High Noon, Dettah NT

Photography on cotton rag paper.

30.50x24x1"

Limited edition 1 of 10.

My husband and I drove out to Dettah on the ice road — our first time crossing. As we drove across Great Slave Lake I mentioned, perhaps unwisely, that it is one of the deepest lakes in the world. He quietly removed his seatbelt. We made it safely across all eight kilometres.

Dettah is a small Dene First Nation community just across the bay from Yellowknife, and what we found there stopped me completely. A teepee adorned with moose antlers stood beside a yellow pickup truck and a motorboat, everything encrusted in hoar frost, the pale noon sun barely clearing the horizon. In the north, high noon looks like this — soft, diffused, the light arriving at an angle that flattens shadow and turns the ordinary into something quietly extraordinary.

It was the collision of things that moved me most. Ancient and everyday, indigenous and contemporary, all of it held together by frost and winter light.

Part of my Life in the Knife series, Dettah, Northwest Territories.