Inhabited: Wildness and the Vitality of the Land 0228008956, 9780228008958

Table of contents :
Contents
List of Figures
1 Introduction
2 Vitality and Relationality
3 Ecological Heritage
Interlude: Fog
4 Entanglement
5 Intensity
6 Inhabitation
Interlude: Bear Spray
7 Atmosphere
Interlude: The Lonesome Loon • Autumn Vannini
8 Exhaustion
Interlude: NOT Alone
9 Aliveness
10 Sacred Ways of Life
Notes
References
Index

Citation preview

Inhabited

I n ha bi t ed Wildness and the Vitality of the Land

Phillip Vannini and April Vannini

McGill-Queen’s University Press Montreal & Kingston • London • Chicago

© McGill-Queen’s University Press 2021 ISB N ISB N ISB N ISB N

978-0-2280-0895-8 978-0-2280-0896-5 978-0-2280-1027-2 978-0-2280-1028-9

(cloth) (paper) (eP df) (ep ub)

Legal deposit fourth quarter 2021 Bibliothèque nationale du Québec Printed in Canada on acid-free paper that is 100% ancient forest free (100% post-consumer recycled), processed chlorine free This book has been published with the help of a grant from the Canadian Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences, through the Awards to Scholarly Publications Program, using funds provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.

We acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts. Nous remercions le Conseil des arts du Canada de son soutien.

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication Title: Inhabited : wildness and the vitality of the land / Phillip Vannini and April Vannini. Names: Vannini, Phillip, author. | Vannini, April, author. Description: Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: Canadiana (print) 20210262567 | Canadiana (ebook) 2021026313x | isbn 9780228008965 (softcover) | is bn 9780228008958 (hardcover) | i sb n 9780228010272 (p df) | is bn 9780228010289 (eP U B ) Subjects: lcs h: Human geography. | l cs h: Human ecology. Classification: l cc gf 50 .v36 2021 | ddc 304.2—dc23

This book was typeset in 10.5/13 Sabon.

Contents Figures

vii

1 Introduction 3 2 Vitality and Relationality 23 3 Ecological Heritage 48 Interlude: Fog 70 4 Entanglement

73

5 Intensity 94 6 Inhabitation

117

Interlude: Bear Spray 142 7 Atmosphere

148

Interlude: The Lonesome Loon 166 Autumn Vannini 8 Exhaustion 168 Interlude: NOT Alone 9 Aliveness

200

10 Sacred Ways of Life Notes

235

References Index

193

237

255

219

Figures Photos by the authors. 2.1

Elder Joseph Gibot and Elder Alex Whiteknife

24

2.2

Elder Charles Crowchief 41

3.1

The community of Trout River

5.1

Lowell Glacier, Kluane National Park 100

6.1

Dinosaur-hunting expedition 126

I.1

Autumn on the Cottonwood Trail

7.1

Hanging in the air near Mount Logan 151

7.2

Sunset shadows at the Temple of the Moon 155

7.3

Mamawi grey

8.1

Aerial view of tailings pond 171

9.1

Brian Hebert on the beach 204

9.2

Ralph Plourde with fossil 209

9.3

Richard Thomas with fossils

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160

213

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1

Introduction

At the time of our interview in the summer of 2019, Kristen Tanché lived in Fort Simpson in the Northwest Territories, a small town of about 1,200 people located at the edges of Canada’s famed Nahanni National Park. A member of the Dehcho First Nation, Kristen worked as one of the Dehcho’s acting regional resource management coordinators. “In Fort Simpson,” she explained, “at the conjunction of the Dehcho River and the Liard River, people from all over the area would travel to gather, to meet, to hold celebrations, to do drum dances.” It is a place, she underlined, “that’s been used for as long as I know by the people of this area.” Kristen had agreed to be interviewed in order to teach us about what “wild” meant to her and about the wildness of Nahanni National Park. She was the 150th interviewee of our cross-Canada research project, and hers was one of the very last scheduled interviews. Nahanni National Park is visited by a few hundred people every year. The numbers are low because Nahanni National Park is one of Canada’s most remote. Distance from major access points and challenges in reaching it by convenient transportation from the rest of Canada make Nahanni one of the most prohibitive tourist destinations in North America. The few fortunate visitors who come to the park tend to join guided rafting trips and travel down the Nahanni River for many days at a time, typically paying several thousand dollars for the outing. Others fly into Fort Simpson and then go on day-long flightseeing tours by float plane that feature a handful of stops at select water landing sites in the park. As there are no roads leading into the park, even First Nations of the area do not travel deep inside Nahanni’s boundaries every

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day, and as Kristen told us, they hold the occasions of such journeys in high regard. In light of this esteem for the park, Kristen’s work was especially significant for local communities. For some time, she had organized land programs that brought youth, Elders, community members, and land users together. “And this area,” she pointed out to the video camera, “is where a group of them landed. This exact spot is where last summer twelve youth commuted from Fort Providence to Fort Simpson to come to that annual Dehcho assembly.” Community members gathered to welcome them with drums and dances after their seven-day journey, she recounted. The youth who took last summer’s trip, Kristen told us, would be absolutely thrilled to do it again. “They got to learn from cultural Knowledge Holders, from language people. They learnt language on the trip. They also received credits for their high school. They also received canoeing certification. There are all sorts of things that they learned. They learned from land users. And in the Dehcho and along the river, many family members have lived and frequented different spots. And so, a lot of our members, when they go on the river, have ties to the land.” Kristen clarified that some of the youth had been on the river before but only in a few sections. Exploring different parts of the river allowed them to learn about areas deeply meaningful to their families and their culture. A few years beforehand, Kristen herself had taken part in a related program called the Shinto, which took her from Fort Providence to Fort Good Hope. That was the first time she had spent so many days on the land in her family’s traditional area: “I got to canoe to the area that my great-grandfather and my grandparents and my mom would have frequented. And so being able to do that and follow the route and put my paddle in the water that my forefathers would have put their paddles in, too, was extremely special. It tied me to the area even more.” By exploring the land, Kristen and the youth made important ties between nature and culture. Some youth, for example, understood “things like how to read the water.” Sometimes, she went on, “they might learn of good berry spots. They might learn how to harvest. There’s a lot of spirituality and culture learned along the way. So it’s about learning some of our practices of respecting the land that we’re coming into and that we’re travelling on.” “How is this different from the knowledge that they teach at school?”

Introduction

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“Learning on the land and from Elders and cultural Knowledge Holders is really different,” she answered. “You’re outside. You’re really engaged. It’s hands on ... It’s so different learning when you’re outside in the environment and in nature than when you’re in a classroom with four walls and maybe a little window ... When you’re learning from an Elder and about the area you’re from, I feel like there’s more connection there. Like my grandfather and my grandmother used to walk on this land, and I’m now walking on it. It’s all so interconnected, and you can’t separate any of them: the land is connected to culture and to language. All three of them are linked.” Journeys out to the land allow people to be whole, Kristen explained. Travelling to the land can make one feel refreshed, grounded, comfortable, at peace. Nahanni has been called a “wilderness” by countless tour operators, travel guides, and visitors. Advertising on the Internet, an outfitter called Nahanni Wild (n.d.) brands itself as a provider of “true wilderness adventures.” On its website, Parks Canada (2020) promises travellers that “the Dehcho First Nations welcome adventurers to Nahʔa¸ Dehé, land of peaks, plateaus and wild rivers.” National Geographic (2011) points out that Nahanni is “seven million acres of wilderness.” The Canadian Encyclopedia describes Nahanni in terms of “wild rivers” and “a wilderness of rugged mountains” (Finkelstein 2006). And the magazine The Narwhal calls Nahanni “a part of the lore of Canadian identity – a poster child for vast Canadian wilderness” (Riley 2019). The semantic differences between this kind of language and the words that inhabitants like Kristen use are striking. Whereas many outsiders seem to use words like “wilderness,” Kristen and so many other First Nation members around Canada simply say, “the land.” When asked whether she thought that the place was “wild,” Kristen reflected, I don’t really think there are too many wild areas. There are traces of people or their footprints everywhere, especially here. Just last week, I was canoeing with my family from here to Willow River. My great-grandfather used to live in that area. And as we were going down the river, it looks untouched, right? There’s no people. There’s no boats. We didn’t run into anybody really for the first few days. But it’s not wild. People have been there, and I know people have been there because we know

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families have frequented the area. And I’ve heard stories about so many people along the Dehcho River. The population was huge before the flu epidemics and all sorts of other things that really decimated the Indigenous populations in the area. There were so many people up here, so it’s not untouched. There’s been people here. They’ve lived here since time immemorial is what our people say. To me, a wild place would be a place that was completely untouched by humans, someplace where no human has been. But at the same time, too, we’re not the only beings on earth. There are animals, and they frequent every single place of this earth, too. So is there really a wild place? I guess it really depends on your perception and where you grew up and what your reality is. If you live in a city, yeah, Nahanni National Park is going to be wild. Probably this very spot would seem wild to you. It really depends on a person’s reality, their perception, where they’re from, where they live. I think Nahanni is a powerful place, spiritually. I wouldn’t necessarily call it wild. I’d call it powerful.

Wild places are central to Canadian culture, identity, and history. In Canada, many of our interviewees told us, the notion of wilderness evokes images of vast, remote, and untouched landscapes and seascapes. For many of our research participants, wilderness is synonymous with the bush, the “great outdoors,” and at times the Far North, where there are places like Nahanni National Park. Wilderness can be a divisive idea, too. Some Canadians may dream of wilderness as a place to escape, a playground. Others might salivate at the thought of untapped natural resources hiding deep underground or growing on the surface of “virgin” lands. Many people may wish to protect it in the name of biodiversity conservation. Others might hope to tap it, maybe under the guise of sustainable development. And then there are peoples like many First Nations, Métis, and Inuit for whom wilderness is simply a colonial invention. For them, as Kristen explained, “wild places” are the places that they have always called home, their land, places of which they have been dispossessed. Regardless of the feelings that it evokes, wilderness is generally understood in the English language as referring to an uncultivated, undeveloped, uninhabited area (Oelschlager 1991). Ask friends if they have ever been into the wilderness, and you will likely hear

Introduction

7

stories of trekking mountain regions, encountering wild animals in the forest or jungle, or exploring a remote desert or a tundra. Those who have never ventured into the wilderness might fear it as a place where they cannot be in control of their destiny, a place far away from the comforts and convenience of modern society, a place where dangerous animals run free, and a place where they cannot get a signal for their cellphone. And then there are those people who will tell you stories of the wilderness excursions that they have taken, perhaps on cruise ships, guided hikes, or flightseeing planes, all of which are adventures inevitably chronicled in camera memories and social media posts. Conventional ideas on wilderness (as a place) and wildness (as a quality of such a place) as referring to something removed and separate from culture and society may be relatively unchallenged in popular discourse, but these are concepts that many critical scholars view as social constructions (see Callicott and Nelson 1998; and Nelson and Callicott 2008). These constructions are myths, many of them say, that are more appropriate for revealing the cultural filters utilized by the peoples who embrace them than for assessing actual environmental realities (Cronon 1996a, 1996b). Within contemporary spatial cultural sciences and environmental humanities, wilderness is understood not as pristine nature but as an idea, as well as a legally protected area that is managed and regulated by various governmental departments and subject to ongoing conflict involving a plurality of social agents (Vannini and Vannini 2016). From this critical perspective, the idea of wilderness is a contested notion characterized by legacies of colonialism and informed not by natural forces but by the social forces of enrichment and eviction and by the ideologies of ethnocentrism, imperialism, nationalism, and androcentrism. To Kristen, and to many other people, “a wild place would be a place that was completely untouched by humans, someplace where no human has been.” This does not need to be the only meaning of “wild.” Wildness can, and does, mean something different. In the pages that follow, we show how wildness is not necessarily removed, separate, and disconnected from the social world. Nature and culture are deeply entangled, and a culture that separates us from wildness is a culture that has lost sight of its rootedness in the land that gives it life. With this book, we re-envision wildness and contribute to the ongoing dialogue on the concepts of wilderness and

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wildness continuously unfolding across geography, anthropology, cultural studies, heritage studies, and the environmental humanities. At the same time, we learn from nonacademic people who experience, conserve, develop, enjoy, fight for, visit, regulate, manage, and represent wild places throughout their day-to-day lives. In other words, we bring so-called laypeople and so-called experts into dialogue with one another in order to challenge, question, and eventually re-envision our collective notion of wilderness, wildness, wild places, and natural heritage. Although wildness is our primary focus, the notion of wilderness and the research that has grown around it remain in the background throughout the book. There are differences between the words “wilderness” and “wildness” but important continuities, too. Wilderness refers to a place, whereas wildness refers to a quality. Around the world, wilderness is often defined as an area that may be legally protected for its valued environmental properties. A wilderness may have qualities of wildness, but these qualities may be difficult, if not impossible, to define precisely, largely because, as Kristen put it, “it really depends on your perception and where you grew up and what your reality is.” In this book, our research is about how these relations between people and place shape perceptions of wildness and ultimately about how such relations inform places that may be protected as wilderness proper or as homes to wildlife, wild plants, and wild natures. Relations matter. Through our research, we have been taught by many of our research participants that humans are connected to wild places. Wild places do not exist because of human absence from them. Rather, humans are a key element of these ecologies. Nevertheless, humans are also often short-sighted, and at times they are blinded by anthropocentric ideals. We would hate for anyone to read our arguments and conclude that people can do whatever they wish with the lands that they occupy because wildness has the potential to regenerate itself or because humans are part of all wild ecologies. Ideologies of extractivism, resource-based economy growth, and imperial-colonial expansion are the dominant social and cultural forces that have wreaked havoc on our planet and will continue to do so until they are extinguished. The human species needs to understand the value of respect toward all the other species with which we cohabit the lifeworld, and no ecologies can continue to regenerate themselves in their full vitality unless the value of respect underlies all of our relations.

Introduction

9

Fundamental to the re-envisoning of wildness proposed in this book are Indigenous concepts such as land. English dictionaries define “land” as an area of ground, a part of the earth’s surface that can be delimited and exchanged as property, or an area that is not covered by water. For many Indigenous groups in Canada, the land is much more than this account allows. Throughout our fieldwork, Indigenous people across the nation taught us that the “land,” in their shared worldview, is both home and more than just a place. Such a concept of land denotes a kinship among humans, animals, rocks, trees, rivers, seas, sky, and all the biotic and abiotic beings that inhabit a land. This kinship extends to the ancestors, whose spirits still reside on the land and continue to exercise their force through sustained presence in myriad forms. The spiritual connection binds the land together, filling it with relations that give birth to language, knowledge, morality, and law. The land cares for its inhabitants, but it demands their care, too. The land therefore knots together identities, families, communities, and nations. The land is all its relations and is therefore alive in complex, entangled ways that are constantly unfolding. This aliveness can be unpredictable, uncontrollable, unrestrainable, but it is always rooted in connectedness, never in separation. The land’s aliveness is its vitality – its sacred wildness. Vitality is a central concept in this book. In its most basic form, vitality is the power to live and grow and is a force that expresses itself through manifestations of a being’s capacity to survive and change. For many of the Indigenous people we spoke with, vitality is the aliveness of all things. Similarly, for European scholars like Ingold (2011), vitality is the aliveness of forms of life entangled in life-giving relations. Throughout this book, we take inspiration from these teachings to understand wild places as growing out of the relations that humans and nonhumans weave with the places that they inhabit. All of our interviews taught us that a sacred concept of wildness, rooted in its relational vitality, is essential to a decolonized environmental conservation politics. In this book, we are thus moved by a desire to strengthen the values behind ecological protection and natural heritage conservation while recognizing the interconnectedness of culture and nature, social life and wildlife, and peoples, other species, and their environments. This book introduces us to individuals and collectives that live, work, enjoy, protect, study, develop, and care for some of Canada’s many protected natural areas. Drawing on their perspectives, stories, actions,

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and experiences, we rethink the idea of wildness, reimagine the relations between natural and cultural heritage, and re-envision the rapport between nature and culture through the lens of a sacred vitalism. Based on three years of ethnographic fieldwork and travel, including approximately 150 interviews and encounters with locals and visitors to some of Canada’s national and provincial parks, we examine a vast web of place-based cultures, local communities, diverse ecological environments, old and innovative conservation policies, and diverse understandings of what it means to be wild and to live with wilderness.

w h o w e are As writers and scholars, we understand the importance of situating ourselves so that the reader knows who we are and where we come from. We are both settlers living in what is now known as Canada. More specifically, we live in British Columbia on a small Gulf Island now known as Gabriola, which is the territory of the Snuneymuxw First Nation. Phillip immigrated to North America from Europe in 1997 and then to Canada in 2003. April is a fourth-generation settler Canadian raised on Vancouver Island. Situating ourselves in relation to the place that we go home to after each fieldwork trip is integral to our research path. For three years, we moved in and out of many Indigenous territories, and this free movement required self-reflection on who we were as visitors to the land and territories that we visited, on how we related to the people we spoke with, both Indigenous and non-Indigenous, and on our own colonial ancestral history in Canada, a country that is still very much living in a continuously unfolding settler colonial system. Not situating ourselves in this way would be a disservice to our own research and to the many people we have had the great privilege to learn from. “Wild” is an English word without immediate synonyms in many Indigenous languages spoken throughout Canada. Yet wildness has a clear meaning in the history and day-to-day experiences of many Indigenous people because it is in the name of wild that many Indigenous peoples around the world have been removed from their territory and restricted from practising their right to live on their land, to trap, to hunt, and to harvest (Callicott and Nelson 1998; Nelson and Callicott 2008). As non-Indigenous, settler scholars, we interpret what “wild” means based on the knowledge of those who

Introduction

11

have participated in our research and our learning, both Indigenous Knowledge Keepers and non-Indigenous interviewees. Given our identity as settlers on Indigenous land doing research about Indigenous land, we understand the complexity of the politics of representation (see Chilisa 2012; and S. Wilson 2008). Consequently, we are driven by an ethic of engagement, inclusivity, collaboration, respect, ceremony, reciprocity, Indigenous communities’ protocol, and honouring the sharing of knowledge (see Archibald 1993; Bishop 1998; Brant Castellano 1993, 2013; and Panel on Research Ethics 2020). You might be wondering about how our interest in this subject began. The answer is best conveyed through a memory and in the form of a story. It was the spring break of 2013. The two of us, as well as our children, Jacob and Autumn, had travelled to Costa Rica for a holiday. One morning, keen on seeing sloths in the wild, we ventured out to Manuel Antonio National Park on the Pacific Coast. Arriving at the main gate just minutes before the daily opening of the visitor centre, we stumbled into a large crowd patiently lined up to enter. The line was so long – which was clearly typical during the high tourist season – that park staff had hired a small troupe of entertainers to keep us all amused as we waited, with visitors being let in a few at a time. The presence of clowns, jugglers, and musicians outside a national park’s gate was strange enough for us – given that we were accustomed to entering quiet and sparsely visited Canadian national parks – but what awaited us inside was even more remarkable. Once allowed past the gate after a half-hour’s wait, we encountered more queues. Lineup after lineup continued to form in front of sloths, iguanas, and other noncaptive animals dwelling in the forest environment beside the main trails. All the animals had long lines of people in front of them, and the people seemed as patient about the whole experience as the wildlife. It wasn’t a zoo, but it felt like one. Accustomed to a human presence, the four-legged creatures slept, ate, or otherwise went about their daily business while the visitors took turns snapping pictures before moving away. Some of the lines were comprised of people on a guided tour. Other visitors, like us, moved freely and independently in any direction that we pleased, joining and leaving queues as the morning progressed. After a couple of hours of trying, in vain, to get away from the crowds, we surrendered. It was clear that we simply couldn’t

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encounter wildlife alone as we were accustomed to doing back in Canada. Nothing about our experience felt wild. Although Costa Rica has done remarkably good work blending eco-tourism and environmental conservation, this experience taught us that our expectations and habitual ways of experiencing and enjoying wildlife and wild places were obviously filtered by our cultural lens and by specific settings, each with its distinct atmosphere. This insight prompted us to reflect on our experience of the wild and ultimately on the very idea of wildness. We both grew up taking the outdoors for granted. Both of us are children of parents who enjoyed being outside while camping, hiking, and exploring. Whether on the British Columbia coast or in the Alps, we both learned (unreflexively) to take the value of relative solitude in the natural environment as a given. This solitude for us became an essential quality of wildness. But that day at Manuel Antonio National Park woke us up from our ethnocentric oblivion. Although the sloths and iguanas that we and all the other visitors managed to photograph may have been noncaptive and thus in a way wild, there was nothing wild about our experience. Even though Manuel Antonio is a national park and a protected area, it seemed to us that there was no wildness left in the place. But upon reflection, we understood that this perception reflected nothing but our feelings. Although we never asked anyone that day whether they felt otherwise, it is possible that some people’s feelings were different from ours given their upbringing, their culture, their habits, and their moods. In fact, some people clearly enjoyed themselves. Some were even in awe. It became clear to us that wildlife, wilderness, wild places are nothing but relative experiences – the result of different personal relations that people form with particular places. This alerted us to something unique and very simple about the complex idea of wildness: wildness is a relative quality, and it comprises much more than can be conveyed by a dictionary definition or a policy. Wildness is a quality, a sense, a feeling, an experience, an embodied perspective of whatever we take “wild” to mean, which grows out of the relation between people and a place. Ecologies are relations, and our understanding of wildness would be empty if we did not ground people’s perspectives of wildness within the precise places where these perspectives unfold. Our relational, ecological, and ethnographic work therefore focuses on these relations to generate an in-depth, embodied, emplaced, intimate understanding of

Introduction

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wildness that neither dictionaries nor policies can provide. That is why in this book, we stay away from generating an ultimate, comprehensive, impersonal definition of wildness. It is why we do not open this book with an ultimate definition of wildness. It is also why we travelled to many different places to encounter people where they lived and worked. Our research, as a result, can be described as a relational multisite ethnography. Instead of conducting fieldwork at a single site like most ethnographers do, we engaged in a series of inductive encounters with multiple lifeworlds across a very large space, Canada. At every site, we built relations and carried out in-depth, open-ended, semistructured interviews with diverse groups of people. We also spent as much time as possible “noticing” places (see Tsing 2015) – that is, exploring the sites themselves and observing the multiple ways that humans and nonhumans there have become entangled with each other. Occasionally, time and money and our physical skills allowed us to venture alone deep into the backcountry of these sites, but in other instances our observations remained limited to the environs where most visitors spent their time, where people worked or resided, or where our research participants chose to meet us. Everywhere we went, we encountered Indigenous Elders, Knowledge Holders, and youth as well as non-Indigenous conservationists, activists, park agents, business operators, travellers and tourists, professional guides and recreation specialists, artists and writers, fisher folk, hunters, local politicians, heritage professionals, farmers, researchers, and many others who had some sort of relation with the place in question and were willing to share their perspectives and experiences. Sometimes, our encounters took place in environments of convenience, like homes and offices. Other times, our interviewees offered to take us somewhere inside a park or nearby it as part of a shared experience and exploration. Regularly, our research went beyond the boundaries of protected areas. Every natural heritage site and park that we visited was understood to be part of a much broader social, political, economic, and environmental setting and not to be separate from ecological relations that went beyond the park borders. That is why we also visited and conducted research in towns outside of parks, sometimes even relatively far from the sites themselves. Take Wood Buffalo National Park, for example. Fort McMurray and the Alberta tar sands may be a few hundred kilometres away from the park, but oil extraction has clear impacts downstream on

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the Athabasca River that must be traced to their origin in order to be understood. Nearly all the interviews that we conducted were filmed and later edited into a feature documentary titled Inhabited. Many of the voices heard and places described in this book are portrayed in this documentary, which you may watch online through a variety of video-on-demand platforms. We should mention that we also created a second documentary and book, both called In the Name of Wild, which focus on the research that we conducted at sites outside of Canada. For both of these audiovisual projects, Phillip was typically behind the camera, and April was typically in charge of conducting the interviews. Our daughter, Autumn, was always with us as well. Because we were accompanied by our young daughter, there is something unique about our experience of wildness. Most books about wilderness and the experience of wild places are written by people travelling solo in search of the latest place to conquer or perhaps in search of their true self. Most of these people, especially the conquering types, are men. And nearly all of these people are young, in their twenties and thirties. When we began this project in the Yukon in 2016, Autumn was twelve, Phillip was forty-two, and April was forty. Travelling together as a family while having to deal with budgetary constraints, interview schedules, and school obligations back home limited where we could go and how much time we could spend in each place. Skills limited us, too. Although we can handle ourselves in canoes, in kayaks, on snowshoes, and in climbing boots, we would never dream of climbing Mount Logan or going to live among grizzly bears for months. Instead, we managed to find people who had done these sorts of things and we learned about wildness from them. Some readers might say that our notion of wildness, after years of research, is still coloured by all these “limitations” and by our personal perspectives and that it is therefore not definitive or objective. And that is definitely the case. We are interpretivist researchers, and we are not interested in coming up with definitive conclusions. We are concerned with shedding light on people’s practices, experiences, beliefs, or expressions, including our own. We believe that it is from multiple perspectives, not from “the best one,” that we can acquire and refine knowledge. Ultimately, we are not interested in arriving at a definitive understanding of what wildness is. Rather, we want to rethink the idea of wildness and expand its horizons. In sum, we care less about what wildness is and much more about what else wildness could be.

Introduction

15

Throughout our encounters with the places that we visited and with our research participants, we also sought something else: to understand relations. Although it would have been far easier to gauge people’s opinions about wildness and wilderness by asking them a set of pre-formulated questions about indicators of such qualities, we engaged in dialogues with people without being afraid to enter into deeper and challenging discussions with them. As part of this process, we sometimes asked people to take us to places that they found wild so that they could show us and teach us about the relations they had enacted with a particular environment and so that we could notice some of the relations they had woven together with a place (see Watts 2013). In doing so, we treated our informants as guides and experts who are no different from the many authors who have published their thoughts about wilderness, wildness, protected areas, and environmental conservation. We deeply valued their relations with us, and we acknowledge that this work could be completed only thanks to the trusting relations that people had with us. It was this trust that allowed those we met to share their experiences and deepest thoughts with us. We are forever indebted for the connections, trust, and kindness provided wherever we went by everyone we contacted. We are driven by relational theories generated from both Indigenous and non-Indigenous perspectives as well as by nonrepresentational theories. Thrift (2004, 81) writes that nonrepresentational theory is “an attempt to change the role of academics by questioning what counts as expertise and who has that expertise.” This process for us has entailed thinking about our research as a type of co-production with our interviewees “through which the researcher and the researched are resituated or repositioned in the world and thereby are engaged in remaking the world through the process of their encounters” (Greenhough 2010, 48). It is upon acts of noticing – based on our “modest witnessing” (Haraway 1997, 269) of multiple relations and multiple species – that our analysis and arguments in this book are built. We do not take the approach of drawing out themes and categories from the data to ascertain what was common. After all, if we had been interested in determining what the majority of people think of wilderness, we would have conducted a survey. Instead of writing about what was typical, we relate what fragments of our encounters generated new ideas, activated new imaginings, affected us more intensely, and astonished us. In doing so, we often

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rely on quotes that are much longer than the typical short excerpts utilized in qualitative research because we feel that longer quotes enable us to properly situate our research participants’ arguments and relations while allowing them to teach us in their own words. Ours is a logic built on singularities, not generalities; it is an analytic of impersonal individuation instead of personal and collective representation. Rather than built on abstraction and generalization, our analysis is driven by the infinite capacity that a multiplicity of relations has for generating new ideas and for making our world more, not less, complex (Greenhough 2010; Hinchliffe 2010). This is an open, partial analytic based on and rather than on is (see Deleuze 2001). In other words, it is a way of reasoning that aims to generate multiple perspectives, not a singular and absolute reality. It is a collection of radical ideas, lessons, arguments, epiphanies, and transformative events generated throughout our encounters and thus ultimately a collection not meant to be judged for how it represents a sample or a population but meant to be valued for what it does next, what it generates and activates, and how it invents “new relations between thought and life” (Thrift 2004, 82). At times, this approach to “data” as something given, gifted to us for our growing knowledge, results in an unconventional treatment of people’s words. Rather than dissecting, analyzing, and theorizing them, we regularly treat these “gifts” as the vitalist expressions of our relations and as a stimulus that generates growth and new ideas. This analytic is generative, not explanatory, and its value is assessed not for what it reveals but for what it enlivens.

t h e jo u r n eys You might be wondering where we went in search of wildness and why we chose those places. If you think about it for a moment, you will realize that our decision was very complex. Really, do think about it for a second. If you were given a research budget, the task of researching wildness in Canada, and three years to do the job, where would you go? And how would you logically justify your choices? Perhaps, after digging up a bit of information on the Internet, you would find out that the International Union for Conservation of Nature (iucn ) has a list of types of protected areas. According to the list, protected areas classified as 1b are considered wilderness. The classification defines wilderness areas as “large unmodified or

Introduction

17

slightly modified areas that retain their natural character without permanent or significant human habitation, which are protected and managed so as to preserve their natural condition” (iucn n.d). “Great!” you think, so you proceed to find out which protected areas in Canada are classified as 1b. Job done, right? But do you see a problem with this approach? Your entire scope of reimagining wildness is pre-coded by the understanding of wilderness that a group of conservationists have agreed upon and made official. How diverse can your findings be? How insightful will your work be? How redundant will your trips get after a while? “Okay,” you say, “to hell with official definitions! I will look for wildness anywhere!” So you look in your neighbour’s backyard. In the city park. In that abandoned industrial lot outside of town. Up Mount Assiniboine. In the far reaches of the Arctic and in the prairie fields where your grandparents used to farm. And, well, in the rainforests of Haida Gwaii and in the desert outside of Carcross in the Yukon. Oh, you can’t forget the Torngat Mountains and the Hudson Bay. But at the same time, you should also include the underwater world. Also, how can you exclude ...? Wait. You see where this is going, right? Wildness is potentially everywhere. And how can you do research everywhere – or therefore nowhere in particular – in three years or less? Moreover, do you see the challenge inherent in being the one who chooses where to look for wildness? Do you see how in the end this would be a very self-indulgent journey that would take you to the places that you want to go to? It took us a couple of years after that initial conversation in Costa Rica to sort out where exactly to go. In the end, we decided against both category 1b and the notion of having no categories at all. Instead, we came across a list of places that someone else had made. The list was not by any means definitive, but definitiveness and representativeness were not things that we were interested in anyway. Moreover, the list was not an explicit list of wild places but was described as containing a lot of different kinds of nature. And finally, the list included places that we ourselves would not have chosen. Some of the places seemed like logical candidates for our purposes, whereas others were places that we had never even heard of. Moreover, the list was famous and politically influential; it was not something that some producer at the Travel Channel had dreamed up overnight to sell a show. This list was the World Heritage List.

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In 1972, unesco’s Convention Concerning the Protection of the World Cultural and Natural Heritage laid out foundations for classifying sites of “outstanding universal value” according to ten criteria, six of which were for identifying cultural sites and four for natural sites, with a third category that draws from both sets of criteria, “mixed natural and cultural,” being added later. At the time of writing, the World Heritage List includes over 1,000 sites in 167 “state parties.” When we first looked at the list, Canada had seventeen sites, nine of which were classified as natural and eight as cultural. After we had drawn up our budget and applied for a grant, a tenth site classified as natural was added. The ten natural heritage sites are (1) Kluane/Wrangell-St Elias/Glacier Bay/Tatshenshini-Alsek, (2) Canadian Rocky Mountain Parks, (3) Wood Buffalo National Park, (4) Dinosaur Provincial Park, (5) Waterton-Glacier International Peace Park, (6) Nahanni National Park, (7) Miguasha National Park, (8) Joggins Fossil Cliffs, (9) Gros Morne National Park, and the most recent of all, (10) Mistaken Point. Whereas some of the unesco natural heritage sites are extremely small and can be explored in a matter of hours or maybe a day (e.g., Miguasha, Joggins, and Mistaken Point), others are immense. Kluane/ Wrangell-St Elias/Glacier Bay/Tatshenshini-Alsek, for instance, is most notably large, encompassing over 9 million hectares of land and ice. Because it is essentially impossible to visit such large sites in their entirety, we had to focus on limited sections of a site, such as Kluane only, at the expense of the other parks that comprise the heritage site. Now, unlike the iucn , unesco representatives work reactively. If someone wants to add a site to the World Heritage List, their first task is to make an argument for why the site has what is known as “outstanding universal value” and draft a proposal for unesco . It is up to the people who live in, work in, or care for a place to claim that it has meaning and value that should be internationally recognized. And that was great for us; we had a (manageable) list of ten sites that were meaningful enough to some people that they had gone to great trouble to see their value recognized internationally. Plus, the list was clearly a mixed bag of all sorts of natures, from spectacular and iconic landscapes fit for the back of a twenty-dollar bill to areas small enough to be seemingly protected by hardly anybody but Ma and Pa, territories steeped in ancestral Indigenous histories and knowledge since time immemorial, and rural regions looking to

Introduction

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tourism as a way of lifting themselves out of economic depression. There were mountains and forests, ocean waters and lakes, cliffs and fossils, impenetrable rivers and skywalks. Some had the yearly budget of small nations, whereas others saw more wild buffalo roaming around than tourists. Natural heritage refers to nature that a group of people find meaningful because it reveals something of value to them – whether something of value in relation to their understanding of ecological or geological processes or something of aesthetic value. Although unesco language makes it clear that some natural heritage sites are known for their conventionally understood wildness – for example, explicit reference to wilderness is made in unesco ’s designation of sites like Gros Morne National Park, those in the Rocky Mountains, and Kluane/Wrangell-St Elias/Glacier Bay/Tatshenshini-Alsek – other sites are not. Rather than deeming the other sites irrelevant, we thought that whatever wild things – if any at all – we might find at these sites would provide us with a fresh perspective on wildness. In other words, according to the World Heritage List, in some of these places we were likely to encounter conventionally defined wildness and even wilderness, and in some we were likely to encounter wildlife, relatively intact natural ecosystems, and outstanding examples of geological processes. Regardless of whether a place was called wild or not by unesco , therefore, all of these natural heritage sites promised to give us opportunities to understand nature-culture relations and maybe even the opportunity to find wildness in unexpected ways. Natural heritage, in short, presented itself to us as a key to entering places with an open mind to the kinds of wildness that we might find there. As a concept, natural heritage is vastly broader than wilderness or wildness, so it gave us an open-ended view of the land and an opportunity to study nature-culture dynamics in a way that was not overly pre-coded by wilderness or wildness qualities. It was as though natural heritage were an atlas rich with maps, official place descriptions, and distinct cases, and it was up to us to “read” this atlas and enrich it by adding bits of stories that we ourselves would collect. As if this were not enough, what we saw at play was a distinction between nature and culture, and between natural heritage and cultural heritage, that would allow us to unearth deep-seated assumptions, political ideologies, and cultural beliefs. In fact, unesco’s (1972) criteria for the identification of natural sites of

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outstanding universal value and its descriptions of the specific qualities of the listed sites are deeply informed by a dualist ideology that separates nature and culture (see Bianchi 2002; Kato 2006; and K. Taylor and Lennon 2011). So, whereas the six criteria pertinent to cultural worthiness predictably speak of human intelligence and creativity, universal human values, cultural tradition, and people’s artistic or technological prowess, the four criteria for natural sites neatly classify nature as a mix of sublime landscapes and interesting scientific objects such as outstanding geomorphic features, endangered habitats for flora and fauna, and rare ecological systems and evolutionary processes. The discourse employed by unesco (1972) in the descriptions of the ten Canadian natural heritage sites served as further evidence of the Western idea that nature is an entity distinct from society and culture. This was the idea that we had wanted to examine and challenge to begin with, so the list became part of our grant proposal and ultimately our itinerary.

t h e pat h a head Throughout this book, we engage in a dialogue between our research participants, Indigenous studies scholars, relational theorists and researchers, and cross-disciplinary writers who have contributed to the evolving idea of wildness and to the study of protected areas and natural heritage. We have knotted all of these people’s ideas and stories together and thus created a “meshwork” (Ingold 2011) through which we can understand and experience wildness differently. Such difference resides in thinking about wildness relationally and thus as a form of vitality. We articulate this perspective in detail in chapter 2. Rather than replication and resemblance, our work is driven by (re)generation and activation. We are interested in the multiple possibilities of wild places in the midst of becoming and unfolding. In this light, throughout this book, we do not provide an ultimate statement of what is wild and what is not or what places are wild and what places are not. More modestly, we seek to generate new perspectives on what wild could be on the basis of the perspectives that our interviewees have taught us. As part of our work as ethnographers, we also feel compelled to reflexively share our own experiences with you. A series of “interludes” scattered between the various chapters of this book contain renditions of our own research experiences, our own feelings, and our personal perspectives on wild

Introduction

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places. And in the spirit of wildness, we will not outline here the content of our book chapter by chapter. You will have to take the journey and find out on your own. In the end, you might argue that it seems anachronistic to still care about wildness after the onset of the Anthropocene. Yet we believe that abandoning the idea of wildness would be a mistake, and the moment of the Anthropocene is probably the best time to rethink wildness. Geographers and other social scientists might have long ago learned to see wildness from a post-colonial, post-humanist, post-anthropocentric, post-natural lens, yet we have collectively done a poor job of sharing these new perspectives outside of the academy. The world at large still cares about wild places and wildness. Thus our work focuses on generating and sharing new (and old) decolonized understandings of wild ecologies that transcend oppositions between natural and cultural life, leading us to re-envision what wildness and its conservation might become in the future. To move forward with wildness in the Anthropocene, an essential part of the renewed commitment to a relational wild life must include, we believe, an emphasis on multiplicity (Hinchliffe 2010; Lorimer 2015). Collard, Dempsey, and Sundberg (2015) and Lorimer (2015) argue that conservation ecology and policy would do well to adopt a multinatural approach. In a multinatural and relational approach, “wildlife lives among us” (Lorimer 2015, 7), exerting its endearing charisma and its power to astonish us with its multiple forms and its myriad relations. Understanding wild natures as multiple means accepting various intensities of wildness, multiple stable and unstable ecological states, and diverse potentials to become something new and unexpected, new meshworks that force us to constantly adjourn our very idea of what wild may be. As Lorimer points out, in this sense “wildlife is vernacular, everyday, and democratic. It provokes curiosity, disconcertion, and care. It demands political processes for deliberating discord among multiple affected publics” (11). Such a multinatural understanding of wildness views change as the norm, not the deviation. So, whereas the dominant view of wildness posits ruptures of “pristine” nature as spoilers and the beginning of the fall from grace, from a multinatural perspective, ruptures can actualize the vitalist potential for new relations (Fraser, Kember, and Lury 2005). This is a post-foundationalist and relational view that denies the notion that nature, in the singular, is either pristine or

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corrupt. Ruptures and disturbance can generate diversity and new forms of life (see Little Bear 2012; and Tsing 2015). As Greco (2004, 12) argues, “the point about a vital order is not that it is an order of existence uncontaminated by human artifice or by the ‘social’; the point is that it involves the social and much more besides.” Wildness in a multinatural vital order is an entanglement constantly evolving into new and more complex socio-natural hybrid ecologies that afford new and more complex transformative encounters (see Tsing 2015, 28). In such entanglements, humans ought to become aware of the logical impossibility of separating themselves from nature and the land that gives forth life, and they ought to care for their interdependence, just as our research participants – our teachers – have taught us.

