Stuck in the Middle 2: Defining Views of Manitoba

By Great Plains Publications

"a compelling look at virtually every corner of our vast province." - Winnipeg Free Press

"Weird and breathtaking: Book showcases Manitoba views through a different lens" - The Metro: Winnipeg

Somewhere between North Dakota and Nunavut sits a curious land with a coastline patrolled by polar bears, highways lined with monuments to household produce and dinner plates drenched in a gluey condiment known as honey dill sauce. This is Manitoba, a province that has captured the imagination of... well, maybe dozens of people around the world.

Stuck In The Middle 2 finds photographer Bryan Scott and journalist Bartley Kives venturing beyond the Perimeter Highway to explore the architecture, landscapes and waterways of a province they know and love but, like most Manitobans, may never truly understand.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Great Plains Publications
• Release date: Aug 15, 2022
• ISBN: 9781773370927

Book preview

Cover: Stuck In The Middle 2 Defining Views Of Manitoba Photographs By Bryan Scott and text by Bartley Kives; The sky is greenish-black and has stars. There is a railway track starting from the middle of the page. A windmill in the stubble field and trees around it. All the words are written in big bold yellow in the centre of the page. Except for the photographers and text writers.

STUCK IN THE MIDDLE 2

Logo: Great Plains Publications.

ALSO BY THE AUTHORS

BY BRYAN SCOTT AND BARTLEY KIVES

Stuck In The Middle: Dissenting Views of Winnipeg

BY BARTLEY KIVES

A Daytripper’s Guide to Manitoba: Exploring Canada’s Undiscovered Province

BY BRYAN SCOTT

Winnipeg Love Hate: Selected Photographs by Bryan Scott

STUCK IN THE MIDDLE

2

DEFINING VIEWS OF

MANITOBA

PHOTOGRAPHS BY Bryan Scott | TEXT BY Bartley Kives

Copyright © 2017

Bartley Kives and Bryan Scott

Great Plains Publications

233 Garfield Street South

Winnipeg, MB R3G 2M1

www.greatplains.mb.ca

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or in any means, or stored in a database and retrieval system, without the prior written permission of Great Plains Publications, or, in the case of photocopying or other reprographic copying, a license from Access Copyright (Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency), 1 Yonge Street, Suite 1900, Toronto, Ontario, Canada, M5E 1E5.

Great Plains Publications gratefully acknowledges the financial support provided for its publishing program by the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund; the Canada Council for the Arts; the Province of Manitoba through the Book Publishing Tax Credit and the Book Publisher Marketing Assistance Program; and the Manitoba Arts Council.

Design & Typography by

Relish New Brand Experience

Printed in Canada by Friesens

Library and Archives

Canada Cataloguing in Publication

Scott, Bryan, 1974–, photographer Stuck in the middle 2 : defining views of Manitoba / Bryan Scott and Bartley Kives.

Includes bibliographical references.

ISBN 978-1-927855-80-5 (softcover)

1. Manitoba—Pictorial works.

2. Manitoba—Social conditions—21st century.

I. Kives, Bartley, writer of added commentary

II. Title.

FC3362.S26 2017 971.27’040222

C2017-902870-7

Logo:FSC Organization.Logo: Forest Stewardship Council.

FOR SADIE

FOR STEPHANIE

CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION : Notes on a sequel

CHAPTER 1 : Stuck in the middle

CHAPTER 2 : What the glacier left behind

CHAPTER 3 : First and foremost

CHAPTER 4 : When ye reap the harvest of your land ...

CHAPTER 5 : We’ll always have Ethelbert

CHAPTER 6 : Looking up

CHAPTER 7 : Things we built

CHAPTER 8 : Things we discarded

CHAPTER 9 : Places of nourishment and slumber

CHAPTER 10 : Asphalt, steel and creosote

CHAPTER 11 : We like to move it

CHAPTER 12 : ... the more things stay the same

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS AND THANKS

SELECTED SOURCES

Cover

Half Title Page

Title Page

Copyright Page

Dedication

CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION : Notes on a sequel

CHAPTER 1 : Stuck in the middle

CHAPTER 2 : What the glacier left behind

CHAPTER 3 : First and foremost

CHAPTER 4 : When ye reap the harvest of your land ...

