Freedom Tours is a multi-part project consisting of live events created collaboratively by Camille Turner and Cree/Metis artist Cheryl L’Hirondelle. The project included a boat tour of Thousand Islands National Park which took place on June 17th and 18th, 2017 and a walking tour of Rouge National Urban Park along with public workshops on June 24th, 2017. Created in response to the 150th anniversary of Confederation in Canada, Freedom Tours contradicted and unravelled the settler narratives of the parks, unsilencing Black and Indigenous histories and facilitating activism for the ecosystems within the parks. Freedom Tours was produced for LandMarks 2017/Repères 2017, curated by Tania Willard, with support from Partners in Art. The artists have drawn from the live events to create an installation entitled Freedom Tours: Dual Dissonance which was presented in the 2018 exhibition, 150 Acts: Art, Activism, Impact and in the 2019 exhibition A Sense of Site at Art Gallery of Nova Scotia.
Freedom Tours (2017)
Camille Turner and Cheryl L’Hirondelle, Freedom Tours, 2017 in Thousand Islands and Rouge Parks.
In Thousand Islands National Park the artists chartered a boat and produced an anti-colonial audio tour of islands with live performances by Black and Indigenous musicians.
At Rouge National Urban Park, the artists led a walk through lesser-known areas of the park. Participants, many of them children from nearby schools, as well as the public, were invited to create banners and flags and to display them on the walk to celebrate and pledge to protect the diversity of life that calls the park home.
Camille Turner and Cheryl L’Hirondelle, Freedom Tours: Dual Dissonance, 2018.