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Vitality and Relationality

The two men portrayed in figure 2.1 are Elder Alex Whiteknife (on the right) and his son-in-law Elder Joseph Gibot, members of the Mikisew Cree First Nation. As this image was captured, Elder Alex was in the process of telling us that he was born and grew up in the bush. He and many others, he told us, lived out on the land and only occasionally made their way to Fort Chipewyan. Notably, Elder Alex used the word the “land,” not the word “wilderness.” Terms like “wilderness” – used by Parks Canada on its website – and names like Wood Buffalo National Park are labels that colonizers created to describe that land. Elder Alex was neither the first nor the last person to teach us about this perspective during our fieldwork. In dozens of interviews with diverse groups of people, we learned that wilderness and wildness are not universal concepts with a stable meaning. Although there are many different dimensions among people with regard to both the experience and the idea of wildness, there are also many common qualities. In this chapter, we reflect in particular on one of these qualities: vitality. Despite the many different understandings of wildness, we found throughout our fieldwork that many people’s perspectives seemed to be informed by a pervasive vitalism, and over time this vitalism became a central focus and even a source of inspiration for our thinking. Vitalism has experienced a resurgence in contemporary cultural theory, but Indigenous Knowledges have long valued vitalist understandings of lifeworlds (see Berkes 2012; Little Bear 2012; Salmón 2017; Todd 2017; and Watts 2013). In this chapter, to begin the work of re-envisioning the notion of wildness, we rehabilitate it (see Collard 2014) by asking what else it can become (see

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2.1 Elder Joseph Gibot and Elder Alex Whiteknife

Plumwood 1998; and Stengers 2010). In rehabilitating wildness in this way, we aim to respect Indigenous bodies of knowledge and build upon relational ontologies of both non-Indigenous and Indigenous origin. Dominant definitions of “wild” as “uncultivated,” “untamed,” and growing without the care and control of humans end up separating nature from culture and society. In this sense, wild becomes synonymous with uninhabited, pristine, and untouched environments where people cannot be present for long (see Cronon 1996a; and Nash 2014). Along these lines, to be wild is to be free, lush, luxuriant, and genuine. But the same perspective also engenders negative connotations: wild means barbarian, primitive, savage, desolate, vicious, dangerous, and uncivilized (Bird Rose 2012; Taussig 1987). These binaries are of course not new to scholars in the humanities and social sciences. Countless authors have deconstructed both the Romantic and the troubled history of wildness and wilderness (see Callicott and Nelson 1998; Cronon 1996a; Marris 2011; Minteer and Pyne 2015; Nash 2014; Nelson and Callicott 2008; Oelschlager 1991; and Wuerthner, Crist, and Butler 2014). What is less common in both academic and popular discourses is an understanding of wildness rooted in a decolonized, phenomenological, and relational approach.

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w il d n e s s in h is to r i cal context In 1933, Luther Standing Bear (2008) – a Sicangu and Oglala Lakota Chief – penned a critical essay on what Euro-American English speakers called “nature” or “the great outdoors” in which he recalled memories of growing up on the land and roaming worry-free in a bountiful place, unafraid of encounters with so-called wildlife. It was only when “the hairy man from the east came and with brutal frenzy heaped injustices upon us and the families we loved” (201) that the land became “wild.” It was then, with the arrival of white settlers, that the place became a “wilderness” rife with wild animals and savage humans. It was under similar circumstances, in the name of wild, that throughout the late nineteenth century and the entire twentieth century, Indigenous people in the United States, Canada, and settler societies around the world were dispossessed of their land, deprived of their culture, and marginalized, forgotten, or even exterminated (Callicott and Nelson 1998; Nelson and Callicott 2008). This account is of course a hurried rendition of a complex story, but the point is that the alliance between colonialism and capitalism ensured that colonizing settlers had a continued and ideologically justified means to access vast expanses of land for agricultural and industrial expansion. In this context, wilderness was formed, tamed, and exploited, regardless of the fact that it was the home of many Indigenous peoples. However, not all so-called wilderness was tamed. Throughout the twentieth century, the colonial capitalist project joined forces with the nascent preservationist movement in setting aside for conservation massive swaths of land deemed otherwise useless for agricultural or industrial development. Iconic national parks informed by Romantic ideals of nature and wilderness appreciation were thus formed around North America and the globe, often after the eviction of their rightful Indigenous inhabitants (Dowie 2011; Nash 2014; Oelschlaeger 1991; Taussig 1987; Solnit 1994). Just like other settler societies, Canada engaged in several kinds of such practices. Starting with the formation of Banff National Park in Alberta in 1885 and carrying on with the formation of other parks throughout the twentieth century, Canada removed First Nations, Inuit, and Métis from newly established protected areas, abolished or restricted their hunting and gathering rights, constrained or prohibited their access, and excluded them from all

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types of decision making regarding park formation and management (Dearden, Rollins, and Needham 2016). In spite of its contentious history, the idea of wilderness seemed to go largely unquestioned for most of the twentieth century, notwithstanding important critiques such as Guha (1989). In popular culture, the idea is still largely unquestioned. Things changed somewhat, however, after a seminar organized in the early 1990s by environmental historian William Cronon at the University of California’s Humanities Research Institute. In the essays published in the book arising from that seminar, Cronon (1996a) and colleagues attack the notion of wilderness by exposing its racist, sexist, colonial, ethnocentric, and capitalist underpinnings. In the often cited introduction to the book, Cronon famously argues that wilderness is “quite profoundly a human creation – indeed, the creation of very particular human cultures at very particular moments in human history. It is not a pristine sanctuary where the last remnant of an untouched, endangered, but still transcendent nature can for at least a little while longer be encountered without the contaminating taint of civilization. Instead, it is a product of that civilization, and could hardly be contaminated by the very stuff of which it is made” (69). Cronon concludes that wilderness, however, should not be confused with wildness. By abandoning the dualisms at the root of wilderness thinking – the dualisms that separate nature from society and that confine wildness to the most remote corners of the world believed to be pristine and people-free – we can find and honour wildness virtually anywhere as an expression of life among all living things (Cronon 1996a; see also Plumwood 1998). This is an important point for us. Whereas wilderness tends to connote remoteness and disconnection, wildness can denote liveliness, spiritedness, the openness of potential for life to be and to become. More recently, within contemporary debates across the social and environmental sciences, the ideas of wilderness and wildness have continued to undergo a decolonizing critique that has challenged the dualisms still lingering in their conceptualizations (see Collard, Dempsey, and Sundberg 2015). In turn, this has brought forward positive changes in collaborative approaches to protected area management informed by the recognition of Indigenous rights and by related principles of self-management (see Stevens 2014). This new paradigm values the multiple forms of the meaningful relationship between Indigenous people and protected areas; recognizes the

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necessity of Indigenous people’s involvement in the creation and management of protected areas; fosters ways to ensure their participation in a more collaborative and co-managerial form of decision making; acknowledges the need to couple environmental protection policy with social amelioration and economic justice programs; and combines biodiversity protection with cultural heritage conservation (Stevens 2014). Although much ground still needs to be covered in order to reach a truly decolonized approach to protected area conservation, a growing number of countries, including Canada, have made progress in moving away from the old fortress model of park management (Dearden and Bennett 2016), a model informed by colonial ideas on wilderness. Recent important contributions from geographers and anthropologists have also generated the conditions for a further rethinking of the idea of wildness in more-than-human and decolonized terms. For example, a recent collection edited by Van Horn and Hausdoerffer (2017) pushes us to rethink wildness as a relational web and as a community of life rather than as something implying disconnection and separation. Such a relational view is deeply typical of traditional Indigenous ecological knowledges (Van Horn 2017). Indigenous perspectives are invaluable in advancing relational conceptualizations of wildness. As Betasamosake Simpson (2011) and Davis and Todd (2017) argue, it is impossible (and unjust) to (re)imagine nature in the Anthropocene without taking into account Indigenous philosophies and the colonial-capitalist legacy. Not only do teachings from Indigenous Knowledges and metaphysics cohere with a notion of nature that is based on connection rather than separation, on becoming rather than being, on life rather death, and on uncertainty and complexity rather than closure and stability, but they also cohere with a notion of wildness as more-than-human rather than nonhuman (Bird Rose 2012; TallBear 2011; Todd 2017).1 For the past twenty years or so, several geographers have been active showing how wild places are the outcomes of political contestation, social construction, and strategic ideological positioning (Braun 2002; Buller 2004; Suchet 2002; Whatmore and Thorne 1998). Among contemporary geographers writing about wildness from a more-than-human and relational perspective, we have found particular inspiration in the work of Collard and colleagues (see Collard 2014, 2016; and Collard, Dempsey, and Sundberg 2015). In a call for future species protection, Collard and colleagues

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advocate a relational approach transcending the limitations of both traditional biodiversity conservation on one side and post-natural, neoliberal approaches to environmental protection on the other. This third way abandons the ideology of pristine nature, reaffirms the values of Indigenous self-governance, recognizes the multiplicity of different cultural understandings of nature, acknowledges the autonomy of animals and the importance of honouring the wild, and embraces the concept of promoting a pluriverse of life forms (Collard, Dempsey, and Sundberg 2015). Wildness is autonomous but relational, they write, and based on “openness, possibility, a degree of choice, and self-determination” (328).

r e l at io n a l w ild li fe The dominant approach – the dictionary and legal approach – very often conflates wildness and wilderness (see Birch 1998; Booth and Williams 2014; and Cronon 1996b). Distinguishing between the two is of extreme importance to us. In the US Wilderness Act of 1964, for example, “wilderness, in contrast with those areas where man and his own works dominate the landscape, is ... recognized as an area where the earth and its community of life are untrammeled by man, where man himself is a visitor who does not remain.” In January 2017, during the early stages of our research, we met an ecologist who taught us about a very important distinction between wildness and wilderness. After obtaining a doctorate in forest and wildlife ecology, Cliff White had spent twenty years working with Parks Canada as a manager in ecological research and restoration. Prior to that, he had been a fire management coordinator, working with prescribed burns to restore ecological integrity. Now, for the past ten years, he had been working as a senior research biologist doing ecological consulting for various projects, including bison reintroduction in Banff National Park. Cliff invited us to his home in Canmore, Alberta. As he spoke, he came across as passionate and convincing, yet he carried the down-to-earth aura of someone who wanted to engage in a conversation with you rather than lecture at you. “When you go to northern Canada and you look at the vast change of that landscape, you see that it’s almost abandoned,” he reflected. “It’s almost feral now. You just kind of go, ‘Wow, what happened here?’ because it used to be moderately well occupied. But

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in northern Canada, people have now sort of gone where it’s more comfortable to live, where it’s warmer, where people need medical services. It feels good for the first couple of times you go there, as you go, ‘Oh, it’s wild.’ And then –” Cliff paused to find the right words. “It’s almost sad.” He explained, If you were on some river in the North and you’d spent a month there 500 years ago, you might have seen, maybe not a lot of people, but you might have seen twenty, forty First Nations people go by you on their various hunting rounds of the year. You would find out who lived in those valleys. And now, I guess they are truly wild. I mean, the First Nations have moved to communities hundreds of miles away from those valleys. You have to fly into them, you won’t see anybody there, and you’ll have this perspective that you’re the only person that ever was there, and it feels neat. I mean, you feel like it is really, really wild, and then you almost have to feel sad in a way that there’s a cultural part that’s been lost and you’re not going to see it, and we’ll probably never see it again because humans have become creatures of comfort and those places were a place that were very rigorous places to live, and yet our species had found a way to be here and live here and become an important part of that landscape, and we’ll never see that again. “So what does wildness mean to you then?” we asked Cliff. He leaned back in his chair, pausing to reflect as the bright sun of a January morning cast warm rays on his face. He began to explain that because of his training in ecology, he routinely wondered whether a particular ecosystem was reflective of long-term conditions in a landscape and whether the ecosystem worked in a way that reflected how the species present there had evolved. He continued, And so, from that perspective, then, you just need to look back in time for several hundred years, or several thousand years, and say, you know, “As best we can tell, how did this system work? Who are the key predators? Who are the key prey species? How did the vegetation change over time? What role did fire play here?” And you’re really not trying to divide the word “wild” out of it; you’re just trying to see how it all works. And as often as not, in many landscapes, you’ll find that humans have played

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a very long-term important role, and you just have to characterize what that is, quantify it as best you can, recognize that the people here today are not the people who were here 100 years ago but recognize what their contribution was. If they still live on your landscape, like here we have First Nations living right adjacent to the park, you can say, “Well, you were very, very important here,” so you recognize that role and invite them back in as sort of a participatory way to help restore that ecosystem once you recognize they were important. So the whole word “wild” just stops really having much context when you start to sort of just say, “Well, how did this ecosystem evolve over time? Where is it going to go in the future? And how best can we integrate people back into it?” If that needs to be done at some scale to act as predators, act as prescribed burners, act as hunters, act as gatherers, and the level at which that happens will, you know, just be dependent upon, you know, not just what the long-term role is, not just a forecast of what the future is going to be, but also values. Wilderness, Cliff went on to explain, is an outcome of all these factors. Wilderness is essentially the legislated manifestation of the dominant idea of wild. He explained that as a quality associated with a place, wilderness reflects the social values dominant at a historical time in a particular place, the values embraced by conservation biology and the ecological sciences, and therefore the values that eventually become legislated. Wilderness is the creation of a place “that never really was.” Cliff was fully aware, of course, that people still reside in remote northern landscapes, but as an ecologist, he recognized that wilderness is quite often the outcome of conservation rather than its premise and justification. Wilderness, he argued, is a concept brought by colonizers and used as a mechanism to assert colonial governance and power, drive conservation policies, and even displace people. Literature by Indigenous and non-Indigenous scholars has also pointed out related arguments (see Atleo 2011; Collard 2014; and Lorimer 2015). For Collard (2014, 154), similar to what Cliff explained to us, wild life is not something removed from humans but something “fundamentally relational, tied inextricably to familial, social, and ecological webs.” Cliff agreed with the view that wildness is different from wilderness:

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Wild is wildlife. You wouldn’t have wildlife, virtually by the nature of the term, without wildness, but then you have to define wildness. And wildness, you know, is the long-term ecosystem that wildlife grew up in, or evolved in and thrived in, and that included, from a human nature perspective, human hunting, human gathering, human herding – just that whole behaviour element between people and wildlife that people call wild. So, for us to realize that wildlife is actually, again, kind of a mirror of ourselves and how a whole assemblage of other species has reacted to us, and where they live, how they live, what they do, reflects a long-term, 100,000-year relationship with us, and that relationship is very important. This relationship is of course at the centre of many Indigenous perspectives. For instance, writing from a Nuu-chah-nulth perspective, Atleo (2011) remarks that the original colonizers’ vision that North America at first contact was a virgin wilderness is deeply erroneous. Like many other North American nations, Nuu-chah-nulth people practised controlled burning as part of what today we would call healthy ecosystem management. This practice enabled people to bring the ecosystem to the edges of death so that it could then regenerate itself by giving life to “an abundance of berries, an increased herbivore population, and an abundance of food for humans” (133). Reflecting some similar ideas, Cliff explained, All these niches of how we regard the wildlife and where it lives and where it’s supposed to live are, again, something that we helped to create over the long term, and we need to appreciate that – that it’s not a tame elk in a ditch or a tame bison in a pasture. What we’re after is that real wildness that we helped create and that evolved for 100,000 years across Eurasia, where most of the species that we have here today travelled with us right across Eurasia and evolved and co-evolved with us and moved into the North American landscape, and we lost a bunch of species that weren’t co-evolved with us. The mammoths are gone, those species have all left, but what came with us across Eurasia, across the land bridge, was a suite of species that had had a long co-evolvement with us, and we call those wildlife. It was Cliff’s argument and the thoughts of the Indigenous Elders we interviewed and the words of those we had read that prompted

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us to rethink wildness as relational. This is not a common Western way of thinking about the concept but a common one from various Indigenous standpoints. If we understand wildness in conventional terms as devoid of human influence, separate from civilization, and untouched by culture, we end up treating wild nature as a discrete, atomized entity that is severed from its binary opposite. But by rethinking wildness as relational, we trouble this opposition and destabilize the very notion of wildness as something “natural” as opposed to “cultural.” This perspective is akin to what Bird Rose (2012) has called ecological existentialism, a perspective that troubles the dualism between nature and culture by replacing separation with connectivity. From an ecological existentialist perspective, humanity is not isolated in the cosmos, and nature is not isolated in patches of wilderness. Rather, the life of all beings is constantly becoming in an ongoing process of “entanglement and interaction, a deep and abiding mutuality” (50). To further unpack Cliff’s view, let us give the “assemblage” that he talks about a more precise name. Many Indigenous perspectives regard such an assemblage as a web of life that entails a kinship among all living things based on the ongoing renewal of their relations (see Berkes 2012; and Little Bear 2000). This renewal is emergent, but in this context, transformation goes beyond the notion of emergence common in the social sciences. As Betasamosake Simpson (2011, 90–1) sees it, this is a new type of emergence, one that is dependent on ceremony and a land-based, spiritual, more-than-human, and nonlinear chain of reactions. Drawing on ethnographic knowledge about Indigenous worldviews accumulated in various areas of Canada’s North, Ingold (2011) calls this type of assemblage a “meshwork.” According to Ingold, a meshwork is the coalescing of movement, change, and growth – the entanglement of the different lines along which the web of life is lived. For Little Bear (2000, 78), life is process, not product, as “everything is constantly moving and changing.” Therefore, we can think of a meshwork as a land – a vitalist world of becoming, of effervescent aliveness, of “continuous birth” (Ingold 2011, 68) and a trail of movement and growth. As Ingold writes, “Neither beginning here and ending there, nor vice versa, the trail winds through or amidst like the root of a plant or a stream between its banks. Each such trail is but one strand in a tissue of trails that together comprise the texture of the lifeworld. This texture is what I mean when I speak of organisms being constituted

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within a relational field. It is a field not of interconnected points but of interwoven lines: not a network but a meshwork” (70). A meshwork is the outcome of “lifeways coming together” and reflects “emergent effects of encounter” (Tsing 2015, 23). In this sense, it is impossible to separate nature from non-nature, natural evolution from human evolution, wildness from nonwildness. The land is involved in a continuous rebirth, and humans are inevitably entangled in the coming together that is occasioned by this growth and change (Bird Rose 2012; Little Bear 2000; Todd 2017). “Things are their relations” (Ingold 2011, 70, original emphasis), so to draw a line of disconnection between organisms such as humans and nonhuman animals or between pristine wilderness and the rest of the land is to adopt a view of reality that is typical of Western dualist philosophy and not universal (Bird Rose 2012; D.R. Klein 1994). And disconnection saps vitality. Although it is important to keep in mind the many differences among Indigenous worldviews, it is true that many of them, as Little Bear (2012, 521) summarizes, “include ideas of constant motion/flux, all creation consisting of energy waves, everything being animate, all creation being interrelated,” as well as ideas about realities as requiring ongoing rebirth and renewal, about forms of life constantly undergoing process of transformation, and about life itself as being grounded in movement. Integrating traditional Indigenous worldviews with contemporary Western relational ontologies is something that can activate newer understandings of ideas like wildness. Yet, regrettably, within human geography, ideas drawn from continental philosophy, post-structural theories, process-based philosophies, and nonrepresentational theories seldom enter into a dialogue with related ideas from Indigenous philosophies (Reddekop 2014; Sundberg 2013; Todd 2015). The alternative notion of wildness that we embrace here teaches us to see wildness as wildlife, or better yet, as wild life (for a related use of “wild life,” see Collard 2014). Although relational through and through, wild life retains a sense of autonomy marked by a will to live an animated uncaptive life (Collard 2014, 2016). Wild life is a “domain of entanglement,” a “tangle of interlaced trails, continually ravelling here and unravelling there,” where “beings grow or ‘issue forth’ along the lines of their relationships” (Ingold 2011, 71). This wild life is not by any means synonymous with a wilderness where some beings are deliberately kept out. This wild life, this

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tangle of the land, is the very “texture of the world” (71). Staying alive within this tangle requires collaboration among species, not separation (see Tsing 2015). It requires relations, not divisions. From such a relational perspective, wildness ceases to connote oppositions. Instead, it requires involvement and entanglement, connectivity and mutuality (Bird Rose 2012). The word “wild,” its etymology tells us, stands for willed or selfwilled, and the idea of nature as self-willed is precisely meant to evoke the self-organizing capacity of ecosystems to evolve as autonomous units that are separate and independent. Although “wild” does connote self-will and self-organization, to perceive wildness as a type of separation is to court a “pathological and ultimately self-destructive” outcome (Van Horn 2017, 3). Understanding wildness as a form of relation, instead of separation, means viewing self-organization as a type of process immanent in the land (Bird Rose 2012). This is a process through which life-shaping forces knot different beings into a meshwork destined for growth, change, and movement rather than an entity closed upon itself and frozen in time. Such a relational view of wildness, Van Horn (2017, 4) argues, is one in which “humans have a role to play in cultivating wildness – in themselves, in their communities, and in the landscapes of which these communities are a part.” In this sense, wildness “is an ongoing relationship, one in which human cultures – through active participation and humble restraint – become attuned to the communities of life and constitutive of the well-being of the places in which they live, work, and play” (4).

w il d n e s s as vi tali ty The main and only paved road in the Yukon’s Kluane National Park meanders its way through tracts of evergreen trees, around azure lakes, and across snow-capped ridges of cold, dark rock erupting from the ground like sudden vertical explosions. Combined with the Wrangell-St Elias, Glacier Bay, and Tatshenshini-Alsek parks, the World Heritage site encompasses a contiguous area of nearly 10 million hectares, roughly the size of Austria and Slovenia together. This is not a place easily grasped by most visiting Europeans. It is easy to be anywhere in Kluane and feel part of an anachronism: a dramatic place larger than life, mastodonic in its proportions, and at first glance, impossibly undeveloped, almost as if forgotten by the

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human race. With no contemporary permanent settlements inside the boundaries of the park, and with the power of the sheer expanse of the largest nonpolar icefield in the world, it is all too easy to experience the atmosphere of Kluane as a type of “wilderness,” as evidenced by the World Heritage description.2 “They call this place a natural heritage, not cultural,” we told Mary Jane Johnson with a smile as we shook hands. “We are wondering what your thoughts on that might be?” Mary Jane, heritage manager for the Kluane First Nation, smiled back and told us confidently, “Yeah, the idea of cultural heritage and the way that unesco has defined it is based on the history of built structures, the history of man’s place on this earth and their creations to make a place special to themselves. Natural heritage is a hard thing to define because many people on this earth do not have built structures. They do not have structures that are 700 to 1,000 years old. We’ve got maybe one or two njals that are still standing, little wooden tipi structures. We don’t have monuments of stone.” The “we” Mary Jane referred to was the Lhù’ ààn Mân Ku Dan´ (Kluane Lake People), also known as the Kluane First Nation, whose members are the traditional inhabitants of Ä sì Keyi (My Grandfather’s Country), an area enveloping the shores of Kluane Lake, the Ruby and Nisling Mountain ranges to the northeast, and the St Elias Mountains to the southwest. Now mostly residing in and around the small community of Burwash Landing, most of the Kluane First Nation people identify as descendants of Southern Tutchone speakers. Two clans, the Khanjet (Crow Clan) and Ägunda (Wolf Clan), comprise the Kluane’s dominant matriarchal moiety system, although other members of the Kluane have diverse origins, such as the Tlingit, Upper Tanana, and Northern Tutchone. Mary Jane explained, “My family is from all of this area that you’re talking about, down from Fort Selkirk, all throughout this country, down through to Alsek, down in the coast toward Haines, Alaska, and in over in through to Skagway.” Indigenous scholars have rejected the Cartesian worldview that separation from one’s environment is possible and desirable and, along with it, the idea that nature and culture are separable (see Berkes 2012). For example, Cajete (2000) has argued that in many Indigenous cultures, knowledge is inseparable from place. As a type of process, rather than content, knowledge mediates between the human and nonhuman (Atleo 2011; Betasamosake Simpson 2011;

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Watts 2013). Knowledge is often expressed through stories that, in being retold, enact deeply embodied relationships with both land and humans (Atleo 2011; Watts 2013). Writing in regard to the St Elias Mountains of the Yukon, for example, Cruikshank (2001) argues that the stories of travellers who crossed from the coast to the interior reveal the sentience of the glaciers that they encountered. These stories, however, are not told to make empirical observations or to reveal findings like a modern Western glaciologist would do. These are stories that, both when originally experienced and when retold, enliven the land and its dwellers, thus animating their relations and establishing their past and present kinship (see Cruikshank 2001). Mary Jane Johnson argued that separating people from their land makes no sense. As people travelled across the land that we now know as Kluane National Park, weaving their lives together with plants and animals, they made distinct changes to the place. To think of Kluane as an uninhabited “wilderness” would be to neglect all of this history and therefore to be deeply ignorant of the profound interconnections among people, land, and animals (see Nadasdy 2007). Instead, a relational approach prompts us to think of wildness as our relationship with the natural-cultural world, which is based on an intimate and creative co-participation. Instead of setting human and nonhuman lifeworlds apart, such a perspective can alert us to the unique qualities of a place, including its/our histories, richness, and more-than-human boundedness. Mary Jane told us, From my understanding, when I go down and see some old fish traps down on the Nisling River, I see old njals that are along some of the rivers or some of the lakes, and I know that these njals were built 1,700 years ago through dendrochronology work. And, if you look at that kind of use of the land or use of the waters and that, and by people putting those fish traps over in the Nisling, like laying the rocks down across the waterway so that the salmon could come up it, you realize that they’ve changed the form of what is on the land. They have changed it by killing off so many beaver and muskrats in some of the waterways in the early 1920s and ’30s and ’40s, when the demand for beaver was so high, and earlier, too, because we’d be down there with the coast people. We allowed the land to be changed because beavers are one of the biggest land changers that are around here. They can change a whole river course; they can

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change the whole flow of a land. By us hunting them, we have had an influence on how the land has changed. By us building rock-ways in the river to get salmon, we’ve influenced the land change. By hunting sheep in different areas, by building hunting blinds up in the mountain to hunt sheep, and following sheep tracks and trails, we’ve made changes. Given what she had just told us, we asked Mary whether she thought that Kluane National Park could be called a “wilderness.” She lit up with a mischievous smirk and exclaimed, Holy mackerel! It’s a good thing my uncle is not alive to tell you something different. He’d say, “Where in the heck you get this word ‘wilderness’?” He said, “There is not one place in this world that has not been touched by a human at some point or another.” We were way the heck back up on the glacier, and then they found a bear hide, a grizzly bear hide, way back up there, and it would take you a full day of skiing up over on top of the icefields to get there, and they found a bear hide, and it was human modified because of the slits and the ties that were on there, and how in the heck it got up there on the glacier? There’s no place here that First Nations people and other people have not been on in this earth. People go over land, they go over water, so when you say “wilderness,” why are we excluded from that idea of wilderness? People are part of the wilderness, people are part of the land. My body does not survive day to day without being part of that land or without being part of that water. And find me one person on this earth who is not part of this land or part of that water where they live, and why are we putting ourselves outside of the idea of wilderness? Wilderness is just a goofy word for somebody that lived in a concrete block for twenty years and came out and saw the wild leaves for the first time or a moose or a bear for the first time. And now, we’re not above this land, and we’re not below the water. We are part of it. Can we move past an understanding of humans as being somehow above the land? Can we move beyond an idea of wildness as disconnection? Can we move past a view of nature as something fragile and easily prone to extinction upon human contact? Can

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we distinguish the notion of wildness from that of wilderness? We believe that these questions can be answered in the affirmative. But this possibility hinges on a newer understanding of wildness, one that is more attuned to decolonized, contemporary ecological and relational understandings of lifeworlds and grounded in a continuous process of creation and renewal (Little Bear 2000). Through her ethnography at wildlife rehabilitation centres, Collard (2014) has shown us that wildness can be relational. When understood as a relational and an open-ended process, wildness can be thought of as a possibility, an immanent potential, an ongoing process of life. This is of course vastly different from the notion of wilderness as a land uninhabited by humans, a land that can cease to be wild once humans come into lasting contact with it, and it is different from the idea of wildness as the opposite of human civilization. The difference lies in thinking of wildness as something relational and alive. Indigenous philosophies have long held the view that the land is alive (see Little Bear 2012; and Watts 2013). This view has typically been pegged as mythical and animistic by Western scholars, but more recent thought has begun to erode this attitude. Watts (2013) has argued that in many Indigenous worldviews, all beings are alive and have an agency that makes their relations sacred. Ethnographic research in Canadian settings provides us with useful examples of this ontology. Cruikshank (2006), for instance, has demonstrated how the glaciers of the St Elias Mountains – those right within the boundaries of Kluane National Park – are sentient and responsive to the actions of their human visitors. And Wilson and Inkster (2018) have shown us not only how water is alive in Yukon First Nations worldviews but also how this aliveness amounts to a form of personhood that should force settler colonialists to rethink their policies – which are deeply rooted in the Western attitude that water is a resource. During our fieldwork, we were clearly introduced to these ideas and their connection with the idea of wildness in Banff. At a gathering of seven Nakoda First Nation members organized for us by Bill Snow, we were taught that wildness cannot be so easily extinguished by varieties of land use. Bill explained that “wildness is a Western scientific term” used for classification purposes: There are two paradigms: there’s the Western scientific and then there’s the Traditional Knowledge paradigm. From a Traditional Knowledge paradigm, when we talk of land, we’re thinking more

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or less of a biodiverse area that is sustainable, self-supporting, that has fresh water that animals, that we use – it’s part of the cycle of that area and other areas that are used by nature and by us as humans. We coexist with all the different types of landscapes. So, again, it’s that difference between the Western science and the Traditional Knowledge, [like] when you think of wild and you say, “Well, somehow when an area becomes deforested, then it’s not wild anymore because it’s being used for growing crops.” But this area here in Banff is regarded as a healing spiritual area for the Stoneys. It will always be that. So it doesn’t matter how many hotels and railroads and highways go up, it’s still going to be a healing area for the Stoneys, so that’s fixed, it doesn’t change, whereas in Western science, this could be a university town, they could put up a bunch of universities, [or] it could be an industrial town, a lumber town, a tourist town. So it’s interchangeable. For First Nations, it’s not. It’s fixed. So that’s why we always enjoy coming out here and coming back to this place, because it’s a sacred healing place, and that’s why all of the names for all of these areas are intertwined with a theme of spirituality, sickness, and healing. But what if wildness could be rethought, integrating ideas from both the Western scientific paradigm and traditional Indigenous Knowledges? Could the notion of wildness, within the broader context of Western culture, be rethought as something other than an either-or classificatory mechanism? Could the notion of wildness, within the broader context of Indigenous philosophy, be used to describe the “self-supporting” capacity of land? As Bill reminds us, Western worldviews treat land as a resource (see also Li 2014). But from a perspective informed by Indigenous worldviews, land is the basis of the ongoing renewal of kinship (see Todd 2017). Land is alive in its ability to withstand change. Wildness could be thought of as this effervescent aliveness. Wildness could be reconceived of as the vitality of the land entangling together people and their lifeworld and carrying on the force of this entanglement in the face of ecosystem change. This vitality, following Bill, should be viewed as a largely spiritual and vitalist force. To better understand Bill’s point, we need to remind ourselves that in most Indigenous philosophies, every element of what we might call in English the “ecosystem” has (or better yet, is) life and spirit.

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Spirit is utterly inseparable from life. The land – a concept typically used in Indigenous languages in lieu of “ecosystem” – cannot be divorced from either human or nonhuman society (Berkes 2012), as it is entangled in a multiplicity of reciprocal life-giving relations. Spirit is not something ascribed to or attached to a land, much like a label stuck onto an empty surface awaiting signification. Spirit is life, and because neither spirit nor life exist separate from the land, it would make no sense for us to understand vitality without morality and spirituality or vice versa. As Wilson and Inkster (2018, 524) put it in relation to Yukon First Nations ontologies, each component of the land, like water, is “a living entity with metaphysical and physical properties whose well-being must be managed as with any being or subject of great importance.” Many writers, either Indigenous or non-Indigenous, have stressed the multiple dimensions of this spirituality. For example, Blackfoot scholar Little Bear (2000, 77) has explained how “in Aboriginal philosophy, existence consists of energy. All things are animate, imbued with spirit, and in constant motion. In this realm of energy and spirit, interrelationships between all entities are of paramount importance.” Similarly, Michi Saagiig Nishnaabeg scholar, writer, and artist Leanne Betasamosake Simpson (2011) teaches us that in Nishnaabeg, thought comes from the land and embodies emergence. Therefore, she writes, “in this way of thinking, the way in which something is done becomes very important because it carries with it all the meaning,” which “is derived from context, including the depth of relationships with the spiritual world, elders, family, clans, and the natural world” (91, original emphasis). Another Blackfoot Elder we met later in our fieldwork, Charles Crowchief (figure 2.2), reminded us of the working of this meshwork with regard to the sacredness of the land now contained within the boundaries of Alberta’s Waterton Lakes National Park. Blackfoot thought is based on the idea that life is rooted in a meshwork of relations that includes the land, the beings that live there now and that have lived there before, as well as the songs, stories, and “the spirit beings that inhabit [a] place. In Blackfoot and Cree understandings, specific locales are inscribed with stories and memories that record diverse networks of obligation with human and non-human beings, including not just what is considered to be ‘nature,’ (plants and animals), but also parts of the landscape like rocks themselves and spiritual beings” (Reder 2012, 512; see also Atleo 2011).

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2.2 Elder Charles Crowchief

Relatedly, Elder Charles taught us that the spiritual part of our life is something we all have. We hear voices, and strange things happen because we protect the environment. Therefore, those people that were up there before us, they always point to the Waterton Lakes as one of the most sacred places there was. And some people just go, they put up offerings, just for that purpose. They camped around there before the town was there. They know up there, there’s a lake up there, and they go up there. Up there, they get these sweet pines and the rosin of the tree. That’s why they go up there most of the time to get those rosins. It’s just like a glue. To make the arrows. To glue the feathers at the end. So they use that place a lot of times. And they get a lot of these raspberries. And they use cottonwood ... Some other people later on they used it for heart problems, for all those medicines up there. That’s why they take it as a very sacred place. They get all the arrowheads and whatnot, the sap, so that was a very special place. And they didn’t really hunt around there because it’s sacred.

