First a travelling storytelling exhibit and now a podcast series and an online resource, COVID in the House of Old has been supported by a vast community of talented, kind, and committed individuals and organizations.
The original 2022 exhibit and podcast were created by Megan J. Davies with Hiroki Tanaka and Kohen Hammond. For our 2023 tour, Celeste Billung-Meyer joined as exhibit coordinator.
Our 2021 search for storytelling chairs led us to the Wikwemikong Nursing Home on Wiikwemkoong Unceded Territory in Northern Ontario. This meant that the project was able to showcase a residential facility where cultural practices support a model of care that embodies respect, connection, and affirmation. Wiikwemkoong citizens Matthew Assiniwe and Darrel Manitowabi have been valued contributors in this process. Miigwech.
Contributors
Megan J. Davies – Curator’s Notes
This project is intensely personal and deeply political for me. It brings together knowledges and insights from decades of research on aging and work providing waged and family eldercare. I used the tools of an oral historian alongside practices developed with academic and community partners at Madness Canada/ Folie Canada that value voice, emergent design and art-making. A 2019 visit to the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum demonstrated how objects could convey personal tragedy, prompting collective reflection and political action.
As COVID in the House of Old took shape and then became a travelling exhibit, I was reminded that public-facing scholars benefit from following possibilities that emerge from new relationships and situations. We need to be alert to moments when shifting from creative and analytical control to facilitation makes sense, thus enacting a kind of caregiving that I am still beginning to understand. These opportunities unfolded at the public libraries, care facilities, and community centres, and through local organizations that hosted us.
Megan J. Davies is a historian of health with a regional focus on BC. She currently works on old age, madness, and everyday medicine. As part of the MadnessCanada.com community, Megan has participated in a number of academic-community collaborations, most notably the 2013 documentary, The Inmates Are Running the Asylum. In January 2022, with the support of a Shadbolt Fellowship, Megan launched COVID in the House of Old, a public exhibit, website and podcast.
Kohen Hammond – Artist’s Notes
Working on COVID in the House of Old has provided an opportunity for me to combine my work in audio with my interest in social justice and activism.
The process of creating and editing together these interviews for me has felt similar to home movies and home recordings. The interviews are filled with stories and moments that are incredibly personal to an individual or family but yet they still manage to speak to universal truths.
It was an immense pleasure to be invited into so many various spaces to record stories all over Canada. Editing together the various components, such as the story telling chairs or the podcast, has been an incredible learning experience for me.
It has been an honour to be able to play a part in telling these stories to create a way to memorialize and reflect on the profound loss that has happened during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Kohen Hammond is an audio engineer, composer, and guitarist from Toronto, Ontario. He works in a variety of different mediums from music, to theatre, to podcasts. His music takes influence from a vast range of subjects such as: contemporary classical, folk, nature, and literature. He has released two albums under his name, Fragments of Moments and Written in the Margins.
Hiroki Tanaka – Artist’s Notes
Megan invited me to a project meeting in the spring of 2021 and I brought the germ of an idea for an audio-visual piece to accompany the installation. I planned to use BC and Ontario data on the number of deaths of residents and healthcare workers in long-term care homes during COVID, and I would represent the data sonically and visually.
While I had some basic familiarity, I began learning how to write in the programming language Max/MSP in earnest for this project. My thanks to Tommy Martinez and various members of the Max/MSP online community for providing guidance and assistance. My work is presented via a project and single speaker. Each loss of life is represented by a coloured dot, and a musical note. The result is an aleatoric “elegy”, in both image and sound.
Placed within the same space as the stories and objects of loss that Megan has provided, this installation provides both a micro and macro view of the pain and loss that has thus afflicted LTC’s during the pandemic.
Hiroki Tanaka is an artist living in Toronto. In 2020, he released his debut solo album, “Kaigo Kioku Kyoku” (caregiving memory songs), based on his experience as a caregiver for his grandmother with Alzheimer’s and his uncle with terminal cancer.