CHAPTER 5 : We’ll always have Ethelbert

CHAPTER 6 : Looking up

CHAPTER 7 : Things we built

CHAPTER 8 : Things we discarded

CHAPTER 9 : Places of nourishment and slumber

CHAPTER 10 : Asphalt, steel and creosote

CHAPTER 11 : We like to move it

CHAPTER 12 : ... the more things stay the same

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS AND THANKS

SELECTED SOURCES

Guide

Cover

Half Title Page

Title Page

Copyright Page

Dedication

CONTENTS

Start of Content

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS AND THANKS

SELECTED SOURCES

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NOTES

ON A

SEQUEL

Bartley Kives in conversation with Bryan Scott Winnipeg, May 2017

Bartley Kives: What do you believe people think when they hear the word Manitoba?

Bryan Scott: Flat, boring ... desolate.

BK: Do you think that?

BS: Before I started extensively travelling, I definitely thought the flat part was true.

BK: You were one of those people who never got off the Trans-Canada Highway?

BS: No, I travelled a little bit. I had been to the beaches. I travelled through a little bit of western Manitoba and the Whiteshell, but I had never made it up north. I never saw the most beautiful parts of the province, including much of western Manitoba.

BK: When we did the first book, I think we had similar views of Winnipeg and similar ideas about Winnipeg. You and I didn’t come to this one with the same conceptions.

BS: That’s probably true. In all the trips that I took in preparation for this book, I was really approaching it like a tourist, because I was seeing things for the first time. Winnipeg, I know like the back of my hand. Manitoba, to a very large extent, has always been very foreign to me.

BK: The more I learned about Manitoba, it presented itself to me as a brand-new place, where the scar tissue has just been revealed and the pink flesh is exposed. It’s geologically and geographically new. People showed up soon after and here they are. All this Indigenous history happens, compressed into a couple of thousand years. And colonial history is an eyeblink.

As a kid, we’re given this quaint, Eurocentric idea of Manitoba – it was founded in 1870 as a postage stamp – but it’s seamlessly attached to other geographic regions and has a much more complex history. People from elsewhere just don’t think about Manitoba. At least not very often.

BS: The same could be said for the majority of Manitobans, seeing as the majority of Manitobans live in big cities like Winnipeg and Brandon.

Manitoba is intimidating because of its size. It’s just so big. There is definitely a large part of the province that is scrub, wasteland. So for me as a photographer, there’s not much of interest in a very large portion of the province.

BK: Wilderness photographers would love all this space. They endlessly amuse themselves by shooting macros of leaves and bugs. But you’re into the built environment. What struck you the most about Manitoba when you were collecting images for this book?

BS: What hit me the hardest was Churchill. Specifically, standing on the shores of what is essentially the Arctic Ocean. It’s Hudson Bay, but if feels like the ocean, it smells like the ocean. For all intents and purposes, it is the ocean – and the ocean is literally the last thing you think of when you hear the word Manitoba.

BK: It’s funny, because that’s the first part of Manitoba that Europeans saw. That coast facilitated much of the settlement of Western Canada for hundreds of years. When we landed in Churchill [in June 2016] you looked around and said, Wow, I expected this to be different.

BS: I had this vision of Churchill as a quaint, national park town. Usually when a town is located near a natural wonder, the built environment reflects that. But not Churchill. It really looks like an Arctic community.

BK: I’ve spent a lot of time in the wilderness when I’ve travelled around Manitoba. We didn’t do that. Do you think more time in the back-country would have changed your perspective?

BS: No. Before I started researching this book, I actually spent more time in the back-country than cities and towns.

BK: The theme of this book is how no two people really have the same conception of Manitoba.

BS: Is that the theme of the book?

BK: We’re trying to define a view of Manitoba.

BS: Right, but defining a view doesn’t necessarily imply we have the defining view. It also doesn’t imply every person has a different view. I fell in love with a lot of Manitoba I previously had not much interaction with. Towns like Carberry, Souris, Neepawa and Minnedosa.

BK: You told me you were surprised how few interesting structures were built outside Winnipeg during the latter half of the 20th Century and more recently.

BS: It’s hard to deny that. All the towns I mentioned had their heyday right around the same time Winnipeg had its heyday: the railway boom. Those towns