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a d e c o l o n iz e d wi ldnes s If we wish to go beyond the dualist limitations of the Western understanding of wildness, with its universalist tendencies, disembeddedness from place, and instrumental attitudes toward nature (Berkes 2012; Watts 2013), we can learn new ideas from Indigenous philosophies. Many North American Indigenous cultures and languages, Little Bear (2000, 78) explains, are “verb-rich” and “process- or action-oriented,” and in such a lifeworld, it makes no sense to build dichotomies between secular and spiritual, wild and unwild, or animate and inanimate (see also chapter 10). “Everything,” Little Bear concludes, “is more or less animate,” and “[i]f everything has spirit and knowledge, then all are like me. If all are like me, then all are my relations” (78). Drawing from a variety of Indigenous worldviews, Grignon and Wall Kimmerer (2017) call into question the received view of wild. Similar to other First Nation languages spoken in Canada, in the Menominee language – part of the Algonquin language family spoken in parts of Ontario and Quebec – the idea of wild did not exist until the arrival of European settlers. In Menominee, there is a related but different word, pekuac, which means “growing on its own.” Pekuac, Grignon and Wall Kimmerer explain, denotes the freedom that a particular being has to live where it wishes. They cite an informant who explained that, for him, “when you can feel the aliveness of everything around using all the senses, you are experiencing wilderness” (70). When you feel that everything in a land is alive, you cannot logically think that you, as a human, are different and disconnected. You cannot think of yourself as the bearer of death. We want to think of wildness like that: relational aliveness, relational autonomy, and a vitalist freedom from control and captivity (see Collard 2014; and Collard, Dempsey, and Sundberg 2015). Peña (2017, 90) writes, “Wildness is the dissolution of the boundaries of the self, accepting an invitation to follow a niche-abiding way of life in gentle relation with more-than-human beings.” It is impossible to separate such a life, a niche-abiding life, from its land (Little Bear 2000; Watts 2013). But mechanistic, atomizing, settler colonial ideologies of disconnection have repeatedly done so, thereby separating culture from nature (see Bird Rose 2012; D.R. Klein 1994; M. Taylor 2006; Watts 2013). Thinking of wildness as relational aliveness dissolves such boundaries, blurring the lines

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between humans and other beings. And “this is the relationality of wildness,” Peña (2017, 90) argues. “Wherever it emerges, such a life is cognizant of the coupling of culture and nature as defined by the conditions of the self-willing bioregional ecosystem. Transcending the universalizing or totalizing human desire to reign supreme (sovereign) over others is a foundational virtue of a niche-abiding life, along with respect for the ‘pluriversality’ of place-based ways of being.” These are the foundations of the idea of wildness as a meshwork (Ingold 2011) and a type of relational autonomy grounded in multispecies solidarity (Collard, Dempsey, and Sundberg 2015). Similar to the case of the Menominee, there is no word for “wild” in ethnobiologist Enrique Salmón’s native language of Rarámuri. The Rarámuri are an Indigenous people of the Sierra Madre Mountains of Chihuahua, Mexico. Salmón (2017, 25) explains that “a Rarámuri worldview does not differentiate or separate ontological spaces beyond and between the human and nonhuman worlds. We feel that we are directly related to everything around us. The trees are us; we are the trees. I am rain; rain is me. The rain is all around me; it aligns inside me.” Salmón calls this meshwork-like view of life a “kincentric ecology” (25). In a kincentric ecology, everything is a relative, so classification systems based on separation and disconnection – which generate oppositions between wild and unwild, human and nonhuman, culture and nature – make no sense. Such an ideology of disconnection cannot be anything but the result of, as Mary Jane Johnson would put it, the attitude of “somebody that lived in a concrete block for twenty years and came out and saw the wild leaves for the first time or a moose or a bear for the first time.” What can wildness become when we wrestle it away from its colonial heritage and envision it as a manifestation of relationality and aliveness? One way to reimagine wildness is to view it as a type of vitality. Vitalism is not a new current of thought, but its current re-emergence across the social sciences has paralleled the growing uptake of nonrepresentational, relational, and process philosophies and theories. In this climate, the new vitalism continues to emphasize, with renewed vigour, the force of “becoming over being, of movement over stasis, of action over structure, of flow and flux” (Lash 2006, 323; see also Bird Rose 2012; and Fraser, Kember, and Lury 2005). Rethinking wildness as a form of vitality allows us to move beyond mechanist understandings based on binary classifications and to rediscover wildness as a self-organization. Yet, from a

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relational perspective, this is not a selfish organization easily contaminated by the deterministic presence of the human other but an emergent self-organization that is open and indeterminate (see Tsing 2015). Understanding wildness as vitality allows us to find the wild everywhere that there is life. It also pushes us to stop thinking of both wildness and wilderness as things that can be ended by the hands of seemingly omnipotent humans. To be sure, vitality can be exhausted, but within the philosophy of vitalism, “life is not at all counterposed to death,” Lash (2006, 326) writes. “Instead death is part of life. Our future is always inorganic matter. Death is seen as entropic, and part of a recombinant life process. So vitalism defines itself mainly against mechanism but also against humanism, which itself is the other side of always dualist mechanism.” Rather than a mechanist and essential ontology, vitalism relies on a nonessentialist ontology according to which being is not counterposed to nonbeing (Fraser, Kember, and Lury 2005). The wild – from this point of view – is not the antithesis of the civilized and the developed, and the pristine and untouched are not the antithesis of the social. The wild is a constant ecological process engaged in becoming, in change, in a nonexclusive evolution, and in constantly shifting relations that involve meshworks of humans and nonhumans (Bird Rose 2012). Wildness should defy boundaries and supersede categorizations (Booth 2011). Wherever wildness and wilderness are intended to exclude, diminish, and segregate, their vitality is constricted and their aliveness is replaced with exhaustion and eventually demise and death. Rethinking wildness through the lens of vitality means rediscovering the relations through which lifeworlds come to life. Rethinking wildness this way means viewing it as a “lure for life: an enticement to move beyond the conflation of life with the (life) sciences, to conceive life as not confined to living organisms, but as movement, a radical becoming” (Fraser, Kember, and Lury 2005, 3). As we have learned from many of our research participants, as well as geographer Kate Booth (2011; Booth and Williams 2014), the vitality of wildness can manifest itself anywhere, spilling out across multiple meshworks, challenging containment, and resisting delineation. People would walk for months to hunt, Mary Jane Johnson told us, and they would venture deep into the backcountry of Waterton Lakes National Park, Charles Crowchief said. “Life forms are restless, mobile, and constantly changing their relationship to their

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environment” (Greenhough 2010, 38) because there is an exceptional quality within them, an elán vital (Bergson 2002) that is unique to them. So what is “sad” for Cliff about seeing immense landscapes nearly free of people is seeing the absence of deeply rooted and constantly expanding and evolving meshworks through which new forms of wild life are begotten. Although a tinge anthropocentric – after all, meshworks of all kinds could properly exist without humans – Cliff’s feeling reminds us that taking culture out of nature, either in the benign but ultimately short-sighted attempt to preserve natural heritage over cultural heritage or in the colonial effort to tame the “wildness” out of nomadic Indigenous peoples, is like taking vitality out of wildness. It is a way of imposing loneliness and isolation, disconnection and atomism, upon more-than-human relations (Bird Rose 2012). Rethinking wildness as vitality allows us to reset our sights on “the vital processes (becoming) as opposed to essential or given qualities (being) as a way of identifying life” (Greenhough 2010, 39). It allows us, in other words, to view human and nonhuman becoming as occurring together and in relation, not in opposition, to each other. It allows us to understand wildness not as something confined or restricted to where the wild things are – the nonhuman things – but as something emergent potentially anywhere in multiple lifeworlds constantly made and remade by all their living occupants (Greenhough 2010; Hinchliffe 2010; Ingold 2011).

a way f o rward An essential part of the renewed commitment to a relational wild life must be, we believe, an emphasis on multiplicity (Hinchliffe 2010; Lorimer 2015). Lorimer (2015), for example, argues that conservation ecology and policy would do well to adopt a multinatural approach. In a multinatural and relational approach, wild life exerts its endearing charisma and its power to astonish us in its multiple forms and through its myriad relations. Understanding wild natures as multiple means accepting various intensities of wildness, multiple stable and unstable ecological states, and diverse potentials to become new and unexpected meshworks that force us to constantly adjourn our very idea of what wildness may be. A multinatural understanding of wildness views change as the norm, not the deviation. In the dominant view of wildness, ruptures

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play the role of spoilers and enact the fall from grace, whereas from a multinatural perspective, ruptures actualize the potential for new relations (Fraser, Kember, and Lury 2005). This is a view that denies the notion that nature, in the singular, is found by humans as either pristine or corrupt. Ruptures and disturbance can generate diversity and new forms of life, as Cliff taught us (see also Little Bear 2012; and Tsing 2015). As Greco (2004, 12) argues, wildness is part of a vital order that involves much more than humans. Wildness in a multinatural vital order is an entanglement constantly evolving into new and more complex socio-natural hybrid entanglements and into new and more complex transformative encounters (see Tsing 2015, 28). In such entanglements, humans ought to become aware of the logical impossibility of separating themselves from nature and the land that gives forth life, and they ought to care for their interdependence, just as our research participants – our teachers – have taught us. In this light, it is important to keep in mind that conservation policy informed by principles of wildness as vitality must find ways forward to ensure that environmental protection is neither subjugated to the growing post-natural neoliberal agenda (see Dempsey 2016) nor reduced to versions of the old biodiversity conservation agenda superficially updated with elements of tokenistic “consultation” with Indigenous “stakeholders.” In other words, we need a conservation model for wild places that is informed by the working principles of relationality and vitality, a model that is neither optimistic and laissez-faire nor paternalistic and ultimately autocratic. We believe that such a model can be built on the principles outlined by Collard, Dempsey, and Sundberg (2015) for securing abundant socio-ecological futures. The first step toward abundant futures is to recognize that ideas such as wilderness and nature are the creations of a colonial-capitalist mind and that the legacies of these ideas are still strong and require sustained dismantling. Rather than replicating old ideas of wildness buttressed by imperialist states or universalizing scientific paradigms, we need to valorize a pluriverse of wildness and of strategies for “living together with radical difference” (Collard, Dempsey, and Sundberg 2015, 326). This approach means protecting places in many different ways that reflect the multiplicity of meanings and forms that wildness takes on. However, this multiplicity cannot become the justification for “anything goes” exploitative approaches that treat wild places as

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monetary resources for either industrial extraction, tourism development, or species separation and confinement. Respecting and honouring wildness must entail a willingness to acknowledge the kinship of all life forms and the relational autonomy of all living things (Betasamosake Simpson 2011; Bird Rose 2012; Collard 2014; Todd 2017; Watts 2013). Autonomy in this sense refers to the expression of more-than-human life, the vital capacity for movement and affiliation, as well as the otherness and sentience of all beings (Collard, Dempsey, and Sundberg 2015, 328; see also Plumwood 1998). A relational autonomy of wildness should inform conservation policies that are as much about conserving and protecting as they are about engendering and opening possibilities for diverse wild lives. Vitality and autonomy thrive without borders and fences, without cages and rules. A future of wild places unlimited by the constraints of state-centred protected areas might be a future of abundance not only for abiotic and nonhuman biotic species but for humans as well. This might be a future where people are able to rediscover their own wildness, whether in the form of freer, cross-border movement within and across wild places – the kinds of movements recounted by Mary Jane Johnson – or in the form of rediscovering a long-forgotten spiritual kinship with the nonhuman world, as discussed by Charles Crowchief.

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Ecological Heritage

In 1972, unesco ’s Convention Concerning the Protection of the World Cultural and Natural Heritage laid out its foundations for classifying sites of “outstanding universal value” according to ten criteria: six for identifying cultural sites and four for natural sites. The World Heritage List was thus split into two categories: natural heritage and cultural heritage. Later, in 2004, a third category was added: “mixed natural and cultural.” Mixed sites feature at least one of the cultural criteria and at least one of the natural criteria. At the time of writing, the World Heritage List includes 1,121 sites in 167 countries. Of these sites, 869 are cultural, 213 are natural, and only 39 are mixed. Canada has 10 natural heritage sites, 9 cultural, and only 1 mixed – Pimachiowin Aki, the latest addition to Canada’s list in 2018. Given our perspective on the inevitable entanglement between nature and culture, we are very skeptical about the value of unesco ’s compartmentalization of land into distinct cultural and natural heritage sites. In this chapter, we focus on how one of Canada’s unesco sites – Gros Morne National Park – is much than just a natural heritage site. We believe that unesco ’s criteria for the identification of natural World Heritage sites and its descriptions of the qualities of such sites are informed by a dualist ontology that sharply separates nature from culture (see also Bianchi 2002; R. Harrison 2015; and K. Taylor and Lennon 2011). Despite the recent creation of thirty-nine mixed sites around the globe, natural and cultural criteria for site inclusion are still rigidly distinct. The result of this separation between nature and culture is the construction of natural heritage spaces that exist in a sort of vacuum from social life, are abstracted

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from human relations, and are seemingly devoid of human presence, their visitors oblivious to the many stories that make them meaningful to both Indigenous and non-Indigenous residents (R. Harrison 2015). In this chapter, we refer to the framing of these sites as storyless spaces. Although the sites themselves are not empty of stories, it is the treatment and classification of a site as natural at the exclusion of the cultural that potentially renders these stories irrelevant and silent. In other words, when we recognize the value of a place’s natural heritage and refer to it as a wilderness, the culture of a place tends to be eclipsed, its inhabitants marginalized and their stories forgotten. unesco’s World Heritage Program is not the cause but instead just one of many symptoms of the infinitely broader dualist way of thinking about nature and culture that informs Western worldviews. It is this dualist way of thinking that allows not just unesco but also countless people to think of nature as the opposite of culture. We believe instead that we cannot take for granted what nature is (or better yet, what natures are), and we think that it is important to document precisely how natural heritage is entangled with cultural heritage, thus problematizing the distinction between the two. Therefore, in what follows, we describe and interpret how at Gros Morne National Park natural heritage is relationally woven with the lives of those who inhabit the place. Rather than existing outside of socio-cultural processes, nature is conceptualized in this chapter as a multiplicity of relational entanglements or “meshworks” (Ingold 2011). The narratives that we share about Gros Morne are meant to reanimate this site in response to the World Heritage classification, calling to attention the perpetual growth and becoming of its relational environments (see Cronon 1992; and Ingold 2006). In our conclusion to this chapter, we argue that rather than natural or cultural heritage, we ought to consider the unified concept of ecological heritage. As we explain in greater depth later on, our concept of ecological heritage is drawn from a notion of ecology that is broader than most people’s understanding of it. Ecology is typically viewed as a branch of biology that focuses on interactions among organisms and their biophysical environment. Students of ecology tend to concern themselves with issues like the biodiversity, biomass, and distribution of organisms, the health of their populations, and the health of ecosystems. Most ecologists, regularly treating distinct variables

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in interaction with one another, do their work by measuring and monitoring their units of analysis. Although there are many different branches of ecological research, and many different theories, it is safe to say that most ecologists do not overly concern themselves with the kind of empirical material that ethnographers care about – that is, for lack of a better word, “humanist” material such as stories about a particular land. Our view of ecology is kincentric (Salmón 2017). In kincentric ecology, at the centre of everything is kinship, not the “interaction” between different units. Starting with kinship, not distinction, allows kincentric ecology to do away with binary oppositions like human versus nonhuman and culture versus nature. Kincentric ecology is aligned with what is otherwise known as Indigenous ecological knowledge. As Banuri and Apffel Marglin (1993) write, there are many key distinctions between Western scientific ecological knowledge and Indigenous ecological knowledge. Western scientific ecological knowledge is rational, universal, individualized, and instrumentalized. It is also marked by binary oppositions such as nature versus culture, biotic versus abiotic, and subject versus object. In contrast, Indigenous ecological knowledge is characterized by embeddedness of knowledge in the land, the boundedness of knowledge of both time and place, the centrality of community, and a lack of distinction between notions such as culture and nature, subject and object, biotic and abiotic, spirits and ancestors, and visible and invisible forms of life. Moreover, traditional ecological knowledge is resolutely not instrumental but characterized by a spiritual dimension that is entirely absent from Western ecological knowledge. As Berkes (2012) puts it, Indigenous ecological knowledge is a “sacred ecology.”

nat u r a l h e r itag e a n d wi lderness In Canada and the rest of the world, natural heritage sites are often portrayed by unesco as beautiful landscapes teeming with wildlife and interesting biological and geological features. For example, Gros Morne National Park, situated on the west coast of Newfoundland, is inscribed on the World Heritage List as an “example of the process of continental drift, where deep ocean crust and the rocks of the earth’s mantle lie exposed.” There, “recent glacial action has resulted in some spectacular scenery, with coastal lowland, alpine plateau, fjords, glacial valleys, sheer cliffs, waterfalls and many

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pristine lakes.” Gros Morne National Park, the inscription further reads, “is an outstanding wilderness environment of spectacular landlocked, freshwater fjords and glacier-scoured headlands in an ocean setting.” The park “is an area of exceptional natural beauty” (unesco 2021b). Descriptions like these may be valuable in highlighting the physical features of a site, but in excluding even the simplest mention of human inhabitants and their activities, they unfortunately end up separating a land from the broader ecologies in which it is entangled. This is not a mere rhetorical issue. Natural heritage designations and related discourses are known to deeply reshape places, such as by forcefully separating local communities from environments that they were previously able to freely access, erasing traces of their presence, and by restructuring resource-based livelihoods into service-based host economies (see Adams and Hutton 2007; and Cronon 2003). Gros Morne is not a unique case. Natural World Heritage sites are routinely presented as untouched, wild, pristine, or teeming with rare and untamed (and often endangered) wildlife. Wild spaces and wilderness areas have historically been defined in the Englishspeaking world as uncultivated regions uninhabited by humans and undeveloped by their activities (Nash 2014; Oelschlaeger 1991). This idea, many critics have decried, is based on nothing but a powerful reification that obfuscates how nature is subject to contesting forces and how designations of wilderness reveal more about cultural attitudes toward the environment than about the objective features of a particular space (see Braun and Castree 1998; Castree 2005; and Plumwood 1998). Research has shown that all of the world’s surface, including its spectacular parks and preserves, has been touched in one way or another by humans (see Miles 2009). Within the Canadian context, a few authors have strived to deconstruct the notion of wild nature as a domain separate from culture and society and to expose some of the anthropocentric (Greig and Whillans 1998), ethnocentric (Hodgins 1998), and androcentric ideologies (Sandilands 2005) underlying this separation. For example, Baldwin (2010) has revealed how narratives on Canadian wilderness are racialized and implicitly exclude nonwhite Canadians. Mawani (2007) has denaturalized park landscapes by outlining the politics of park formation and management as an exclusionary exercise of juridical power over Indigenous populations claiming rights to park land.

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Discourses associated with Canadian wilderness spaces have also been found to marginalize women’s identity (Sandilands 2005) and cultural diversity (Sandilands 1999). Most pertinent to the case described in this chapter is the research by Erickson (2015) on the significance of an Ontario heritage river, the French River. Erickson observes that the French River is constructed simultaneously as a historical marker of the nation and as a wild natural space. The alleged wilderness quality of the river environment is portrayed by heritage managers and tourism promoters as a way to experience the nation as it might have appeared hundreds of years ago to the first colonial explorers. Nature, in this sense, is a vehicle for the narration of the nation’s history, a narration that allows for a sense of continuity with the past and for cementing a sentiment of nationalist rootedness in the landscape. But in inviting tourists to experience the nature of the river, Erickson notes, “this embodied heritage ... roots the nation not in history of social and political interaction (of trade, of war, of treaties, of residential schools, of reconciliation, etc.) but in the land itself as a record of both the conquest and what came before” (318). This focus on nature results in erasing the social, cultural, and political dynamics that have given shape to the river. Ideas about wild nature, in short, can often omit politics, culture, and social history. Rather than finished states transcending social dynamics, “natures” in the plural, Hinchliffe (2008, 88) argues, are “unfinished matters” constantly “in the making.” From a vitalist perspective, we can think of natures as places evolving as outcomes of the activities of their inhabitants, places that arise “in the specific relational contexts of their [inhabitants’] practical engagement with their surroundings” (Ingold 2000, 186). According to this perspective, a place like a natural heritage site “owes its character to the experiences it affords to those who spend time there – to the sights, sounds, and indeed smells that constitute its specific ambience,” and these experiences in turn “depend on the kinds of activities in which its inhabitants engage” (192). Such a principle of inhabitation is based on the idea that every organism is immersed in a lifeworld as an inescapable condition of existence (Ingold 2011). From such immersion and the relations that emerge, “the world continually comes into being around the inhabitant, and its manifold constituents take on significance through their incorporation into a regular pattern of life activity” (Ingold 2000, 153).

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Following such a perspective, places like Gros Morne are entangled becomings that “do not exist at locations, [but] occur along paths” (Ingold 2006, 14). Paying attention to how natures take place entails following diverse threads in order to reanimate heritage. This approach allows us to view natural World Heritage sites like Gros Morne as events and happenings exceeding their present material existence and becoming enmeshed in a continuous flux of morethan-human relations that transcend the park boundaries. Through stories, the vitality of such natures can be reanimated (see Cronon 1992; and Ingold 2006).

g ro s m o r n e ’ s stori es Gros Morne was established as a national park in 1973 and inscribed as a World Heritage site in 1987. Before the park was eventually announced, Parks Canada and the Newfoundland government envisioned a complete relocation of several communities scattered inside the park boundaries. This move was in line with Parks Canada’s modus operandi at a time when eviction and resettlement of human residents were seen as essential for the preservation of supposedly wild areas (Overton 1996). Local protests, however, quickly ensued (see Matthews 1976), and federal and provincial authorities decided to temper their plans by offering a voluntary resettlement option (see McCleave 2008). While most of the 175 families living within the new park’s boundaries agreed to leave in exchange for a cash settlement or a new home outside the park, a handful of fishers and loggers decided to stay (see MacEachern 2001; and McNamee 2016). The area contiguous with today’s boundaries of Gros Morne National Park has a long history of human use and residence (Crabb 1981). The establishment of the park meant that both the families who chose to stay put and those who resettled in the communities situated just outside of park boundaries had to adapt to new regulations restricting their hunting and gathering activities, as well as to the new economic realities brought about by tourism. The residents interviewed by Innes and Heintzmann (2012), for example, lamented the loss of freedom due to the new restrictions on land use, recreation, and traditional extractive activities but at the same time recognized the benefits of new employment opportunities, environmental protection, and community development brought about by the tourism industry and related infrastructure.

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Over recent years, Parks Canada’s approach to dealing with local communities has changed significantly, as our interviews with Parks Canada representatives at Gros Morne revealed (see also McCleave 2008). Not only is Parks Canada now more aware of the value of community support, consultation, and at times even co-management – especially with First Nations – but concessions that were unthinkable in the past have also been made. For example, Gros Morne National Park allows for limited quotas of wood harvesting within park boundaries by non-Indigenous residents. Notably, Parks Canada has also begun to valorize the cultural heritage of natural parks – as can be observed throughout the park as part of guided heritage talks and interpretive plaques and events. Nevertheless, the classification of heritage into distinct natural and cultural categories continues at the unesco level, where Gros Morne’s heritage is still valued for its wilderness-like qualities. The natural heritage of Gros Morne is not something that we can abstract from social relations. Alterations of an environment through human activities do not necessarily result in the loss of wilderness qualities, as Cronon (2003) has found in regard to the Apostle Islands (see also Deary 2015 with regard to the Scottish Highlands). Places like the Apostle Islands and Gros Morne, we argue, are not the epitome of an unpeopled wilderness but a “historical wilderness” – a “superb example of a wilderness in which natural and human histories are intermingled” (Cronon 2003, 38). To think of a place like Gros Morne as a “historical wilderness,” we must listen to the stories of its human inhabitants – the narratives through which it comes alive as an entanglement of human and nonhuman relations (Cronon 1992, 2003). Such stories can thus be understood as performances that remind us of the importance of ecological heritage. A popular advertising campaign for the province of Newfoundland and Labrador featuring images from around the province shows Gros Morne as a people-free land of moss-covered rocks, deep fjords, and vibrant natural colours. And it is not alone in casting the image of the park as a prototypical wilderness. Perform a Google Image search for “Gros Morne National Park,” and you will get more of the same. In fact, it takes a lot of scrolling down to get images of anything besides the lone rocky outlook perched above Western Brook Pond. And when you do find anything else, it is the tablelands or a hiking trail leading into the mountains.

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Five days into our stay in the area, our impression of Gros Morne could not have been any different from what the images had promised. The park itself featured a stunning number of diverse landscapes, including the sandy beaches between Cow Head and Bakers Brook, fjords and rocky cliffs, and treeless rock-strewn valleys. But it was beyond the park that the real surprise awaited us. Unlike other parks in Canada accessible by one or maybe two small outpost towns, Gros Morne National Park was flanked by small communities from south to north, not unlike the way that many parks are in Europe. “There is Trout River. There’s Woody Point, Curzon Village, which is part of the community council of Woody Point, Winterhouse Brook, Glenburnie, Birchy ’ead – ‘Head,’ I should’ve said, sorry.” Bonnie-Lou paused with a smile to forgive herself her western Newfoundland accent. “Am I forgetting anything? – no, I think I’m good. Wiltondale, then coming over this way there’s Norris Point, there’s Rocky Harbour, there’s Sally’s Cove, there’s St Paul’s, and there’s Cow Head. Seems like I’m missing one on the south side. Winterhouse Brook, Shoal Brook – did I say Shoal Brook? I don’t think I did. Winterhouse Brook, Shoal Brook, Glenburnie, Birchy Head, there. And then Woody Point, Curzon Village, Trout River, and Wiltondale that’s on the south.” It was impressive that she could remember all the towns. She did the math quickly for us and calculated that a little over 3,000 people lived in them. Bonnie-Lou Hutchings had agreed to meet us at the Lobster Cove Head Lighthouse, a light station a few minutes north of the bustling and idyllic town of Rocky Harbour that was high on the itineraries of most visitors to Gros Morne National Park. During the summer, Bonnie-Lou led interpretive talks and tours around the area for Parks Canada, showing visitors select bits of the area’s history and taking time to answer their questions about everything related to Gros Morne. “So, I’m a heritage presenter, it’s called,” she told us as we sat at a picnic table a few steps away from the lighthouse. Bonnie-Lou was born and raised in Sally’s Cove, a little community fifteen minutes north of the lighthouse. In her mid-forties now, she had lived her whole life in the area. “You blink, you miss it,” she quipped about her hometown. “It’s this small. For the last census, there were twenty residents, but that might be counting cats and dogs.” She laughed. “It’s a nice little community, I must say, and a lovely upbringing. I was very fortunate. My mom and dad had nine kids and my dad was a fish harvester. So he fished about sixty

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years of his life until he physically couldn’t get back in the boat anymore. And that’s when we stopped and passed on his licences to my brother, who is a shoreman.” Since you might say that Bonnie-Lou told stories for a living, she was more than ready to share one with us: Every little community in Newfoundland has a unique story about its name. Sally’s Cove was named after Sally Short, who was married to Alex Short, and they lived up around the Broom Point area. As the story goes, they argued a lot because sometimes men don’t want to listen, hey?! [She laughed.] But anyway, God love ’em, they argued a lot. So they got into an argument one time, and she went to leave him. We’re talking about the early 1800s, so it would have been by boat, hey? So she got in a boat with her kids and a storm came up, so she had to take shelter in a little cove. And she stayed overnight in a puncheon tub, and I don’t know if you know what a puncheon tub is, but it’s a big wooden cast, over five-foot tall. They used to hold 44 to 140 gallons of pickled herring, salt, molasses, or you talk about in Jamaica – Jamaican punch-hole rum – and stuff like that. She stayed there overnight to get out of the storm and the next morning she went on her way. I don’t know if she got back together with Alex or not, I’m not sure, but some people say she stayed over winter there. But the story I always was told from my father is that she went on her way the next day and that’s how Sally’s Cove got her name – from Sally Short. Bonnie-Lou had a personal connection with the story: Sally Short had a daughter, Susanna. So Susanna married a Richard Gillie, and Richard Gillie came from the uk , like a lot of our forebears along this side of the coast. But as the story goes, he killed one of the king’s deer and he had to jump aboard a boat and come to Newfoundland. He was a rogue, and he met up with Susanna and they married and they had twins and they had three boys also. And three of the boys married three Clark women. The Clarks came from Trinity Bay. Their fathers worked in the lobster factories, right? And my dad was a Gillie. So my dad’s mother was Mildred Gillie, and her great-grandfather was Richard Gillie, one of the three boys. My grandmother and my grandfather were first cousins, too. [She laughed.] So I’m related

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to the Gillies and the Clarks very closely. So I guess Sally would be my great-great-great-grandmother! We told Bonnie-Lou that we were interested in her thoughts on whether the place was a wilderness, as unesco and advertising campaigns promoted. She told us that it wasn’t, and to explain how the park came to be, she told us a bit more about Sally’s Cove: When the park was established in 1973, there were six communities that were slated for resettlement. Sally’s Cove was one of those communities, and a couple of communities around here got resettled, too: Lobster Cove and Woody Cove, Bill Downes Point up by Shallow Bay, Baker’s Broken Green Point, and so on. But about half the community in Sally’s Cove refused to move. But a lot did move out ... And I remember my dad deciding what to do, because I had just been born in 1975, so I’ve been here ever since the park has been here. But I guess he probably realized he still had a young daughter. He didn’t want to leave. He fished there all his life. But we did watch my grandmother and my aunts and uncles move out. But we decided to stay there, and it worked out for the good because it became a park enclave, and just like every other community, now the park surrounds it. Sally’s Cove is a park enclave like many others in the area: a little white island of human habitation in a green map of protected land. Although the park technically has no one living inside its boundaries permanently, the towns around it are busy and alive. If the place is a wilderness, it is one dotted by thousands of family stories just like Bonnie-Lou’s. Parks Canada, Bonnie-Lou reflected, “are realizing some of the mistakes they made. Parks has realized that, ‘You know what, the people in the communities are important, too.’ And now they’re trying to get people more involved, especially the community in the events and that, as they should be. Because the park is beautiful, but I think they’re nothing without the cultural part of the people in the park, right?” “So, that’s why you think that Gros Morne is not a wilderness, then?” we asked. “Well, there’s not a lot of it that hasn’t been touched,” she explained. “I’m sure there’s been a lot of people here long before,

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and they have been over every part of this park. I guess it’s classified as wilderness. I don’t know, though. I guess the backcountry is wilder, but again people have been there. It’s not like it’s never been known there. The thing is, people have been here since the 1800s. Aboriginal, Indigenous people have been here since the beginning of time. So, to me, it’s not wild, no. It’s not wild. It’s been inhabited by people for a very long time.” We wanted to ask Bonnie-Lou whether the presence of people necessarily disqualified a place as being wild, but given her job as cultural heritage presenter, we directed our conversation to matters of heritage instead and asked for her thoughts on how the World Heritage listing had included Gros Morne only for its natural properties. “Yes, it certainly is natural,” she told us. “Certainly, we have wonderful rocks, very old mantle rock here. Definitely geological significance. Green Point rocks. But, to me, the culture of this is just as important as the natural rocks because, you know what, the glaciers were here, they carved everything. The glaciers formed the fishing banks, and the fishing bank attracted people from Europe. So I think everything goes hand in hand. So one cannot live without the other. We have the geology but we have the people that live on the geology. So, to me, it is very important. Gros Morne is an area of cultural significance, also.” Across from Lobster Cove Head, on the southern side of Bonne Bay, lies Woody Point, the most populated community in the Gros Morne area. About 300 people live in Woody Point, but because of the accommodations and businesses present in town, Woody Point feels five times as large. Woody Point is also where the occasional small cruise ship docks in the summer, letting out tourists headed by bus for the park’s famed Tablelands Trail. We met with a local resident, Charlie Payne, to learn more about the community during a busy afternoon at his arts and crafts shop, The Hunky Dory. Charlie is very well known in western Newfoundland as a musician, and over the years he has also been involved in the arts community in Woody Point in various capacities. “The arts community has really taken off” in Woody Point, he told us. “During the past several years, we got artists that have actually moved here from different parts of Canada and different parts of the world and settled here in Woody Point because, well, all you got to do is look around you and see that you know they’re very inspired by natural surroundings.”

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It wasn’t just the natural surroundings, however, that had put Woody Point on the arts map of Canada. For the past sixteen years, an annual writing festival has attracted storytellers as well as musicians from Canada and abroad. “So, of course, there’s a lot of little pubs and little places along the waterfront that have different music there from time to time,” Charlie explained. “And it’s just gotten to be a real artsy community. There’s writers that have bought summer homes here and spend a lot of time here now and actually come here and do some writing and – you know, people like Lawrence Hill, who’s very well known across this country. And so we’ve become quite the artsy community.” Like many other Newfoundland-based musicians, Charlie’s music is deeply rooted in the region’s culture and folklore. For a long time, the region of Gros Morne remained challenging to access from the rest of the island, and over time music and storytelling combined not only to entertain locals but also to pass on community values and myths. In addition to writers and musicians, Woody Point – like Cow Head – has become known for attracting performers and theatre lovers, thanks especially to the annual Gros Morne Theatre Festival. And just south of Woody Point, in another park enclave, the residents of the town of Trout River have begun hosting cultural heritage days with guided tours of the community’s waterfront that give visitors a glimpse of the town’s social history. Heritage programs also include kitchen parties filled with storytelling, live music, and dancing. As part of the heritage program called Wave Over Wave, one day in Trout River (figure 3.1), we and a small group of visitors were led through the local museum, an open heritage house, and then to a small harbour where we learned how to clean cod and, more notably, what cod meant to the cultural fabric of the community (see more on this program in chapter 9). As her husband, Wade, cleaned cod, heritage presenter Bonnie – who doubled as a paramedic and a school bus driver – recounted stories of how as a child she had managed to buy her first pedal bike by selling cod tongues to the Deer Lake Hotel for $1.50 a pound. Largely as an outcome of the scattered population – each park enclave with its stories and traditions – and largely as a result of having to reinvent themselves as tourist destinations following the decline of the extractive economy, most of the Gros Morne communities feature heritage activities daily during the summer months.

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3.1 The community of Trout River, a Gros Morne landscape seldom captured by travel guides

One is a sacred fire circle organized by Parks Canada and led by Kevin Barnes. In his late fifties, Kevin introduced himself to us and to about a dozen campers who had gathered for the twice-weekly event at the Trout River Campground on a warm July evening: I have an Aboriginal ancestry. French Mi’kmaq actually. My ancestors are part of that expulsion that got kicked out of the Maritimes many, many moons ago. Anyway, this program we built here tonight is called a fire circle. When you do a sacred fire circle, there are certain things you have to do. A sacred fire is lit when somebody dies in the village. The most important person then becomes the firekeeper. The firekeeper keeps the fire burning because Aboriginal people believe that the spirit of that person who died wants to go out and visit all the people that he came in contact with while he walked over Mother Earth. It’s very important to the Aboriginal people, and the firekeeper keeps the light so he can be guided back to this spot to go to the Creator.

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The fire circle takes place at the Trout River Campground and at Lobster Cove Head, but because of its convenient location right where visitors stay overnight, the campground fire circle attracts more participants, Kevin told us. The fire was just getting warmer as dusk began to fall. “What I want to do first before I pass around the talking stick, I want to do a verse of a song,” Kevin told us. “And we’ll pass around the stick, then everybody will get a chance to say their piece.” He began drumming and singing, and he taught us how to sing along. Everyone joined in earnestly, and then the stick was passed around as people introduced themselves. We felt a bit sheepish about being there with our camera since this was supposed to be a sacred ceremonial affair, but in all honesty – and despite Kevin’s best attempts – the fire circle wasn’t as sacred as it might have been under more authentic circumstances. Nonetheless, it reflected fairly well on Parks Canada to have at least tried, we thought. After a couple of songs, Kevin shared a few stories with the intent of revealing how people and nature are interconnected. If it had been anyone else, the whole affair might have felt too much like a “presentation,” but Kevin’s genuineness and humbleness made it feel truly narrative. One story in particular stood out for us – a story about his grandfather and hunting: When my grandfather brought down a moose for us to eat, you know what he did first? He put his hand on the animal, walked out, knelt down by the animal, offered a little bit of tobacco, and said, “Your spirit will live forever.” I thought my grandfather was nuts. [Kevin smiled.] I didn’t know what he was saying. And he knew that I didn’t know. But he told me, “Kevin, think about all the food we eat. Think about the food you had to eat today. Did that come from a living creature or animal or something that was alive on a tree? A fruit, a vegetable? Was it alive at one time?” Yes, it was. Everything we eat came from something that was alive at one time, no matter what. And it had to die in order for us to live and live really good. But it had to die. So my grandfather was saying to me, “Kevin, that animal died for us. When you eat that meat, the spirit of that animal is going into you. It’s part of you now. It’s going to nourish you. It’s going to support you.”

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Many different Indigenous philosophies tell us that we are part of the land that gives us life. We do not live on the land as if we were disconnected from it – as discussed in chapters 1 and 2. Rather, we are one with it (Berkes 2012). That is part of the reason why the notion of a wilderness – a land disconnected from the people that it gives life to – is quite naive. Memories, short stories, and small reminders like those offered by Kevin’s grandfather to him and by Kevin to us make an important point about a place that is supposed to be an unpopulated wilderness. About an hour north of Trout River lies the community of Cow Head. There, the cliffs give way to windswept sand dunes and expansive beaches flanked by tall grasses. Glenda Bavis, a volunteer with the Cow Head Historical Society, offered to lead us on a hike along a coastal trail so that she could give us the lay of the land. “We are looking down over the harbour,” she told us at the beginning of our walk as we faced the waters. “This is where our first European settlers, John and Mary Payne, came in 1809, and they arrived on what was known as Tuckers Cove, which is down where the wharf is today. And just at that point, we know that Cow Head was settled long before – not settled but visited – by Aboriginal peoples, but it wasn’t until 1809. John and Mary had been coming to Cow Head to fish in the spring. And then a son was born and they decided to stay.” The historical society had been active in reconstructing what everyday life might have looked like back then, and Glenda told us how trying life was. “I’m sure they came in on a small boat, so they couldn’t bring much with them. But it wasn’t long when other families joined them, and by then John and Mary had nine children. Their children had very large families. So they not only helped settle Cow Head but the neighbouring communities as well.” The trail led us to the Cow Head Lighthouse, which is located on a small peninsula attached to the rest of Shallow Bay by a thin isthmus. In the past, the isthmus was a threshold between season cycles. “Back in the day,” Glenda explained, “we were a summerside-winterside community. When John and Mary came, they settled first for the winter on just the other side of the head. This is what we call summerside. And then they started trekking back and forth across the sandbank to the mainland, which became known as winterside. In the fall, they would pick up all the goods and belongings and they would move over to winterside to be near the trees and the shelter, and so they would have two homes, two small – very small – homes.”

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It was as recently as 1904 that France relinquished its fishing rights along this side of the Newfoundland coast, after which more permanent settlements were started. Glenda clarified, Well, permanent settlements had started before them, of course, because our first settlers were in 1816. But it was kind of dwindling, I guess, over the years. People just came and stayed. But as I said earlier, the harbour was still full of French fishing vessels. And some communities retain more of the French heritage – their names, for example. I mean “Tête de Vache” is “Cow Head” in French. Porte aux Choix kept their name. And there’s a lovely town, Conche, further north, and you go cross-country. We call it inland. You have to drive across. And they have a French interpretation centre, and so it’s pretty neat. They actually have French cemeteries. And the Port au Port Peninsula, of course, they’ve retained their French ancestry. They lost a lot of it over the years, but they’re bringing it back.

e n ta n g l e d w il d natures In casting the park as an untouched wilderness, the World Heritage Program portrays Gros Morne as purely and exclusively natural – a window to a distant geological past. McClintock (1995, 40) has referred to such places as “anachronistic spaces.” Anachronistic spaces are sites that exist outside of modern progress. These wilderness spaces function as relics of bygone eras, spaces that mark the passage from a pre-modern to a modern period. Many wilderness spaces around the globe are constructed as timeless by virtue of having somehow escaped historical developments and the impacts of modern “progress.” “Anachronistic spaces,” Erickson (2015, 323) writes, are especially “valuable for colonial nations as they provide a connection to antiquity that anchors a nation to its territory.” In Canada, unesco natural World Heritage sites function as anachronistic spaces situating iconic parts of the country within a deep time trajectory of evolutionary events. For example, the World Heritage classification of Gros Morne National Park casts the site as featuring “the complete portrayal of the geological events that took place when the ancient continental margin of North America was modified by plate movement by emplacement of a large, relocated portion of oceanic crust and ocean floor sediments.” unesco makes no mention

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of the social history of the townships and communities within Gros Morne. No human lives are present in the natural World Heritage designation. For unesco , natural heritage sites like Gros Morne are framed as places completely devoid of narratives other than natural history. Such designation processes render places like Gros Morne not only as spaces outside of modern history but as spaces outside of place as well. They are what we call storyless spaces. To be sure, plenty of stories about Gros Morne are told and shared by its inhabitants. But these stories are silenced by unesco ’s natural heritage designation. A storyless space is not just outside of social history but is also atopical. An atopical space is one without a topic – that is, without discourse. It is also a space without topos – a disemplaced space. A storyless space is a site whose stories have been muted, a site emptied of the narratives told about it, and its many forms of life, by its human and nonhuman inhabitants. A storyless space is a site whose narrative threads have been frayed by neglect, unravelled by an unwillingness to attend to the multiple knots that have been formed therein over time. A storyless space is a site valued just for its wealth as scientific data, a site whose vitality has been deadened and excised from the broader ecologies that give rise to it. Mohawk and Anishnaabe scholar Vanessa Watts (2013) argues that from Indigenous perspectives, the separation of nature and society makes no sense (see also Berkes 2012; and Cajete 2000). From Indigenous viewpoints, she argues, the constitution of society revolves around the interaction among the animal world, the spirit world, the human world, and the plant and mineral world. Out of this interaction arises what she calls “Place-Thought,” which is “the non-distinctive space where place and thought were never separated because they never could or can be separated” (Watts 2013, 21). “Place-Thought,” she continues “is based upon the premise that land is alive and thinking and that humans and non-humans derive agency through the extensions of these thoughts” (21). To a Western scientist, emptying a place of its thoughts and stories may seem like an appropriate way to isolate significant variables and units of analysis, but it is utterly nonsensical from a relational perspective. Watts (2013, 23) finds that “if, as Indigenous peoples, we are extensions of the very land we walk upon, then we have an obligation to maintain communication with it.” A separation between nature and culture, and by extension between natural and cultural heritage, is a separation of the self, the family, and one’s own people from one’s

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land. To turn a place into a storyless space is not just an insensitive act ignorant of cultural value but also a thoughtless act characterized by the incapacity to listen to place-thought and place-stories. “Our truth, not only as Anishnaabe and Haudenosaunee people but in a majority of Indigenous societies,” Watts reminds us, “conceives that we (humans) are made from the land; our flesh is literally an extension of soil” (27). And these are not just myths or just stories, Watts (2013) and Little Bear (2000) remark, but reality. Sharing stories about the land that people call home and maintaining communication with the land are ways of alerting us to the value of our connection with our environments and with one another (Cronon 2003). They are ways of restor(y)ing a place in order to turn a supposedly unpeopled wilderness into what Cronon (2003) calls a “historical wilderness.” And as we will show, it is a way of turning away from a heritage that divides nature from culture and toward a heritage that is ecological.

r e a n im at in g s to ryles s spaces Although we acknowledge the importance of the work done by unesco’s World Heritage Program around the world to recognize and protect valuable lands from development and exploitation, we believe that the ongoing separation between natural and cultural heritage is inappropriate (see also K. Taylor and Lennon 2011). The affirmation of nature as a domain separate from social bonds is insensitive to the ways that natures are enacted (Braun 2002; Braun and Castree 1998). The compartmentalization of nature into neat classifications, as Pratt (1992) has argued, is a narrative through which scientific writers hide their own colonial authority and global pretensions. Natural history, in this sanitized and people-free version of history, is something that is already there, ordered, and immanent in nature itself, transcending human classificatory activity (Johnson and Murton 2007). In this process, “[o]ne by one, the planet’s life forms were drawn out of the tangled threads of their life surroundings and rewoven into European-based patterns of global unity and order” (Pratt 1992, 31). As part of this process, culture was folded into natural history and reduced to silence, as “[n]atural history extracted specimens not only from their organic or ecological relations with each other, but also from their places in other peoples’ economies, histories, social and symbolic systems” (31).