Celeste Billung-Meyer – Project Coordinator’s Notes
After the success of the first COVID in the House of Old tour, I joined the project to help organize and update the exhibit for a second tour taking CIHO to a national audience. Reflecting on the project, we recognized the profound connection visitors felt to exhibit narratives, the desire to discuss their own experiences of pandemic eldercare, and the cathartic potential in sharing one’s story. As a result, the Story Space was born.
Story Space provided visitors with an opportunity to write, record, or make a piece of art about their memories, thoughts and feelings of residential care in Canada and the impacts of COVID on these facilities. These stories were then collected and preserved as part of the historical record of COVID-19. This record is so important because by learning from it, I believe we can create a more compassionate eldercare system. I was thrilled to contribute to the development of Story Space, and deeply touched by the stories we received. Thank you to all who chose to share their story with us.
Celeste Billung-Meyer is currently working on an MA in Anthropology and GDip in Curatorial Studies. Her thesis focuses on cosplay, identity performance, and how our bodies are transformed in virtual spaces. She is also interested in folklore, material culture, and knowledge translation with a commitment to making academic research accessible to a wider community.
Matthew Assiniwe – Community Participant Notes
I brought my experiences and learnings as Activity Manager at Wikwemikong Nursing Home during COVID to this project. There was frustration among the residents, “Why can’t we go? Why can’t my cousin come here anymore?” They understood what was going on, but not completely because it wasn’t here. Then the illness actually came in and a lot of us got sick from it and affected from it.
At the same time, we were growing Anishinabek spiritual practices in the home. We started off with drumming, finding a teacher, me accumulating more songs, using those songs at home, teaching other people them, teaching them here. I shared our Grandfather Teachings, working with sage and cedar, putting tobacco down, giving opportunities for residents to be with their own thoughts and speak our language and put a prayer down. You know – there’s something within us that’s old and knows that language.
Now we’re looking towards the new Elder Lodge, not living in that time of COVID anymore, but moving forward from it. But we’ll always hold those stories though, together, because we all went through it together. It’s nice to have had the COVID in the House of Old exhibit come up to Wiikwemkoong Unceded Territory and to let us share our story so, you know, we could also move on from it to. The project gave us that opportunity to do that.
Matthew Assiniwe was raised in Wiikwemkoong Unceded Territory. He has a Bachelors Degree in Kinesiology from the University of Toronto and did Post-graduate Studies in Exercise Science. He worked at the Wikwemikong Nursing Home in different roles from 2008, most recently as Activity Manager from 2021 to 2024.
Darrel Manitowabi – Academic and Community Participant Notes
The COVID in the House of Old Stories from Wikwemikong Nursing Home Podcast offers an opportunity to hear from Indigenous Peoples about the lived experience of COVID-19 in a community-based nursing home. This unique collaboration provides a chance to add to the record a moment in history when an Indigenous community faced tremendous adversity in navigating the stress of isolation and contagious disease. It furthermore tells the story of the origins of the nursing home and the centrality of relationships and community spirit in caring for Elders.
Darrel Manitowabi, PhD, is an associate professor at the Northern Ontario School of Medicine University. He is the inaugural Jason A. Hannah Chair in Indigenous Health and Traditional Medicine. He is Three Fires Nishnaabe, a citizen of Wiikwemkoong Unceded Territory, and he currently resides in the Whitefish River First Nation. He is an applied, medical, and Indigenous scholar with research interests in Nishnaabe ethnohistory and Indigenous healing, Indigenous social determinants of health, Indigenous gambling, and Indigenous resurgence.
IN THE NEWS
Projects like this wither without media attention. Journalists, photographers and videographers connected with CIHO’s message and worked to bring the story of the exhibit to a broader public.
The Current – CBC (listen)
Toronto
Manitoulin Island
The Manitoulin Expositor 1
The Manitoulin Expositor 2
The Manitoulin Expositor 3
Saskatoon
CBC Saskatoon Morning with Leisha Grebinski
www.thestarphoenix.com
The CIHO Community
An extraordinary and heartwarming number of individuals, organizations and people running public venues gave time, talent, and support to the CIHO project.
