The Gaspésie and Maritimes regions, covered in this guide, have been inhabited by the Mi'gmaq people for thousands of years. Today, visitors can still encounter many of these First Nation communities across the area.

In Gaspé, a city with a rich history of French explorer Jacques Cartier's interactions with the Mi'gmaq nation, the Gespeg Micmac Interpretation Site showcases the culture of the local Mi'gmaq community. Through interactive exhibits and guided tours, the site offers a fascinating insight into the history and traditions of the Mi'gmaq people. The on-site shop features a range of authentic, high-quality Mi'gmaq crafts and other Indigenous products from Quebec.

Further along the Baie des Chaleurs, Gesgapegiag is a popular spot for tourists eager to experience the unique attractions of Mi'gmaq territory. Visitors can enjoy a picnic in the community park or marvel at the impressive tipi erected by the sea in 2018.

For those seeking a more immersive experience, the community of Gesgapegiag offers cozy chalets and traditional tipis in Anse Sainte-Hélène. Alternatively, guests can stay aboard a replica of Jacques Cartier's La Grande Hermine, an iconic vessel from the age of exploration. Nearby, hikers and snowmobilers can take advantage of Le Relais de la Cache, located close to the Chic-Chocs mountain range.

One of the most exciting annual events in the region is the Pow-Wow, a traditional festival held every July. This vibrant celebration sees Mi'gmaq people from across the region coming together to share their culture and traditions through song, dance, and storytelling. Everyone is welcome to join in the festivities and experience the warm hospitality of the Mi'gmaq people.

Multiple award-winning Montréal-based artist from Mauritius, Kama La Mackerel, is delighted to present their debut exhibition, Who Sings the Queer Island Body? at the Visual Art Centre's McClure Gallery from March 3 to 25, 2023.

La Mackerel’s work, for the past few years, has sought to question and counter-narrativize dominant colonial island tropes through a queer/trans lens. Their photography series Breaking the Promise of Tropical Emptiness (2017-19), for example, calls into question the colonial legacy of the visual representation of “tropical islands” by questioning the aesthetics of the postcard. In this work, La Mackerel reframes clichés of Mauritian postcards, by foregrounding their transgender body at the centre of the frame. In their most recent work in moving image, poetry, textiles and performance ritual, Queering the Is/land Body (2021), presented at 17th edition of MOMENTA, Biennale de l’image, they explore the spiritual relationship that is sustained between the transgender, racialized body and that of the “island body” in order to bring forth ancestral forms of Indo-African spirituality. In their award-winning debut poetry collection, ZOM-FAM (Metonymy Press, 2020), they invoke ancestral voices of slaves and indentured labour who worked amidst colonial silences on plantation islands.

In Who Sings the Queer Island Body?, La Mackerel expands on their previous body of work to contend with the question of island sovereignty and ocean mapping. In this new work, they further question ocean and island cartographies as these have been documented, archived and communicated through modernity: The sea as aqua nullius, a masculine space that men traverse in order to to go to islands which were regarded as terra nullius, empty feminine spaces to be colonized. Through hybrid creative forms, La Mackerel explores the unruly interstices between photography, video, sound composition, poetry, textiles and performance to offer a decolonial mapping of “the island body” and its relationship to the ocean. Who Sings the Queer Island Body? opens up new aesthetic spaces where trans and decolonial personal, ancestral, geopolitical, geological and ecological narratives make themselves heard.

This new work body of work is also heavily influenced by the tragedy of the MV Wakashio. In July 2020, the MV Wakashio – a Japanese-owned cargo ship sailing under a Panamanian flag of convenience with a team of Indian sailors and on its way to Brazil – ran aground the coral reefs of La Mackerel’s native-island, Mauritius. More than 1,000 tonnes of heavy oil were spilled, impacting the entire south-eastern coastline including ecosystems of wetlands, mangrove forests and a marine reserve. More than 50 melon-head whales and dolphins washed up dead on the island’s coast. For the inhabitants of the south-eastern coast of Mauritius (“the people of the sea,” as they are called), this signaled the end of their traditional way of life.

The tragedy of the MV Wakashio – the biggest ecological disaster in the history of Mauritius – is in many ways embedded in this exhibition. On the one hand, watching this oil spill from afar demanded that the artist work through a deep process of grief for the ecologies, the people, the “island body” in relation to their own queer Mauritian body. On the other hand, the lack of international geopolitical accountability and the failure of any country to take responsibility and take action for this oceanic environmental disaster reinforced the dominant trope of disposability with which islands have been historically construed.