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The identification, cataloguing, and classification of plants, animals, and lands “is an asocial narrative in which the human presence (European and Indigenous) is absolutely marginal” (Johnson and Murton 2007, 121). Even when people are included in such accounts, they are typically perceived to occupy a separate place where their activities are merely textual and restricted to attaching meaning to place (see Castree 2005). Through such portrayals, inhabitants remain detached from the landscape. As the Western positivist project of nature classification expanded, all plants, animals, rocks, and people were placed “into an objective taxonomy and grid of knowledge, separating and displacing them from their landscapes” (Johnson and Murton 2007, 122). Fabian (1983) has described this kind of objectification as a temporal displacement in virtue of which Europeans found that they could not occupy the same spaces together with Indigenous populations. This attitude resulted in the expulsion of Indigenous people and long-time local inhabitants from protected areas of natural significance and in their resettlement to spaces where their activities would not interfere with scientific conservation (see Adams and Hutton 2007). In this process, “wild” and “natural” spaces were emptied not only of their inhabitants but also of their stories (Plumwood 1998). In such a world, Ingold (2011, 141) writes, natures, persons, and things simply exist. They exist as if they were there, fixed, immutable, and bestowed with attributes transmitted ready-made from the past. Official science, he argues, turns occurrences of life into self-contained facts, discrete variables, and intrinsic attributes. A decolonized, nonrepresentational, and relational understanding of the lifeworld can provide a different perspective. For those who inhabit a land, rather than just occupying it, things do not merely exist but also occur (154). For inhabitants of the lifeworld, knowledge is not integrated vertically, through scientific classification, but “alongly.” Ingold continues, “[T]he epitome of alongly integrated knowledge is the story. In a classification, as we have seen, every element is slotted into place on the basis of intrinsic characteristics that are given quite independently of the context in which it is encountered, and of its relations with the things that presently surround it, that preceded its appearance, or that follow it into the world. In a story, by contrast, it is precisely by this context and these relations that every element is identified and positioned. The stories always, and inevitably, draw together what classifications

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split apart” (160). Following alongly integrated knowledge, we ought to understand stories not as narratives about a land or as discourses that attach meaning to an otherwise blank entity awaiting inscription. Stories, instead, are alive and life-giving; they give birth to places just as much as places give birth to stories (Cronon 2003). Both stories and places are ongoing activities, giving shape to one another in a constantly evolving kincentric ecological field of relations. Following this perspective, we should no longer speak of “nature” or natural heritage but of ecological heritage. The concept of ecological heritage could remind us of the inextricable ecological relations between people and their environments. Let us remind ourselves what heritage is and is not. Heritage is not history. As Lowenthal (1998) explains, history aims to be an empirical inquiry focused on the generation of accurate records of past events. In contrast, heritage is a partial memory of the past, filtered by what we care to recall, what we care to value, and what we care to pass on to future generations about past lives. Heritage depends on narratives that are not testable or necessarily accurate. The value of these narratives depends on a common declaration of faith in their value by those who share them. In inscribing sites on the World Heritage List, unesco does take into account what people value – after all, sites are nominated by local communities and by state members – but in assessing nominations for natural sites inscription, social and cultural dynamics take a backseat to geological and biological matters. In fact, article 2 of unesco ’s Convention Concerning the Protection of the World Cultural and Natural Heritage (1972) considers natural heritage to consist of the following:

· · ·

natural features consisting of physical and biological formations or groups of such formations, which are of outstanding universal value from the aesthetic or scientific point of view; geological and physiographical formations and precisely delineated areas which constitute the habitat of threatened species of animals and plants of outstanding universal value from the point of view of science or conservation; natural sites or precisely delineated natural areas of outstanding universal value from the point of view of science, conservation or natural beauty.

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From this classification, it is easy to see that there is very little to no concern with the role that human inhabitants play in these sites. There is little to no concern with the memories that they share about these places, with what they recall about their communities’ past lives in these lands, or with the stories that they tell and the values that they pass on about their relations with these environments. In short, there is very little to no heritage at all in this distorted view of natural heritage, and this is a direct outcome of the separation between nature and culture. From a kincentric ecological point of view, culture is inseparable from the land that bestowed it life. Memories, stories, and relations are rooted in the land. Ecology therefore blends with culture, and it is something that should be intended as a way of life. As McGregor (2004, 78) puts it, this knowledge becomes much more than knowledge about how to live on a landscape; rather, it is the living of that continuously unfolding life. From this perspective, the environment is a relational entity, Ingold (2000, 20) argues, in that it is “relative to the being whose environment it is.” No organism, either human or animal, can exist without an environment. We cannot think of an environment without taking into account the organisms that inhabit it. Along these lines, it makes no sense to think of a natural heritage site without considering the multiple ways that all of its inhabitants – human and nonhuman – are entangled in a meshwork. Ingold writes that “the world can exist as nature only for a being that does not belong there, and that can look upon it, in the manner of the detached scientist, from such a safe distance that it is easy to connive in the illusion that it is unaffected by his presence” (20). In unesco ’s discourse, natural World Heritage sites exist as natural sites only for distant scientists and bureaucrats who are able to turn a blind eye and ear to the countless stories of such places. By defining heritage as natural, unesco constructs places like Gros Morne as external to both humanity and history itself, “as though the natural world provided an enduring backdrop to the conduct of human affairs” (20). We propose the concept of ecological heritage not only to move beyond the distinction between cultural and natural heritage but also to move beyond the category of a mixed heritage. To be inscribed on the World Heritage List as a mixed site, an area has to feature at least one of the criteria for inscription as cultural heritage and at least one of the criteria for inscription as natural heritage. That a mixed

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site may be a bit of both does not contradict the notion that culture and nature are separate and meet different criteria of significance but simply reinforces it. In other words, a mixed site has a bit of this and a bit of that, but “this” and “that” remain distinct at the end of the day. Ecological heritage, as we view it, more inclusively refers to heritage that is culturally and naturally significant since culture and nature cannot be separated, since heritage itself cannot exist without the social and cultural relations that give it form, and since these relations cannot be divided from the lands where they originate. Our notion of ecological heritage highlights the continuous coming into being of our environments and our heritage as well as the way that inhabitants and their places mutually shape each other. In sum, the concept of ecological heritage is meant to highlight how memories, related through stories, are entangled with particular places. Following Indigenous Knowledges and their relational underpinnings (see Berkes 2011; Cajete 2000; and Watts 2013), the concept of ecological heritage stresses how life is immanent in the land – in the relations among people, animals, things, spirits, stories, and places. Rather than creating dichotomies, such as between nature and culture, a relational worldview treats ecological heritage as a lifeworld “woven from the countless lifelines of its manifold human and non-human constituents as they thread their ways through the tangle of relationships in which they are comprehensively enmeshed” (Ingold 2011, 141). Ecological heritage, better than the notion of natural or cultural heritage, would more easily allow people to recognize their place in the land that they call home rather than prompting them to think of themselves as outsiders to nature who can examine it from a distance.

Interlude: Fog

The word could be “toot,” but that’s not quite right. It’s more of a “thud,” only higher. It’s an empty sound that seems to echo through its own sinister chamber and then reverberate in an airtight metal canister. Whatever it is, it’s not animal, not atmospheric, and definitely human-made. It comes from over there. Maybe. Or maybe the other side. We turn around, looking at the road for clues. We see nothing in the soggy white mist. The Cape Race Lighthouse reveals its foghorn minutes later once we reach the compound, becoming unravelled to our eyes with only a few metres to spare. There is sea below us, underneath cliffs whose edges become apparent when it’s almost too late. Caution signs alert us to the obvious, as the thud-like toot persists, its rhythmic refrain calming enough to be almost soothing. It’s July, but summer is enveloped in the white, dense moisture. Solitary flowers growing out of silvery ponds stare at their still reflections in the glassy water, looking slumberous, desaturated of colour and vibrance. Even the peat around us seems to have lost its green to the white of the air. Only distant waves and seagulls are patently awake – their sounds reverberating the few signs of sensible life in the turbid white darkness. Wildness isn’t supposed to be like this. Wildness roars. Wildness startles. Wildness enlivens everything around it, striking a lifeworld with its vitalist power. Wildness isn’t supposed to put you to sleep. It isn’t meant to blind you to the lifeworld. Wildness doesn’t speak through deafening foghorn thuds, toots, and pings. And yet. Tony took us out to Long Beach for a walk yesterday. It was a day like this. It was us, him, the waves, and the seagulls. He told us that

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Mistaken Point got its name from a navigational error. You can guess what caused it. In the fog, he pointed out to the seas, as angry yesterday as they are today. He recounted stories of mariners who never returned, lifeless bodies that have never been found, swallowed by the waters of both sea and air. It’s foggy nearly two days out of three here, he told us. “But I don’t mind,” he said. “You get used to it, like everything else.” Fog isn’t poetical. Its heart doesn’t beat like thunder. Its spirit isn’t alive like autumn wind. Its radiance isn’t as bright as a summer sky. Its mute voice speaks no words other than the cries of trash birds and the thrashing of waves. Fog is more like a blank page that stares into your mind, waiting for you to fill it with something, with anything. Fog is like an empty canvas, a limitless potential, a chance for your imagination to run free and then get lost. That is the wildness of fog. Fog is nothingness itself. Tony told us about the creatures that dwell in these verdant tundras. He told us stories of fairies who play tricks on those who live here. He told us about a woman who was surrounded by strange children out on a field. He told us that they were no one’s children. He told us many stories like that. And then there are the stories of shipwrecks. The stories of lost souls who still inhabit these cold waters, waiting to be recovered, waiting to be remembered. And then there are the stories of fossils. The stories of petrified fish who still inhabit these cold rocks waiting to be recognized, waiting to be remembered. They, too, are in the fog, together with the seafarers on the lookout for more mistaken points, together with the cries of seagulls and the laments of fog horns. But you won’t see them in the absence of colour. Just like you won’t see the fairies, the extinct fish, or the human lives shattered by the sea. You won’t see them, but you will know that they can live on a blank page. Fog’s wildness lives in its vital energy to make you daydream. It’s a soporific vitality, drenched in a humid torpor. A blinding vitality that will frighten you because of what you can’t see and because of what you think you see. A still vitality that will invite you to move about, only to step closer to a cliff’s edge. Fog’s wildness isn’t ferocious, sublime, or revealing of worldly ecologies; it’s trickster-like, haunting, pregnant with other-worldly possibilities. A few years ago, we are told, a crew from a Japanese television network came here to film a documentary about fog. When they

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arrived, the skies opened up and the fog lifted. It didn’t come back until the crew gave up and returned home empty-handed. It’s as if the fog didn’t want to be seen. It’s as if it wanted to tell us that it, itself, does not matter. What matters, it wanted to say, is what we can’t see, what we can imagine within it.

4

Entanglement

In early 2017, sixteen bison raised in captivity in Elk Island National Park, Alberta, were taken to an enclosed pasture in Panther Valley inside Banff National Park. They spent about two years there under human care and surveillance, getting accustomed to living outside of captivity while giving birth to ten calves. On 29 July 2018, the bison were finally let go from their “soft-release” pasture in Panther Valley and allowed to roam freely within a zone of 1,200 square kilometres in Banff National Park. This historic event was made possible by the years of hard work and cooperation of the Ktunaxa, Blackfoot, Nakoda, Cree, Métis, and Dene First Nations, nongovernmental organizations like Bison Belong, the Yellowstone to Yukon Initiative, dozens of local businesses, and Parks Canada – which alone invested $6.4 million in the five-year project. A few hundred kilometres south in Alberta, a collaboration similar in spirit has resulted in improved well-being for wildlife since 2009. The Waterton Biosphere Reserve’s Carnivores and Communities Program, spearheaded under the aegis of the Man and the Biosphere Programme, was initiated in and around Waterton Lakes National Park, part of the broader Waterton-Glacier International Peace Park, a unesco World Heritage site, in order to mitigate and prevent conflicts between people – especially farmers and ranchers – and wolves, cougars, black bears, and grizzly bears. Following a 2009 survey where a majority of residents indicated that they were willing to share their lands with carnivores, the Waterton Biosphere Reserve began to implement initiatives intended to improve the way that humans and wildlife can coexist – a program that has led to fewer

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animals getting relocated or killed after problematic encounters with humans and to fewer such encounters overall. In this chapter, we ask ourselves how humans and wildlife can better coexist. We frame the issue of coexistence not as an issue of tolerance but as one of relationality. Our relational and vitalist perspective on wildness leads us to believe that humans and nonhumans can be alive together, flourishing within an affective ecology. An affective ecology, as discussed below, is a realm of ecological relationships where members of multiple species have the capacity to be affected by others and have the capacity to affect them. Vitality is central in affective ecologies as it emerges relationally. By embracing an affective ecology, what we are advancing here is the notion that humans and animals – as well as anything else inhabiting the land – are “alive in their complex interrelationships, entanglements, and propensities for open-ended change” (Bennett 2010, 11). In this sense, coexistence is something that we can view not as a compromise but as a relational condition of life itself. As we discuss in greater depth later, this is an affective ecological perspective that allows us to view life not as a property of separate beings but as something emerging in the web of relationships among all living things. As Ruddick (2010, 2017) points out, this perspective forces us to attend to how our coexistence enhances the mutual thriving of multiple species. For species to become entangled with one another in mutually thriving kinship rather than merely coexisting, there needs to be a foundation of care (Hinchliffe 2008) that pushes each of us “to openness to being transformed by the world” (Singh 2018, 2). In the pages that follow, we draw from interviews conducted in Banff National Park and Waterton Lakes National Park. Through these interviews, we learned about the growing respect given to bison and bears, in sharp contrast with a not-so-distant past characterized by domination and violence. But through these interviews, we also came to terms with a major limitation of our fieldwork (and just about anyone else’s fieldwork for that matter). As insightful as people were, we realized how helpful it would have been if we could have learned from animals’ perspectives as well. We regretted that we could not spend time with wildlife, observe them in their lands, and speak with them. We wondered how they felt about this wave of social change and what they would tell us if they could talk. Intrigued by this possibility, we speculate on what their voices might sound like and what they might teach us. Based on what we learned about them from people, we present two ethnographic stories about

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bison and grizzly bears, as told by a bison named Otis and a grizzly named Ursula. Drawn entirely from our fieldwork, these two stories are factual in content yet fictional in form. They are inferential, potential, and “subjunctive” (see Vannini 2015).

Otis was a middle-aged male bison who, at eleven years old, looked more like eight or nine. Somewhat scruffy for someone raised in captivity, he was strong and healthy, about six feet tall, and pushing upward of 1,700 pounds. We had been introduced the day before by a Parks Canada staff, Steve, who thought that Otis’s perspective would be of great value to our research. Because we don’t speak the language of American Plains bison, Steve offered to come with us to translate the interview. We met with Otis on a late January morning in a remote snowfield inside Banff National Park, Alberta. Even though Otis’s grunting, snoring, and sneezing-like sounds might have felt unsophisticated to a nondiscerning ear, after just a few minutes of speaking, it became clear that he was remarkably articulate and immensely knowledgeable. Perhaps somewhat cantankerous at times but always righteous, Otis spoke about the local powers-that-be with a tone of disdain, without ever failing to be polite toward us. Truth be told, he had good reasons to be resentful. Otis had lived most of his life in captivity. His ancestors, he told us through Steve, had been corralled and exterminated “without ceremony, without a thank you, without being given due respect.” We could tell that all of these injustices had left deep wounds in him, deeper than he was willing to reveal to us. He explained that captivity had caused him to nearly forget where he came from and who he truly was. When we asked him if he would ever be able to forgive, he told us that he “couldn’t hold a grudge for long,” sounding almost hopeful for the future. “I am here now, at last, where I have long wanted to be,” he added, “I can’t blame these people for the past, people like Steve. It is not their fault. They are the ones who want to see me roam free again. They trust me enough to let me go.” Although Otis made it clear that he spoke for himself, his story is best understood in the broader context of a species-wide history. Otis’s story begins in a place that we humans call Elk Island National Park, a little over 50 kilometres east of Edmonton, Alberta.

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Elk Island is known as a place where people can enjoy snowshoeing, hiking, and camping. Otis camped there for most of his life, too, but as a refugee. It is where his parents were born and his grandparents and great-grandparents before them. “My family, we are survivors of –.” He paused momentarily as he told the story, his words failing him. Steve and Otis went back and forth for a few seconds, struggling to look for, and translate, the right word. “I think he means ‘genocide,’” Steve explained matter-of-factly. We started walking together around the snowy field as Otis picked up his story again. “I don’t need to remind you of the millions of lives that ended in blood – the blood still soaking the earth that you now claim to be yours. If you ever wondered about us, whether we survived, I am your answer.” The genocide – that is, the extermination of bison from the North American continent – fortunately was never completed. A small herd of bison was given a chance at survival, albeit in captivity, in Montana. In the early 1900s, the Canadian government purchased some bison from that Montana reserve and brought them up to Elk Island by train. The bison were kept in Elk Island mostly disease-free and cattle-gene-free. Healthy and safe, yes, but confined inside a fence. Over the past century, 2,500 of the offspring of the early refugees were then taken from Elk Island and shipped all over the world: Russia, the United States, and Banff National Park. The bison served as tokens of a nearly extinct species, living reminders of the violence generated by expansion and colonization. “They’ve called us pure and wild, and that has given them the licence to contain us and ship us left and right. Wild in name only,” Otis laconically observed. Otis’s life, and that of his on-again, off-again partner, Brutus (it is a little-known fact that more than half of male bison’s sexual activity takes place with other males), changed forever in 2017. “One morning, we were taken. Twelve females and four males. Brutus and I were put into a cage dangling from a giant, loud bird with spinning wings. All we were told was that they were taking us to a place you people call Banff National Park, an area named Panther Valley.” Otis had never heard of Panther Valley, but Brutus had. His direct ancestors had lived there before the genocide and had passed some of their stories down to his grandparents. Although Otis and Brutus are members of a Plains species, their ancestors belonged in these mountains. “Brutus told me that between 1897 and 1997, some of our kin were kept in a paddock in these parts. In 1997, your people decided

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we could roam a bit on our own. Twenty years went by. My family doubted things would ever change. And now, hopefully, they have.” In 2014, the Buffalo Treaty, which stipulated that there should be land for bison to roam, was signed by eight First Nations: the Blackfeet Nation, the Blood Tribe, the Siksika Nation, the Piikani Nation, the Assiniboine and Gros Ventre Tribes of Fort Belknap Indian Reservation, the Assiniboine and Sioux Tribes of Fort Peck Indian Reservation, the Salish and Kootenai Tribes of the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Indian Reservation, and the Tsuu T’ina Nation. Following the treaty, the First Nations worked with Parks Canada, Bison Belong, and the Yellowstone to Yukon Initiative in order to take the next steps necessary to reintroduce bison to Banff National Park. But in a way, it is almost as if the bison had never left, as Marie-Eve Marchand of Bison Belong told us in an interview. There are bison everywhere in Banff, whether in photographs, paintings, sculptures, plush toys, skulls, or nominal references. In symbols and spirit, the bison have always belonged to this place. Otis might have seemed withdrawn and resentful at first, but as the day went on, his stories revealed him to be a deeply social creature strongly attached to his promised land. Communicating with him wasn’t always easy. Not only was it difficult for Steve to translate his thoughts and feelings into English, but at times it was also challenging for us to ask proper questions. One of our least effective questions, asked toward the end of the interview, was whether all bison were as sensitive about this issue as Otis was. “I don’t mean to be rude, but you guys are social scientists, right?” he answered, trying to hide his indignation. “So have you ever found one issue that all members of your species feel equally sensitive about?” We blushed with embarrassment. Fortunately, he didn’t seem offended and we moved on. But just a few minutes later, Steve received an urgent call asking him to go back to town, and we had to bid Otis farewell. As our helicopter took off, he looked up and sort of nodded at us, in what appeared to be a genuine salute. Then he slipped into the thick bush. For two years before the bison’s final release in July 2018, human minders watched them give birth and raise their young around Panther Valley. Humans made sure that bison were able to live off the land. They also built and maintained underpasses and bridges where bison could cross the highway. They installed cameras to observe whether bison were able to cross the road, and they sent

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in drones to monitor their movements. “They’ve been tagging us, tracking us, and policing our borders,” Otis told us moments before we departed. “They’re calling the day they will finally let us free a historic, ecological, and cultural triumph. For me, it will feel like getting out on parole after a century of detention.”

Grizzly bears have a reputation for ferocity, and it was not without trepidation that we had resolved to schedule an interview with Ursula, a twenty-two-year-old female bear who lived inside Waterton Lakes National Park in southern Alberta. It was early springtime and Ursula had been on a hibernation diet for some time. Since she didn’t have a lot of energy, we agreed to meet near her den, not too far from the property lines of a rancher named Larry we had interviewed in the area. Larry had put us in touch with Ursula a few days prior to our scheduled meeting, and since he spoke the ursine language, he had agreed to translate. But life had other plans. On her way to our meeting, while crossing Highway 2, Ursula had been hit by a speeding truck. Fortunately, she had gotten away with just a broken paw and a few scratches, and after some rearranging of our schedule, we managed to meet up the following day in the triage area of a nearby veterinary hospital. Ursula was tall and confident-looking and had a hump on her back that was larger than normal. Although clearly worn out by the ordeal, she occasionally growled in an aggressive tone that seemed in sharp contrast to her otherwise gentle demeanour. She opened the interview by telling us that we smelled different from the people she had met before, to which we replied that we came from a small island on the West Coast. She then asked us, through a peeved-sounding series of snorts, “Did you hear that I’ve been accused of killing two cows?” We admitted that we had and told her that one of the reasons we wanted to speak with her was to find out her side of the story. “Well, I didn’t do nothing,” she snapped. Larry intervened, “They’re just here to get your perspective, Ursula.” Larry’s reassurance seemed to calm her down right away, and the conversation resumed. “Coyotes, wolves, and all kinds of punks ’round here do more damage in a friggin’ month than all bears combined do in a year,” she said, “but guess what? We always get the blame.

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We get no goddamn respect!” We sensed that it was time to shift the conversation, at least momentarily. “Do you like living around here, Ursula?” She smiled softly, appearing to calm down. “I do. I love hiking. I go look for berries, leaves, fish, all kinds of good stuff, you know what I’m saying? It sucks that because of this stupid broken paw I’m not going to be able to hike for a while. Actually, could you pass me that groundhog? I can’t reach over there. I’m starving.” As the interview went on, Ursula gradually became more loquacious and relaxed, but she still sounded strong-minded and self-assured. “You know, I wish you people started portraying grizzly bears as great hikers. Like adventurers or something, you know. I want grizzlies to be known as awesome explorers of the land, not like mean assassins.” We told her that we liked this thought. Ursula had hiked everywhere in the area: around the Rockies, deep into Montana and back across the Alberta border, all the way around Chief Mountain and the Milk River Ridge, and then far into southeastern British Columbia. “Have you guys spent a lot of time inside Waterton Lakes National Park?” she asked. We admitted that we hadn’t. The weather and our limited time had prevented us from exploring as much as we would have liked. “You really should,” she replied. “You’d love it. I bet ya there ain’t a single patch of forest in Waterton Lakes National Park that I haven’t walked to. It’s a beautiful land. In the summer I could show you around if you want.” A few years before, during a hike, Ursula and her two cubs had run into a man we, too, had met: Charlie Russell. She hadn’t seen him in some time, but she seemed to have a very fond memory of him. “Charlie could tell you some amazing stories about us,” Ursula said. “He told me that when he lived in eastern Russia, he walked with the local bears almost every day. Those Russian bears, they loved that. Charlie’d tell you so many stories about that. The bears would go by his cabin to invite him out for a hike. Bears have always been great walkers, you know? We used to hike all over the Prairies. Then people came and jammed us into the forests and the mountains. People used to shoot at us when we got too close.” Fortunately, Ursula confided, things have gotten better around these parts. “Now, there is more respect.” In fact, in 2009, local farmers got together and started the Carnivores and Communities Program. All around Waterton Lakes National Park, farmers are now sharing tools and resources to keep bears from getting into grain containers, which is what would often get them into trouble. Farmers have also

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learned to be more careful when it comes to deadstock removal and composting, again to avoid attracting bears. Recently, they have also put in place a system for ranchers to get compensated when wild carnivores go after their livestock. The compensation system is not perfect, but it’s something. “One morning, a cow around here was found dead with a broken neck,” Ursula recounted as the vet checked on her paw. “Her body was split open like a banana peel, just the way some bears do it. But the conservation officer said he couldn’t prove a bear was the killer. ‘Bears don’t break necks,’ he said. The next morning another cow was found dead. Her body was opened up like a banana peel. But her tail was missing. ‘Bears don’t take tails,’ the conservation officer said. He didn’t have the proof to say that a bear was to blame. He didn’t jump to conclusions. So, you know, it’s a good sign. Things are changing a bit. People don’t jump down our throats as quickly as they used to.” Cohabitation is difficult, however, and it has its risks. The boundaries of Waterton Lakes National Park are very fuzzy. When the park was designed, park founders wanted visitors to be unsure where it started and where it ended. And now borders have blurred even more, as the whole region has become part of the Waterton Biosphere Reserve. “Long story short,” Ursula concluded, “sometimes you think you can run freely, and then you get hit by a friggin’ truck.” Ursula had raised her cubs alone for nearly four years. They were now off on their own, and she admitted that she enjoyed having more time to go hiking. We told her that we wished she felt better so that we could walk together and talk some more. She smiled, “Y’all come back in the summer and I’ll show you some nice places.” We agreed to do that. Because the vet had recommended a short visit, we decided to leave Ursula alone to get some sleep. Three months later, our attempts to reach Ursula failed. Some more time went by, and we tried again. That was when we found out that she had been involved in another road accident and had passed away. When we met her, Ursula had told us that she wanted humans to respect bears. “You people fear us,” she said forcefully, “but you don’t respect us. If you thought of us as great explorers, not killers, maybe your attitude would change. You should treat us like you want others to treat you. You should take the time to learn about us, to understand us. You should try to walk a mile in our shoes.” We’ll always remember Ursula as the greatest hiker we’d ever met.

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m a k in g e t h o - e t h n ographi c fables Bears and bison do not speak English with such gusto, and we owe them an apology for putting words in their mouths in the way that we have. Making animals speak could be viewed as a naive anthropomorphic act more fitting for a fable or children’s literature than for scholarly research. However, in writing about these two animals the way that we have – just as if we were describing ethnographic encounters with humans – we have tried to cultivate an “affective identification” (Castellano 2018, 176) with the singular experiences of two distinct lives. These stories are intended to serve as a counternarrative to the typical framing of animals as belonging to an indistinct species population that can be spoken about in general terms (Castellano 2018). Our representational choice here is thus an intentional strategic device – a rhetorical ethnographic tool meant to blur the distinction between people and wildlife. So, for a moment, let us suspend disbelief and entertain the thought that perhaps the issue is not that animals cannot speak but that many of us humans are unable to attune themselves to animals’ experience. Giving them a voice is therefore done here not in an anthropomorphic manner but in a subjunctive and nonrepresentational way intended to animate their actions, experiences, and thoughts in order to push us humans to think with animals (see Daston and Mitman 2005). We might even go further and say that animals can speak, in fact, but that not every human can listen. The Cree people of eastern James Bay, for example, teach us that animals communicate regularly and clearly with their hunters but only insofar as their relationships are based on respect and trust (Berkes 2012; Lemelin et al. 2010). Inuit and Blackfoot people have similar knowledge and obligations to fulfill toward animals (Little Bear 2012; Schmidt and Dowsley 2010). And so do countless other Indigenous people around Canada and the world. These worldviews teach us that animals have spirits and are intelligent, sentient, and aware of people’s behaviour toward them, as their stories regularly reveal. Western human exceptionalism differs, however, and denies animals’ agency and capacity to communicate in order to legitimize their subjugation to human will. So, although giving animals a human-like language and voice might at times be seen as an anthropocentric act, denying them the possibility of a meaningful voice that can be perceived by humans can be

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an undeniably disrespectful act that results in animal disconnection and, ultimately and potentially, in exploitation. What we learned from First Nations Elders and Knowledge Keepers at the locations of our fieldwork is in line with scholars working in the field of multispecies research. Like Indigenous ontologies, multispecies theory understands nonhuman animals as communicative, sentient, and intelligent. As of late, multispecies (Kirksey and Helmreich 2010) and lively ethnographies (van Dooren and Bird Rose 2016) have begun to blend ethnographic and ethological methods in order to shed light on the situated experiences of animals and their multiple entanglements with humans (for recent reviews, see Buller 2015; and Lorimer, Hodgetts, and Barua 2019). Despret (2016) argues that animals could share with us many interesting and insightful stories about our shared lifeworlds if only we learned to ask the right questions. Throughout her book – the result of years of fieldwork and extensive reviews of multidisciplinary bodies of literature on animal behaviour and human-animal encounters – Despret listens to animals’ perspectives about issues of concern both to them and to us. Despret’s narratives are unique “scientific fables,” Latour (2016, vii) says in the book’s foreword, that offer “true ways of understanding how difficult it is to figure out what animals are up to.” Inspired by Despret’s approach, we have opened this chapter with two fables, which one might be tempted to call etho-ethnographic, where ethos- refers to animals and ethnos- refers to people. Ethos, however, means something else, too. As Geertz (1973, 136–7) articulates, “A people’s ethos is the tone, character, and quality of their life, its moral and aesthetic style and mood; it is the underlying attitude toward themselves and their world that life reflects.” Yet ethos is not something that characterizes only humans. Lively, more-thanhuman ethnographies aim to be attentive to animals’ ethos as well in order to portray their lifeworlds with the same richness and respect owed to human individuals (van Dooren and Bird Rose 2016). Our etho-ethnographic fables therefore portray human and nonhuman animal entanglements from the perspective of animal interviewees able to teach us about more-than-human feelings, thoughts, and words. Such etho-ethnographic fables are experiments through which we attempt to attune ourselves to animals’ ontological perspectives and experiences (see Blue 2016; Brigstocke and Noorani 2016). They are experimental narratives that transcend the neutral

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and dispassionate limitations of anonymous bodies of data about animals (Braverman 2015; Buller 2015; Despret 2016). The form of these fables and the ways that animals speak and reveal their character is something that we can treat not as fictional but as subjunctive in mood. The subjunctive mood is an “as if” rhetorical device that blends fiction and reality in order to generate a sense of possibility meant to facilitate affective identification. The subjunctive mood is potential, hypothetical, and conditional but not false. It is intended to animate, not to invent, a pluriverse of knowledges. And in this case, it is meant to reveal voices and characters of animals as “embodied individuals living their lives entangled with humans and their own wider environment” (N. Taylor 2012, 40). The use of the subjective mood is a nonrepresentational strategy “directed at making ethnographic representation less concerned with faithfully and detachedly reporting facts, experiences, actions, and situations, and more interested instead in making them come to life, in allowing them to take new and unpredicted meanings, in violating expectations” (Vannini 2015, 119). In this sense, we do not claim to speak on behalf of animals, pretending that we somehow have the authority to do so or that we have found the ultimate way to listen to them. Through our subjunctive presentation of the fables, it is as if the animals are speaking for themselves, and so the question is no longer whether we have the representative authority to speak of them but whether we are open to the possibility of listening. Our style in this chapter is inspired by the development of multispecies ethnography (see Kirksey and Helmreich 2010; Kohn 2013; Ogden, Hall, and Tanita 2013; and van Dooren, Kirksey, and Münster 2016). Multispecies ethnography is “ethnographic research and writing that is attuned to life’s emergence within a shifting assemblage of agentive beings” (Ogden, Hall, and Tanita 2013, 6). Within multispecies ethnography, more-than-human beings are intended as a multiplicity of organisms in relation with one another, relations through which life as a whole is animated. Unbounded by the notion of organic bodies or by human-animal boundaries, multispecies ethnographers aim to reconsider the notions of nature and society, thus decentring the role of humans and opening the doors to alternate ontologies and epistemologies, as well as to novel styles of knowledge representation (Ogden, Hall, and Tanita 2013; van Dooren, Kirksey, and Münster 2016). In this way, multispecies ethnography becomes less about ethnos and more about a diffused

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more-than-human corporeality and a transspecies ethos that emerges through a kinship among humans, animals, and the plant world. This is a kinship that is “materially real, partially knowable, multicultured and multinatured, magical, and emergent through the contingent relations of multiple beings and entities” (Ogden, Hall, and Tanita 2013, 6). Countless scholars across a wide variety of fields have fruitfully attempted to re-envision human-animal relations from a post-human perspective (see Bird Rose 2012; Despret 2016; Heise, Christensen, and Niemann 2017; Lorimer 2015; and Philo and Wilbert 2000), and we are not so ambitious as to believe that we could significantly update this body of scholarship in a single chapter. Instead, we hope to build on some of that scholarship in order to envision wild life and wildness in a different way, one that is based on care and respect rather than on fear and mistrust.

f ro m d if f id e n c e to reci proci ty During our time in Banff, we were fortunate enough to be invited to a gathering of seven members of the Stoney Nakoda Nation, an event organized for us by Bill Snow – the nation’s consultation manager. We were told that if we wanted to understand human-wildlife relations, there was a lot that we could learn from the park’s history. Like many other protected areas in North America and around the world, Banff National Park was initially built on a model of exclusion. As tourists began to arrive at the turn of the twentieth century in the newly formed park, traditional inhabitants of the region were barred from hunting and excluded from areas that they had long occupied. Exclusion was not motivated by the need to safeguard ecological integrity. Instead, game conservation was the key focus. Wildlife conservation was simply intended as a means to promote and safeguard the economic viability of the nascent tourist industry, at the centre of which were practices like big game hunting and fishing (Binnema and Niemi 2006). But whereas big game hunters were believed to bring value to the region, First Nations hunters were not. In the area, First Nations and bison are known to be “beings with simultaneously parallel and entangled biographies” (Kirksey and Helmreich 2010, 552). In fact, following the bison’s exit, the “Stoneys were run out of Banff back in the early 1900s,” Bill told us. By then, the bison had already become so scarce that the Stoney Nakoda and

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other nations living in the area were practically unable to subsist on them (see Locke 2016). With the bison all but destroyed, it had become easy for the provincial and federal governments of the day to confine the Stoney and the other Treaty 7 Nations on reserves. The combined objective of annihilating the wildness of bison and Indigenous peoples had thus been achieved. “I am not at all sorry that this has happened,” Canada’s prime minister at the time, John A. McDonald, commented in the House of Commons, “so long as there was a hope that buffalo would come into the country, there was no means of inducing the Indians to settle down on their reserves.” Decades passed and attitudes changed. For the past decade or so, First Nations and conservation organizations like Bison Belong have been successful in bringing bison back to Banff National Park. This was a symbolic achievement but also a very important ecological success. Wild bison, Bill explained to us, perform very important functions on the landscape: “They are very important keystone species, and they have to have room to do all of those functions that they do on landscapes because they help wildlife, birds, reptiles, ungulates, other predators, other forms of life out there. So they contribute so much not only to the ecosystem but to other forms of wildlife. When they come back to an area, they really make a big impact.” In addition, they perform an essential affective role in the psychological, social, and cultural health of many Indigenous groups. “We truly honour the bison,” Charles explained, echoing Bill, “because it saved us. Way back, it fed us. We didn’t go hungry. We relied on the bison, and when they signed the treaty, after there were restrictions about hunting bison. But still to this day, we still rely on the bison spiritually. We pray and we rely on the buffalo spirit.” Although the bison of Elk Island had lived a life in captivity and a state of partial domestication – as our fable revealed – they were now finally about to change Banff National Park. As Hobson Haggerty and colleagues (2018) have argued, the bison is not just a keystone species in relation to the functioning of an ecosystem but also a bona fide cultural keystone species (see also Garibaldi and Turner 2004). In light of the bison’s importance, bison de-domestication (see Klaver et al. 2002) can result in restoring lifeways central to the survival of both animals and humans. First Nations teach us that bison and humans are related through an ancestral heritage that does not make classificatory distinctions between them and “in this relational cosmology buffalo can communicate, act and relate with

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human beings” (Hobson Haggerty et al. 2018, 23). Given their interconnectedness, “it stands to reason that experiences that enhance and express awareness of human-buffalo relationality are important to building and sustaining individual and community health” (23). To borrow a concept from Anna Tsing (2015), bison and people can be seen as “mutually flourishing” companions. In mutually flourishing companionship, there is an important feeling of reciprocity, as “the mental and physical health benefits provided to humans are complemented by benefits to the buffalo relatives” (Hobson Haggerty et al. 2018, 23). Reciprocity is not part of the dominant Western view of the relationship between humans and wildlife. Reciprocity, however, is important for the Stoney Nakoda. “In a wild forest, for our people, there’s nothing wild or dangerous,” Chris explained to us during the Banff gathering. “It’s a peaceful environment where our people can be at peace with the animals, especially the protectors, the grizzly, the wolf. You go in there with respect and then nature respects you.”

