🪶 Who Is LodgePole Arts Alliance? The Indigenous Arts Charity Dreaming Big at Lemoine Point

Lemoine Point Farm from above, with its stone house, barn and water tower among the fields and woods, and the shoreline at top left. Photo courtesy of Aanii Nichii Drones.

On a spring 2026 Jane's Walk at Lemoine Point, archaeologist and educator Dr. Terri-Lynn Brennan holds up the Kaswentha, the Two Row Wampum Treaty. The 1613 agreement between the Haudenosaunee (Six Nations Confederacy) and the earliest Dutch newcomers stands for mutual respect, peace, friendship and non-interference. Nearby, Lake Ontario laps at a shoreline people have lived on since long before anyone called it Collins Bay.

By the time we reached Grandmother Eartha's white cedar tea, the talk had turned to the farm next door. The City of Kingston now owns Lemoine Point Farm. LodgePole Arts Alliance hopes to buy it and build what it calls Canada's first Indigenous-led, land-based arts centre.

LodgePole Arts Alliance is a national, Indigenous-led charity based in Ka'tarohkwi (Kingston), that supports First Nations, Métis and Inuit artists through arts, culture and the land. Its big goal is a land-based arts studio complex that Indigenous people own, run and program. LodgePole calls it "a place for visiting, creating, teaching, performing and feasting."

The idea grew out of a lot of listening. In 2019, Terri-Lynn and fellow founder JP Longboat began a four-year study with ArtsBuild Ontario on Indigenous cultural spaces across the province. They heard from 182 Indigenous artists and cultural workers, from newcomers to veterans. Again and again, those artists described the same need: public spaces that are welcoming, safe and under Indigenous control. The study's report is called Paddling Upstream.

In 2021, five Indigenous leaders from across Canada formed a Grand Council to shape the vision. LodgePole became a not-for-profit that fall and a registered charity in 2023. Its home base is Hotel Wolfe Island.

Lemoine Point Farm is an 82-acre (32-hectare) property on Front Road in Kingston's west end, right beside Lemoine Point Conservation Area. It has about a kilometre of natural Lake Ontario shoreline, plus woodlands, open pasture and two stone buildings about 100 years old.

For LodgePole, the land's history matters as much as its size. Indigenous peoples and archaeologists know the area for long-term occupation by First Nations ancestors. Huron-Wendat and Haudenosaunee ancestors have made the north shore of Lake Ontario their homelands since the ice receded thousands of years ago. Many other Nations shared the shoreline as its environment and resources rose and fell over those same millennia. Evidence of First Nations tools, meals and burials remains on this landscape today.

The farm stayed in private hands for more than two centuries. A United Empire Loyalist family won it in a lottery in 1784, after the Crawford Purchase. It changed hands only twice more, ending with Mary Fraser and her heirs in 2026. "To have this landscape returned to and fully controlled by Indigenous peoples would be a true act of conciliation," Terri-Lynn told Kingston Spotlight.

The farm's future was uncertain after its owner, Mary Fraser, died in 2022. LodgePole took its idea to the City's Arts and Culture Advisory Committee in 2024, asking the City to buy the land and then sell it to LodgePole. Jessica Foley covered that pitch for the Kingstonist at the time.

Then, through a court-approved settlement, the City of Kingston bought the farm for $12 million, as Elliot Ferguson reported for the Whig-Standard. The City has said the land won't be used for housing or intensive development, and it's planning the farm's future with the community.

The day before Terri-Lynn's Jane's Walk, the Save Lemoine Point Farm group led its own walk through the farm's past, present and future.

LodgePole still hopes to buy it from the City for what the City paid, so it adds no extra cost for Kingston taxpayers. The plan includes artist studios and residencies, indoor spaces for performances and workshops, and outdoor land-based learning. It also covers food growing, conservation and letting parts of the land return to the wild. Trails and shoreline would be open to the public, extending from the current trails in the conservation area. LodgePole plans to reuse the footprints of the existing buildings rather than build bigger. There would also be a federally designated museum to care for ancestral Indigenous items returned from other institutions. The museum would also welcome items from private and public attics and basements.