Who Sings the Queer Island Body? then, is an exhibition that is a call for reframing our relationality to island territories, to bodies of water, and to the ecologies of which we are part. At the core of this work, La Mackerel grounds us in an imperative to heal our hearts, to repair our relationship to the island body, to soothe the spirit of the ocean. Through the retellings expressed in the different pieces of this exhibition, Kama La Mackerel reactivates the work of the imagination, so that we can reinvent ourselves, with purpose; so that we can reclaim the very integrity of our human life; so that we can leave a roadmap of beauty, joy, of being in relationship differently, for generations yet to come.

ABOUT KAMA LA MACKEREL

Kama La Mackerel is a Mauritian-Canadian multilingual writer, visual artist, performer, educator and literary translator who believes in love, justice and self and collective empowerment. Their practice blurs the lines between traditional artistic disciplines to create hybrid aesthetic spaces from which decolonial and queer/trans vocabularies can emerge. At once narratological and theoretical, personal and political, their interdisciplinary method, developed over the past decade, is grounded in ritual, meditation, ancestral healing modalities, auto-ethnography, oral history, archival research and community-arts facilitation.

La Mackerel is a firm believer that artistic and cultural practices have the power to build resilience, to heal and to act as forms of resistance to the status quo. With wholehearted engagement in ocean narratives, island sovereignty, transgender poetics and queer/trans spiritual histories, their body of work challenges colonial notions of time and space as these relate to history, power, language, subject formation and the body.

La Mackerel has lectured, performed and exhibited their work internationally in museums, galleries, theatres and universities. In 2021, they were awarded the Canada Council for the Arts' Joseph S. Stauffer Prize for emerging and mid-career artists in Visual Arts. Their award-winning book ZOM-FAM (Metonymy Press) was named a CBC Best Poetry Book and a Globe and Mail Best Debut. Kama La Mackerel lives and loves in Tio’tia:ke, also known as Montréal.

KAMA LA MACKEREL & THE MCCLURE GALLERY

The McClure Gallery at the Visual Arts Centre in Montréal is an independent not-for-profit gallery operating for over twenty years. The gallery has a history of hosting high-quality, professional exhibitions by early, mid and late career artists working in a variety of disciplines. The programming is chosen by a jury made up of professional artists (one from the previous season, two from the teaching staff, one from the community) and board members (many of whom are also artists). The jury was particularly taken by La Mackerel’s exhibition proposal and their interdisciplinary work. The McClure Gallery is committed to supporting this work, particularly given the ongoing systemic barriers that the artist has faced as a racialized, transgender immigrant who is also self-taught.

Photography, video, textile installations, multilingual poetry and audio compositions combine for a debut multimedia exhibition

March 3 to 25, 2023
McClure Gallery

What happens when you’re caught between bittersweet memories of youth and the realities of middle age, with only a couple of opinionated old gay friends to lend you an ear. From the writer of the hit play Mambo Italiano, another sharp-witted look at what it means to be an Italian/Canadian gay man in an ever-changing world.

https://youtu.be/ZIMZTgcIkF4

Three old friends gather and reminisce about the past — the good, the bad, and the outrageous. They talk about everything from boyfriends to Sunday night dinners, backed by a soundtrack of Blondie, the B-52s, and the Village People. Everything bubbles to the surface while memory and loss stir up questions about healing and moving on.

With an open heart, Galluccio has penned a story about his own loves and losses in an unabashed love letter to Montreal. How do you remember your past? At the beginning of time… when everything is fresh and new. Galluccio’s newest play reminds us that memories are like a good shot of espresso: best shared among friends.

“​​At the Beginning of Time is my most personal play since Mambo Italiano. It seems only fitting that 20-some-odd years later I am back at Centaur to share this new chapter. In 2018 my life exploded, and I was forced to re-imagine my existence. I was a gay man in my late 50s who thought his life was settled. Overnight I found myself at the beginning of time, in a new chapter, in a new world, and a new reality. New beginnings are frightening and overwhelming, but if you surrender to the journey, the destination will ultimately be… spectacular. Thank you Centaur Theatre for taking my broken heart and turning it into art. Theatre, much like time, heals all wounds.”