A year after our journey to Banff, we met the man Ursula spoke about. Born in 1941, Charlie Russell grew up near Waterton Lakes National Park. As a young man, he became involved in helping out his father, Andy Russell, with his adventure business. Together, they guided big-game hunters on bear-searching expeditions. But after a while, Charlie realized that he was more interested in the bears than he was in the hunters, and eventually, together with his dad and brothers, he started making documentary films about grizzlies. Despite a lack of formal training in ethology, Charlie became widely recognized around the world as an expert in grizzly behaviour. Through his books, articles, videos, photography, and presentations, Charlie shared with countless audiences his remarkable stories of living thirteen years among the grizzly bears of Kamchatka. In one of the most iconic images from his sojourn in eastern Russia, Charlie and a giant grizzly are photographed sitting calmly and tired-looking next to one another by a trail side as they catch their breath and rest for a few minutes after a long hike together. Bears are great walking companions, Charlie revealed. “Grizzly bears, I thought, were incredibly misunderstood, animals,” Charlie told us as he began to explain his fascination with

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them. People “tend to villainize grizzly bears to justify killing them.” For many years after settling on the Prairies and in the foothills of the Rockies, many farmers and ranchers would shoot problem bears without any regard for their life. Charlie knew this firsthand; he was a rancher, too, for a long period of his life. “But I wasn’t a particularly good rancher,” he noted with a smile. “I just wanted the bears to be what they wanted to be on the land, to see if they were such a problem to ranching. So, I invited the bears to feel at home on my land, be one with my cows, as I wanted to see what would happen. And nothing happened! It’s not as though they don’t kill cattle. They do, but not very many do.” Charlie’s ranching experiences pushed him to become active in reimagining conservation in and around Waterton Lakes Park. In the 1970s, together with a diverse group of local people, he lobbied for the formation of what was then a brand-new concept in conservation: a biosphere reserve. In 1979, unesco recognized the region as a biosphere reserve (sixteen years before it was inscribed on the World Heritage List), acknowledging the value of the many local initiatives to balance biodiversity conservation and sustainable human use of the land. As a biosphere reserve, the region was then mapped into three distinct zones: the core conservation area, the buffer zone, and a transition zone called “area of cooperation.” All zones are voluntary cooperative areas dependent on the good will of their residents. Charlie, who as a rancher had learned ways to practise this good will by coexisting with bears, told us that cooperation and coexistence boiled down to a simple concern: “I just wanted to learn what would happen if bears were treated with respect, if we built trust with them. There were bears that were totally amazing. I watched them wander through cattle, and the cattle didn’t even glance at them ... I learned very quickly what I suspected from the start: you get what you give. I had learned that with horses and cattle. If you want to get along with these animals, you treat them the way you like to be treated. It’s that golden rule thing.” Reciprocity, Charlie explained, was essential to establishing good relations. There was nothing magic about dealing with wild animals, even wild animals believed to be unpredictable and dangerous like bears. What coexisting required was respect and trust in one another. Cooperation is essential, Charlie remarked. But cooperation is still largely uncommon around the world. “Man dominates everything,” he observed laconically. “Domestication is about dominating nature.

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You take an animal and develop it into an animal that is more useful to you. Domestication is about working for the establishment.” There is no autonomy in the life of a domesticated animal. As a result, Charlie observed, “we’ve lost touch with what wild is because if you are trying to conquer and dominate, then you don’t want wildness creeping back in. So you control it. But wildness is undomesticated. It is unmanaged by man.” His experience is a reminder of what you get when you grant respect to a species.

f ro m s t r a n g e n e s s to ki ns hi p From a Western perspective, wildlife is comprised of animals that are separate, removed, and inherently different from the sphere of human life (Reder 2012). Wild animals are dangerous and burdensome. Their wildness removes them from both humans and domesticated animals (see Buller 2004; and Van Horn and Hausdoerffer 2017). In a classification system that can be traced back to Roman law, animals are either domesticated and thus categorized as individual property or wild and therefore collective property (Oksanen and Vuorisalo 2017). And whereas in general domesticated animals live with humans in homes or on farms, wild animals live in the wilderness, removed and separated from humanity (Buller 2004). As a confirmation of this distinction, Ingold (2000, 62) argues, pastoralist societies are fundamentally distinct from hunter-gatherer society in that the former deal with domesticated animals, whereas the latter deal with wild animals that are by definition out of control. Indigenous ontologies may help us to move beyond the dominant perspective. Lakota/Dakota scholar Kim TallBear (2011) argues that there are dangers in splitting humans apart from wild animals and from other organisms. Disconnection is separation. Disconnection is the origin of domination and the possible genesis of colonial subjectification and violence (see also Bird Rose 2015; and Watts 2013). But if we realize that “human nature” in all its myriad forms “is an interspecies relationship,” as Tsing (2012, 144) eloquently puts it, then we can begin to move beyond separation and disconnection. In multispecies communities, everything is related, she tells us (see also Deloria Jr 2001). Like TallBear (2011), geographers have recently problematized the notion of wildlife, showing it to be a slippery concept (see Lorimer 2015; and Lorimer and Driessen 2016). Take, for example, the bison

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that we met earlier, Otis. Undomesticated and the genetic offspring of generations of prairie-roaming bison, Otis might be regarded as a kind of wildlife. But what are we to make of how his life thus far has been the outcome of complex manifestations of post-natural conservation science designed, planned, managed, and enforced by humans? What happens when the existence of wildlife is entangled through intense human involvement? Can we continue to speak of a clearly nondomesticated wildlife? Not so much. Wildness is indeed not only a relational achievement (Whatmore and Thorne 1998) but also something that is contingent and easily subject to change (Buller 2004; Lorimer 2015; Marris 2011). Wildlife thus emerges as a problematic concept. Relational and Indigenous ontologies offer a way out of this conundrum. For example, Métis/Otipemisiw scholar Zoe Todd (2017) writes that if we humans thought of ourselves as co-constituted with the lands that we share with nonhumans – as opposed to different and removed from them – we would learn to view ourselves as part of a kinship with all beings. “Tending to the reciprocal relationality” inherent in such kinship, Todd writes, “is integral to supporting the narrow conditions of existence in this place” (107), our shared planet. Relatedly, Rarámuri ethnobiologist Enrique Salmón (2017) teaches us that a Rarámuri worldview does not differentiate between human and nonhuman. In kincentric ecology, everything is relative and interconnected, and there is no need for categories of thought that separate wildlife from humanity. No longer strangers to each other, humans and wild animals can be seen as kin.

f ro m d o m in at io n to respect Kinship depends on respect. Respect is a simple word, but it is a complicated idea. A useful approach to understanding the value of respecting wild animals can be found among some Indigenous peoples, like the Cree. Many Cree hunters believe that animals will present themselves intentionally to be killed if the hunters have not treated animals with disrespect in the past. Disrespect may take place when hunters cause undue pain in the process of killing animals or when they fail to observe protocols specifying how to butcher the meat, dispose of the bones, or consume the flesh. Unnecessary killings, failures to share meat within a community of people who need it, and wasting animal parts are also seen as egregious displays of disrespect (Brightman 1993).

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Respect for wild animals hinges on communication and relationality, as well as on recognition of the inherent value of their wildness (Norton 1995). Respect hinges on dialogue, Ingold (2000) illustrates, as in the case of the conversation that takes place between hunter-gatherers and the wild animals that they encounter. Authentic dialogue can exist only when all parties are perceived as equal. In this sense, moral distinctions between humans and wildlife are both inappropriate and nonsensical. Thus humanity and nature, Ingold tells us, drawing upon teachings from circumpolar people, are not to be viewed as separate: “There is one world, and human beings form a rather small and insignificant part of it. Given this view of the world, everything depends on maintaining a proper balance in one’s relationship with its manifold powers” (68). In such a world, it makes little sense to think of an animal as different from humans. If animals are considered to be on par with humans as equal members of a shared lifeworld, then it is illogical to regard them as strange, or alien, or even morally different from hunters. As Ingold illustrates, respectful hunting, for instance, draws animals and people together into a shared realm of coexistence. Respect is about trust. Trust entails autonomy and dependency, argues Ingold (2000, 69–70): “To trust someone is to act with that person in mind, in the hope and expectation that she will do likewise – responding in ways favourable to you – so long as you do nothing to curb her autonomy to act otherwise.” Trust is a manifestation of relational autonomy between two or more members bounded to an agreement. When built on respect and trust, encounters between animals and humans such as hunters are then a moment in the unfolding of a continuing – even lifelong – relationship between the hunter and the animal kind. The hunter hopes that if he is good to animals, they in turn will be good to him. But by the same token, the animals have the power to withhold their surrender if any attempt is made to coerce what they are not prepared to provide. Coercion, the attempt to extract animal life by force, represents a betrayal of the trust that underwrites the willingness to give (71). As bison became confined, domesticated, and subjugated to the will of their owners, they became objects and possessions – beings incapable of acting with any degree of autonomy. As bears were hunted unceremoniously by countless ranchers throughout North America, for no offence other than approaching pastures, they became untrustworthy villains. Without recognition of one another’s

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right to live independently, without autonomy, there can be no trust and no mutual respect. Without respect, there may be wildlife but not the possibility for a wild life. Respecting the freedom of grizzly bears and rewilding bison are thus reconciliatory acts meant to re-establish the respect owed to these animals. Rewilding bison and recognizing bears’ autonomy are in this sense akin to regenerative acts that provide a way to re-establish the relations upon which a wild life and the conditions of its regeneration depend. They are undertakings that move from domination to respect, from controlling wildlife to restoring the possibility of cultivating a wild life.

f ro m w il d l if e to wi ld li fe Within the dominant view, the notion of wildlife reifies dualist human-animal fault lines and reinforces the symbolic boundaries between domesticated and wild animals. By asking what else wildlife could be, we are asking not only what ways of coexistence are open to humans and wild animals but also what wildness itself can mean in a post-natural world. Although some might be tempted to do away entirely with the notion of wildness, we believe that the recognition of wildness is essential if we wish to value animal relational autonomy. In a worldview based on reciprocity, kinship, and respect, what else could wildlife be? Could wildlife become wild life? As we discussed in chapter 2 in the context of our interview with Cliff White, there is a difference between wildlife and wild life. Wild life is not something removed from humans but something “fundamentally relational, tied inextricably to familial, social, and ecological webs” (Collard 2014, 154). The time of the Anthropocene is ripe for a re-envisioning of wildlife as wild life. “Wild beasts, whether real or virtual, seen or imagined, are coming back,” Buller (2004, 133) alerts us. Newer conceptualizations of our relations that function as clear alternatives to the received view become necessary as wildlife and humans encounter one another around the globe in novel ways. An ethic of respect must be central to the reimagined kinship between humans and wildlife. As a type of affect, respect is critical in helping us to re-envision mutually flourishing ecologies of care, trust, and reciprocity. This is not a patronizing care but a “care for others ... in the sense of being open to others, or being curious about others,” a care that is “produced with and as others” (Hinchliffe 2008, 95) through

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a type of kinship. Thinking of respect as affect, as the capacity to respect others and to be honoured by their respect for us, is an invitation to think of more-than-human kinship as an affective ecology “that is attuned to openness to being transformed by the world” (Singh 2018, 2). Affective ecologies are political entanglements that can help us to think of kinship as alive, open to change, mutually interdependent, and based on the equality of all its constituent members. As Singh (2018, 3) writes, “Thinking in terms of affective ecologies inspires and enables an ecopolitics rooted in care for the material world not as ‘impersonal nature at a distance’ but from a lived-in or kin-centric ecological perspective.” In such an ecology, Indigenous teachings remind us, respect for the personhood of all kin is of essential importance (see Wall Kimmerer 2013). An ethic of respect enables us to go beyond the mere celebration of biodiversity and to transcend visions of ecological integrity centred on combating threats or protecting endangered species that remain disconnected from us. Respect, as the enabling capacity to exercise our relational autonomy along with other species, allows us to put our energies toward reimaging a socio-ecological future based on mutually thriving coexistence and species abundance. A central aspect of our effort to give wild life respect in this chapter has been to portray animals, including their experiences and perspectives, in the same way that we regularly portray humans. This depiction employed a subjunctive tone, an “as if” rhetorical style that let us focus on a bear named Ursula and a bison named Otis. Otis and Ursula allowed us to shed light on unique, embodied individualities, which enabled us to maintain an openness to the vitality of specific lives. This strategy allowed us to stay clear of species-wide abstractions that do not respect the character, style, and ways of being – in other words, the ethos – of animals. Our etho-ethnographic fables therefore work to animate wild lives as “emergent and performative happenings, never isolated or fixed, bleeding into and coshaping one another, and yet somehow maintaining their distinctive uniqueness” (van Dooren and Bird Rose 2016, 80). Putting words into animals’ mouths might be viewed as a form of human arrogance, but stories allow nonhuman others to appear fleshy, lively, complex, visible, audible, relatable, and worthy of care and respect. Throughout this chapter, we have also argued that through an affective ecology of respect, we can rehabilitate the value of wildness,

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and thus retain the notion of wildlife, while emphasizing the centrality of the wild lives of wildlife. Like Collard (2014), we believe that wild life resides in the potential wildness of life and that the care of wild life resides in the recognition that all forms of life are sentient and living and thus entitled not to be treated as commodities and not to be captured or killed. Unlike in the received view, where wildlife is bound to remain in opposition to humanity, culture, and civilization, within a respectful affective ecology, a wild life can be re-envisioned “as a means of recognizing and supporting the autonomy and alterity of nonhumans” (154). Unlike a wildlife that is distant, removed, separated, and disconnected from both humanity and domesticated animals, a wild life is simply one that is warranted respect, trust, and a degree of freedom from human control and domination. Respect for one’s autonomy – although entangled in life-affirming kinships of all sorts – grants a wild life the opportunity for self-organization and association, as well as for “openness, possibility, a degree of choice, and self-determination” (Collard, Dempsey, and Sundberg 2015, 328). Respect for the value of a wild life entails treating more-thanhuman others as deserving of a full life lived not for the sake of ecosystem services, symbolic heritage capital, species tokenism, or scientific value. Respect for a wild life implies relating to wildlife as kin, as cultural keystone species, as autonomous beings deserving to be honoured (Cronon 1996b), as life-giving uncolonized companions (Watts 2013), and as “beings with their own familial, social, and ecological networks, their own lookouts, agendas, and needs” (Collard, Dempsey, and Sundberg 2015, 328; see also Norton 1995). In respectful affective ecologies, a wild life is autonomous but not disconnected, other but not foreign, unmanaged but not separate. It is a life where everyone has the right to be understood, to be trusted, to be thanked, and to feel at home in a shared land.

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Over the course of our research, we asked everyone who agreed to be interviewed, “What does wild mean to you?” In this chapter, we present some of the answers that we received across the country. We fully realize that such a body of data could have been ideal for a systematic and formal analysis. For example, we could have conducted a discourse analysis of people’s definitions, focusing on the terms that they chose to characterize wildness and to differentiate it from the nonwild. Alternatively, we could have generated descriptive statistics to reveal what kind of perspectives on wildness were more typical of this or that social group. All of these research avenues could have been valuable and interesting, but we decided to do something different with the “data.” We are always fond of telling our students that the word “data” is Latin for “given.” When something is given to us as researchers – who typically do not pay for data – that thing is typically a gift. A gift between strangers, such as researchers and research participants who meet for the first time, is an act of relationship building – an act based on respect and on the hope that the gesture will be somehow valuable. So we decided to treat these data as true givens, as truly valuable gifts. What that meant for us, epistemologically speaking, was simple: instead of treating data as possible ways to categorize reality, we decided to treat them as possibilities of what else we might do with realities. A gift, after all, is something new, something you did not have before, and something that can change the way that you have done things or maybe the way that you used to think about certain things. From the perspective of this “vitalist epistemology,” data cease to be tools for providing

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closure and explaining the world away and instead become openings and potentials – gifts that allow us to re-envision things and to start something new. Shawn Wilson (2008, 35) writes that if the act of doing “research doesn’t change you as a person, then you haven’t done it right.” In the following pages, we reveal how these gifts changed us and changed the way that we thought of wildness. In other words, we show how our interviewees’ thoughts and words gave life to our thoughts and our words and guided us to form relationships with places, people, and ideas. This type of exchange is, we believe, the essence of a vitalist epistemology, for it involves knowing that unfolds not as a way of predicting, controlling, or even interpreting but as a way of generating and regenerating. Thus we introduce individuals in this chapter who gifted us their ideas, and we narrate how their gifts planted the seeds of our evolving thinking. To respect the value of these gifts and appreciate them for what they are, we focus on them as descriptively as possible, as inductively as possible, without the typical interjections of theory and research literature. As we illustrate some of the answers that we received to our question, it will become clear how these gifts allowed us to begin outlining all the pieces that were eventually assembled to form this book. It will become clear, in order words, how this book came to be a collage, a collection of gifts that we now wish to give to you. At the end of the chapter, we offer a brief reflection on wildness as intensity, a crucial quality of the notion of wildness and a crucial quality underlying all the pieces that make up this book, from the intensity of vitality and exhaustion to the intensity of atmospheres, entanglements, and so on. But before we present our interviewees’ definitions, we want to outline some established definitions as a way of generating a contrast.

f o r m a l d e f in it io n s of wi lderness In Canada, “wilderness” is an officially recognized legal term for places deemed worthy of protection. Canadian law recognizes wilderness following the definition of the International Union for Conservation of Nature (iucn ) found in protected area category 1b. The primary objective of category 1b is “to protect the longterm ecological integrity of natural areas that are undisturbed by significant human activity, free of modern infrastructure and where natural forces and processes predominate, so that current and future

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generations have the opportunity to experience such areas” (iucn n.d.). Additional objectives of the iucn (n.d.) are

· · · ·

To provide for public access at levels and of a type which will maintain the wilderness qualities of the area for present and future generations; To enable indigenous communities to maintain their traditional wilderness-based lifestyle and customs, living at low density and using the available resources in ways compatible with the conservation objectives; To protect the relevant cultural and spiritual values and nonmaterial benefits to indigenous or non-indigenous populations, such as solitude, respect for sacred sites, respect for ancestors etc.; To allow for low-impact minimally invasive educational and scientific research activities, when such activities cannot be conducted outside the wilderness area.

According to the iucn (n.d.), these areas should

·

· · ·

Be free of modern infrastructure, development and industrial extractive activity, including but not limited to roads, pipelines, power lines, cell phone towers, oil and gas platforms, offshore liquefied natural gas terminals, other permanent structures, mining, hydropower development, oil and gas extraction, agriculture including intensive livestock grazing, commercial fishing, lowflying aircraft etc., preferably with highly restricted or no motorized access. Be characterized by a high degree of intactness: containing a large percentage of the original extent of the ecosystem, complete or near-complete native faunal and floral assemblages, retaining intact predator-prey systems, and including large mammals. Be of sufficient size to protect biodiversity; to maintain ecological processes and ecosystem services; to maintain ecological refugia; to buffer against the impacts of climate change; and to maintain evolutionary processes. Offer outstanding opportunities for solitude, enjoyed once the area has been reached, by simple, quiet and non-intrusive means of travel (i.e., non-motorized or highly regulated motorized access where strictly necessary and consistent with the biological objectives listed above).

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Be free of inappropriate or excessive human use or presence, which will decrease wilderness values and ultimately prevent an area from meeting the biological and cultural criteria listed above. However, human presence should not be the determining factor in deciding whether to establish a category 1b area. The key objectives are biological intactness and the absence of permanent infrastructure, extractive industries, agriculture, motorized use, and other indicators of modern or lasting technology.

In addition, the iucn (n.d.) states that wilderness areas can include “[s]omewhat disturbed areas that are capable of restoration to a wilderness state, and smaller areas that might be expanded or could play an important role in a larger wilderness protection strategy as part of a system of protected areas that includes wilderness, if the management objectives for those somewhat disturbed or smaller areas are otherwise consistent with the objectives set out above.” As a result of such a definition and under the aegis of the Canada Wildlife Act of 1985, the Canadian government holds massive expanses of natural areas that are renowned nationally and worldwide for their biological diversity and aesthetic appeal. Through a variety of federal departments like Environment Canada, Fisheries and Oceans, and Parks Canada, the Canadian government plays an essential role in the protection of wilderness sites, chiefly by defining certain habitats as important in terms of national ecological value and managing them accordingly. The designation of an area as “protected” consequently results in management policies that aim for the conservation of species at risk and migratory birds. To date, the network of protected areas in Canada totals 12.4 million hectares, 85 per cent of which are classified as “Wilderness Areas.” Canada was the third country in the world to create a national park. Although the formation of Banff National Park in 1885 had more to do with exploiting the tourist potential of mountain scenery and natural hot springs than with protecting wilderness for its own sake, the early onset of park legislation eventually allowed Canada to develop a vast and advanced system of protected areas, which now amounts to roughly 8 to 10 per cent of the nation’s size. With the exclusion of Antarctica, Canada is believed to be the home of 20 per cent of the world’s remaining wilderness as defined according to iucn categories. Except for the protection of federal wilderness areas under the amended Parks Act of 2000, Canada lacks a federal wilderness law

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comparable to the US Wilderness Act of 1964. However, wilderness protection exists at both the national and provincial/territorial levels. Ontario, for example, has had a Wilderness Areas Act since 1959. This legislation allows land to be set aside for the protection of flora and fauna, education, and recreation. Federally, the national park system outlined in the Canada National Parks Act of 2000 is mostly managed by Parks Canada. A total of forty-two parks and reserves protect 68 million acres. Key management principles include a zoning system within parks, the maintenance of ecological integrity, the prohibition of resource extraction, and consultation with First Nations. Legal definitions and policies go only so far to capture the essence of wild places, and alternative definitions abound in the literature. Michael P. Nelson (1998) offers a rather comprehensive list, an inventory of sorts, of thirty kinds of places that wilderness areas could be according to different people: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17

A repository of precious natural resources. A rich hunting and fishing ground. A vast source of species for natural medicinal use. A self-regulating service “industry” for humankind (e.g., by working as a carbon sink). A human and nonhuman life-supporting ecosystem. A place to seek physical health and to practise various kinds of therapy. An arena for athletic and recreational pursuits. A place to seek and practise mental health. An aesthetically rewarding environment. A source of artistic inspiration. A quasi-religious place for spiritual and mystical encounters with the divine and transcendental. A scientific field “laboratory” for the observation of natural processes. A base-datum, or comparative standard measure, for land health. A reservoir of biodiversity. An outdoors “classroom” for many different kinds of learning. A memorial site commemorating human evolution. A cultural landscape.

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18 A symbol of national character and identity. 19 A place for self-realization. 20 A buffer zone, or “disaster hedge,” that protects humans from unknown viruses and bacteria. 21 A bastion of individual freedom. 22 An optimal location for the study of past myths and the generation of new myths. 23 A metaphysical necessity for our understanding of civilization. 24 A site for the practise of minority rights. 25 A liminal space for the formation of small group social bonds. 26 The prime site for animal welfare. 27 The prime site for the smooth functioning of the earth, or Gaia, as an organism. 28 An inheritance to be preserved for future generations. 29 A place full of enchantment, wonder, and unknowns. 30 A place that has its own intrinsic value, regardless of human interests.

w h at e l s e c a n w i ldness be? In the Yukon, vast expanses of forests, massive towering peaks overlooking impossibly deep glaciers and river valleys, and crystal-clear lakes whose shores are mostly unspoiled by modern industrial, commercial, or residential development are just about anywhere – either inside or outside protected areas. And then there is the wild life, of course. In the Yukon, it is easy to get the feeling that bears are as aware of you as you are of them, or that a moose might jump out of the bush as you drive on the road, or that as a human, you are never quite in control. Physically incapable of hiking to Mount Logan (the Yukon’s and Canada’s tallest mountain at 5,959 metres), we chartered a three-seater Cessna one afternoon for a short flight over the glaciers inside Kluane National Park (figure 5.1). Minutes after our takeoff from Haines Junction, we were flying over rivers of solid ice that were sinuously meandering around mountains like gargantuan multilane highways. Speaking to us through the plane’s intercom headset – in what was possibly the most blood-pumping interview setting of the whole project – our pilot, Alex, told us that “wild out here means pretty much unspoiled.” There are no roads into the park, he said, no access “other than people power – whitewater rafts, canoes,

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5.1 Lowell Glacier, Kluane National Park

hiking, mountaineering sort of thing,” and so the place felt especially wild to him. The broader World Heritage site inclusive of Kluane National Park, he reminded us, is about two and a half times the size of Switzerland, and while flying over it, we had the whole area pretty much to ourselves that day. There is “hardly anyone else out here,” he remarked as he cruised his way around peaks as smoothly as a gondolier might have navigated narrow Venetian channels. Although there may have been no people present at the time, the mountains and the glaciers resounded with a unique vitality, with deeply entrenched stories waiting to be heard, with the intensity of an atmosphere enriched by the presence of countless beings, as we will see in chapter 7 on atmosphere. Throughout our interviews in the Yukon, we came across many of the elements of wildness that we would later encounter in the rest of Canada. For Parks Canada ecologist Carmen Wong, based in Whitehorse, wild meant “things that are within their natural range of variation – things that are working without being hugely modified

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by modern humans, processes that are still operating within their natural range, and animals that are still operating in the same ways as they would if there wasn’t a huge influence from humans.” This was a biological approach common to many other conservationists, ecologists, and biologists. But for Carmen – and for others, too – wilderness was a culturally inflected “human construct” as well. “It’s that idea of solitude,” she told us, “an idea of remoteness so that you’re self-reliant, a place where there’s a natural quiet, where there’s not a lot of human disturbance.” Our interview question “what does wild mean to you?” was regularly met at first with trepidation and struggle by many of our interviewees, but it regularly yielded intelligent reflections and articulate perspectives. Christina MacDonald of the Yukon Conservation Society, for example, was the first of our interviewees to articulate clearly how wildness is a “feeling.” “When I picture some of the most wild experiences I’ve had, it’s vast spaces, wind, mountains, sounds like the roar of the ocean,” she told us from her office in Whitehorse. But unlike the view that many people think of wild places as disconnected, her perspective was deeply relational. “No airplanes overhead, no screens, no buzz of the phone,” she went on. “It’s a chance to see wildlife, but I don’t have to see wildlife. A lot of the time in the Yukon on these hikes, you don’t. You might see the tracks. You might see grizzly prints or caribou prints. So wildness is all those things.” But, Christina told us, you don’t have to be deep in the forests of the Yukon to experience wildness. “Whenever I go back to Toronto, which is this megacity, I’m always astounded by the wild – what I see as wild places in that city. It’s so green compared to the Yukon. There are huge deciduous trees, there’s vines hanging all over the roads and the walls, and there are these incredible park networks, and so I’ve gone into those parks and still felt a feeling of being connected and being away from technology, and finding that peace that perhaps is that feeling that I associate with wildness. So, whether you can find it in your local park, or watching a dragonfly, or watching ants make off with your lunch crumbs, you can dig into that and try to find ways to unite us with that connection to nature.” In the Yukon, we also collected one of the most intimate definitions of our entire project. Sally Wright, a renewable energy and environmental activist who was then running for the New Democratic Party in the ongoing territorial election, welcomed us

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into her off-grid home, where she explained that for her wildness was “heaven.” “That’s where everything is in equilibrium, and that we are just in awe,” she told us. “We’re sitting in a place of contemplation and it’s a higher level of consciousness. To sit in wilderness and just give yourself to it, and just know that it accepts you just the way you are with all your problems and all your petty bickering. You know you can walk out and be free when you’re in a state of wildness. We always talk about pristine, and we know that pristine has some connotations, that it would be shiny and perfect, and all those sorts of things, but there’s all that messiness, too, that goes on with it, and wildness is unpredictable.” We view this messiness and this unpredictability as essential qualities of the vitality of wild lands and wild life. From a vitalist perspective, chaos and disorder are not exceptions to the norm but the norm itself. Vitality is uncontrollable, unmappable, impossible to capture through mathematical models attempting to predict interrelationships between variables. A vitalist wild is messy, whimsical, irreverent. It was in the Yukon that it became apparent that wildness was also a deeply political matter. Our meeting with Mary Jane Johnson in Burwash Landing (see chapter 2) was followed a few days later by an interview with Ron Chambers at his home in Haines Junction. Ron – an artist, a member of the Champagne and Aishihik First Nations, a founding member of the Chilkat Dancers in Haines, Alaska, and of the Ko-wee-kee Dancers of Whitehorse, and a wilderness educator – minced no words when we asked him whether Kluane National Park could be considered a wilderness. “Well, to the First Nations, it’s not,” he told us. “It’s home. It’s where they live, it’s where they harvest, and it’s what they see around them.” Wilderness, like wildness, is in the eye of the beholder. But when the beholder is the government, a lot of lives can change in the name of wild. “So it’s all about who determines if it’s a wilderness, you see,” Ron reflected. “And the other aspect of it is that somebody else is saying that your home is a wilderness. Not to us, it hasn’t been. And we’ve kind of let it happen in the past, but today we’re saying, ‘No, this is our home, and this is where we’ve always been and where we’re always going to be.’” Resisting definitions of Kluane as a people-free wilderness – colonial definitions that in the past resulted in evictions and rights restrictions – First Nations are now co-managers of the park and have hunting rights and other rights within the park that are exclusive to local First Nations. “So now

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there are visitors who come here who have trouble with that because they’re not thinking of it as a home,” Ron told us. “They’re thinking of it as a wilderness” – a people-free wilderness. For Ron, the word “wild” still brought to mind images of “wild Indians,” like in “the old Wild West days.” And although the West and places like the Yukon may not seem so wild anymore, they and their Indigenous residents might still feel wild enough to the casual overseas visitor. “So that’s the image that those guys had of us, you see, that we’re just a bunch of wild people.” Ron’s point was that as long as we think of wildness and wilderness as separate and disconnected from human communities, there will be problems. We realized that alternative understandings of wildness as connection, as an affective ecology, and as a type of heritage that blends nature and culture – and indeed troubles the very distinction between the two ideas – could move us past the view of wilderness as a people-free land. First Nations’ definitions of wildness would continue to extend our own understanding of the idea for the next three years. In Fort Chipewyan, at the edge of Wood Buffalo National Park, we met Derek Tourangeau, a young man who was deeply invested in practising the teachings of his ancestors and passing on his hunting skills to his own children. Wild for him meant “hunting an animal that’s free and at home in its habitat and giving us its life to eat its wild meat.” It meant “living off the land.” Wildness, in this view, was a matter of respectful coexistence, not of exclusion and disconnection. We learned that care, respect, and a willingness to be open to the experiences of nonhuman others were essential if we wanted to move past models based on domination and colonization of the land. We were not alone in finding First Nations’ understandings of wildness profoundly revealing. One day at work, Andrew Hunt, manager of southern Alberta’s Dinosaur Provincial Park, had learned the uniqueness of Indigenous perspectives on wildness in an illuminating way, and this understanding in turn had changed his own forever. “No, no. It’s not a wilderness at all,” he answered when we asked about Dinosaur Provincial Park. “I’ll tell you a story,” he said. I was young. I was just coming into my job from school and environmental science and all the things that I thought I had to say to keep a job in government. One day, I was talking to a group of Blackfoot elders at the top of the viewpoint, and I kept using the word “preserve, preserve.” And one of the elders, about

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eighty years old, said “preserve for what? Against who and against what?” He said, “My people used this land. We burnt it. We hunted here. We used this land. We were part of this land. We consumed. We are consumers. We are the first consumers.” And I could see his point in that. I was saying that “the government is here, we’re protecting, we’re protecting.” And he said, “Protecting what?” There has long been a living, breathing relationship between humans and the earth or this landscape. And so he was saying, “You’re not doing anything special.” As First Nations’ influence on this land diminished and European settlers came, this area was a working ranch. And it was a working ranch for about 100 to 150 years. This, where we’re sitting on, in fact, this was a wintering ground for cattle in the late 1800s, early 1900s, and it was a very important place for getting out of the wind. Otherwise, your cattle die up there. So there would have been thousands of cows in here. What may look like a wild place now, Andrew concluded, was a rich cultural landscape, not a wilderness. It was what Cronon (2003) might refer to as a “historical wilderness.” It was not just a natural heritage site but also a place where ecological heritage lived and thrived. For others across the country, wildness was not just something in the eye of the beholder but also something in the ear of the beholder. In Canmore, Alberta, writer Lynn Martel explained that wildness was first and foremost about quiet. “No motors. No machines. No electronic devices. If I hear anything, it’s a person breathing or a person walking or a ski pole hitting the snowpack,” she told us. “These are natural sounds. The minute you throw a motor in there, you’re killing it. It’s not wilderness anymore. Not to me. But to be self-propelled out there in nature, to be self-sufficient, to make decisions, it’s the peace. It’s the quiet. It’s the stillness.” When you paused to listen to silence, we thought, you could hear stories that were otherwise unspoken. These could be the stories silenced by the designation of a place as just a natural heritage site – in spite of the cultural lives present. But it occurred to us that these could also be the stories told by animals or by fossils about how their lives have become entangled with their human companions. For Tom Cochrane, creative director of Newfoundland’s Old Crow Magazine, wildness could be very visual. In the dark skies

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around Gros Morne, you could see “magic” in the air when the sky opened up to reveal the Milky Way. We had felt the same way in the Yukon one night under the Northern Lights. It felt like the sky had become alive. Magic, wonder, and the resulting sense of awe and enchantment infused these affective ecologies. They were elements of the sacredness of the land, something to which many First Nation members taught us to be sensitive and pay respect. On the east coast of Newfoundland, Mistaken Point community organizers Kit Ward and Loretta Ryan told us that wildness is in the beauty and the unique feeling that comes with a place. The two had played an instrumental role in getting unesco to add Mistaken Point to the World Heritage List, and although Mistaken Point is not commonly recognized as a wilderness in the same way that Kluane or Nahanni might be, the place was unmistakably wild to them. “Wild,” Kit told us, “has a uniqueness and it is natural. It’s something that hasn’t changed very much. It’s in its original state with little development, little interference. But it’s also associated with beauty, a wild beauty. Beauty intended as ruggedness, naturalness, and uniqueness of a site.” Loretta agreed: “Wild for me is a place that is not taken over by human development, where you can go and have this feeling that you’re in a place that no man has walked before. Now, that may not be necessarily so, but the southern Avalon certainly has that feel to it. When you look out over the barrens, when you walk out to Mistaken Point, it is beautiful. And that to me is a wild place. You can be really alone there and just be with nature.” The idea of being with nature rather than being truly alone – of being with rather than being without – suggested the relational beauty of aliveness and its enchanting power to draw us inside it, to build kin, to cultivate connections rather than separations, and to demand care rather than exploitation. By the time we met Clem Reid, a teacher living in the Bonne Bay area of Gros Morne National Park, our daughter, Autumn, had gotten used to long hikes in the woods, wildlife encounters when you least expect them, teeth-rattling flights over glaciers, and slow afternoons spent doing interviews on beaches, in mountain parks, and on lake shores. Taking notice of her level of comfort away from computers, malls, televisions, and the urban world, Clem asked us if we had ever read the book Last Child of The Woods. Written by Richard Louv, Last Child of The Woods, he told us, is about the value of introducing children to wild areas “and what that can

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teach them about successful risk-taking behaviours, about being real, and what it can do for their physical and psychological health. And that’s what a wild place is: it’s knowing that there’s a place you can go to recharge your batteries. A place where you can go sit and watch the sunset or sunrise. A place where you can go and look at the red leaves and the yellow moss. A place where you can go and eat berries or drink the water. A place that’s publicly accessible but private because there is nobody there. That’s a wild area. And it’s a place that encourages health – healthy heart, healthy mind, healthy body.” Recharging one’s batteries was an apt metaphor. Like sparking energy into a battery, wildness electrifies a being into becoming alive once again. Wildness animates, giving forth life. This idea enabled us to think of a wilderness not as a place of nothingness – a “wasteland,” as a dictionary might put it – but as a place where life sparks, a place scintillating with multiple forms of life that recharge one another.

w h at e l s e c o u l d wi ld mean? It would be easy for a mountaineer to tell you that wildness is always a step farther or a peak higher than what she managed to reach on her last expedition. And if no higher peaks were left to conquer, perhaps this mountaineer might find that wildness lies in climbing under more challenging circumstances – maybe without oxygen, or without support, or without technology or maybe by climbing faster, more purely, and harder. But that is not what we were taught by Chic Scott, one of Canada’s most renowned mountaineers. We met Chic at his house in downtown Banff in January 2017. Born in Calgary in 1945, Chic became known worldwide in his twenties and thirties for his mountain adventures, including the first winter ascent of Mount Assiniboine (1967), the first Jasper to Lake Louise highlevel ski traverse (1967), an ascent of the north face of the Aiguille du Dru in the French Alps (1973), and an ascent of Myagdi Matha (1973) – the first Himalayan summit reached by a Canadian. In 2018, in recognition of his expeditions, tireless organizational and leadership efforts, and countless publications of books and articles, Chic received the Sir Christopher Ondaatje Medal for Exploration from the Royal Canadian Geographical Society. “Well, my definition of wild is if you think it’s wild, I suppose,” Chic told us in answer to our habitual question. “Real

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wild – original, natural – the original natural environment, doesn’t exist in many places anymore. I think wild is just if you think it’s wild. If you’re a kid who grew up in the inner city of New York, and some youth group is taking you for an outing into Central Park and you’re worried about lions and tigers and you think it’s wild, well then, I guess that’s wild. It can be whatever it is.” Wildness is a quality and a feeling, Chic was telling us, and as such it is based on your experience, your notion of what wildness means to you, and your personal feelings. As a quality of a place, wildness is not just something within us but also something dependent on the relations that we have with a place. Chic went on to explain, I grew up in Calgary, and we often rode our bicycles out into the countryside and camped and fished and stuff like that, but I discovered a new wildness when I came to the mountains and up the Icefields Parkway to the Columbia Icefields, and it’s pretty close to natural wild up there. In being in a national park, it’s protected, but the highway is right there. So wild is just what you feel is wild, and as we were discussing earlier, the Indigenous people don’t see any difference: wild is where they have traditionally lived for millennia. So wild is just where we live. What most people in the world don’t realize, because we live in cities now, is that we actually live on a wild planet. We live in nature. The wild has not gone away, and if there were some reason why human beings disappeared in New York State, a thousand years from now, there’d be a little mound called New York and there’d be grass and trees growing out of it. All those buildings would have fallen down, the plants would have re-established themselves. The idea that even busy cities are potentially wild is in line with what many conservationists and environmental policymakers today are promoting as the rewilding of the world (see Monbiot 2014), which is the process of restoring formerly developed areas, protecting and enhancing natural processes by providing for connectivity between previously disconnected wilderness areas, and reintroducing apex species and predators in areas where they had been previously removed. As we were visiting the area, Banff National Park was abuzz with the ongoing reintroduction of bison and the continuous building of extensive corridors to allow wildlife to extend their

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movement range. “The wild is still around us, and it’s just waiting there, it hasn’t gone away, and the life force on the planet is so strong I don’t think we can kill it,” Chic reflected. “Even if we do our worst – and we certainly are trying hard – it’ll just come back. You see the grass growing through the cracks in the sidewalk, cracking the sidewalk – the grass will break the sidewalk.” Given the distinction between wildness as a quality potentially present anywhere and wilderness as a place limited to only the most remote corners of the world (see Cronon 1996b), we asked Chic if he distinguished between the two. Well, for me, wilderness means the natural world, the way it was before there were human beings. We don’t have much real wilderness left anymore because human beings have changed the environment all over the world. We’ve been almost everywhere, but there are some places that are still pretty close to real wilderness. For me, although there is this pure real wilderness, there are varying degrees of wilderness, too, and what we have here at Banff National Park is a type of wilderness – it’s managed. I think it’s called “managed wilderness.” I think that’s what Parks call it. They manage the wildlife, they want it to stay sort of in a natural way, but they have to work on it to keep it staying in that natural condition because the train is killing bears, and the highway is killing animals, and we’re having these effects on the landscape, and it’s very hard to keep anything in a static condition. Over time, we began to think of wildness as an intensity. In the early spring of 2018, we explored these ideas further with Barb Johnston, a Parks Canada ecologist working at Waterton Lakes National Park in Alberta. “It depends on your perspective for sure. I think wild comes in degrees,” she told us from the front yard of her house in Waterton. “I think if you ask someone who comes from northern Canada, you’re going to get quite a different answer than if you ask someone who comes from Europe. For example, I’m working on a project right now that’s looking at rewilding an area in northern Scotland. And so my idea of wild is a place that is now grassland or peat land that historically was Caledonian forest, but the Romans changed it 2,000 years ago. So what does wild look like now? Is that when there aren’t people influencing the current structure even

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though that structure is different than before humans were there to begin with? So I think there are very big degrees depending on your culture and on your location.” Barb went on to explain that experiences of wildness can take place in sites that are not ecologically intact. Wildness is a subjective experience, and it can exist “even where there is quite a bit of human presence.” We asked Barb if she made a distinction between wildness and wilderness. “Wildness is more of a sense, a feeling. And wilderness is more connected to specific place. So I think of wilderness as a wilderness area – not necessarily a park but a place that has certain attributes. Whereas to me wild is more in the eyes of the beholder. A feeling or sense.” “Would you call this park, Waterton Lakes National Park, or the unesco World Heritage site, a wilderness place or a wild place?” we asked. “I would say it’s both,” Barb reflected. “For me, it’s a wilderness because there are large tracts of this area that don’t have a lot of influence from human presence. But it is also a wild place because it is a place of solitude, of escapism. For me, it’s a spiritual place. It’s a place where I feel connected to the whole. And to me that’s where wild comes from. It’s a place where I don’t feel the influences and the stress of the rest of the world.” There was a powerful message in Barb’s words. Wilderness has been traditionally defined as a place where humans are absent, visitors who do not remain. Yet the appeal of wilderness is that it’s a place where people can connect with nature. The contradiction is obvious: wilderness is a place disconnected from society yet a place where people can go to feel connected (but only insofar as they go alone, one at a time, so that they do not run into one another). We asked Barb to tell us more about that feeling of connection. “Again, it depends on your perspective,” she said. “I always laugh because my cousin is a city gal. We’re very close and for her my job and my life as an ecologist is her worst nightmare. But for me, I feel really at peace and connected to my inner self when I’m disconnected from the rest of society. Many humans are not that way. We are a social creature and many people feel very at ease and calm when they’re in a social environment, whereas I feel that calm when there’s nobody around. That’s why I was drawn to work in a wilderness area and why I feel connected to this place. But for some people, being alone and out in the wilderness is very stressful.

