The Naskapi Development Corporation is proud to announce that a remarkable collection of photographs taken in 1947 has found its way back to the Naskapi Nation of Kawawachikamach, and the community is now working to identify the people in the photos and uncover their stories.
The photos were taken by Keith Willard Lank, a soft-spoken man from Charlottetown, PEI, who had originally planned to follow in his father’s footsteps and become a farmer. Instead, he took a job with the Government of Canada and spent 37 years as a radio operator for Transport Canada. In 1947, at just 21 years old, he was stationed at Fort McKenzie in northern Quebec. He brought a camera with him—a Busch Pressman that used large-format negatives—and spent his time there photographing the people he met and the daily life around him. A local Indigenous interpreter helped him and his coworkers communicate with the community, and Keith came away with vivid memories: a seal hunt and the way the catch was shared among all members of the band, and women gathering evergreen branches to sleep on in their tents.
Thomas Sandy, photographed by Lank in 1947–48
What makes his collection particularly special is his focus on children. While other photographers of the era tended to document adults, Keith got down to the children’s level and spent time with them, going on slides and joining in their activities. Many of those children are still living in the community today, now in their eighties.
Keith retired in Sherbrooke, Quebec, in 1983. He kept his photos, his negatives, and his old Busch Pressman camera his entire life, along with a pair of snowshoes and a drum he was given during his time in the north. He passed away in Sherbrooke in 2011.
After his death, his daughter Cathie Lank found the photographs while going through his belongings. She contacted the Naskapi Development Corporation, which coordinates much of the community’s cultural, historical, and language work. Cathie carefully wrapped the photos and sent them back along with the snowshoes, the drum, and the original negatives.
Benjamin Jancewicz, a communications consultant for the Naskapi Development Corporation, was tasked with identifying the people in the photos and capturing the stories behind them. He spent the past month visiting elders throughout the community, plugging his laptop into their televisions to enlarge the images as much as possible, then setting up microphones and letting them speak.
“I let them tell stories about whatever they remembered from that time,” Benjamin said in an interview with CBC Quebec AM. “We’re going to use that as the historical record.”
The conversations that emerged from those visits have been deeply moving. Elder Kitty Peastitute, without being prompted, spoke of losing both her parents to tuberculosis when she was just seven or eight years old. When asked what she remembered most about that time, she said simply: hunger. Moses Mameanskum recalled being put on the first airplane he had ever seen and flown to Halifax for tuberculosis treatment, spending over a year in the hospital far from home, without speaking a word of English.
Some of the people shown the photos were seeing images of their own parents for the very first time. The collection includes six color photographs—the first known color photos of the community.
The Naskapi Development Corporation plans to release the photos gradually on its Facebook page, roughly two at a time, once as many people as possible have been identified. The project is deliberately AI-free. As Benjamin explained, AI tools are not well-trained on Indigenous faces and often alter or invent details that were never there. Instead, the community’s elders are doing that work.
You can listen to Benjamin’s full interview on CBC Quebec AM here: https://www.cbc.ca/listen/live-radio/1-87-quebec-am/clip/16228908-kawawachikamach-gets-glimpse-never-before-seen-pictures-community-members-80