– Steve Galluccio

Centaur Theatre

February 21 - March 12, 2023

Built along the port, the formerly walled off old city has a gastronomic tradition that goes back to the colony’s beginnings. A time when hostels welcomed visitors from all over the continent and across the Atlantic. The Maison Pierre-du-Calvet, which was constructed in 1771, today still attests to this tradition, as it is the oldest building in Montréal still welcoming visitors and offering them its copious cuisine in the style of 18th century inns. Since that time, the gastronomic propositions have of course evolded and become more diversified – there are many great restaurants to be discovered in historic Old Montréal.

Near Notre-Dame Cathedral, you can begin or end your evening at L’Assommoir, with its trendy atmosphere and emphasis is on products of the terroir. On De la Commune street, just next to the Old Port, Da Emma is à Montréal Classic. From the decor to the plate, everything here transports us to Italy. More specifically, to one of those dining cellars that you only come across in Rome, which seems almost frozen in time. Located in a basement, the intimate space seats 140, plus another 70 on the terrace in front of the restaurant, weather permitting.

At the entrance, the celebrity wall confirms the reputation of the establishment with a numerous photos of stars from all over the world photographed with Emma. White tablecloths, period paintings, stone walls and wooden ceilings… the Italian charm is immediately felt, and most welcome.
With the urban re-development of the Faubourg aux Récollets west of Old Montréal, McGill Street has become a sought-after stretch of great restaurants and bistros from the Old Port to Victoria square. With its warm décor and friendly, laid-back ambiance, Ikanos invites you to rediscover some of the classics of Greek and Mediterranean cuisine, reinvented by the chef and owner Constant Mentzas. The seafood and fish is carefully selected and grilled in wood fire ovens. Located on the site of the old Soeurs Grises nunnery near the Old Port, the Bistro Brasserie Les Soeurs Grises offers a selection of home-brewed beers and a menu composed of local products.

You can’t talk about Mile End gastronomy without talking about Montréal’s Jewish and Eastern European heritage. It is the centre of the emblematic institutions of this legacy in the city, where immigrant Jews, most of them from Eastern Europe, brought us the bagel, the smoked meat sandwich and cured sausages in the early 20th century. In Mile End you’ll find the two temples of bagels that are Fairmount Bagel and Saint-Viateur Bagel. The story goes that the Montréal bagel is sweeter and more delicate than its New York cousin, a probable result of adapting to local taste. Try out a sausage sandwich at Wilensky’s on Fairmount Street. Smoked meat fans will definitely want to wait in line to try Montréal’s famous smoked meat sandwiches at the restaurant Schwartz on St-Laurent, just south of the Mile End.

The specialties of bagels and sandwiches associated with the Mile End neighbourhood are most probably linked to its being a favoured brunching destination. This tradition has been well established by the restaurant Beauty’s on Mont-Royal Avenue, where bagels are a specialty. Restaurants such as B & M or Fabergé, located on St-Viateur and Fairmount respectively, offer their own updated version of the Mile End brunch. The Syrian restaurant Kazamaza on Parc Avenue even proposes a Middle Eastern version of it.

The multiethnic character of the neighbourhood is, of course, also reflected in the more refined eateries of the area, with some fine cuisine from all sides of the Mediterranean basin. In the intimate décor of bistro Barcola on Parc Avenue, you will discover authentic Northern Italian cuisine. At the limits of Outremont on the corner of Van Horne and Hutchison, the Caffé Della Pace prepares a variety of Italian coffees and offers healthy, homemade vegetarian dishes composed of fresh ingredients. The prices are very reasonable and the atmosphere is friendly, with a piano in one corner and sofas in another. Both families with children and queers rub shoulders here. The fancy bistro Chez Lévêque on Laurier West has remained a very popular spot for the past 45 years. There is a humorous, slightly irreverent tone here, and a religious theme is displayed in reference to the patronymic of chef and co-owner Pierre Lévêque (L’évêque meaning Bishop). This chic Parisian brasserie with a distinctive Montréal touch has never deviated from the concept that made its success: good food and wine, in a trendy but casual ambiance. Their “faim de soirée” menu becomes available after 9pm, with more affordable prices attracting a younger clientele.

Of course, this neighbourhood’s culinary spectrum is much larger than what we can possibly cram into this page, and Local Montréal Tours can design customized gourmet tours that allow for rich and diverse Mile End discoveries.