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So I think it is about your past experience, your culture, but also just your personality.” “What do you think this says about our culture and our society,” we asked Barb, “that we need to have a place where we can get away from people? Is it because there’s something wrong with our society?” “It’s a difficult question,” Barb admitted. “And I’m probably not the right person to ask because I am a Canadian who spends quite a bit of time abroad because I’m not a huge fan of our culture.” She laughed. But I think partly it is just a Canadian experience. So obviously there are Indigenous people who were always here before, so I’m speaking from a Western European perspective, where many people came. And from that perspective, Canada’s always been kind of a frontier place, and I think what drew people here originally is that not everyone could hack it. So I think there was a certain gene pool that actually got here that was more the frontier adventurer, and maybe that’s something that’s always been an attraction for Canadians. I think it is in our history and in our culture to some extent, and I think it might be partly what sets us apart from other cultures in other countries. That might be part of it. Partly, I think, there’s just a lot of wild open space in Canada, and we’re very fortunate in that we have these large places. We have very small population density, so there are more places to escape to. And I think it’s just something a lot of us grew up with. Our parents took us camping as a kid and I don’t think that is the case in a lot of other cultures. Although Barb rightly spoke only from her perspective as a settler, there was a strong similarity between the spirit of her word and the perspective of someone like Ron Chambers. For Ron, there was no wilderness; there was home. For Barb and many others, feelings of connection and of peace were feelings of being at home in an environment. And although settler Canadians like us cannot easily call Canada home, we can certainly give it the respect and reverence that a home demands. The trouble with wilderness is not so much that we as a society choose to protect a place but that often, in doing so we, ignore its history and cultural heritage, just as Andrew Hunt has realized at Dinosaur Provincial Park while speaking with Blackfoot Elders.

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Another interview back in 2017 in Banff was particularly important for the development of our perspective. Harvey Locke, founder of the Yellowstone to Yukon Initiative, is one of Canada’s most influential authors and leaders on wilderness conversation. In 2013, he received the J.B. Harkin Medal for Conservation and the Queen Elizabeth II Diamond Jubilee Medal. In 2014, he was awarded the Fred M. Packard Award for outstanding service to protected areas by the iucn World Commission on Protected Areas, and in the same year, Locke received the Gold Leaf Award from the Canadian Council on Ecological Areas for his lifetime of extraordinary vision and commitment to advancing the cause of parks, wilderness, ecological integrity, and landscape connectivity in North America and the world. He and his partner, Marie-Eve Marchand – a key driver behind Bison Belong, one of the organizations involved in reintroducing bison into Banff National Park – welcomed us into their Banff home days after we had met Chic Scott just a few blocks away. Harvey had dedicated a lot of writing to the issue over the years, so his thoughts were remarkably articulate: “Wilderness” is this incredibly rich term that is both, at the same time, a place and an idea. “Wilderness” is in the old Celtic definition, wildeor, “the place of wild beasts,” and also the roots of the word are “self-willed land.” Those two things merge in the word “wilderness.” That’s a reference to a place that’s just evolving, living. Humans have been part of that landscape for as long as they have been upright walking and distinguished themselves as homo sapiens. When early Canadian fur traders and explorers were coming into western North America, they talked comfortably about the people of the wilderness being the First Nations people here. You read their texts, that’s how they describe them. Those are the words they use. And I know First Nations people who are very comfortable with the word “wilderness” and say, “Yeah, that’s the wild place where we would go hunting, but, you know, we live here, but we would go there.” And then there became this kind of weird post-modern desire to say that humans are ubiquitous, they control everything, everything’s a human construct, there’s no such thing as wilderness, “wilderness” is an oppressive colonial term and we have to banish it from the vocabulary of progressive people, and that’s us imposing our will on people. And it’s absolute garbage, nonsense.

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The post-modern critique that Harvey was referring to has been traditionally identified with the group of contributors to William Cronon’s (1996a) famous collection Uncommon Ground and with the writers they later inspired. Their critique of the received idea of wilderness – although popular among post-modern and post-structuralist academics – generated a great deal of controversy among conservationists and environmentalists, many of whom accused Cronon and colleagues of undermining the work behind wilderness protection (see Callicott and Nelson 1998; and Nelson and Callicott 2008). If we agree that there is no such thing as wilderness, their response was, then we end up having very little standing in the way of developers. Harvey’s own critique to the so-called “post-modern idea” hinged on the role played by humans. “The condition of the earth,” Harvey explained, “is different in different places. For example, Antarctica is a place that only supports life subsidized by imports from other continents for humans. It supports its own indigenous life like penguins quite abundantly, but for humans, we have to import goods to live there. So, unquestionably, that’s a wild place, and unquestionably, that’s a wilderness. It wasn’t constructed by anyone, it is what it is, and humans live on the margin of it, barely.” Human presence, according to his view, does not detract from the existence of wilderness. Harvey continued, To deconstruct nature and say it’s a human construct is a form of hubris, it is a form of stupidity, and it is also deeply dangerous for the rest of life. If everything is a human construct, then we choose to or choose not to construct nature, and it’s all up to us. Well, sorry, we’re a natural species, one species among many, that evolved with the rest of life. We don’t have the moral right to kill off the rest of life, nor is it in our self-interest to destroy the functions of the world that are built by the interaction of species and biogeochemical cycles. And it’s our profound stupidity around our centrality as the constructor of the universe, the master of the universe, that is the reason we’re changing the climate, that is the reason that the fisheries of the world have been depleted, that’s the reason that the nitrogen balance is in serious trouble in the earth, and the reason we have an extinction crisis. And we have got to pull back, and in my view, we need to pull way back and leave at least half the world to function on its own terms and to make sure that that’s

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interconnected, so that all the flows and natural patterns of life can continue to move and evolve and adapt and be resilient. And then we can take our place as one extremely intelligent and skilled species among many, to acknowledge that we are not in charge of wilderness. We acknowledge that it’s about there; it’s not about me. I’m part of it, but I don’t control it. This is where this idea of self-willed land is so fundamental. Wilderness does not derive its existence from human activity. It derives its existence from the evolution of planet Earth. We belong in the community of life with the rest of life. Wilderness legislation is sometimes our best way of saying we know that, we understand that, and we’re going to secure that in the face of a species that can be extremely greedy, acquisitive, and self-centred. Wilderness is really legislatively imposed humility. It’s really about us understanding our place in the world. Harvey’s argument was strong. Although the two of us recognize that social construction processes can be powerful, we retain a belief in a certain immanence of life. Humans are part of nature, a species among many. We may construct ideas of what nature is, but we are not the makers of nature. Believing otherwise would give us the right to take from our world as we please. We have a moral obligation to realize that our species is not superior and that every other species inhabiting this planet has a right to exist. “I’m part of it, but I don’t control it” was a brilliant conclusion to what Harvey taught us that day, a lesson that we would receive one more time in Alberta fifteen months later. Charlie Russell, whom we met earlier in the book, had discussed the idea of “learning to be wild” in some of his writings. “‘Wild’ is just another way of saying ‘primitive,’” he explained, “and primitive is what it takes to exist on the land. The word ‘wild’ is such a complicated concept –.” Charlie paused to reflect. “It isn’t a complicated – see this is where I’m having a problem – it’s quite simple, but we tend to exaggerate it because it’s become kind of rare. We’ve lost touch with what wild is because if you’re trying to dominate and conquer things, you don’t want this wildness creeping in and upsetting things. You’ve got to control it. And controlling wildness is one of the ways you control things.” Learning to be wild, therefore, simply meant learning to let go of our human will to dominate and control. “Wildness is just what’s there,” Charlie explained. “There’s lots of wildlife right in this building,” he told us in reference to his house, “and mites, and insects and all sorts of things that kind of snuck into

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our world. So you don’t have to look very far for wildness, but you kind of have to look quite a way for the understanding of it. And, again, I think it’s pretty simple. It’s undomesticated. It’s unmanaged by man because managing is what we’ve become very good at.” We grow up and become educated, Charlie reflected, and we become managers of this and that. “Managing is our way to control things, and we’ve become really good at it. But we shouldn’t be managing everything. We should allow.” We should pull back and “leave at least half the world to function on its own terms.” “Unfortunately, we can’t ask animals this question, Charlie, but if we could ask bears what ‘wild’ means to them, what do you think they’d say?” Without a moment’s hesitation or an instant to catch his breath and collect his words, Charlie responded loudly, “leave us alone, you arrogant bastard .”

in t e n s it ie s o f wi ldnes s The notion that wildness comes in degrees – as Barb put it – is something toward which we were initially skeptical. At an intuitive level, the idea made sense since we knew that some of our own experiences of wildness were more intense than others, depending on where we were, whether we were alone, whether we were on foot, what the weather was, and so on. But mathematics has never been our preferred way of knowing. When you say that something comes in degrees, soon enough you find yourself creating a scale and ranking wild places and wildness experiences on a continuum of 0 to 100. That is how you end up with lists and ultimately how you end up generating an operationalizable definition, creating a list of indicators, and establishing a valid and reliable system of imposing your own views on the entire universe under the pretense that your view is the correct one because it is what science says. But as time went on and more people told us that their experiences of wildness were more or less intense depending on a variety of circumstances, we started believing that the notion of intensity held a good deal of value. What interested us about the idea of intensity, however, was not its quantitative properties but its qualitative ones. After all, if we say that wildness is a form of vitality, then there is nothing wrong with suggesting that sometimes this vitality is more or less intense than at other times. But what exactly is an intensity?

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Intensity, according to the dictionary, is the quality of being felt strongly. The word comes from the Latin intensus, which refers to something that is stretched, high-strung, tight. If you pick up a rubber band and start pulling it, you get tension. Pull it a bit more, and you get more tension. More pulling causes more intensity. Wild places work like that, too. Sometimes they pull you in more, and you feel that intensity more deeply. And the greater the intensity of that pull, the less in control you feel. The force of a pull, after all, is a matter of its vitality, its strength, its will. The wildness of a place, then, can be thought of as the intensity of its vitality, as registered in and reverberated through the affective ecologies that entangle all of its inhabitants. Intensities are complex, fine-grained, nuanced qualitative differences that cannot be confined in hard-edged, pre-defined categories. Intensities are felt through the body, and so to understand them, we need to understand the body as a “site for the circulation of energetic intensities,” as per Deleuze (Grosz 1994, 138). Given this imperative, Deleuze argues, it would be a mistake to think about intensities in quantitative terms. A measurable, quantifiable understanding of intensity misses the role of its qualitative nature in producing difference in relation to itself rather than in relation to a pre-established identity. So, for example, the intensity of wildness is something that you feel in relation to your experience of a place, not as a contrast between the objectively measured wildness and its comparison against pre-established categories of wildness. When we understand the intensity of wildness as the capacity of a place to pull us and understand our capacity to sense this pull as a feeling of sort, we start to envision the felt intensities of wildness as a type of affect. McCormack (2008, 414) writes that affect is a “field of pre-personal intensity” and a feeling of “intensity registered in sensing bodies.” As Mader (2014, 239) puts it, “although intensities are the source of sensations and of experience, [they] are not sensed or experienced as intensities themselves. It is the coupling of an intensifying or remitting quality with an extension that is the way in which intensities are registered. In other words, they are only registered by their impact as extended qualities, or qualities as extended.” So, from a Deleuzian perspective, intensities are virtual potentials. How they actually manifest themselves is actualized differently under different circumstances for different people. It is all a matter of your relations.

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Lash (2010, 3) writes that there are extensive cultures and intensive cultures: “Extensive culture is a culture of the same: a culture of equivalence; while intensive culture is a culture of difference, of inequivalence” (original emphasis). In highlighting these differences, Lash makes the argument that an intensive culture calls for novelty, for possibility, for difference. “At the heart of extensity,” he says, “are homogeneity, equivalence and identity; at the heart of intensity is heterogeneity and inequivalence, difference” (4). This distinction has important implications for how we approach the question of wildness. If we understand wild nature as something that simply is, as a singular reality, then wilderness becomes a definable legal and scientific category. And in the name of wild, we can then do things like remove people from it – regardless of the fact that they call it home. In the name of that kind of wildness, we draw borders and fences, we control, we exclude, we domesticate, and we “manage” (to echo Charlie Russell). Instead, engaging intensively with wildness is about engaging with wild places, wild natures, and wild forms of life in terms of their pluralities, not a singular generality. In this sense, we respect that something is wild if you feel that it is wild – as Chic Scott taught us. In this sense, we respect that wildness comes in varying forms of intensities that arise from varying relations. This is a multinatural way of understanding wildness not as something that is but as something that could be – a potential for being something else, for taking place somewhere else, and for becoming something else, too, if it wills. In the remaining chapters of this book, we regularly return to the notion of intensity, especially to describe the aliveness of places, their atmospheres, and their spiritual power.

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There are three kinds of animals, Ingold provocatively argues, drawing on Deleuze and Guattari (1980). Domesticated animals make up one category. These are animals like pets that have been given a personal name. This proper noun – Whiskers, Fido, Socks, or whatever – works to delineate the pet’s individuality and subjectivity, distinguishing it from other members of its species. Wild animals comprise a second category. Wild animals – except for in unique circumstances – do not have distinct, human-like names. They are identified through anonymous appellatives that classify them as members of species, like jaguars, lizards, or blue jays. A third way, Ingold writes, following the Indigenous Knowledge of the Koyukon people, is to name animals as goings-on. By identifying an animal as a going-on rather than using personal or proper nouns, the Koyukon are able to regard it “not as a living thing of a certain kind but as the manifestation of a process of becoming, of continuous creation, or simply of being alive” (Ingold 2010, 174). As Ingold (2010, 169) writes, the Koyukon draw names for animals from three nonmutually exclusive types of knowledge: “First, there are straightforward descriptions of the animal’s observed behavior. Second, there are the Distant Time stories, tales from the era of world creation when the beings that were to become animals had yet to assume permanently their animal forms. Third, there are riddles, which describe the impression left by an animal in such an oblique or metaphorical form that the listener is left to guess at their identity.” For example, the Koyukon’s name for a butterfly is “flutter here and there,” the name for a maggot is “comes to life,” and the name for an osprey is “stares into water” (R. Nelson 1983, 61–4). In the Koyukon

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logic, then, animals are what they do. Their names refer to their ways of life. An animal is “the instantiation of a particular way of being alive – a concentration of potential and a locus of growth in that entire field of relations that is life itself” (Ingold 2010, 170). The logic behind the Koyukon system of naming animals is often extended to the naming of places, not just among the Koyukon but also among verb-rich Indigenous languages. Thus, whereas it is common for colonizing people to name places after individual leaders – such as politicians, scientists, and war heroes – Indigenous peoples around the world tend to name places for what goes on there (Berkes 2012). Places, therefore, are named after rivers that meet, loons that sing, bears that sleep, medicines that heal, and so on. In this way, places arise as processes and actions. If we think of places this way, as patterns of activity, as verbs where lives occur, then we begin to think of places as verbs, too. “The life of every being,” Ingold (2010, 168) writes, “issues forth into the world as it proceeds.” But it does not issue forth alone; it moves and it grows, and it becomes something other than itself as it enters into relations with those who inhabit the same land. It is through the inhabitation of multiple species and what they do together that lands can exist as verbs. By inhabiting a land, humans and nonhumans weave it together through the threads of their activities. Lands, then, are very much like “knots,” according to Ingold (149). In this chapter, we focus on how lands emerge through various activities of humans and also nonhumans like dinosaurs, ice, and cod. Through three ethnographic vignettes, we show how three sites are knotted together at particular moments in time. This allows us to think of lands as happenings, as actions, as verbs, not unlike the ways that animals are conceived in verb-rich languages. We focus on three types of activities: acting, playing, and remembering. These three actions, as we explain, are kinds of performances. The concept of performance allows us to think of ways that wildness can be enacted. In the chapter’s conclusion, we again link the concept of performance with that of inhabitation. Performances, we write, are verbs. They are the actions that make our shared lifeworld, and they are the actions that underscore its aliveness. The concept of performance is also particularly useful for highlighting how different actions carried out by different actors will result in different outcomes, with important consequences for the idea of wildness. Let’s use an example to make this point.

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In 2014, a new tourist attraction was all the buzz in the Canadian Rockies. Following a $21 million investment by the Brewster Group and two years of environmental assessment and subsequent construction, the Glacier Skywalk opened 280 metres above the Sunwapta Valley, near the Columbia Icefield. Jutting out over a craggy canyon and granting walking access to vertiginous views above the winding river and valley below, the glass-covered semicircular Skywalk pathway extended 30 metres out onto thin air. By writing time in January 2020, access to the Glacier Skywalk cost $36, or $87 if you booked your experience as part of the broader day-long Columbia Icefield Adventure. The point of this project, in the words of Juliette Recompsat – communications manager for the Brewster Group – was “to get people out of their cars and connecting with the environment in the national park” (cited in Derworiz 2014). Although countless tourists have enjoyed the experience promised by the Glacier Skywalk, the project has caused a great deal of controversy due to concerns over a private corporation doing business inside a national park, fears that the Skywalk and its associated car and bus traffic would interfere with wildlife dwelling in the area, skepticism about the value of adding a large human-made structure in a natural setting, and last but not least, a general disdain for the whole idea. The disdain, in particular, was directed at the idea that tourists would be lazy enough to sit on a tundra bus crawling over glacier ice as part of the Columbia Icefield Adventure and then proceed to take a three-minute saunter on 200 metric tons of steel as a way of “connecting with the environment.” What this case reminds us is that experiences of natural settings differ profoundly from individual to individual. What someone might call nature, someone else might call a consumerist trap. What someone might call a wild experience, someone else might call a manifestation of laziness. These different perspectives allow us to underline once again that wildness can be very different things to different people, and in this chapter, we provide three more perspectives drawn from three very different ways of experiencing natural heritage sites and reflect on how different experiences play out. We focus on Dinosaur Provincial Park, Gros Morne National Park, and the Alberta Rockies. With these three cases, we focus respectively on the perspectives of tour guides and tourists, residents of a community inside a park, and lifestyle migrants. All of these experiences and perspectives are examined through the concept of performance,

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allowing us to think of wildness and nature as verbs – as something done in different ways, something accomplished by different people, and something emergent in and contingent on multiple settings.

p e r f o r m in g nature Performance is a notion most often associated with theatre and acting, but it can easily apply to heritage performances. Cultural heritage performances, for example, are a very popular way to attract tourists to protected areas. To get an idea of the popularity, run a quick online search for “cultural heritage performances in Canada,” and you will be given a list of hundreds of choices organized by dates and locations. Here in British Columbia, for example, in the northern part of the province, there is a small town called Barkerville where thousands of tourists every summer gather to take part in daily activities, storytelling, theatrical performances, and games intended to celebrate the town and the region’s gold-mining history. These cultural heritage performances are meant to evoke a sense of time and place. They call upon shared memories to (re)create a sense of a past and a feeling of what life once was. Tourists take in these performances to educate and entertain themselves. Natural heritage performances are not as common as cultural heritage performances, but they still do take place at several natural heritage sites, whether they are explicitly advertised as “performances” or not (a more common label is “interpretation”). Regardless of their differences, natural heritage and cultural heritage performances work more or less in the same way because of how performances generally work. Like their cultural counterparts, natural heritage performances educate and entertain visitors by (re) creating a sense of a past time and a past place that evokes feelings of what nonhuman life once was. At times, natural heritage performances focus on natural history (as in the case of Dinosaur Provincial Park), and at other times, they focus on the intersection between natural and social history (as in the case of Trout River). Schechner (2006) explains that performances are first and foremost types of actions. As actions, performances vary in nature: some are types of play, others are enactments, and others are rituals. They also vary in purpose: there are everyday, mundane performances of social roles, there are celebrations of special moments, and there are scripted actions driven by artistic and entertainment intents.

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Regardless of nature and purpose, performances are always verbs – actions intended to get something done, to achieve certain intents, and to enact a transformation of some kind. Performances occur in all sorts of places. People perform in the boardroom, on sports fields, in the bedroom, and so on, and in all these settings, they “play” by certain rules and conventions that are accepted as true and useful by all those who play along. Once these rules and conventions are accepted by every member of a performance – whether players or spectators – “performances mark identities, bend time, reshape and adorn the body, and tell stories” (Schechner 2006, 28). An important effect of performance is that of transportation. Performances have the power to transform things and to transport people to other places, other lifeworlds, and even other “dimensions,” as it were. For example, actors on theatre stages can transform themselves into people other than who they really are. Transformations move us. A stage set somewhere in a small community theatre, for example, can transport us all to different times and places. “In a transportation,” Schechner (2006, 72) writes, “one enters into the experience, is moved or touched ... and is then dropped off about where he or she entered.” Performative transportations enliven a place. In a natural heritage transportation, for example, someone may be taken to a world long gone, a prehistoric world perhaps, maybe a world where dinosaurs roamed free. Or they may be taken to a world where ancestors once lived, a world where cultural customs and rituals first took form. Performative understandings of nature are important to us in this book because they are based on the principle that there is not a single nature out there (Abram and Lien 2011; Nustad 2011). Nature is instead something that you do; it is something that you perform as you engage with it. For someone thrilled, excited, or even scared to walk on a steel and glass structure jutting out over a canyon, the Glacier Skywalk could be a wild experience of a wild place. It could be a great way of “connecting with the environment.” For someone who would much rather keep on driving as fast as possible to the next remote trailhead than rub elbows with crowds of tourists, wildness is something different, but it is still something that they do through their actions. It is something that they perform as they climb their next peak, maybe, or as they paddle to their next wild campsite. Wildness, wild nature, and even wilderness are not one thing to

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all people. They emerge in what people do and how they do it or in what they do not do and why not. Studies on travel and tourism make frequent use of performance and performance-related concepts (see Edensor 2000). In a recent ethnographic study conducted at Yosemite National Park in the United States, for example, Ness (2016) examined how a wide variety of park visitors engage with different areas of the park and draw on a variety of “choreographies” of movement to perform diverse landscapes. These are enactments, Ness explains, through which people express not only who they believe they are but also what they believe Yosemite is and could be. In this sense, Yosemite becomes a stage for cultural performances of competing ideas of nature and nature appreciation. Nature appreciation is at the basis of all elective travel to natural settings, whether for education, play, adventure, sightseeing, or spiritual rejuvenation. Within Western societies and settler nations like Canada, the dominant cultural perspective on nature appreciation can be traced back to the sense of wonder raised by scientific discoveries of the European Enlightenment – discoveries that framed the natural world as a reality governed by a set of laws unaffected by humans (Gregory 2001). According to Gregory (2001), this ideological standpoint generated the foundations for an understanding of nature as a domain separate from the realm of human culture, which demanded appreciation as something existing in an original state distinct from social and human history. As Olafsdottir (2013, 128) writes, “For some, especially (Christian) industrialists, first nature was the wild, unruly and savage nature outside the Garden of Eden in which the sinners landed after the fall. This vision, representing original nature as hostile and harsh to humans, became one of the ideological foundations of the European Enlightenment.” In somewhat of a paradox, the dualist separation between the realm of culture and that of nature generated the conditions for the eventual future development of nature-based tourism and travel. Because nature was different, remote, and disconnected from the realm of the social world, it provided for a certain kind of retreat and escape, thus demanding an appreciation of its virtues. As Olafsdottir (2013, 128–9) observes, “Backed-up with scientific theories of geology, it was indeed the wild and unruly processes, performances and characteristics of landscapes devoid of human interference (later

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termed wilderness in the North American discourse) that initially attracted people to explore nature for its own sake ... Wild and mountainous landscapes, oceans, icecaps and deserts that, since the end of classical history, had been avoided and feared for their unruly and savage characteristics became sought, discovered, respected and appreciated (first by scientists and explorers and later by others) for their overwhelmingly powerful, chaotic, cataclysmic and informative characteristics and sublime beauty.” As Olafsdottir (2013) argues, nature-based tourism and travel in the Western world also depend on a history of thought that can be traced to nineteenth-century Romanticism. Romanticism was, and still is, an ideological reaction first to urbanization and large-scale industrialization and later to mass consumption. Romantic ideals advocated, and still do, the value of individuality, authenticity, passion, and an admiring love for nature and its fascinating processes. These ideals fuelled in many people across the Western world a burning desire to get away from work, cities, and the falseness of social conventions in order to connect with spirituality, introspection, the natural environment, and physicality. Being in nature, then, was viewed as something that could allow us to put things back into perspective and to self-regenerate. Romanticism therefore enacted two types of wildness appreciation: People went to nature to follow the footsteps of the great (scientific) explorers searching for new and unforgettable sublime experience in “wild” nature where the emphasis was on getting in touch with grand and unpredictable natural phenomena. This type of tourism called for courage and physical ability on behalf of the individual traveller and offered the possibility of adventurous excitement and the potential for discovering something new about the world and oneself in extreme conditions. The other type of nature-based tourism involved looking for the picturesque landscapes that artists and writers represented, conjuring a longing to see them ... This softer form of tourism was based on the search for natural beauty and linked to the inviting and nurturing qualities of the natural world, where one might escape the stresses of everyday (urban) life for a while. (130) The performances of wildness at Dinosaur Provincial Park and outside of Banff National Park are clear examples of this Romantic

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appreciation of nature, as we will see. But heritage performances can also reveal connections between people and their environments, prompting us to think of wild nature as something not separate from but deeply entangled with culture, as in the case of Gros Morne National Park and Trout River.

e n ac t in g w ild li ves About 130,000 people visit Dinosaur Provincial Park every year. The park is not exactly on the way to anywhere, and most people who wish to stay overnight have only two choices. The first option is to sleep and eat in the small town of Brooks, Alberta, about 50 kilometres to the west. The alternative is to camp within the park. Campers can either bring their own tent or book one of the halfdozen four-person glamping units available on-site. A small cafeteria and a very small convenience store can also be found within the park’s boundaries, just below the visitor’s centre. What the park lacks in terms of accommodation and dining facilities, it most certainly makes up for in terms of things to do. During the warm months, park interpreters offer multiple daily guided activities, some of them inside the park’s headquarters and museum but most of them outdoors in various areas of the park and with various target groups in mind. There are sunset photographic safaris, extended fossil-hunting hikes, and various interpretive programs ranging from short guided walks to bus tours. We boarded one of the park’s shuttle buses – a vehicle that seemed to have been plucked straight off the set of Jurassic Park – on a warm and sunny morning in early September. Fiona, a twenty-something college student, welcomed us aboard. She wore a tan button shirt with matching shorts and field boots. It wasn’t an actual Jurassic Park costume, but it playfully hinted at it. There were about twenty people on the tour, many of them kids, and Fiona understood that the best way to entertain both kids and their parents (who seemed to know far less about dinosaurs than their own children) was to put on a bit of a play. As we stepped off the shuttle, Fiona told us, Okay, so we are heading to the world renowned Centrosaurus Quarry. If you look in the distance, you can see a sort of jagged rock formation. It is one and a half kilometres away. That is the citadel. And our destination is just on the side of the citadel. So,

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as we’re walking, we’re going to be making four stops, where we’ll talk about why Dinosaur Provincial Park was such a good place for dinosaurs to live, why it was such a great place for them to die, and why we can find fossils here and not in Calgary or Brooks unless we dig really deep. And at the bone bed that we’re heading to over there is evidence of many of these animals that died all at the same time. So we’re going to use clues to figure out why that is so. We began to walk in a single file, led by Fiona, the kids jumping around with excitement (figure 6.1). Maybe they knew that we wouldn’t find any actual dinosaurs, but it was obvious that there was at least some hope in their eyes that they would spot secret clues. “On our way to the first stop,” Fiona alerted us, “I want you guys to look for clues in the landscape and that will help us to understand what this area looked like 75 million years ago. I think when we chat about it at our first stop, the answer might just rock your world.” A few minutes later, Fiona stopped and so we all did. She stepped onto a tall rock like an actress on stage, and we formed a circle around her. She commanded our attention once again with her verve and clear voice: “So, while we were walking, was anybody looking for clues in the landscape as to what this area might have looked like 75 million years ago? Did you see something?” Kids and parents shouted a few answers. No one had the right guess, so Fiona decided to give us a hint: “Does anybody know what kind of rock we’re all standing on right now?” “Sand rock?” someone answered tentatively. “Sandstone,” Fiona corrected. “Exactly. And where do we find sand today?” “Beaches.” “Beaches, yes. Perfect. So where there’s water, there’s sand. Exactly!” Fiona exclaimed. North America looked different in the late Cretaceous period, she said, before showing us a drawing. “So, if you see this blue line running down the middle of North America, that is the Bearpaw Sea, a warm, shallow inland sea that used to go right down the middle of North America. And this Red Square is where Dinosaur Provincial Park is today. So we were on prime beachfront property. And that meant that there was lots of water here from that warm, shallow Bearpaw Sea.”

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6.1 Dinosaur-hunting expedition

We began to envision the arid place where we found ourselves much differently. Fiona prompted us to imagine meandering rivers and a thick rainforest instead of the desert-like badlands that surrounded us. She gathered two keen volunteers to act out our newly found geological imagination. One volunteer performer was asked to act like a river and the other like a big boulder. The river pushed the boulder around and deposited the boulder in a corner at Fiona’s narrative commands, and we all laughed at the growing enactment of geomorphological transformation. Then we started hiking again, still on the hunt for clues. Fossils were our clues. Dinosaurs needed food, and plants were their preferred delicacies. The fossils told the story of their eating preferences. Through the fossils, we were encouraged to imagine what it might have been like to live here while dinosaurs ate and slept. “Okay, so we know that there were lots of plants here for the dinosaurs to eat,” Fiona challenged us, “but how do we know that the dinosaurs were eating those plants?” “Poo?” a child answered, drawing the immediate scorn of his parents. “Poo, exactly!” Fiona exploded to everyone’s surprise. We all laughed. “So dinosaur poo – or coprolite as it’s more scientifically

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referred to – is a very fun fossil that we like to show off here at Dinosaur Provincial Park.” She immediately passed a piece of fossilized poop around for everyone to hold. “And don’t worry. It’s 75 million years old. You don’t have to wash your hands after you handle it!” The group erupted in laughter. “Now, we also need to figure out today why Dinosaur Provincial Park was such a good place for these dinosaurs to die,” Fiona resumed as the fossilized turd was handed back to her. “It seems like a bit of an oasis right now – beachfront property, living right by the ocean, but something was killing dinosaurs thousands at a time. So we need to figure out what that was. And we’ll chat about that a little bit more at our next stop.” Flooding was the answer, we found out minutes later. But Fiona wanted us to understand the process of fossilization, and she called for more volunteers. Several hands went up quickly. A volunteer was told to act like a hurricane and another like a dinosaur. Fiona stepped into the role of the narrator, informing the actors of their script and telling the story to the audience at the same time. “I don’t know about you guys, but when I eat a huge meal, I get really sleepy. So the Centrosaurus is going to lie down and take a nap.” The volunteer dinosaur lay down on the ground. “What a sweet Centrosaurus peacefully dreaming! But what she doesn’t know is she’s eaten her last meal.” The volunteer dinosaur suddenly looked worried. “As she sleeps, a large hurricane is brewing just off the coast of the Bearpaw Sea, and as she’s sleeping, it twirls and lands, burying her in a huge storm surge. The storms are just so violent it rips her limbs from her body. Spread your limbs out Centrosaurus!” The poor dinosaur started convulsing. Everyone laughed. “So she is no longer in the perfect condition she was twenty minutes ago. Poor Centrosaurus! So eventually, the water starts to settle, but poor Centrosaurus, it’s too late for her. So big predators like Gorgosaurus and little predators like all of the Raptors we can find here, they smell something. Oh, interesting – meat! Yum! So, they start crunching on limbs and crunching on heads and they break these bones up even further. This bone, the skeleton is scattered all over the place. Little shards and fragments. Oh, this poor dinosaur. But eventually, she is buried peacefully under layers and layers of sediment. And she sits there that way for 75 million years. But eventually, all of that sediment gets eroded, exposing a beautiful but completely obliterated skeleton.” The volunteer dinosaur tried

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her best to look beautiful but completely obliterated as parents and children alike rolled on the floor with laughter. “So what happened while she was buried under that sediment that made her a fossil?” Fiona asked. “Time passed, 75 million years,” she answered her own question. “But, as she was lying under all that sediment, mineralized water was trickling through and replacing every piece of organic material in her bones with minerals. So the dinosaur bones we find here are about 90 per cent minerals and about 10 per cent original bone material. So that’s because bones like the ones in our own body already have some nice hard parts like that mineral calcium. But a lot of our bones are actually made of proteins, which don’t stick around once the fossilization process begins.” We all listened attentively as her story concluded. “Alright Centrosaurus, you can get up now.” Everyone applauded. “Thank you for your help!”

Our collective performance, directed and narrated by Fiona, brought the age of dinosaurs back to life that day at Dinosaur Provincial Park. By enacting hurricanes, rivers, rocks, and extinct species, our small group of tourists enlivened a world long gone and “produced wild new imaginaries” (Thrift 2003, 2019). By the time we reached our destination – a small plateau full of fossilized dinosaur bones – it was easy to feel that we were part of something special, something vibrant, something that was wild and alive. It was as if we were right inside Jurassic Park and a Centrosaurus could pop in to pay us a visit any time. Fiona’s performance relied on a bit of collective pretense, of course. We knew that we were enacting parts and playing roles. We knew that we and the dinosaurs were “momentary creations ... conjured into existence according to the summonings” (Thrift 2003, 2021) that we were enacting, but we also trusted that the paleontological knowledge that Fiona shared with us was real. And so was the dinosaur poop, and so were the fossilized plants and bones. A morethan-human nature had not been “made up”; rather, it had been revitalized by our performance. Performances enliven wild things; they animate them, waking them up from their sleep, as it were. Performance can reproduce the materials and meanings of natural spaces. The staging of natural heritage can then build new

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relationships between humans and the nonhuman world, between different species, and between the organic and the inorganic. It is through the unfolding of these relationships that wildness can manifest itself and spring forward to a life that humans can sense. Performances of wildness, like all performances do, require that certain roles be established and maintained. In our case, it was obvious from the beginning that Fiona would be the expert, the guide, and ultimately the director and producer of our performance. In accepting her role, we became the actors and the audience. Natural heritage interpreters around the world, although perhaps not as performative and charismatic as Fiona, routinely play similar roles in parks and protected areas. And even if tourists may not be called upon to enact such clearly scripted roles as we were, their acceptance of even lesser roles results in the desired effect of transporting them to a distant world, a wild world removed from their ordinary lives. As Edensor (2006, 484) writes, “Performances are socially and spatially regulated to varying extents. Stages might be carefully managed, and enactions can be tightly choreographed or closely directed.” In our case, the rules were spelled out at the very beginning of our small expedition. We were to stay on the trail in order to reduce the impact of our presence on the fragile vegetation, we should refrain from taking “souvenirs” home (whether small rocks or fossils), and we had to leave the place exactly as we had found it in order to preserve its wildness for the visitors to come. By performing our roles correctly, the fossilized wildlife could continue to live indefinitely. Performances of wildness and natural heritage must cultivate a certain sense of unfamiliarity and a feeling of out-of-placeness among the participants. They must conjure, in Thrift’s (2003, 2021) words, a “dappled world” marked by “uncertainty.” Fiona, for example, began her performance by pushing us to imagine a setting that was much different from Dinosaur Provincial Park today: a lush, moist, thickly vegetated forest at the edge of large bodies of water long gone from today’s world. This was a place radically unfamiliar to us, a place where dinosaurs and strange plants lived together in the absence of humans. It was a strange, wild place much different from our world, a place where we felt like we did not belong. For nature-based tourists, this world must function as an escape, “as the antithesis of performance for many city-dwellers” (Edensor 2006, 484).

