The Inevitability of Nina
Saint Paul's River, Quebec
The Inevitability of Nina: Saint Paul’s River 1972
My recent photography projects are inspired by an album of family photographs abandoned at an antique mall in Denver, Colorado. After ten years of engaging with the album, I felt so connected to the people and places that I had an uncanny sense of knowing the photographer. An internet search revealed that Nina Weiste, of Finnish descent, took the photographs in 1917 while attending teacher training at the State Normal and Industrial School in Ellendale, North Dakota. “The Inevitability of Nina” is the third chapter of the project, inspired by those photographs. The original chapter, “Family Album,” focused on the intersection of Nina’s family photo album and mine, highlighting themes of interconnection found in most family photo albums. In the second project chapter, “Honeymoon in Finland,” I engaged with life-sized enlargements of Nina’s photographs, along with photographs of female descendants of Finnish settlers, scanned from family albums preserved in the collections of two museums near Nina’s Dakota birthplace, thereby creating the illusion of occupying the same time and place despite a 100-year gap. “The Inevitability of Nina” revisits locations tied to significant personal experiences, tracing the continuity of events leading up to the inevitable discovery of Nina’s album in 1993 and sharing those experiences with Nina through new photographs and letters. Nina’s photographs continue to inspire my creative projects. Over time, however, I came to recognize that Nina Weiste, as a self-healing construct, was conceived in my subconscious as a means of processing childhood trauma, prompting my imagination to create a healing space for Nina to inhabit. Although I have never met Nina, I have come to regard them as a collaborative spirit, supporting one of my project’s principal objectives: demonstrating that separateness is an illusion.
Reflecting on my relationship with the environment, with Nina as my most consequential guide, I photograph out of a deep psychological need to mediate my state of being in relation to everything else, both internally and externally. My actions in that pursuit have not always benefited the environment. In my own defense, I dropped out of high school in 1969, a naive 15-year-old, with travel and adventure as a top priority. Opportunities to pursue those aspirations with minimal formal education were limited, so I took some jobs I later considered ethically problematic, all of which required me to live in isolation. I spent two years as a deck boy in the British Merchant Navy, working on oil tankers that transported crude oil from the Persian Gulf around Africa to Europe. I then spent a year with the Hudson’s Bay Company in northern Quebec, including 8 months as a trainee fur trader. For the following 23 years, I worked as a mineral prospector for the Canadian mining company INCO, including 5 years prospecting for uranium from the Arctic Ocean in Canada to Mexico (INCO transferred me to Denver in 1981). Because I was raised in a remote village in the Scottish Highlands, I found isolation both familiar and appealing. However, after many years of extreme isolation, including living in tents, often with only one other person for extended periods in both summer and winter, and without addressing my trauma, my mental and physical health ultimately deteriorated. I’m not apologetic for my participation in occupations that have harmed and continue to harm the environment. Instead, those experiences, along with finally addressing the trauma, gave me valuable insights that led me to pursue higher education later in life and to adopt a holistic path of creativity and teaching as a photography professor at the University of Denver. For example, I am currently overseeing the renovation of our photo darkroom to promote safer, more environmentally friendly practices, with an emphasis on plant-based photographic processes and ecology.
Saint Paul’s River, Quebec.
Dear Nina,
When I first traveled to Saint Paul’s River in July 1972, as an eighteen-year-old Hudson’s Bay Company (HBC) trainee store clerk and a recent immigrant to Canada, I had no idea I was taking a step toward my inevitable connection with you. Although my mother was distraught that I was leaving home again, she gave me my first serious camera as a gift: a Russian Zenit E single-lens reflex with two lenses, which she bought brand new from Kay’s mail-order catalog for twenty pounds. It was exciting to graduate from a plastic Kodak Instamatic to a more substantial camera and to begin experimenting with interchangeable lenses and different types of film. Although my approach to photography was untrained and therefore naïve, a powerful yet mysterious necessity to preserve my experiences persisted – to position photography between myself and everything else as a means of contemplating my existence. I’ve no idea where that need came from; perhaps it was internal, but most likely it was external as well, because since partnering with you, Nina, I’ve come to accept that internal and external are the same. Consequently, evidence of my existence since 1964 is preserved in photographs I chose to make, which reflect the continuity of who I am, where I was, and who I was with. I sensed that you had a similar relationship with photography, Nina, which compelled me to purchase your 1917 photographs, 85 years after you created them.
Montreal was my base for the first week in Canada, during which I spent each day at the HBC’s Northern Stores Department headquarters, preparing for a new life in the north, signing paperwork, and completing medical and dental exams. I was part of a group of fresh recruits from Scotland. Each evening, after the official business ended, we celebrated Montreal’s brasserie culture by eating large T-bone steaks and drinking generous amounts of Canadian beer. By the end of the week, each recruit was assigned to a different Hudson’s Bay Post in the far north. Mine was Saint Paul’s River, in a region of Canada I knew nothing about. The all-day journey from Montreal began on a large jet to Sept-Îles, then on a twin turboprop to Havre-Saint-Pierre. Finally, after five hours in a single-engine De Havilland Otter on floats, flying along the North Shore of the Saint Lawrence River—which looked nothing like the Canadian Rockies I expected all of Canada to resemble—and stopping at each small community to drop off passengers, mail, and other essentials, I reached Saint Paul’s River, the final stop, as the last passenger.
