The Naskapi Development Corporation is proud to share that a remarkable collection of photographs taken in 1947 has found its way home to the Naskapi Nation of Kawawachikamach, and the community is now working to put names and stories to the faces in them.
The photos were taken by Keith Willard Lank, a soft-spoken man from Charlottetown, PEI, who had originally planned to follow his father into farming. Instead, he took a job with the Government of Canada and spent 37 years as a Transport Canada radio operator. 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 with 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, women gathering evergreen branches to sleep on in their tents.
Thomas Sandy, photographed by Lank in 1947-48
What makes his collection especially special is his focus on children. Where other photographers of the era tended to document adults, Keith got down to the kids’ level and spent time with them, going sliding and joining in their activities. Many of those children are still alive 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 passing, his daughter Cathie Lank found the photographs while going through his belongings. She reached out to the Naskapi Development Corporation, which coordinates much of the community’s cultural, historical, and language work. Cathie wrapped the photos carefully and sent them back along with the snowshoes, the drum, and the original negatives.
Benjamin Jancewicz, 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 across the community, plugging his laptop into their television sets to blow the images up as large as possible, then setting up microphones and letting them talk.
« I let them tell stories of whatever they remembered from that time period, » Benjamin said in an interview with CBC Quebec AM. « We’re going to have that as the historical record. »
The conversations that came out of those visits have been deeply moving. Elder Kitty Peastitute, unprompted, 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 hospital far from home, not speaking a word of English.
Some of those shown the photos have seen images of their own parents for the very first time. Among the collection are six photographs in color, the first color photos ever known to exist 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. The community’s elders are doing that work instead.
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