Special gratitude to these essential creatives:
Jamie Brennan
Vitalyi Bulchev
Taliya Cohen
Dorli Duffy
Winnie Hui
Carol Macdonald
Hannah Maitland
Marina Morrow
Robert Penrose
Zsofin Sheehy
Rose Stanton
Oliver Sutherns
Georgia Violin
And thank you to the people and organizations who breathed life into this project:
Keri Albert, Eric Anderson, Pat Armstrong, Albert Banerjee, Rachel Barken, Anne Marie Barrett, Fred Bell, Rachel Bergquist, David Berman, Doreen Bible, Michele Billung-Meyer, Annick Boulet, Cam Burns, Alison Campbell, Laurie Cerqueti, Patrick Chasse, Bernadette Cheung, Antoinette Cheung, David Clandfield, Jim Clifford, Colin Coates, Bryn Coates-Davies, Mab Coates-Davies, Stephen Collis, Allison Cooper, Elizabeth Cooper, Linda Croall, Meghan Crowe, Tamara Daly, Pat Deacon, Chris Dooley, Erika Dyck, “Esther”, Liam Fagerlund, Magda Fahrni, James Francis, Courtney Fraser, Kim Fraser, Jane French, Tamara George, Stephen Goring, Sally Gose, Noreen Grange, Bruce Grond, Helen Grond, Jacobus Grond, Steve Hammond, Sonia Hardern, Margot Harrison, Bonnie Hatfield, Susan Heximer, Amelia & Felix Howland, Heather James, Paula Jardine, Toby Jaxon, Cindy Jiang, Sharon Corbiere Johnston, Stephanie Jonsson, leZlie lee kam, Anne Kelly, Mary-Ellen Kelm, Tom Knott, Anne Ladouceur, Kayley Lawrenz, Krysta Lawrenz, Michelle LeBlanc, Ron Lee, Andrée Lévesque, Gabriel Levine, Karen Ann Lewis, Barbara Lorenzkowski, Nora Loreto, Christine Lyons, Val MacDonald, Eugene Manitowabi, Marina Marrow, Patrick McGimpsey, Sharon Meen, Mélissa-Anne Ménard, Carolyn Minor, Andrew Moyer, Tamara Myers, Judith Nassuna, Lori Nawrot, Bruno Nota, Michelle Nyberg, Dominic Odjig, Cheryl Osawabine-Peltier, Caroline Paulson, Joy Paulson, Maria Anna Parolin, Mike Jon Peltier, Alison Phinney, Michelle Porter, Diane Purvey, Loretta Recollet, Jen Rinaldi, Alexa Roggeveen, Reka Rossignol, Mike Ruderman, Elaine Savoie, Ellery Schafer, Marcie Schlick, Andrew Sixsmith, Linda Steele, Diane Strong, Jim Struthers, Laura Surman, Diana Sweatman, Devon Tatton, Terry, Pat Thane, Jocelyn Thorpe, Jessica Ticar, Hayley Manitowabi Trudeau, Lobsang Tsering, Ethel Tungohan, Emma Walter, Josh Wemigwans, the manager at the Cloverdale paint store in Kitsilano, participants in the Old Age Care in Times of Crisis Symposium, April 2021, London, UK.
Active Adult Centre of Mississauga, Action Marguerite, Age, Care, and the Caregiving Crisis Group, Archives Passe-Mémoire, Buddies in Bad Times, Castleview Wychwood Towers: City of Toronto,Central Branch: Greater Victoria Public Library, Centre for Creative Writing and Oral Culture: University of Manitoba, Centre for Old History and Digital Story Telling: Concordia University, Centre on Aging: University of Manitoba, Century House: City of New Westminster, Christie Gardens Care and Apartments, Hornby Denman Health, Hornby Arts, Arbutus Gallery: Kwantlen Polytechnique University, Lynn Valley Branch: North Vancouver District Public Library, Montreal History Group / Le Groupe d’histoire de Montréal, Nanaimo Harbourfront Library, Remember Rebuild Saskatchewan, Sherbrooke Community Centre, Simkin Centre, Squamish Public Library.
––
This project was supported by a Jack and Doris Shadbolt Fellowship in the Humanities and the Department of Gerontology at Simon Fraser University and York University’s Faculty of Liberal Arts and Professional Studies.