Founded in London in 1670 as a fur-trading enterprise, the Hudson’s Bay Company recruited men from Britain until the 1980s, initially from England and later from Scotland, where life was tough and opportunities were limited. The Company offered employment and adventure. I was drawn to both, but mainly to the latter. When I was interviewed in Glasgow for the position, two questions stood out: "When was the last time you went to the movies?" and "When was the last time you went dancing?" Having been at sea for two years with the British Merchant Navy and, earlier, for a short time in the Royal Navy, I answered honestly that it had been a very long time. The interviewers did not mention the Hudson’s Bay Company’s problematic colonial history or discuss how I should prepare psychologically to engage with its legacy. Like most Eurocentric people at the time, including the Hudson’s Bay Company representatives and me, we were largely oblivious to the troubling implications of colonialism and the ecological consequences of its production practices. Fortunately, awareness was developing rapidly.
My monthly salary was approximately $150 Canadian, before my airfare from Scotland was deducted, plus room and board. It was four times what I earned in the Merchant Navy, but I would have worked for free because, as I mentioned, Nina, I was seeking adventure, not financial gain. I should add that my attitude toward both hasn’t changed much. Because I’d be living in shared company housing, in this case with the store manager, his wife, and a new baby, another stipulation in the two-year contract I signed was that I would not sleep with the locals, Indigenous or otherwise, or get married for two years. The population of Saint Paul’s River was principally of Irish and Welsh heritage. Fishing, primarily for cod, had been the main source of income on the North Shore of the Saint Lawrence, including Saint Paul’s River. But overfishing had reduced yields, and unemployment had increased. So here I was, arriving as a new immigrant with a job in a community with high unemployment. What could possibly go wrong?
Watching the float plane depart after dropping me at the dock, with all my worldly possessions packed into my little Royal Navy suitcase, was one of the loneliest moments I’d ever experienced. Loneliness turned to terror when I turned around to find what felt like the entire population of Saint Paul’s River gathered to see what the plane had delivered: a newly minted trainee store clerk from Scotland. Luckily, that feeling didn’t last long. Soon, I made new friends in what I would discover, with a few exceptions, was an extremely friendly community, and I relished many new experiences, especially in the magical boreal landscape. Saint Paul’s River is about 60 kilometers down the coast from Labrador. At that time, there was no road to the outside, so the area was isolated. The Hudson’s Bay Company store was the only place to buy food and household supplies, including hardware, all of which were brought in by boat once a week. The North Shore is hot in summer. School was out, and each afternoon, swimming from the town’s dock was the main attraction, so I happily joined in. Mosquitoes and horseflies posed a particular challenge; they were more aggressive and bloodthirsty than the midges I remember from my childhood in the Scottish Highlands.
My initiation into the role of a Hudson’s Bay clerk included stocking shelves and checking out customers’ purchases, primarily groceries, at the cash register, both essential skills for a store manager-in-training. One of the local employees, a young guy about my age, took an instant dislike to me. I wasn’t sure why, but it was likely because I was an immigrant with one of the “secure” jobs in town—a job with prospects. Little did he know that, at the time, job security wasn’t on my list of aspirations. I wasn’t consciously focusing on it then, but the Hudson’s Bay Company was a means to an end. The job made emigrating to Canada possible—something I had dreamed of—even without marketable skills beyond an adventurous spirit and a predisposition for living in isolation. Because Canada was a member of the British Commonwealth, the path to permanent residency was relatively easy for UK citizens then, unlike today.
There was an altercation with the young guy who disliked me. My memory of it is vague, but it went something like this: he intentionally pushed the swinging door separating the stockroom from the storefront into me. I pushed back, and he fell. I assumed that was the end of it. A short while later, while serving a customer at the cash register, the young guy leaned across the counter and grabbed my shirt by the collar. In response, I jumped over the counter and shoved him against a shelf full of canned goods and other items. Meanwhile, the groceries belonging to the customer I was serving were scattered across the floor. As I pushed the young guy, the shelf toppled, and when it hit the next shelf, that one toppled as well. As we were tussling on the floor, the store manager, whom I sensed didn’t like me much either, probably for good reasons, grabbed me by the scruff of the neck and yelled, “I’m gonna kick your butt back to Scotland.” The next day, I was on the boat heading back down the Saint Lawrence’s North Shore toward my next and last Hudson’s Bay Company posting at the Cree Nation Village of Mistassini.
Returning to Saint Paul’s River in 2026, after fifty-four years, with a handful of memories preserved in photographs, I made new ones and wrote you this letter, Nina. Unlike in 1972, I returned independently, fully in control. I flew from Denver to Saint John’s, Newfoundland; rented a car; drove 10 hours across the island to St. Barbe; then took a car ferry to the mainland at Blanc Sablon on the Quebec-Labrador border. A road now connects Blanc Sablon to Saint Paul’s River, built shortly after I left in 1972. However, since I was only there for a few days, I couldn’t fully assess the road’s benefits beyond the obvious. I seem to remember a livelier community before the road was built, though I’m sure other factors contributed. My most notable memories from 1972 include moving to Canada, starting a short-lived career with the Hudson’s Bay Company, and the altercation that prompted my premature departure from Saint Paul’s River. My outlook has continued to evolve since then; however, key aspects of my essence have endured, including openness to new learning experiences that challenge my perspective and a need to mediate those experiences through photography. Photography, in its perceived ability to freeze time and mirror reality, consistently challenges my viewpoint and reinforces my acceptance that interconnection is a core feature of the universe. I am grateful for your guidance in this pursuit, Nina. This reflection would not have been possible without the “serendipitous” discovery of your photographs. Thank you.
With much love, Roddy