Who Tells the Story of a Place?

“I think I was about eleven the first time I saw Nachvak in the Torngat Mountains. My dad brought me here on a fishing trip for char.”

Jason Edmunds, born and raised in Nunatsiavut, is remembering more than a childhood trip. He is speaking from a relationship to this place shaped by family and return. Now an expedition leader with Adventure Canada, he comes back often. Sometimes he brings his own children, showing them where their ancestors came from. 

When he says “Nachvak,” the name lands differently. You hear that this is more than a point on a map. It raises a question at the heart of travel: who gets to tell the story of a place? The land is there in all its scale and beauty, but the name carries a different weight when it is spoken by someone whose connection to it is not brief or borrowed.

When we travel, we often begin with what is visible. Coastlines, settlements, weather, wildlife, harbours, tundra, cliffs. We notice shape, colour, scale, light. We take in where we are.

But a place is never only what you can see. A fjord can be understood through geology, ecology, navigation, archaeology, politics, or art. An island can be introduced through birdlife, language, music, migration, or community life. A coastline can be admired for its beauty and also understood as a working homeland, a travel route, a source of food, or a place of return. None of these ways of seeing is wrong. But each brings a different place into view.

A place opens differently when the people helping interpret it are not only knowledgeable but deeply connected to it. They may live there now or have grown up there. Their families are often rooted there across generations. They may understand how conditions have changed over time, or know in practical terms what the place asks of those who move through it. What they know comes from years of familiarity and repetition.

On Adventure Canada expeditions, local residents and knowledge holders are core members of the expedition team, not occasional additions at the edges of the experience. Guests are learning from people whose ties to the region are ongoing and personal, alongside others whose expertise adds important scientific, historical, and interpretive depth to the journey. A local knowledge holder often brings a different perspective to a place. They know which stories are central, and what visitors tend to romanticize, overlook, or misunderstand. They connect what guests see on shore with patterns of livelihood, weather, family, language, and seasonal life. They help transform a place from a destination into a lived world.

I think of Tom and Dave Paddon, from Northwest River, Labrador. Their grandparents lived seasonally at Indian Harbour, where they operated a medical clinic associated with the Grenfell Mission. When we stand at the site of the now-vanished residence, the brothers do more than recount a historical footnote. They share family stories. They help us imagine what it meant to provide medical care along the Labrador coast in the early 1900s, in a place that can otherwise seem quiet and distant. The landscape is still there, but it changes when family history and lived connection become part of the story.

There is a similar shift when Tom Muir joins us in Scotland, the Faroes, or Iceland. Tom is from Orkney, born on a small farm by the sea, and he carries the lore of those islands with him. He has spent decades working with Orkney history, Nordic tales, and the Icelandic sagas, but what guests notice first is often his voice: a deep, unmistakably Orcadian cadence shaped by the islands he comes from. In his telling, the North Atlantic feels less like a string of destinations and more like a connected world of story, seafaring, ancestry, and exchange. What might otherwise feel like history on a page becomes something spoken, lived, and close at hand. 

I have felt a version of that myself in Newfoundland. When I speak about a cove, a community, a turn of phrase, a snippet of history, or a custom that influences me, I am not only giving information. I am also receiving a reflection of the place through the questions and attention of others. Guests ask about things I may have taken for granted. In that sense, the telling runs both ways. The guest learns the place through someone who knows it, and the teller is reminded about what is still alive. I admit I also feel a quiet sense of pride.

That same shift matters in regions where Indigenous presence is inseparable from the place itself. To understand the region responsibly means recognizing Indigenous voices as essential to the experience. Indigenous knowledge holders, cultural interpreters, artists, community members, and expedition team members bring knowledge shaped by lived experience and long relationship to land and water. They can speak to meanings, histories, and realities that cannot be reached through observation alone.

That does not mean there is only one valid voice, or one complete account. Places are complex. The richest expeditions draw on multiple ways of knowing: scientific, historical, cultural, practical, artistic, and lived. This is not about replacing one kind of expertise with another. It is recognizing that some forms of knowledge come from long relationship, and that they change what people notice.

For travellers, this changes the journey in consequential ways. It is part of what makes an Adventure Canada expedition distinct. Travelling on your own, you may see a place clearly and learn a great deal about it. But when local and Indigenous voices are part of the expedition team itself, the journey feels different. You are not only observing a landscape or receiving information about it. You are encountering a place through people whose knowledge comes from longstanding ties to it.

This is one of the ways expedition travel can alter your sense of a place. It helps you see the human life of a region more clearly. The landscape is still there in all its scale and beauty. Wildlife still stops you. Weather still shapes the day. But it begins to feel more human. Less generic. You begin to sense the lives that shape it.

Perhaps that is part of what travel asks of us now. It asks us to pay closer attention to who is doing the telling. Who names a place. Who welcomes us into it. Who carries knowledge shaped not by brief encounter, but by long belonging.

In the end, the story of a place does not live in landscape alone. It also lives in the people whose lives are bound up with it. To travel well is, in part, to recognize that and to understand how much richer a journey becomes when those voices help lead the way.

Journeys for the Curious