09/30/2025
Today, on Truth and Reconciliation Day, we at Envision-Tatham reflect on our experience supporting the creation of the Awen' Gathering Place in 2018 with the Town of Collingwood.
While there is much to celebrate about the beautiful Awen’ structure — the result of collaboration between Duke Redbird, Elder of the Global Village, Brook McIlroy ’s Indigenous design team, Tatham Engineering, and several talented artists and craftspeople — our reflections focus on the land and its healing.
The lesser-told story is that this scenic waterfront site was once a landfill — a buried remnant of Collingwood’s industrial past. For our team, this reality highlighted a deeper cultural contrast in how Collingwood’s settlers and First Nations communities have historically understood their respective relationships with nature.
Through this lens, our team had the opportunity to not only design spaces for reflection, storytelling, and ceremony, but also to better honour the land through naturalization and restoration. Native successional species were introduced and no-mow zones were established to help rehabilitate the thin soil cap, create new habitat, and provide a natural setting for the Awen’ Gathering Place that aligned with the structure’s interpretive story and artistic representations.
Although our role was quieter, we’ve taken lasting pride in watching this former landfill regenerate to support both the Awen’ Gathering Place and, in its own way, serve as a symbolic gesture of reconciliation that initiated the healing of this once-impacted Georgian Bay landscape.