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n at u r e - c u lt u r e ri tuals What we witnessed that day at Dinosaur Provincial Park was a type of natural heritage performance. There was no mention of human life in Fiona’s re-enactment, and logically there couldn’t be any. But there are also times and places where natural heritage is performed together with cultural heritage, and given our interest in the entanglement between nature and culture, these performances are of particular significance to us. We came across a handful of them in Gros Morne National Park, where both Parks Canada and a variety of community groups in the park’s many towns were very active in teaching tourists about not only the natural history but also the social history of the park (see chapter 4). Trout River was one of these towns. Trout River is a community of 552 people at the southern edge of Gros Morne National Park. It is located in an enclave carved just outside the park boundaries, but it is only a ten-minute drive west of the Tablelands Trail (one of the park’s most visited spots) and a five-minute drive north of Parks Canada’s busy Trout River Campground. Despite its strategic location, the centre of Trout River lies off of Highway 431. Campers need to leave the highway and deviate from their route to the campground, and busy visitors to the Tablelands Trail need to be given clear reasons to continue driving west on the highway rather than turning back toward Bonne Bay. There are plenty of reasons why a tourist would want to check out Trout River. Trout River Bay, quite simply, is gorgeous. Looking out toward the Gulf of Saint Lawrence, the bay can be taken in through a pleasant stroll on the town’s waterfront boardwalk and pebble beach or through a short and easy hike on the Eastern Point Trail. At its southern tip, Trout River Bay meets a narrow channel coming from Trout River Small Pond. There, the casual visitor can glance at the dozens of charming fishing vessels that are waiting at the docks for their next chance to sail. Moreover, the colourful historic buildings on the waterfront are nicely preserved and perfectly fit the atmosphere of the place. There are even cozy-looking hand-knit socks, mittens, and hats for sale that are hung on the clotheslines in front of a handful of homes, giving the place even more of that prototypical Newfoundland outpost feel. But – the sobering reality is – there are not many ways for tourists to linger and spend money. Limited accommodations, few shops, and even fewer eateries make it difficult for tourists to hang around.

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Not too long ago, partly as a way to resolve this issue, enterprising Trout River community leaders thought that it would be wise to launch a new heritage presentation program. The Trout River Heritage Committee was then tasked with leading visitors on a two-hour heritage presentation and performance called the Wave Over Wave program and with organizing lively kitchen parties filled with music, storytelling, and dancing – known as the Passing the Time event. We joined both activities one weekday in July 2018. Bonnie was the curator of the Heritage Committee for the year, and she was in charge of leading Wave Over Wave that day. She met us and another couple of families at the museum at the northern end of the boardwalk. “Ladies and gentlemen,” Bonnie began in a loud and clear voice coloured by a western Newfoundland accent, “we’re going to discover a town where time stood still. And that’s the title of our Wave Over Wave program today.” Bonnie asked us to follow her along the town’s boardwalk, and off we went. Although she carried notes, it was obvious that Bonnie was telling her own stories and offering her own perspectives as much as she was covering a script. As we made our way into the museum, she said, Now, you may wonder why people came here to settle. They came for the fishery. But why did they come here? First of all, they came because there was shelter from the winds in the cold. They also came for the great fishing grounds and the great farming land, and on our walk today, you’ll notice that there are different things that I’ll point out along the way. You’ll see big piles of wood. Most of our homes are heated by wood and not electricity. So that’s an indication of how time stood still: a lot of people still heat our homes by wood. There’s also hunting and fishing still in Trout River. We hunt moose in the fall. Myself included. Women are more involved in that, too, now, more so than they were years ago. There’s also hunting for rabbits in the fall and in the winter as well. If you’re on the trails, folks, and you see someone bent over in the bush, they’re not trying to scope out anything. They’re probably picking berries. So we gather berries for our winter as well. The community, she explained, was named after the abundance of trout in the river. There were still trout in the river, but salmon fishing had been shut down due to low stocks. Fishing closures, of

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course, were a big part of the reason why we were taking part in this tour in the first place. The history of the cod fishing moratorium in Newfoundland has been told countless times by others (see Bavington 2010), and we won’t repeat it here, but let it suffice to say that in Trout River and the surrounding region, much like in the rest of Newfoundland, tourism was generating employment that the sea once provided. In this sense, time really did not stand still, but Bonnie’s memories and those of the other volunteer heritage interpreters involved in the program were clearly performing a shared sense of the past and bringing it to life. Inside the museum, a young lady by the name of Destiny, Bonnie’s daughter, showed us how cod traps worked. Bonnie jumped in to demonstrate. “When they used the trap,” Bonnie clarified, “the fish would be going around and around in the trap. There was no way to kill them in there. They were still alive. So the fish was actually fresh all the time.” The method is illegal now, however, as it was deemed too effective and not selective enough. “And the fish was so plentiful that they overfished it.” In contrast, she explained, “the gillnet would only capture the larger fish, but the fish would drown in the gillnets as opposed to staying fresh and alive in the trap.” We exited the museum and began walking on the wooden boardwalk. As we did so, Bonnie pointed out at the water, directing our attention to the so-called “lobster sanctuary” – a string of buoys marking a limit for lobster trapping. “In 1901, there was eighteen canning factories here,” Bonnie expanded, “and there were fifty-eight employees. The fishermen went out to catch the lobster, and they brought them in and cooked them and they canned them. That was because that was the only way to preserve the lobster at that time.” After the cod moratorium, lobster became a more prominent enterprise, and Bonnie went on to explain a few conservation measures that had recently been enacted. The tour proceeded on to Jacob A. Crocker’s house – one of the town’s pioneers – and when we stepped back outside the Crocker house, Bonnie recounted shared memories of fishers whose lives had been taken by the wild seas over recent years. We walked a bit farther and learned that Bonnie had arranged for her husband, Wade, to give us a demonstration of how to clean cod. Wade was a fisherman at one point in his life, and after that he managed a fish plant in town for seventeen years. “And now he’s a carpenter. But today, I kind of conned him into showing us how to split the fish,” Bonnie remarked

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with a smile. Wade grinned as he stood behind the splitting table, getting ready to clean a fresh fish. “This is how the fishermen had to clean every fish they brought ashore,” Bonnie began to narrate. “The boat brought loads of fish and it had to be done by hand.” As Wade began cutting, like he and so many others in the community had done countless times before, Bonnie provided the descriptive voiceover, often inserting comments drawn from her own memories. “He’s now taking off the sound bone meat. As a kid, teen, a young teenager, we used to come up and picked that off the bones and we’d get a dollar fifty per pound for that. And of course this was our big treat. When we were teenagers, we used to come up and couldn’t wait for our dad to get in out of the boat to cut out the cod tongues – a delicacy. I cut them out enough that – that’s how I bought my first pedal bike actually! My older sister used to take them over to Deer Lake Motel for me and sell them. And she got a dollar fifty a pound for me, and I thought it was the best thing since sliced bread when she actually got the dollar fifty a pound.” As Wade cut into every bit and morsel, Bonnie described what they were used for. Local recipes, jewellery, treats – everything came with a purpose and a story. On Wade and Bonnie’s “stage,” that cod might have been a prop and the sea behind us a backdrop, but what they were performing was more than a show to keep a few visitors in town: it was a ritual through which Trout River’s nature and culture were being entangled as tightly as the fishing nets that had taken that fish’s life and given it a whole other one.

For many people who visit national parks, even after a few days on-site, parks tend to remain largely unfamiliar environments. Mostly, that is because so much of what tourists do in natural settings concentrates on the natural history of a place, on taking in spectacular landscapes, on spotting wildlife, and on taking part in activities – from hiking to surfing or from climbing to snorkelling – that rely on clear boundaries between the natural environment and its built surroundings. Indeed, much of the research on people’s experience of protected areas, wild places, or wilderness tells us that nature is typically seen by tourists as something removed and separate from the ordinary experience of daily life. As Lund (2013, 160) writes, “According to the conventional distinction, nature, in

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its purest form, is allegedly situated somewhere where there is ‘no culture.’” This perception “reinforces the idea that nature exists in places that are separate from culture,” which “means that people can visit and consume national parks but never be understood as part of their nature” (Rutherford 2011, 103). The case was much different in the small town of Trout River, Newfoundland. Through the rituals performed as part of the Wave Over Wave program, nature and culture became clearly connected, and Gros Morne, for us at least, began to feel much more familiar. Ritual is one of the most common manifestations of performance. There are many different kinds of rituals, which may vary from highly stylized performances that carefully follow a formal script to improvised and fully unstructured behaviour that despite infrequency and irregularity is still subject to ritualization. The rituals described by Bonnie and her husband, Wade, referred to ordinary routines. Through their routines, such as cleaning and cutting fish, families and friends gather in order to get something practical done. But through the retelling of routines in a performative setting, these routines acquire a second life; they become performances of shared memories and feelings of a past life. Through the performance of such routines, time in a way does stand still, as people celebrate, commemorate, evoke, or otherwise share their rituals with outsiders and one another. Through routines and their subsequent performance, members of a community learn about the foundations of their society and culture, acquire group membership, reinforce group bonds, and come to appreciate what makes a community unique and distinct from others (Schechner 2006). They also learn about their places in wider, more-than-human ecologies, and as their performances are shared with audiences of outsiders to their community, they too learn a bit about the ways that people and their natural environments are knotted together. Through such performances, a sense of place is transformed as well. What may at first appear foreign and distant quickly becomes more familiar. This change in perception has important consequences for our understanding of wild places in general. It is logical to categorize a place as a wilderness if you are unfamiliar with it. But as you begin to “do” a place – as you become entangled with it – that place and the ways that you sense it undergo a transformation. Through rituals, a wilderness eventually begins to feel like home.

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A performative approach to wildness allows us to think of natural realities, in the plural, as emergent and contingent phenomena enacted by human and nonhuman actors. Instead of thinking of nature or wildness as one fixed reality that is the same for all, thinking about wild places as the outcomes of specific performance pushes us to accept the notion of multiple natures (Nustad 2011). “This is a shift away from the foundational nature/society division that lies at the heart of perspectivalism or constructionism,” a division “in which society is the active force that shapes our understandings of nature, a singular reality that is independent of and precedes our thoughts and actions” (Lavau 2011, 43; see also Law 2004).

w il d p l ay Banff National Park is Canada’s most visited. Four million people travel to the park each year. During winters, visitors can ski, snowboard, snowshoe, and also pamper themselves at luxurious spas and resorts. During summers, tourists can hike, climb, paddle, camp, and take part in countless guided activities. A walk down Banff Avenue at any time of the year can quickly reveal the myriad ways for people to play in the Canadian Rockies, and each new year, businesses launch new services to give people opportunities to enjoy their time in what is Canada’s oldest and the world’s third oldest national park. Banff National Park was established with the very purpose of giving people a chance to relax and play. But it all began by accident. As construction workers for the Canadian Pacific Railway blasted their way through the Bow Valley in 1883, they stumbled on a handful of natural hot springs in the vicinity of what is now known as Sulphur Mountain. The Canadian Pacific Railway would eventually need customers, and the springs were identified as a key attraction that people would wish to travel to. Keen on protecting the Cave and Basin springs in order to develop the area, the Canadian government quickly established a reserve in 1885, which it expanded in 1887, named the Rocky Mountains Park of Canada (later renamed Banff National Park). With the park’s establishment, a hotel was built, and soon afterward, the townsite saw its birth. In addition to the hot springs, the politicians and businessmen of the day envisioned that trophy hunting would bring visitors. None of them, it is fair to say, imagined that one day people would travel to the region to climb frozen waterfalls.

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People like Crista-Lee Mitchell and her partner, Ruben Perez Blazquez – Ino, for short – climbed icy waterfalls whenever time allowed them, much like other people around Canada might play a game of ice hockey with friends or maybe go ice fishing. Both experienced climbers, Crista-Lee and Ino lived in Canmore, just outside the national park boundaries. In 2017, when we met them, Crista-Lee was thirty-nine years old and liked to joke that she wasn’t as agile as she once had been. “My body is so uncomfortable that I don’t even recognize when I’m hurt,” she told us with a smile. As we began to approach the frozen waterfalls by following a faintly marked snowy trail, she made a list of limbs and joints that hurt. But it was all worth it, she explained. Her job as a professional wedding photographer would get especially busy in the summer, and during the winter, it was easier to make time to get into the backcountry – as long as she managed to find a friend to watch her young children. Climbing frozen waterfalls was also a great way to go on a date with Ino. Crista-Lee told us that some of the people headed to our same destination were locals and that others were adventure tourists who had just heard of the place or who were returning after a few years. The activity was for few, but it wasn’t a secret; in Banff, it was even possible to hire a guide who would teach you how to climb ice and loan you the needed gear for the day. Sure, it wasn’t as popular as skiing, but in principle, it didn’t seem too much different. “It’s so cold here for most of the year, and it’s just one of those sports that’s just very mysterious when you’re young to learn about,” Crista-Lee explained. “If you see people climbing up ice, it’s just super intriguing. And there’s days when you love it, but a lot of times it’s really painful on your fingers and your toes, and cold, and a lot of times the waterfalls will seep water onto you, and then you have to continue climbing wet, and then it turns to ice, so it’s very uncomfortable, but there’s a connection.” “A connection?” April asked. “Ice is really neat, it has a lot of sounds and movement, and there’s a lot of pattern recognition with it. So you’ll see a lot of people here that come for their first time with the mountain guides. I mean, it’s neat. You look at it and you’re like, ‘How is that possible?’ But once you start to get really into technical stuff, it becomes a way of life. And I can’t say I’d like to live without it. This is a sport that, you know, if you start doing it, you get sucked into it, and if you fall in love with another climber, then you make it a lifestyle.”

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After walking for a while, we reached a secluded, narrow gorge covered in copious amounts of snow. Before us was a cliff about 30 metres in height. Two waterfalls, each about 20 metres in width had frozen from top to bottom. Half a dozen people had begun to slowly climb one of the waterfalls, so Crista-Lee and Ino suggested that we take the other. Ino’s first language was Spanish, and he was more than happy to let his vivacious and fast-talking partner take care of all the verbal reflections while he began to unpack their gear from their bulky backpacks. “If you break your femur,” Crista-Lee told us as she began to rope herself up by the waist, “it is going to take a few hours to evac, and it’s −25 Celsius. And then there’s questions of what it costs to the parks to get people out. And then the hospital bills.” “But the risk factor is part of the attraction for you?” April inquired. “Maybe when I was younger, yeah. Now, as I’m getting older, I don’t know because I haven’t touched the ice all year, so that’ll be interesting to see what my connection is with it. But I don’t really like the big risk factor. I really love the movement, though. When you can see what this boy’s doing down here with these tools on the rock, it’s very flowing and you’ve got to connect your whole bodies. I really love the gymnastics. It’s really fun.” Ino, “this boy,” smiled modestly at her compliment as he finished slipping into his crampons. Moments later, Crista-Lee whacked her ice pick with her right hand into the frozen waterfall, and then wacked her left pick. With a kick of her right foot into the ice, she took the first step up, and seconds later she began to elegantly “walk” up. A flick of the pick, a kick of the crampons, and a pull-up of sorts. Repeated over and over. In less than five minutes, she was on top of the waterfall. The people climbing the waterfall to the left, in the meantime, had taken half an hour to cover a third of the ground. “So why do you do it?” we asked her as she touched the ground in front of us once again. “Something that seems so risky for one person,” she explained, “like driving on the Deerfoot Trail around Calgary or the TransCanada Highway, really wigs me. Yet I can go to the Andes or the Himalayas or here and be really excited about things that some people would find maybe really unnatural, really wild, whereas it becomes domesticated for me after so many miles. It’s still challenging, but I get really scared driving on the highways here, compared to doing this.”

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“Where’s the wildest place you’ve ever climbed?” “Well, this is it,” she answered confidently. “Right here.” “Why here?” April asked. “This terrain is so extreme. The rock is so crumbly and you don’t want to fall around here. If you fall, they’re big, big falls. And there’s a lot of rockfall here. And it’s challenging, the climbing here, no?” Ino agreed. Bolt climbing like they were doing was safe enough, but some of the rock climbing that they had done here was vastly more technical and adventurous. “People come here in cold extreme temperatures to climb these mountains because then the rock doesn’t break as easy,” she explained, “but if there’s water behind the rock, it splits, and if you fall, then it’s very dangerous. This is definitely the wildest place.” Ice climbing like they were doing that day, however, had a feel that was different from rock-climbing for them. It was familiar, she explained. It was about familiarity in a place that felt wild. “It’s very much part of something I’ll do, like doing dishes. It’s part of my life. You know, like vacuuming the house, or spending a few days on ice. It’s just kind of what I know. Do I like vacuuming? No. Do I like the house clean? Yes. Do I like climbing on this when it’s dripping water and freezing? No. But do I like the walks, the company, the way my body feels – maybe not the hip, but you know, overall – yes, it’s a beautiful sport.” “What does ‘wild’ mean to you, Crista-Lee?” “When things go out of control.” “And what does wilderness mean to you?” “Home. Wilderness feels like home.” It was Ino’s turn to “vacuum” the frozen waterfalls, and CristaLee grabbed his rope. “My love for you is wild, Ino,” she told him with laughter as he began his ascent.

There is an assumption – we believe – in much research on experiences of natural settings that people are not at home in wild places. Nature-based tourism research and tourist studies more broadly, for example, are built on the assumption that travellers arrive at a natural setting from somewhere else and then return home. The same kind of scholarship often makes a clear distinction between tourists and locals. Crista-Lee and Ino push us to re-examine the validity of these distinctions.

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In Banff – and even more so in adjacent Canmore – “locals” are often people who have chosen to migrate and settle there after falling in love with the area. These people are neither tourists nor longtime residents. They are “lifestyle migrants,” people like Crista-Lee (who spent half her life in Paraguay) and Ino (a Spaniard) who feel at home where they love to play. Lifestyle migrants are not unique to places like the Canadian Rockies, of course. Hundreds of towns around the world are known for the magnitude of their nature-based recreational and employment opportunities and are consequently teeming with lifestyle migrants whose play in natural settings ceases being a form of tourism and becomes a lifestyle proper. Along these lines, it makes perfect sense for Crista-Lee to say that wilderness feels like home. Home in this sense means familiarity, comfort, and a place where one can be oneself. Climbing, however, features an element of play. Play, Schechner (2006) tells us, is a quintessential kind of performance. Play-oriented adventure depends on the sensation that one is somehow playing wildly in the sense of feeling a loss of control. Loss of control is relative, however, because adventurous play is in actuality very control-oriented. From the gear one utilizes to the skills one learns and applies, adventurous play is a delicate balance between gaining and holding control over a natural environment and negotiating with that environment’s capacity to wrestle control away from human hands. Among the “toys” needed for this kind of wild play are tools like outdoor clothing and specialized gear that distinguish the casual players from the regular ones. These instrumental and communicative technologies, writes Edensor (2006, 482), mediate “the experience of the rural through their ‘proper’ use and application, simultaneously confining and extending experience and human capacities.” Technologies for wild play are used so competently and utilized so routinely that they become second-nature, just like domestic appliances. Unlike domestic work, however, wild play requires a great deal of technical competence and physical literacy, including the ability to withstand inconveniences like bad weather, discomfort like fatigue, and even pain. Adventure sports practitioners know that their actions are at times publicly visible, even if only by small crowds or groups of peers, and understand that the suitability of their performances are “subject to the disciplinary gaze of co-participants and onlookers” (Edensor 2006, 485). Wild play therefore becomes

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grounded in conventions that stipulate how good a player’s style is and how effective one’s performance is. As Edensor notes, “appropriate actions are upheld by directors and choreographers in the form of group leaders, who are usually well rehearsed in forms of knowledge, ability to utilise technologies and the physical skills necessary to negotiate rural space as walking terrain, rock face or nature reserve, and thus are exemplary performers. These co-ordinating experts lead by example and monitor the performances of others in their orbit of influence ... The authoritative regimes installed by these ‘directors’ stabilise the relations between equipment and clothing, bodily maintenance, manoeuvres and collective enactions which sustain performing climbing” (485). A final and extremely important characteristic of the wild play of nature-based adventures is the vitality of the land. Challenging terrain, sudden changes in weather, unexpected appearances of animals, remoteness, fatigue or injury, and other unexpected events can have profound effects on play, turning even the most mundane experiences into anxiety-raising and even life-threatening circumstances. And this unpredictability is possibly what makes wild play truly wild for most people. Without the potential for things to go unexpectedly, without the possibility that human plans might be swept aside by “forces of nature,” the nature of play in natural settings would be little different from a game of soccer on a well-manicured pitch. Without nature’s playfulness, there would be no wild play.

w il d p l ac e s as verbs The idea that, as an outcome of performance, wildness can be playful enables us to appreciate its contingent, situational, and perspectival dynamics. A performative understanding of wildness pushes us away from the notion of nature as singular and leads us instead to think of multiple natures, in the plural, that become entangled with multiple cultures, multiple perspectives, and multiple ways of being and acting in “natural environments.” But performative understandings of wildness achieve something else, too: they underline the transformative power of the wild. Whether it is the feeling of familiarity engendered by a fish-cutting ritual, the feeling of comfort described by Crista-Lee, or the wild imagination of what else a lifeworld might be – as enacted by Fiona and her audiences – wildness is powerful because it is alive. But its

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aliveness is never something that should be taken for granted. The vitality of wildness, of wild places, is ephemeral, being contingent on the actions of human and nonhuman beings and subject to their relations, their entanglements, and their becomings. By thinking of the land as a swirl of activity, as a hub of growth, as a knot woven together by the activities of its inhabitants, we become attuned to its vitality and to the vitality of those who inhabit it. Thinking of lands as verbs is no original invention. Many Indigenous languages in Canada and much of the world already do this, using verb-based names to underline the patterns of activities unfolding on the land and the relations that inhabitants have woven with their environments (Ingold 2010). By thinking of lands as verbs, we recognize that wildness is not independent of the relations that tie inhabitants together. Wildness is an emergent outcome of activity, of performance, of inhabitation.

Interlude: Bear Spray

There are distinctly unique business establishments all around the world that stand out for the way that they evoke a feeling of home far away from home. Maybe you know what we’re talking about. These aren’t fancy places. They are not Starbucks or Tim Horton’s or Costa. These are locally owned and locally operated establishments that can’t be found anywhere but in one single place in the entire world. These are places where you can’t pay with your cellphone or with your American Express. These are places where you can’t drive through. These are places where you want to stay a while, maybe to recharge your mobile devices as you wait for your turn in the bathroom or maybe to dry out for a little bit while it keeps pouring outside. In these places, you find yourself going through two or more consecutive rounds of breakfast or lunch because somebody else ends up sitting down at the table with you to visit. These places might be renowned for a speciality – it could be pizza bagels, quiches, meat pies, ramen, or empanadas, depending on where on the planet you are – but most definitely they are places where you still take your chances when ordering a caramel macchiato. In these places, you can get almost anything from the elderly lady behind the counter if you just ask politely. These are places where you can find out whether so-and-so is in town, whom you can rent a car from, and where you can rent a bottle of bear spray. There is something else that makes these places unique: their location. Whenever you travel to national parks, especially to rather remote nature parks in a country like Canada, these places become your last real chance to get what you need – be that a flush toilet, an electrical outlet, a Wi-Fi signal, or a warm meal. As a result, these

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places become bona fide communication and logistics hubs for the globetrotting nature lover. Not only do they provide (partly) reliable and exquisitely free digital communication opportunities, but even more importantly, through their comprehensive and exhaustive paper-based bulletin boards, they also open up myriad exploratory possibilities, from guided hikes and bush plane flightseeing trips to canoes for rent and fishing charters. These are the places that never appear in documentaries or magazine articles about a national park, yet these are the places where those articles and documentaries are often produced. One of these places is the Village Bakery & Deli in Haines Junction, Yukon, which became our de facto office during our fieldwork at Kluane National Park in the late summer of 2016. It was also the place where we rented an opened bottle of bear spray for our scheduled hike with local guide and business owner Brent Liddle. For thirty years, Brent had worked as a park interpreter in Elk Island and Jasper National Parks in Alberta before moving to Kluane, where he had developed various facilities and services for Parks Canada as the manager of Interpretive Services for the national park. Brent had retired from his official roles, and with his wife, Wenda, he now ran an idyllic off-the-grid compound of guest cabins just across from the Kathleen Lake Campground. On a regular basis, he also organized guided day hikes into Kluane for his guests and anyone else who wanted to come along. That day, besides Brent and the three of us, two European couples were set to hike the first dozen kilometres of the Cottonwood Trail and back. The Cottonwood Trail (figure I.1), which takes four to five days to hike, is a 75-kilometre route that circles around the Dalton Range and coasts along the shores of Kathleen Lake, Louise Lake, and Mush Lake before ending at Dezadeash Lake. There is nothing overwhelmingly challenging about it, but the trail is simply gorgeous. Because it is carved 100 metres or so above the shores of the lakes that it passes, the path guarantees panoramic vistas that change at every corner. In light of that, even a single round trip day’s walk can give the occasional hiker plenty to see and experience, and that is what we had planned with Brent for 4 September. Making our date of choice even more ideal for a glorious hike in the woods, the sun was shining brightly and warmly that day, and the breeze was strong enough to keep the bugs at bay. But let us return to that bakery-provided pepper spray.

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We have never used bear spray. We’ve been taught to carry it in an easy-to-access spot (hint: not your backpack), and we’ve been instructed on how to remove the safety and point the device at an aggressive bear approaching within a range of 5 to 7 metres. To avoid these aggressive situations, we’ve also been told to make lots of noise as we walk on a trail known to be frequented by the ursine kind. Bears don’t like to be spooked, especially if sows are busy looking over their cubs. We’ve also been told that grizzly bears are better climbers than black bears and that if a bear appears anxious, we shouldn’t run or shout. And we’ve been told something else: if a black bear attacks, you should try to fight back; but with a grizzly, you should play dead. But we also know something else, or better yet feel something else. Bears – whether black, grizzly, or polar – are imposing creatures that you don’t want to mess around with, and for us and many other people, the mere thought that their presence is not only possible but in fact also likely is enough to change the entire atmosphere of a walk in the woods. Guides like Brent – and many others like him around the wild areas of the world – play a very important social psychological role in this kind of encounter with wilderness. Not only can local guides with experience interpret, or teach you about, the place that you’re about to visit, but they will also inevitably play the role of a parent. Yes, a parent. Venturing into an unfamiliar place in the woods, especially one frequented by predators, is a bit like entering a pitch-black room when you’re a kid. It’s simply less intimidating if there is a parent with you. Maybe deep down you know that not even a parent can fight off a bogeyman, but having someone more familiar with the dark there with you is enough to give you a feeling of control. The Cottonwood Trail winds its way along the southern shore of Kathleen Lake under a canopy of short evergreen trees, their growth stunted by the cold climate. As we spot bear scratch marks and hair on a tree, Brent tells us the story of the one time that he saw truly angry bears: “I was in a nine-passenger suburban. We were going into Mush and Bates Lake, and these two grizzly cubs came shooting past the front of the vehicle. Right behind the cubs was a great black bear, chasing them, wanting to kill them. And then out comes mama bear, racing from the other side, and right in front of us. These two bears got up and they started swatting each other, and the sow took a big chunk out of the hindquarters of the black bear. I said, ‘Everybody stay in the car and remain calm.’ We drove on a little bit

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I.1 Autumn on the Cottonwood Trail

further and the grizzly bear charged the vehicle – she was still really excited, you know.” On a “normal” hike – one in a place where there are no predators larger than us – our thoughts tend to melt into the forest. Soon after breaking into a comfortable pace, it is easy to let our sensations drown out our thoughts. Our bodies become positively busy with themselves. Feet simply care about stepping on safe ground. Ears tune into the murmur of wind and the songs of birds. The nose is alert to the scent of trees, flowers, and plants. Eyes alternate between settling on microscopic details and taking in sweeping vistas. The mind, gladly, shuts up. But on a bear-infested trail, the mind drones on. There and then, the eyes scan the forest for patches of black or brown fuzz. The ears pick up wood branches snapping suspiciously and attune to irregular rustles. The nose, too, wants to help, pretending to be useful in detecting the scent of a rotten carcass that a bear might be feasting on. And the hand, regularly, nervously, irrationally, goes back to the bear spray dangling from the waist belt, checking to see if it’s still there, with the fingers caressing the safety and then the trigger. This is not to say that a hike on a bear-frequented trail is unpleasant. Not at all. It’s just different. You might say that the difference

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comes from anxiety. And if you’re truly terrified of bears or other large predators, this difference might end up spoiling the day. But for us the feeling is different; it’s a bit of anxiety, yes, but it’s a bigger feeling that comes from a distinct loss of anthropocentric control. It’s a feeling, we want to say, that we humans are not in charge. We are not managing the experience, so we are not able to determine its outcome. That is how wildness can feel for us: unpredictable, out of control, messy. Even in its absence (but likely presence) wild life is enough to enliven a wild atmosphere. Let’s go back to the bear spray. Let’s go back to your fingers touching it, your hand making sure that it’s still there, and your thigh feeling it there next to your hip with every step you take, reminding you that it hasn’t fallen off. Have you ever wondered, have you ever truly asked yourself, or even researched, how effective this spray can be when an angry bear approaches you and is ready to charge, 7 metres or less away from you? Have you rehearsed that scenario in your mind? Do you know how many seconds it would take to remove the safety? Do you know for sure whether you’d have the coolness of mind and nerves that it takes to fire correctly and hit the target? Are you sure that it would be enough to scare the bear away, and for good, so that you could finish your hike in peace? No, it’s likely that you haven’t, and neither have we. But the spray is there. By your side. At your finger’s reach. And that’s enough to give you just enough of a feeling – no, make that an illusion – of control. A feeling that you belong there, just a bit, however shortly. Like a refrain that calms down a crying infant, the spray soothes you by turning a strange and unfamiliar situation into a more habitual and familiar one. Like a habit, it takes some of the edge of wildness away. It’s not just the bear spray, of course. A tent will bring a sense of home into a wild campground. A portable propane stove will allow you to cook comfort food and make your shelter more home-like. A campfire will bring the hearth of your own house into the woods. A flashlight will lessen the darkness and unfamiliarity of the night in the forest. All of these products are meant for wilderness experiences, yet they are used to de-intensify and downgrade the wildness of not being in control, of being far away from home. Just like the cheese bread, pizza bagels, and empanadas purchased from the cozy bakeries on the edges of the world’s parks, all of these products remind you that wildness for many of us visitors, many of us settlers, and many of us travellers is often a feeling of being away from

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home, and wilderness is the place where you – the visitor – are most clearly not at home. When we ask Brent if he’s afraid of bears, his words echo those of Charlie Russell. Absolutely not, Brent tells us. “Bears are to be respected and treated as wild animals with whom we share a place.” He adds, “With proper public education, those of us who are ‘bearanoid’ will come to realize there is nothing to fear. It is a privilege to share the same territory.” This privilege demands all the respect that visitors can give. Our hike ends without bear encounters. The next morning, we’re back at the Haines Junction bakery, planning our next experience of wildness and looking for another place where we will feel at home far away from home.

7

Atmosphere

Throughout our interviews across Canada, we heard countless times how people considered wildness to be a kind of feeling, not so much an emotion as a kind of ephemeral and mood-rich event, something that could be felt and sensed but also something difficult to put into words. In this chapter, we reflect on this aspect of wildness by conceptualizing it as an atmosphere. Atmospheres are not “things” and not easily captured by words; rather, they are possibilities, moments, and moods that are diffuse and shared. They are elusive and ephemeral, and they exceed comprehension, demanding a kind of writing that avoids certainties, closures, and definitive statements. But wild atmospheres are unlike other atmospheres. One way to render them – in fact, a common way among certain wilderness writers – might be to portray them as places and moments marked by aloneness, by solitude, by disconnections from other humans. Another way, our way of choice, is to render them as rich with relational vitality and the presence of multiple life energies becoming entangled with one another. In this chapter, we not only portray wild atmospheres as rich with multiple presences but also extend our argument and ethnographic descriptions further in order to underline the point that these expressions of a wild life are sacred. This is not a “sacred” intended in the canonical religious sense but a sacred intended as a vitalist, life-giving spiritual energy that transcends human nature, a life-giving energy worthy of respect and honour (see Atleo 2011). As we will show, at times these vital sacred energies are present and obvious. They are palpable and evident. But at times these forces are mere possibilities, speculations, implications, or gestures suspended between presence

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and absence, forces acting in excess of human comprehension that demand careful attunement. In this sense, we will show, wildness is felt as a life-bearing force, one that is immanent within the land as a capacity to affect its human and nonhuman inhabitants. Although not everyone we have met throughout the course of our research has had the conceptual vocabulary to tell us that wildness is an “atmosphere,” their stories about their personal experiences have taught us just as much. In addition, our own experiences of being out and about on the land, sometimes with other people and sometimes only with each other, has taught us just as much. Understood as an atmosphere, wildness is something that we and others felt in moments that exceeded compartmentalized notions of affect, emotion, and sensation. It was something felt in moments that we cannot capture but still wish to try to animate through ethnographic description.

The mountain is reaching toward us. It appears to be stretching its stony limbs, as if it wanted to grab our small propeller plane by the wings and swallow it through its frozen face. Yet it’s not the mountain beside us that we are truly worried about but the one next to it. It stands farther away but is bigger, stronger, sharper, and hungrier. Its edges are protruding farther, and its walls are prohibitively more precipitous. Our flimsy six-seater is flying too close not to be engulfed by it. The sudden quiet of our voices has drowned the headset intercom in loud static noise. April, sitting next to Alex – the pilot – looks like she’s about to lose it. She gingerly turns around with a ghastly look on her face, quivering. Her eyes intersect with Phillip’s, who is seated in the very back row. She mouths a four-letter word to him. He acknowledges with a nervous grin. The plane drones on, reaching deeper into the St Elias Mountains. April turns back toward the front, bringing her right hand to her forehead. Her eyes struggle to glance away from what lies beyond her window, aching to shut yet still wanting to still take in the awe-inspiring beauty of the expanse outside. Phillip resumes staring into the camera viewfinder, knowing that by doing so he won’t be perturbed by thoughts of terror. Once more, he sticks the camera lens outside of the plane through a small opening in the plane’s back window and presses the record button. Holding the camera steady as it gets battered by the rushing air,

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Phillip manages to keep a grip on the world. But it’s an illusion. We both know that we have no control. The mountains and the glaciers have surrounded us (figure 7.1). They can snatch us any time that they wish. Maybe this is what wildness feels like. Loss of control. Trepidation at the hands of nonhuman nature. Feeling that your life is fragile, miniscule in comparison to the might of the forces around you. Knowing that you’re at the mercy of the world’s will. It’s not a feeling that you would ever know by flying in the protective cocoon of a jet. In the unpressurized cabin of a Cessna, the atmosphere that the mountains breathe is the atmosphere that you breathe. You can feel wildness above you in the peaks that belittle you. You can feel wildness below you in the channels of glacial ice that bend toward infinite space and in the icebergs that float freely in seemingly unpeopled lakes. But you can also feel wildness in excess of what these features of the landscape evoke. It resides in something around you, something inaudible and unsayable, something invisible yet present in the air.

Wildness can hang in the air above the ground, in the light of the sky, in the colours of the horizon. It can emerge during a wild ride. It can reveal itself as you come to terms with a wild mountain, as you encounter wildly spirited life, or as you attune to the mysterious stories that a land wishes to pass on. Wild places are uninhabited, undeveloped, and uncivilized – dictionary definitions tell us – because wildness is a geographical and historical reality that features the absence of cultivation, control, or the care of humans. But this is a partial perspective emptied of personal meanings, experiences, and situated relational knowledge – a perspective emptied of the sacred. In asking people what “wild” meant to them – as explained in chapter 5 on intensity – we learned that for many of them, dictionary definitions often missed the point; wildness is more than a geographical abstraction. For many people, it is simply a “personal feeling.” For example, as mentioned earlier, for Christina MacDonald, wildness was “a feeling of being connected.” But wildness is also more than a personal feeling, one that begins and ends with a person’s body. As a feeling that is inseparable from a land, wildness is the capacity of those who dwell there to be affected by the ephemerally

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7.1 Hanging in the air near Mount Logan

wild qualities of a place as well as the capacity of the land to affect the lives its dwellers. Understood this way, wildness is an emergent and atmospheric affective event that is place-based and corporeally felt. This idea forces us to reimagine the meanings of wildness found in dictionaries by going beyond the usual descriptions of a scary place free of human control.

As our plane reaches farther into the world’s largest nonpolar icefield, Alex tells us that we can now see Mount Logan in front of us, the highest peak in Kluane National Park, in the Yukon, and in all of Canada at 5,959 metres. The unforgettable climbing story of a man we met the day before at the park’s edge, Ron Chambers, suddenly comes to mind. A few years ago, Ron successfully climbed Mount Logan, possibly the first ever First Nations man in recorded history to do so. The entire expedition took him eighteen days. As incredible as that was,

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it was one of the responses that he got upon his return that made the story stand out. When he was back in town, one of the elder ladies of the community saw him in the grocery store and said, “Oh, I hear you climbed that big mountain there.” “Yeah,” Ron said. “Any sheep there?” “No.” “Goats there?” “No. No goats either.” Puzzled, she looked him in the eyes. “So, what did you go there for?” Ron’s story hovers in the air as our flight approaches Mount Logan. What are we here for? There are neither sheep here nor goats. It’s cold and scary. What there is, however, is a feeling of wildness that exceeds Mount Logan, the St Elias Mountains, the crystal-clear lakes, and the immense polar icefields. It’s this feeling that pulled us here, portending what we might find by coming. It’s a feeling of familiarity and belonging yet a feeling of being nothing but passing guests. The place is familiar to Ron, too; it’s his kin. In his stories about the place, Ron told us that his father used to trap in Kluane National Park before it was a national park. There’s a lake just above Kathleen Lake called Louise Lake. It was named after Ron’s grandmother. He also had an aunt by the name of Kluane, and his older sister’s name is Kluane, and his eldest daughter’s middle name is Kluane. There may be neither goats nor people here today. Yet “this isn’t a people-free wilderness,” in the words of Ron; “it is our home.” And he is right; this isn’t an uninhabited wilderness. The place isn’t empty or quiet if you choose to listen to its voices. Stories dwell here, kinship still lives here, and multiple lives have been lived here. The mountains and the glacier and the lake are alive with these stories. The First Nations, the gold diggers, the trappers, the berry pickers, those who sought copper and obsidian, the mountaineers, the bush plane pilots, and the geologists whose family names were scattered amidst the mountains – all of their stories are here. There are neither goats nor sheep here, neither bridges nor highways, neither cabins nor hunting lodges. The land is uncultivated, untamed, undeveloped, yes, but not uninhabited. There are memories living here. Some are the stories of people, and some are the stories of glaciers and goats and mountains, and they’re all alive. You can’t see them or hear them, but you don’t have to see them to know that they’re there. You just have to choose to listen.

