydro turbines. In researching the sacred, Eliade recommended the phenomenological approach, he thought sacred space could occur naturally or could be human-built. From the evidence, the Kumik is a human-constructed space made sacred in the acknowledgment and repetition within it of ideas from Algonquin spirituality. New trends are emerging where individuals are claiming back the landscape and small installations like the Algonquin lodge inside a workplace seem to be re-establishing this connection.
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Papers by Judith Jibb