We arrived in La Mitis through fields, forests, and roads that felt familiar and orderly. At first glance, the land appeared legible: parceled; cultivated in neat rows; and clearly bordered. Hayfields and soybeans stretched across long lots toward Wahsipekuk,¹ while tree lines marked property edges, suggesting continuity and stability. Within this apparent order, however, are older pathways, displaced ecologies, and interrupted ways of living with the land that are not immediately visible.

Settler and Indigenous presences persist together in Bas-Saint-Laurent, though they are unevenly inscribed across the landscape. After spending a month in the region, we came to understand the land not only as a passive surface with productive potential, but as a repository of policies, practices, and material movements over time. In addition to regional subsistence, agriculture emerged as a structuring force that organizes space, enforces ownership, and normalizes extraction.

Our time in La Mitis offered a concentrated entry point into these complexities. The narratives most visibly preserved and circulated tend to foreground setter histories of land and water management, shaping a particular understanding of the region and its past. This perspective centers the last two centuries, despite these lands having been inhabited for thousands of years. Through conversations about the transformation of the Jardins de Métis, the evolution of regional farming practices, as well as the histories and ongoing presence of Wolastoqiyik¹ and Mi’gmaq communities, we began to understand the many intersecting narratives that shape the landscape.

In a landscape largely organized around monocultural agriculture, the Jardins de Métis stand out for their commitment to biodiversity. At the same time, the historic gardens embody a tradition of land management rooted in private ownership and the botanical legacies of colonial plant collection and classification. The site framed many questions central to the region: Who organizes land, and for what purposes? What forms of cultivation are celebrated, and which are normalized or obscured? Whose voices shape the land, and what histories of dispossession are embedded even within carefully tended spaces? These tensions made the Jardins a generative starting point for our research, as a place where the region’s agrarian logics are both visible and actively negotiated.

The gardens are a result of extensive material and ecological transformation. Originally a spruce forest, the site was reshaped into an English-style garden under the stewardship of Elsie Reford, who inherited the forty-acre property from her uncle, George Stephen; the first president of the Canadian Pacific Railway. Beginning in 1926, Elsie documented her horticultural experiments in cultivating plant varieties from around the world. The Himalayan blue poppy—which is now emblematic of the gardens—stands as a symbol of Elsie’s botanical achievement while holding deeper histories of colonial plant exchange and control.

As we moved beyond the Jardins de Métis, their uniqueness in the region became clear. Just down the road, a former soybean farm sits uncultivated, slowly healing from decades of glyphosate use as the Jardins make plans for the land’s future. This land is open to the myriad of agricultural practices and values found in the region. We encountered a wide range of these approaches in Bas-Saint-Laurent: a small-scale organic farm run by a young couple at Ferme Ravito; large-scale industrial livestock operations; conventional forestry practices in Price (classified as agriculture under Québec law); and alternative land models such as the FUSA (Fiducie d’Utilité Sociale Agroécologique, or Agroecological Social Utility Trust) at Sageterre in Rimouski, where land is held collectively rather than privately.

We learned that livestock and dairy farms are declining in La Mitis, while plant-based and organic farms are increasing. Many of these newer initiatives are reactions to the harms of industrial agriculture, such as soil degradation, pesticide use, air pollution, and broader health concerns. Regardless of present efforts to make farming more sustainable, the reality is that these issues arose from the sweeping industrialization of farming practices, which was made possible with the introduction of private property on these lands in the 17th century. As settlers were granted permission to establish seigneuries along the shores of Wahsipekuk, Wolastoqiyik communities were gradually constrained by imposed property lines, transforming relationships to land that had previously followed the Wolastoq¹ watershed and natural borders.

Throughout our time in La Mitis, we recorded the unassuming materials of everyday life: plants, chemicals, infrastructures, tools, and documents. We focused on the mundane as elements that collectively have the power to reveal how Eurocentric logics of land management have shaped the site, degraded local ecologies, and reinforced colonial state-building. While the region’s histories are deeply layered, Québec’s collective memory often privileges settler narratives of productivity and improvement at the expense of Indigenous rights and ecologies. This historical framing has primed the region for intensive resource extraction, normalizing the dispossession of Wolastoqiyik and Mi’gmaq land and rendering their presence peripheral.

