Métis Crossing: A Gathering Place in Smoky Lake, Alberta
AZURE Magazine | March 29, 2024
Decades in the making by Reimagine Architects – and centuries in the imaginations of its Indigenous community – Métis Crossing takes wondrous shape.
Métis Crossing is a cultural space, a savvy piece of regional development and a beautiful architectural intervention in the land. Its assemblage of wood buildings, old and new, stretches along a bend in the North Saskatchewan River. As you approach the complex in Smoky Lake, Alberta, a campground of contemporary trappers cabins gives way to a collection of 19th-century farm buildings, repurposed now as interpretive spaces.
Just a little further downstream is the Gathering Centre, the complex’s main structure. Its sloping roofline stretches toward the river, seeming almost to encompass it. Via a covered walkway, the centre connects to the two-storey Lodge, which twists slightly away from the water in a gentle jumble of posts and lattices, providing an overlook to a veteran’s memorial. Another 150 metres down, a field of geodesic sky-watching domes, illuminated at night, resemble some kind of moonscape spaceport.
The complex seems to traverse two or three centuries as it meanders along the river. According to Juanita Marois, Métis Crossing’s chief executive officer, that’s about how long it has taken to realize this centre of Indigenous culture. The Métis first settled in this area in the early 1800s, when they were key players in its trade network. Marois, like most of the folks involved in the Métis Crossing, is a member of the Métis Nation of Alberta (MNA), which was formed in 1932 to alleviate poverty in the community and create a secure land base for its people. In 1999, former MNA president Audrey Poitras led the “Métis Millennium Voyage,” a journey across the province that identified 63 significant sites and assessed them as potential locations for a social and political gathering place for the Métis.
The chosen site, 120 kilometres northeast of Edmonton along the northernmost bank of the North Saskatchewan River, was for at least 6,000 years the natural starting point for land routes across to the Athabasca River watershed.