After the City's purchase, LodgePole put out a news release, quoted by the Whig-Standard. In it, Terri-Lynn said LodgePole's main goal "remains focused on protecting and preserving the land through Indigenous teachings, values, knowledge, and caretaking traditions."

Terri-Lynn told Kingston Spotlight that LodgePole's biggest message is simple: "we want the farm with good intention as a public space." LodgePole is in talks with the City and getting ready to launch a capital campaign to back those talks.

A safe, welcoming space for Indigenous artists is the reason LodgePole started, and Terri-Lynn says that still comes first. "You can have all the money in the world, but if you don't actually have a community that is welcoming, it's useless," she said.

LodgePole doesn't have its land yet, but it's already busy bringing Indigenous artists and audiences together around Kingston and Wolfe Island.

The Art of Visiting. Each October, LodgePole hosts The Art of Visiting: National Indigenous Presenters Gathering on Wolfe Island and in Kingston. Indigenous people and Treaty Partners who book shows and festivals come from across Canada, along with artists, agents and arts leaders. The gathering mixes workshops, performances, a makers market and plenty of shared meals. There's even "Speed Visiting," which is exactly as fun as it sounds.

Sounding Thunder. LodgePole also produces Sounding Thunder: The Song of Francis Pegahmagabow, a touring musical about the Ojibwe First World War sniper, decorated soldier and Indigenous political activist.

Local partnerships. LodgePole sponsors and co-presents Indigenous artists with local festivals, including Kingston WritersFest, the Kingston Canadian Film Festival and the Skeleton Park Arts Festival. It also leads land-based walks and teachings, like the Jane's Walk at Lemoine Point.

Full Circle meetings. LodgePole holds public Full Circle meetings where anyone can learn more and get involved. Find the next one on LodgePole's events page.

LodgePole Arts Alliance was envisioned by two people with family roots at Six Nations of the Grand River.

A Grand Council oversees LodgePole and makes its decisions by consensus. On its website, LodgePole says that approach reflects how its ancestors governed, in harmony with the land and between Nations. Each seat carries a role name:

You can read more about each of them on LodgePole's governance page.

On Wednesday, September 30, LodgePole and Kingston WritersFest co-present Sculpted by Storms at the Isabel Bader Centre for the Performing Arts. It's an evening with Cree author Michelle Good on the National Day for Truth and Reconciliation, and a lead-in to this year's festival.

Michelle is a member of Red Pheasant Cree Nation in Saskatchewan, and a lawyer who advocated for residential school survivors. Her first novel, Five Little Indians, follows survivors of residential school and draws on her own family's experience. It won the Governor General's Literary Award for fiction and was the 2022 Canada Reads winner.

At Sculpted by Storms, she'll talk with broadcaster and Queen's University Chancellor Shelagh Rogers about her new novel, Eliza Sunshine. It follows three generations of Cree women connected by story, survival and the land. Lheidli T'enneh singer-songwriter Kym Gouchie performs. Jan Hill opens the evening with a welcome, and Armand G. Ruffo from LodgePole's Grand Council hosts.

Get tickets from the Isabel box office.

LodgePole is also sponsoring The Inbetween Leader at Kingston WritersFest on Saturday, October 3, at the Kingston Marriott. Former federal justice minister Jody Wilson-Raybould, a member of We Wai Kai Nation, is joined by lawyer and educator Roshan Danesh. They'll talk about their new book, The Inbetween Leader: Cultivating Courage and Unity in a Complex World. It looks to Indigenous ways of governing for a style of leadership that keeps people connected across their differences. They'll be in conversation with Kyle Wyatt, and Harmony from LodgePole's Grand Council hosts.

Get tickets on Showpass.

From the start, LodgePole has been supported by three people: James Brown, Joan Lee and Lib Spry. LodgePole counts them as extra-special Treaty Partner dignitaries in its Inner Circle.

Terri-Lynn also thanks everyone who has stopped by LodgePole's booth to say hi, or shared its website and brochures, over the past few years. "It fuels our conviction to rebuild Ka'tarohkwi as a welcoming space for global Indigenous arts performance and engagement," she told Kingston Spotlight.