In the fall of 2021, mayors from the Greater Montreal area officially announced a plan to develop Île-Sainte-Thérèse (Sainte-Thérèse Island) into an Eco-Park. The park project is an expansion of an already existing network of park and recreational infrastructure across various municipalities throughout the Hochelaga Archipelago. But the new park project on Île-Sainte-Thérèse, which aims to make land and water more accessible to the public, comes at a cost of 50 family cottages that will be evicted from the island. In the year following this announcement, a group of graduate students from Montreal Waterways, a working group from the Concordia Ethnography Lab, worked collaboratively to explore the island’s history and the material entanglements with land and water, as well as to speculate what is to become of this place and its inhabitants.

While the proposed eco-park and impending eviction are reminiscent of a troubling history concerning National or Provincial Parks as a form of conservation, Île-Sainte-Thérèse offers its own story, albeit a fragmented one involving multiple actors, each with a claim to the island’s landscape and heritage. The group shared and engaged with ethnographic methods and imagery, and brought these fragmented pieces together collectively; they did so not in a way that is definitive, fixed, or complete, but rather to demonstrate how these fragments move—and move us—when telling the story of an island.