‘The prettiest house of the region’: Performance and imagination of the industrial fishery heritage in Bonne-Espérance, Canada

ABSTRACT

Between 1855 and 1960, a fishing industry developed on Bonne-Espérance Island, locally known as ‘Bony,’ on the Lower North Shore of Quebec, Canada. The site now abandoned and in ruins, is a symbolic place of local history and strongly linked to the fishing identity of Rivière-Saint-Paul village, where many of the descendants of those who lived and worked in that maritime extractive industry currently reside. I study this site using digital recording tools and a 3D reconstruction of its visible features. The house of the Whiteley family, owners of this fishing industry, is presented here to examine the industrial heritage of the recent past and the role that performance and imagination, encouraged by a collaborative archaeological project, play in the persistent resonance of the past in the present.

KEYWORDS:

• Industrial fishery
• contemporary past
• imagination
• performance
• Bonne-Espérance

Acknowledgements

This paper is part of a postdoctoral fellowship at the Arctic Studies Center, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C., funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. I am grateful to William Fitzhugh, Brad Loewen, Garland Nadeau, Eileen and Piercy Schofield, Karen Fequet and the Centre de Services Scolaire du Littoral, Québec, the Bonne Espérance Municipality, and Tiziana Gallo.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 An important digital archaeology project in the Lower North Shore has been carried out by Manek Kolhatkar and Diane Martin-Moya who are currently working on a 3D reconstruction of the entire Bony Island and all its architectural features.

2 All interviews were conducted with a verbal and voluntary informed consent, following ethical principles of inclusion and respect.

3 A new interesting public outreach website: https://whiteley.miaexplore.com/en/.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.

Notes on contributors

Francisco Rivera

Francisco Rivera is a historical archaeologist and received his PhD in Anthropology at the University of Montreal, Canada. His research interests are the anthropology of extractivism, industrial heritage, and the historical archaeology of capitalism both in the Atacama Desert and Quebec’s Lower North Shore, Canada.