In response, we assembled The Agrarian Mundane: a land-based archive, that positions the agrarian landscape as a layered and contested site, where the residue of colonial history is still present and in conversation with an active resistance. Produced in La Mitis, in the Bas-Saint-Laurent region of Québec, this project emerged from our shared effort to understand how agriculture operates as a persisting mode of colonial occupation, shaping land relations long after the formal establishment of settler governance.

We initially approached these ideas through a collaborative drawing practice. Drawing became a way for us to record, question, and relate the materials we encountered on site, connecting them to one another and to the deeper histories of the land. We integrated graphite, linocut prints, photographs, maps, and archival documents, often overlapping, obscuring, and interrupting one another, mirroring the entangled histories we sought to trace. Unlike traditional archival documentation—which often isolates objects and events—the practice of drawing allowed us to embrace ambiguity and relationality. Drawing slowed us down, requiring us to spend time with what we might otherwise overlook. The slowness of producing and engaging with the drawing offers a different way of engaging with the land that values intimacy and attention over efficiency and order.

We came to understand the drawing as a part of the archive itself shaped by our experience. It does not claim completeness or neutrality but is an open-ended visual conversation we share to invite others to reflect on how the agrarian landscape is seen, organized, and inhabited.

The drawing we made is accompanied by a written and photographic booklet, allowing the user to move between looking and reading. Together, they form a land archive which can be entered from multiple points. While the drawing invites visual recognition or curiosity, the booklet offers a way to engage more deeply with the histories embedded within specific elements. Alongside a written text and photographs, each entry provides translations of key vocabulary into Wolastoqey Latuwewakon and Mi’gmawi’simg¹—the languages of the Wolastoqiyik and Mi’gmaq respectively.

The booklet is intentionally flexible in its construction. It is folded, rather than bound, to contain loose pages devoted to a single entry. Each entry can be rearranged, mirroring our intentions for the land archive itself: unsettled, relational, and resistant to a singular reading. The initial order of the entries traces our own movement through La Mitis, reflecting our encounters with each object, plant, document, or tool over time. This order carries a personal and temporal imprint of our fleeting presence there. We expect, and invite, the entries to be rearranged as the archive is used, allowing new narratives to emerge through handling and engagement.

The entries that form The Agrarian Mundane emerged through walking, listening, drawing, and paying attention to what persisted across the landscape. Each entry represents a form of material evidence found in abundance yet rarely questioned. By qualifying mundane objects and ephemeral phenomena as evidence, we sought to subvert the hierarchies of the conventional archive.

Some entries, like Route 132, are omnipresent, and fold seamlessly into daily routines. Others, such as glyphosate, are concealed as their impacts are dispersed across bodies and ecosystems. Still others, like sedges, are overlooked in the landscape because they are ephemeral, seasonal, or ecologically marginal. Lastly, several entries highlight mundane documents such as survey plans or legislation—though not witnessed directly in the landscape—have deeply influenced how the landscape is organized and operated. What connects these entries is not their scale or visibility, but their capacity to reveal how colonial extraction has been made ordinary in the rural agricultural setting. Our land archive is a living portrait of settler placemaking, Indigenous dispossession, and ecological interdependence influenced by the month we spent in Bas-Saint-Laurent.

The drawing functions as a visual finding aid for the booklet, though not in a conventional archival sense. Rather than directing the user through categories or chronology, it operates through visual association. A viewer might be drawn to a familiar form, such as Route 132, and then locate the corresponding entry in the booklet. From there, connections may unfold— infrastructure alongside agricultural practices, chemical inputs, or plant species that appear nearby in the drawing.

Ultimately, The Agrarian Mundane asks us to read landscapes differently. Agriculture is not merely a backdrop or resource, but an active archive that holds histories of both care and violence; extraction and persistence. By attending to the mundane, we are reminded that colonial histories are not confined to the past. They remain embedded in the everyday, shaping how we move through, relate to, and imagine land today.