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f e e l in g w il dness As we mentioned in chapter 5 on intensity, in the words of Barb Johnston – the ecologist working for Parks Canada we interviewed at Waterton Lakes National Park – “wildness is a sense, a feeling,” and “a spiritual place,” a place where one can “feel connected to the whole.” The feeling of wildness that we try to animate with our opening story is just that: a feeling of connection to the whole experienced in an atmosphere that emerged through the meeting of us and the land, a connection between human perceivers and nonhuman percepts (Michels 2015). We are not the first to argue that wildness, in broad terms at least, is something that can be felt. A sizable amount of research has investigated emotional experiences of natural environments, and even though researchers may not always focus on the affective experience of wildness per se, the knowledge that they have accumulated confirms our broader argument: wildness is something that is felt intensely. Several environmental psychologists, for example (see MacKerron and Mourato 2013 for a review), find that being in natural environments affects the nervous system positively by resulting in stress reduction and in restoration of attention. Natural environments are also experienced positively by many people because they typically lack negative sources of stress such as noise, pollution, and traffic (see MacKerron and Mourato 2013). Of course, such experiences may be negative, too, especially when associated with fear, danger, lack of control, reduced comfort, or even terror (see Koole and Van den Berg 2005). Experiences of relatively undeveloped natural environments are also linked to a sense of adventure. Adventure provides people with elements of real or perceived risk, danger, difficulty, uncertainty, and the potential for loss of life and property (Berry and Hodgson 2011). Mullins (2009) also cites feelings, experiences, and outcomes such as higher self-efficacy, self-actualization, improved quality of life, skill development, self-expression, accomplishment, and more harmonious relations with the environment and co-participants. Research tells us that wildlife encounters, either real or potential, are also an important component of the affective experience of wildness. The most typical affective aspect of the experience of interaction with wildlife is wonder and awe (see Curtin 2009). Nature-based tourists typically recount their encounters with

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wildlife in terms of excitement, amazement, mystery, delirium, and thrill (Bulbeck 2005). Wild animal encounters, despite their brevity, can also be cathartic, inspirational, and humbling, and they can lead people to temporarily forget quotidian concerns, to feel self-realized, and to sense intimacy with the world (Bulbeck 2005; Curtin 2009). Whether it is grizzly bears (van Hoven 2011), alligators (Keul 2013), dolphins (Curtin 2006), whales (Cloke and Perkins 2002), or polar bears (Lemelin and Wiersma 2007), encounters with wild animals “are able to inform people’s sense of what it means to coexist and share space with other bodies” (Keul 2013, 931). A good deal of research has also focused on the emotional consequences deriving from the rejuvenating and spiritual power of experiencing wild nature (see Heintzman 2009 for a review). Experiences of and in nature lead to feelings of awe, personal balance, inner peace, beauty, goodness, inspiration, renewal, intuition of the divine, ineffability, mystery, and a sense of the sublime. Emotional experiences in natural settings have also been found to be conducive to spiritual well-being, a trigger for spiritual discovery, a way to connect with creation, and an opportunity for reflecting on spiritual values and for cultivating introspection, spiritual inspiration, and solitude. All of this research is transferable and insightful but inevitably coloured by the feeling that natural settings are out there, places removed from the ordinary experience of life. Perhaps that is because research on the emotional experience of natural settings has privileged the study of short-term visitors and recreationalists rather than full-time residents. And perhaps that has happened because researchers have neglected to realize that many of even the most remote natural settings are inhabited. To counter these trends, our research has been investigating the experiences and perspectives of those for whom wilderness is their home, traditional territory, or even workplace, as in the case of Fred.

It’s early September and the light is no longer what it was in the heart of summer. In the late afternoon and especially the early evening hours, the hoodoos cast flat, black shadows that seem to dance with each other, intermingling on the hardened desert floor (figure 7.2). As the sun reaches farther down toward the Prairie horizon,

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7.2 Sunset shadows at the Temple of the Moon

even smaller erratics and myriad nameless rocks begin projecting long dark silhouettes, each gliding faster and faster with every passing minute. Fred – the Dinosaur Provincial Park interpreter assigned to guide us – has unlocked the gate granting access to the area of the park where visitors cannot venture on their own, and we are alone with him at the moment. There’s no one else in sight, just us and the quiet lives dwelling in this place. We are not the first to attempt the impossible task of writing about atmospheres. Over the past few years, research on atmospheres has increasingly relied on reflexive, autoethnographic depictions of how atmospheres are felt, sensed, and otherwise experienced, designed, and even contested. As Sumartojo and Pink (2018) have observed, as of late, such research has shifted from an early emphasis on the unspoken, pre-reflexive, pre-objective, and affective dimensions of atmospheres to a focus on the ways that researchers attune to their own experiences and those of others. We do agree that atmospheres are fleeting, ephemeral, contingent, and emergent, but we also believe

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that our responsibility as ethnographers is to continue seeking ways to make sense of these experiences, no matter how challenging the task. Our attempt to re-enliven these moments is by no means self-assured, let alone exhaustive or objective. It relies on filters, memories, subsequent reflections, and interpretations. We do not hope to reliably “capture” the atmospheres of the moment. More meaningfully, our writings are attunements to the ways that the moments felt at the time, but they are also inevitably partial representational renderings of experiences that are essentially more than representational. As Sumartojo and Pink (2018, 6) write, “this means treating atmosphere as a coming together of different and subjective ways of understanding a site or event, based on different memories, expectations or foreknowledge, sensory or bodily capacities, cultural understanding and familiarity and the immediate contingencies of the experience.” But enough prefacing. Back to the land. Fred tells us that what we today refer to as Dinosaur Provincial Park was called Makoshika by First Nations. Makoshika is a Lakota-Sioux word roughly meaning “bad land.” In these badlands, their oral history teaches, there are “live spirits” – spirits of plants, rocks, animals, and the sky – who do not welcome your presence at night. “They may tolerate you during the day,” Fred warns us, “but you shouldn’t stay here overnight because the spirits in the rocks, in some of the hoodoos, can come alive at night and try and throw their rocks or their heads down at you.” Dinosaur Provincial Park is the resting place of countless dinosaurs. Fifty-eight species have been found here. Thousands of bones and bone fragments are littered around, everywhere you look, too many for paleontologists to care to pick up. Some are still as large as they once were, like 3-foot tibia and rib bones. Lying quietly on the earth’s floor, they are somehow still able to tell stories. Wildness can be present in wildlife, in forms of life that are still alive in the conventional sense, but it can also be present in life that once was, which somehow still retains its vitalist powers. It is eerily quiet now. The wind is asleep and Fred has resolved to let us explore on our own for a while. He’s not too far away, but we feel a private communion with the place, like we’ve been let in. There are peace and acceptance in the air. There is a sense of placidity in the way that the shadows are slowly and quietly stretching. Even the dinosaurs seem at peace, as if fatigued after a long day of

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visiting with the tourists. This place is what wildness can feel like to him, Fred tells us. We nod in agreement. We could argue that the place feels wild because of something swirling in the air, but that is not the source of its wildness. We could also argue that the park’s management has designed the park to generate certain experiences among visitors. It would be a valid argument, but in the minds of the park’s superintendents, that is not where the sense of wildness comes from. Wild atmospheres are less about what is there or what can be explained and more about what might be there or what might remain unexplained. Wildness, right here, right now, is borne by nonhuman forces: hoodoos, dinosaurs, erratics, and everything else in between. Atmospheres can act wildly, uncontrollably, without regard for the human desire to explain them away. More and more research is now looking at atmospheric processes as something dependent upon human design and human co-presence. When viewed this way, atmospheric processes unfold by way of transpersonal contagion and often through the strategic deployment of atmospheric design by human hands and minds. Crowded and designed environments like stadia (Edensor 2015; Stephens 2016), urban settings and megacities (Adey 2013; Gandy 2017), emergency rooms (Anderson and Ash 2015), street festivals (Edensor 2012a), trains (Bissell 2010), and ships (Ashmore 2013) are all places where the stories of atmosphere planning and the affective contagion among the co-present can be told and have been told well. However, atmospheres can be something else. Wild atmospheres can tell different kinds of stories. They can be something that human co-presence alone cannot explain, that emotional contagion is insufficient at evoking. They can be something taking place more by way of an absent presence than by co-presence. They can be something manifested in and through vitalist forces immanent in the land, forces that designers cannot manufacture and that scholars can hardly describe. Attempting to make sense of them feels Romantic, odd, hokey. But it is what it is. The stillness of the area of the park called the Temple of the Moon has bled inside our bodies. Atmospheres are contagious, beyond the boundaries of human flesh. We meander around the place without either hurry or destination, our bodies, too, acting like erratics. Wildness can feel like you’ve lost control and you’re about to

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plummet down a cliff. But it can also feel like you’ve lost control and you’re about to curl into a ball and lie on the lap of the land. Wildness can be a precipice. But it can also be a smooth desert floor, so clean and warm that you could surrender to deep slumber on it. Wildness can be the darkness of a forest and the roar of wildlife. But it can also be the warmth of a setting sun and the mute cry of stilled life, dead but still alive, still infectious. We could rest here all evening and all night, without cover. But the dormant wild life inside the hoodoos won’t be idle much longer. We detect a sense of urgency in Fred. Maybe he’s just due home for dinner. But he knows more than he lets on. We ask him whether we can come back on our own after supper, before the last rays of sunset expire in the Prairie night sky. He agrees. We can unlock the gate on our own and let ourselves in. Before he can even remind us about the spirits, we reassure him that we know. We have felt them already. Wildness is something that you feel more intensely once some kind of force pulls you in and lets you in. Once again in the words of Christina MacDonald, whom we met earlier, “whether you can find it in your local park, or watching a dragonfly, or watching ants make off with your lunch crumbs, you can dig into that and try and find ways to unite us with that connection to nature” (emphasis added). The act of digging into that, or striving to find ways to seek connection with the atmosphere of a place, is what Stewart (2011) would refer to as an “attunement.” Attunements are a “tricky alignment with the amazing, sometimes eventful, sometimes buoyant, sometimes endured, sometimes so sad, always commonplace labor of becoming sentient to a world’s work, bodies, rhythms, and ways of being in noise and light and space” (Stewart 2011, 445). Attunement is a kind of worlding, a way of paying attention “to the matterings, the complex emergent worlds, happening in everyday life ... the rhythms of living that are addictive or shifting ... the kinds of agency that might or might not add up to something with some kind of intensity or duration ... the enigmas and oblique events and background noises that might be barely sensed and yet are compelling” (445). These are attunements to the vitalist connections constantly unfolding in places that feel wild. These connections reveal bonds formed in time immemorial, relations that are often barely sensed yet inextricable from the land.

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n o t t h e w il d yo u mi ght know Throughout this book, we have re-envisioned wildness as something else. Wildness, we have argued, can be a relational force – a web and a community of life implying connection, not something implying disconnection from human civilization or separation between people and nature (Bird Rose 2012; Van Horn and Hausdoerffer 2017). This is a relational view that cuts ties with the colonial ideology of a virgin, untouched nature, reaffirms the values of Indigenous Knowledge and kinship with the land, recognizes the multiplicity of different cultural understandings of nature, acknowledges the sacredness of forms of life other than humans, and embraces the concept of promoting a pluriverse of life forms (Collard, Dempsey, and Sundberg 2015). This is a sacred, immanent wildness.

There are days when grey skies feel drab and stony. And then there are days when ashen skies hold on to a kind of chromatic depth that accentuates, rather that deadens, the contrast with the land and the water below. Today is one of those days. The silvered sky has somehow engulfed Lake Mamawi at the horizon, making it impossible to determine where the pearly water ends and the cinereal atmosphere begins (figure 7.3). There are no mountains around us, no hills, no undulations of the landscape in sight. The Peace-Athabasca Delta is as low and as unbroken as a watershed can be. Making the atmosphere feel even more ethereal for us, as visitors, is a sense of geographical loss. There are no roads to Lake Mamawi, no airline routes, and no markers on a standard Google map other than a small name typeset in a sea of blue surrounded by a vast expanse of green. Being in the middle of Wood Buffalo National Park for the first time is the geographical equivalent of hitting a broken Internet link: although somehow you found it, this site feels as though it can’t be reached. Hours earlier, Ronnie Campbell had picked us up with his boat in Fort Chipewyan (known as Fort Chip), at the border between northern Alberta and the Northwest Territories. We asked him to take us out to the land. We’ve been riding all day on bodies of water whose veins and arteries blur the distinctions among rivers, lakes, ponds,

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7.3 Mamawi grey

flood basins, and swamps. Ronnie, like many people in Fort Chip, knows the land and the water closely. It’s where his stories are, and it’s where his knowledge and his culture come from. Given the remoteness of the community – you can only fly to Fort Chip or reach it by an ice road during the winter – groceries in town are prohibitively expensive. So Mikisew Cree, Dene Athabaskan, and Métis people depend on country foods – wild foods – to make ends meet and to keep rooted to their ways of life. All day long, Ronnie has shown us around the cabins where people spend their summers hunting, trapping, and fishing, and he has introduced us to a few folks at Dog Camp, the traditional summer residence of many Fort Chip residents. Wildness here doesn’t feel like an unpeopled wilderness but like a kinship between forms of life that have shared this land since time immemorial. For Derek, whom we met at Dog Camp, wildness here means “living off the land, hunting an animal that’s free and at home in its habitat and giving us its life to eat its wild meat.”

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We have three evocations of three different environments – Kluane National Park, Dinosaur Provincial Park, and Wood Buffalo National Park – each rich with transpersonal intensities, distinct auras, and ephemeral senses of place, and we have three atmospheric provocations (see Stephens 2016) urging us to reconsider the role of what is involved in the making and unmaking of atmospheres. These are provocations about wildness that push us to go beyond the dictionary and prompt us to rethink what wild atmospheres might be and how they might take place differently. Wild atmospheres are ambiguous (see Anderson 2009), forever flirting between presence and absence, what feels real and what feels unreal, what is and what might be. Wild atmospheres occur unpredictably alongside and beyond what is there and what is not there. Echoes from encounters with inhabitants like Ron, the absent present energies that come alive at night at the Temple of the Moon, and the immanent sacredness of the land within a traditional First Nation territory are something that “exceeds rational explanation and clear figuration” (78). Wild atmospheres are affective environments teeming with a vitality that does not just engender emotion but also intensifies the very conditions whereby feelings might be felt and so the very conditions where things might just be. These are wild singular forces dwelling “at the edge of the unsayable” (Anderson 2009, 78), intensities taking place at the margins of the human and the nonhuman, the material and the immaterial, the quiet and the loud, the perceivable and the unthinkable, the visible and the invisible, the present and the absent. Atmospheres, in general, are neither personal nor environmental realities. They are “half-entities” accessible only “through their individual perspective, a perspective shaped by personal experience” (Michels 2015, 256). These half entities come to life not through representation but through attunement, a kind of attunement that lies in the capacity to be affected, which is conditioned by one’s emotional, sensorial, and affective history (Michels 2015). Attunement is not a developed skill and does not require know-how. Attunement, like atmospheres themselves, is a “propensity” (Bissell 2010, 273) – a draw, and a pull, and a charge that sometimes emerges (and sometimes does not) in a particular place, enlivening specific events, sensations, feelings, emotions, and thoughts. We are at a standstill on Lake Mamawi. Minutes earlier, Ronnie stopped the boat so that we could see and talk. We allow the deep

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silence of the soundscape to resonate in our bodies. It’s easy to feel the wildness of the land around you. It’s a wildness coming from the land itself, its apparent remove from the rest of the modern, busy world, its piercing ashen light, and its sonic peace encasing us within it. In part, it’s a wildness of silences and absences: the lack of cement, of neon, of combustion engines, of Internetagitated electrons. But it’s also a wildness of sacred ties between kin and their spirits where a feeling hangs in the air through the stories and the memories that still drift with the waters, a feeling that requires attunement and cultivation. But wildness is evanescent. It comes as a pause, and it fades as such. Atmospheric attunements are in fact pauses (Stewart 2011, 445–6) in the regular flow of daily life and even in the everyday conduct of fieldwork. They are pauses that cannot go unnoticed, demanding that we turn our attention to stories awaiting to be heard. An atmosphere of wildness is a pause amid a field of vitalist forces alive in the land around us, a field forcing us to slow down and reconsider our presence as humans in a world where we are often only present as a distraction. An attunement to a wild atmosphere is an “attunement of the senses, of labours, and imaginaries to potential ways of living in, or living through, things ... left hanging in the air” (Stewart 2011, 452) – things alive in dreams, in memories, in spirits, in stone, in light. Attuning to wild atmospheres entails becoming attuned to human and nonhuman bodies. It entails becoming attuned to presences and absences, to the atmospheric traces that “both exist and do not exist” (Anderson 2009, 79). Wild atmospheres are not reducible to co-present human bodies (Anderson 2009). There, how the contagion of affect happens is different from how it happens in crowded and built environments, often simply because other human bodies may not be co-present. That wild atmospheres unfold autonomously from the co-presence of humans, however, does not mean that they unfold because of the absence of humans. Wildness does not lie in our absence but in the “spectral penumbra” of “human meaning and habitation” (Gandy 2017, 354). Wild atmospheres depend on the proliferation of present absences that seem eager to hide away from our apprehension and comprehension, present absences capable of generating feelings of peace and harmony within an environment and capable of generating fear

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and loss of control. Attuning to these atmospheres requires shifting our attention between life as we know it and life as we have never known it, between orthodox ways of knowing and more imaginative forms of sentience. These are attunements, in the words of Anderson and Ash (2015, 42), that involve “a flattening and breaking down of distinctions between living and dead matter,” between matter itself and nonmatter.

t h e l a n d is ali ve Wild atmospheres are mercurial. On Lake Mamawi, wildness fades the moment that Ronnie’s boat motor fails to ignite. This failure is a reminder of where we are. “See, this is what I told you would happen,” Ronnie groans as he flicks the button one more time. The engine fails again. And again. And again. Its convulsions continue for a few minutes as the atmosphere shifts from the peace of wildness to one of apprehension. Ronnie decides to let the ignition switch rest for a bit. As we wait, he directs our attention to a tall pole sticking out of the water not too far from us. He tells us that thirty years ago some folks from Fort Chip decided that the only way to safely navigate these waters and steer clear of the weeds was to mark a clear path that everyone could follow. The water of Lake Mamawi and all the lakes and rivers around here had been getting shallower and shallower for sixty years, and more and more weeds had been making navigation difficult. Water levels have been decreasing even more for the past thirty years or so. We’re now stuck in those weeds. To maintain its health, the delta needs regular flooding. “It’s at the bends of the river that the ice used to jam,” Ronnie tells us. “Then you’d have over-the-bank flooding in springtime. And that would bring water into the little lakes and meadows. The floods would replenish the water into the delta. Then, in 1958, they started the Bennett Dam on the Peace River and that altered the flow of the Peace River, and we haven’t had the big springtime runoff with the big slug of water coming down. We broke the natural cycle.” When the Alberta tar sands came upstream, the remaining water suffered once more, this time from the pollution of the chemicals seeping in. This is where we’re stuck now. The place and the moment hardly feel wild any longer when you attune to all that. Ronnie appears to be upset as he looks at the water. He tells us he never used

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to take drinking water along with him on his trips out on the land. “You could just dip a cup into the lake and drink it.” He pauses as he turns around to press the ignition button again. The engine finally ignites, its noise burying the quiet that once was.

Wonder and awe (Curtin 2009), excitement, amazement, mystery, delirium, and thrill (see Bulbeck 2005), catharsis, self-realization, and connectedness (Bulbeck 2005; Curtin 2009; van Hoven 2011) – these are just some of the emotions that encounters with wildlife engender in people. We felt something similar on Lake Mamawi. For a few moments, the water, the land, and the sky had become one, and we had become one with them. It was a moment of wonder, of awe. It felt like the atmospheric boundaries between different lifeworlds had faded, the vibrancy of aliveness itself shining through in a fleeting silvery light. Light is crucial to wild atmospheres. Light opens up new perceptions of colours, shapes, textures, and moods (Edensor 2012a, 2015). Light is the aliveness of the landscape itself, an expression of its emergent vitality (Edensor 2017), an evocation of the intensities immanent in the land. In the unpredictable and sudden manifestation of its aliveness, of its magic, the unique light of an atmosphere “gets inside us” (Thibaud 2011, 209) as we get inside it. It demands our attention, it alerts us to its presence, it pulls us toward it, and it shines inside of us as it shines around us. Light is not something that we see, Ingold (2011) tells us, but something that we see in. Something similar can be said of atmospheres. Atmospheres are not “out there” but “always located between experiences and environments”; they are a “constellation of people and things” (Bille, Bjerregaard, and Flohr Sørensen 2015, 32). It is precisely these constellations to which moments of wildness attune us. In the land’s ephemeral moments of highest intensity, these constellations reveal the qualitative immediacy of its material existence, the grain of the voices in which it speaks a wordless language. The aliveness of these constellations alerts us to the fact that wild atmospheres exceed human affect and transcend anthropocentric experience. In so doing, the “colours, lighting, humidity, sound, odour, the texture of things and their mutual juxtaposition” (36) call upon us to recognize human finitude, prompting humility and demanding respect.

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In 2018, just outside of Waterton Lakes National Park in Alberta, Charles Crowchief, a member of the Blood Tribe, recounted to us how he and others had once witnessed the spirits of the land coming alive, speaking in voices, and making strange things happen to those who were there. The land is alive with the spirits of those who have dwelled there before, he explained, and therein lies its sacredness. This sacredness is often expressed in Indigenous languages across Turtle Island (North America) through place names that sometimes reveal what the land does and could do, reflecting the kinships of wild lives that dwell and act there. These are names that can reveal actions, unpredictable forces, expressions of life – names that reveal how the land has life and spirit, how it is life and spirit, how it is a constellation of emergent forces compelling us to remember, revealing itself through us, through stories, and through memories (Berkes 2012). Stories like those shared with us by Charles Crowchief prompt us to think of wildness as the presence of something that “can come over us, into which we are drawn, which takes possession of us like an alien power” (Böhme 2013, 2). This is a wild idea, we know. But wildness demands it. Wildness is a vital force exceeding human capacity. It is a feeling that a land is not always designed by and for people. It is a feeling that something about the world is still uncontrollable and unpredictable, capable of resisting the human will to plan, manage, and control. By attuning to atmospheres of wildness, we can realize that the land “is alive with energies, eternally fluid, its rocks, earth, vegetation and climate continually undergoing change as elements from near and far, and from different times, are entangled and folded together in a continual making” (Edensor 2010, 234). Within this will to attune lies the capacity for a wild atmosphere to emerge, for the land to make itself manifest and visible through a particular light, through echoes of its voices, through trickster-like quirks of its aliveness. Thus wildness is a feeling that belongs to us as much as it belongs to a land willing to hail us, a feeling sparked by an outburst of vitality itself.

Interlude: The Lonesome Loon Autumn Vannini

It was early September 2018. My parents and I were spending the remainder of our summer in Wood Buffalo National Park to gather research for their project on wildness. We stayed in a quaint log cabin on the shores of Pine Lake, a forty-five-minute drive south of Fort Smith in the Northwest Territories. The cabin was surrounded by evergreen trees, wildlife, and a small aquamarine-coloured lake. There were no people, no cars, and no distractions from taking in the beauty of the land. To get there, the day before, we had flown from Fort Chip and then driven on a rocky road, constantly stopping to take photos of lazily roaming buffalo. Before and after interviews in Fort Smith, we spent our time at the lake having bonfires, spotting buffalo, and enjoying the last days of the warm summer weather. One night, while sitting around the bonfire, we decided that the next morning we would go for a canoe paddle. The morning sun peeked out of the trees and struck my body with its warmth as we left the dock. The lake was almost completely still, the only movement being the ripples of our paddles dipping in and out of the water. It was the epitome of a perfect morning. Everything surrounding us felt mellow and peaceful, for the world had just woken up. Steam fog rose from the lake, creating an almost eerie atmosphere. As my parents paddled, I leaned back and closed my eyes. When I heard a call echoing in the distance, I snapped back to reality and turned toward my mom, who looked as confused as I was. “What was that?” I asked. “I’m not sure,” she said. Seconds later, we heard the unrecognizable sound again. Its wistful call echoed across the lake and slowly faded.

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“I think it’s a loon,” my dad guessed. He thought it was a loon, although we couldn’t actually see the creature. We didn’t even know if it was a creature. In three years of travelling alongside my parents, I had never been so enchanted by a sound coming from the wild. There was something about the powerful call that put my mind at ease. “Is that what loons sound like?” I asked. “I’m pretty sure,” he replied. Once again, the call echoed across the lake. Only this time, it was louder. We listened as the call grew louder and more consistent. “Over there!” my mom said, pointing into the distance. I followed her finger with my gaze and stared in awe. There it was – a single loon floating on the lake at a slow pace. Every so often, it would let out a haunting call that echoed across the water. The sound was so loud that it was hard to believe it was coming from only one bird. The call had a melancholic feeling that sent chills down my body. It almost sounded as though the loon was mourning something. What could it be mourning? Could it be that the bird had lost its family? Could it be that the loon was grieving a death? Or maybe the loon was overwhelmed with loneliness. Here it was in all this open space floating on the lake with no company. Or maybe it was the exact opposite. Perhaps the bird felt free being all alone on the lake. In times like this, being able to communicate with animals would be so fascinating. Our paddles rested upon the rim of our canoe while we steadily moved along the lake. We sat in complete silence as we listened to the call of the loon, repeating itself over and over. No matter how many times I heard it, I could never get tired of it. I closed my eyes and started imagining how different this experience would be if there were other people around, several canoes filled with people crowding a single bird. The beautiful call would get drowned out by their unnecessary chatter and by the sounds of their camera shutters. Everything would feel less like a dream and more like reality. I believe that’s why this whole experience felt so special to me. It felt as though we were the only people in the world, surrounded by nothing by wildlife. This moment belonged only to us, and we would cherish it forever.

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“As a remote wilderness park and World Heritage Site,” Parks Canada (2018) writes on its website, “Wood Buffalo National Park attracts Canadian and international visitors who wish to experience and learn about the unique cultures, landscapes and wildlife of the boreal north.” The Peace-Athabasca Delta, the description continues, “lies beneath several major migration flyway zones and provides one of the most concentrated nesting environments for geese and ducks on the planet.” Although the description sounds idyllic, what is missing from it is the sombre fact that the park and the Peace-Athabasca Delta – the largest inland freshwater delta in North America – also unfortunately lie at the intersection of disturbed waters dammed to generate electricity and polluted rivers flowing downstream from Canada’s infamous tar sands. For the last half a century, industrial mega projects like bc Hydro’s W.A.C. Bennett Dam and tar sands oil extraction have treated the landscapes of the boreal north like nothing but a bank of free natural resources to be extracted for the sake of capital gain. As we describe in this chapter, this extractivist regime has been exhausting the wildness of the park and heritage site, decimating wildlife, and severing the sacred relations between Indigenous people, their ways of life, and their land. Extractivism has also led to a point where the Mikisew Cree First Nation has quickly exhausted most of its options for fighting the system. In 2014, frustrated by the Government of Canada’s continued unwillingness to listen to their grievances, the Mikisew Cree took the dramatic step of filing a petition to ask unesco that Wood Buffalo National Park – part of their traditional territory – be added to the list of the world’s endangered heritage sites. Having exhausted

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all other alternatives, the Mikisew Cree initiative resulted in embarrassing the Governments of Canada and Alberta on the world stage in an unprecedented way. In this chapter, we describe how events got to this point and what the situation signifies for environmental politics, wilderness conservation, and Indigenous relations with settler society within a colonial state. It was in late August of 2017 – exactly a year after massive wildfires had devastated the Athabasca region of northern Alberta, particularly the city of Fort McMurray – that we travelled to Wood Buffalo to listen to the stories and perspectives of elders and other members of the Mikisew Cree First Nation in Fort Chipewyan and Fort McMurray, as well as to Parks Canada staff in Fort Chip and Fort Smith. This was the first time that we were visiting a protected area whose apparent wildness was being exhausted right before our eyes in flagrant disrespect of treaties, promises, and international agreements. By then, our ideas on the vitality of wildness had begun to coalesce, and the notion of exhaustion seemed a fitting counterpoint to that of vitality. Wildness is an expression of the aliveness of the land, and although it is forceful and resilient, it is not immune to abuse. This abuse and this violence do not necessarily destroy wildness forever, but they can exhaust it to the point of sapping it of its vitality.

“Before we do this, we just need to confirm something: can we freely take pictures and shoot video?” “Yes. It’s a flightseeing service.” “And they won’t get pissed off at us or shoot our plane down with water cannons?” “We’ll be okay,” our pilot reassured us with a smile as we began walking toward our tiny Cessna 172. “So do you want to fly over Suncor? Syncrude? Both?” he asked. “Why not both?” April replied. It had seemed bizarre right until that moment, but the notion of a private flightseeing plane trip over Alberta’s tar sands was starting to make perfect sense for the sake of our visual comprehension of the place. Although we had driven on the highway crossing the tar sands before, we had been told that there was nothing like taking it all in from the air. Part of the “Extended city adventure” tour, the flight plan promised such highlights as the

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biggest tailings ponds in the world, the Syncrude sulfur piles, the main plants, and various other in situ projects. Everything could be tailored to passengers’ specific needs, all for an unrealistically modest price. Who would pass down the opportunity to fill a few hours’ stopover at the Fort McMurray Airport with a quick trip to the fourth circle of hell? At 141,000 square kilometres, the Athabasca tar sands are the world’s largest deposits of bitumen, or to be exact, a mixture of crude bitumen, clay minerals, silica sand, and water. They are located just a few kilometres north of the city of Fort McMurray. Minutes after take-off, our Cessna cleared the city limits and began to fly through the haze over the southern reaches of the tar sands. Fitting the uniquely gloomy mood of the experience, the late summer sky had turned ash-brown, filled with smoke wafting in from distant boreal forest wildfires. The atmosphere was perfectly suitable; who would want to visit the world’s “most destructive” industrial project (Hatch and Price 2008) on a bright sunny day? “If you think the mine below looks big,” our pilot warned us through the headset intercom, “it’s because you haven’t seen anything yet.” He wasn’t exaggerating. Although pictures may be worth a thousand words, a thousand pictures would be worthless in describing the tar sands from the air. They would be useless in capturing the ocean of dirt, mud, slime, grease, and gunk being tussled, dug, kneaded, and vomited by armies of excavators, loaders, and men. They would be worthless in portraying the immensity of dreary holes filled with bleak waters that are no longer made of water. The word “pond” championed by tar sand tycoons is of no use in this dimension either. In ponds you find frogs and lily pads. In a pond ecosystem, there are forms of life like water, marsh, aquatic plants, insects, and amphibians. There are no such things as “ponds” that interlace for hectares and hectares to form archipelagos of tar zigzagged by ships, barges, and kilometre-long chains of buoys. Yet there are no terms to describe a sludgy world choked in regurgitated air and sculpted from odd-sized dug-out craters and perfectly rectangular holes filled with grime. We flew for what seemed like hours. At one point during our flight, a faint sliver of blackened sun pierced through the smoke. Its reflection shone on the sleek surface below us, colouring the sepia landscape with a weak golden flare. It all began to look much like a sinister painting of a life lost in its own haze. The sun’s reflection

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8.1 Aerial view of tailings pond

lent the land and the air around us a dire and perverse beauty – an ugly beauty whose appeal rested in the horrific shapes of an unkempt earth, in the malefic, corrupt, malignant shapes formed by the maelstrom of holes, rivulets, lagoons, and puddles of glop and goo. Our photos, snapped one after the other in search of nothing in particular, began to resemble a succession of stormy Rembrandt landscape paintings, with oppressive skies enveloping a lonesome world trapped in chiaroscuro lighting (figure 8.1). “Would you like to see more?” our pilot asked after a while. In the air for a little more than an hour and a half, we felt like we’d flown over the entirety of a European country (the Athabasca oil sands are one and a half times the size of Portugal). We had seen enough.

The Athabasca River crosses Fort McMurray and Fort McKay, cutting right through the tar sands on its way north. Downstream, some 100 kilometres or so, lies Wood Buffalo National Park, Canada’s

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largest national park and the second largest national park in the world at 44,807 square kilometres. Straddling northeastern Alberta and the southwest region of the Northwest Territories, Wood Buffalo National Park is larger than Switzerland. Although it was not added to the unesco World Heritage List until 1983, Wood Buffalo became a Canadian national park in 1922 when it was believed to be instrumental to the conservation of the last remaining herds of wood bison in North America. No permanent communities exist inside the boundaries of the park, but two main towns lie adjacent to it. The largest is Fort Smith in the Northwest Territories, a town of 2,542. On the Alberta side of the park, Fort Chipewyan is the largest hamlet, with 852 residents. Although by 2019 there was only one resident living full-time inside park boundaries – a man known as Cowboy Joe – many Dene, Cree, and Métis people use the park regularly year-round to exercise their fishing, hunting, and trapping rights, just as they have done since time immemorial. Besides First Nations and Métis people, Wood Buffalo National Park is home to wood bison and to the rare and stunning whooping crane, as well as moose, black bears, great grey and snowy owls, lynxes, timber wolves, wolverines, marmots, peregrine falcons, and countless other species. In addition to frequent wildlife spotting, visitors can enjoy the immense vistas of one of the world’s largest freshwater deltas, the Peace-Athabasca Delta, and the vast expanses and myriad lakes of the boreal forest. Despite its massive size, Wood Buffalo’s visitation numbers – roughly 3,000 per year – are extremely low. There are several reasons for that, but distance is the main one. To reach Fort Chip, the only available road is a dangerous 220-kilometre ice track from Fort McMurray, an option available only during winter and limited to intrepid drivers. As for reaching Fort Smith, the alternatives include driving 740 kilometres from Yellowknife or 1,022 kilometres from Grande Prairie, Alberta. Flights to either destination – the most practical alternatives to driving – are very expensive. The only road leading into the park is an unpaved one from Fort Smith – where car rentals, it should be noted, are extremely limited and pricey. In addition to distance, Wood Buffalo’s visitation is impacted by limited accommodation facilities. Nearly all of the tourists who enter the park do so from Fort Smith. Fort Smith has a very small number of outfitters and travel operators, as well as a moderate offering of

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small-scale locally owned accommodations. In contrast, Fort Chip has a single bed and breakfast, a couple of Airbnb rentals, and only one restaurant. It all used to be much busier. Archaeological records show that Wood Buffalo has been home to many First Nation peoples since the end of the last ice age. Mikisew Cree, Dane-zaa, Dene-Tha’ (or South Slavey), and later on Métis have long lived in different areas that are now included within park boundaries. Their existence has been enabled by the abundance of animal life made possible by the confluence of the Peace, Athabasca, and Slave Rivers. However, the human population was decimated in the 1780s when a smallpox epidemic caused by the arrival of the colonizers wiped out hundreds of people. Human inhabitation of the region eventually grew again. In the 1800s, Fort Chip became a major fur-trading post, and for some time in the late 1800s, the town was one of the largest in northern Canada. Even today, Fort Chip feels larger than its small population of 852 would warrant. There are paved roads, a very large school, a new community recreation centre, a Parks Canada office, a well-stocked museum, the airport of course, and a busy grocery store branded as northern and owned by the North West Company (yes, the same fur-trading company that you read about in middle school history textbooks). Unlike other remote First Nation and Métis communities in northern Canada, Fort Chip also feels quite modern. If not for the absence of Tim Horton’s, the high cost of everyday items (a 4-litre jug of milk goes for $9.25 and up), and the presence of spoiled fresh fruits and veggies at the grocery store, it would be easy to get the feeling that you were in a grid-connected small town in southern Canada.

t ryi n g to m a k e “ r e s e a rc h ” a less di rty word In respect of protocol for conducting research with Indigenous communities, well in advance of our travel plan, we had sought the collaboration of representatives from the Mikisew Cree Chief and council and from the Mikisew Cree Government and Industry Relations group. Their mediation and support made our fieldwork possible and gave shape to what you are reading now. We acknowledge that in addition to Mikisew Cree, both Métis and Dene Chipewyan people live in the hamlet of Fort Chipewyan as well.

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As non-Indigenous scholars, our interpretation of what we were taught is grounded in the knowledge, stories, and perspectives of those who have participated in our research and our learning, both Indigenous Knowledge Keepers and settler interviewees. Given our identity as settlers on Indigenous land doing research about Indigenous land, we understand the complexity of the politics of representation. All the interviewees mentioned in this chapter were asked to comment on drafts of our work and have received copies of this chapter. During our time in Fort McMurray and Fort Chip, we spoke with nearly two dozen people who welcomed us into their homes, their camps, their cabins, and their offices and who graciously took us around on their boats to show us their land. Time and again, we were told stories of what the place was like before the W.A.C. Bennett Dam and the tar sands developments. We were also told about many journalists, scientists, and government people who had shown up before us. We were shown technical reports written by consultants hired by local leaders to convince governments and oil corporations that industrial development was killing people, animals, and plants. Given the wealth of knowledge already available on the decaying health of Wood Buffalo and its traditional inhabitants – humans and animals – we felt compelled to do something different with our writing, something other than yet another typical report, something that respected the emotional spirit in which knowledge had been shared with us. Technical reports and scientific studies are not the most impactful, emotional things to read, as we all know. For example, in all such writings we had noticed that Elders’ passion, wisdom, and knowledge had been typically reduced to short quotes indented in the middle of a page. For these short excerpts, people were generally reduced to anonymous codes, like “Male, 54, Mikisew Cree First Nation Elder, 73,” and so on. Quotes were invariably short, and a sense of narrative was entirely absent. Something else in this useful but impersonal body of science seemed to stand out as being somewhat inappropriate, or at least cold and distant. In all of these writings, the authors – natural scientists and social scientists alike – seemed to refer to Mikisew Cree people as “they” and “them.” This is standard operating procedure, accepted practice across disciplines. In interview excerpts, people are shown as referring to themselves as “we” and “us,” whereas report authors refer to them in the third person plural as “they” and “them.” This

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convention left us with the lingering feeling that “we” – southerners, scholars, white people – were distinct and separate from “them.” It made them appear as “others” – First Nations living in a remote place far away from us, out of sight, and easily out of mind. Yet, being there, we felt that there was nothing distant about life in Fort Chip, in Wood Buffalo, or over the tar sands. Being there was something that affected us and that we felt carnally. We could feel that wildness was being exhausted right before our eyes. It was not something that you could ignore in the same way that you do when you hear about the tar sands on television. It was something that touched you, something that should have affected you. It was something that you could hear, smell, and taste. So we wanted to convey this feeling in a way that was more direct and immediate than what other writers had done. And that is when we started to notice that when people spoke to us, they would – more often than not – speak in the second person singular, saying not “I,” or “we,” or “us” but “you.” It was uncanny. After we went home and reviewed the transcripts, we noticed that this tendency was pervasive. So we decided to preserve the use of the second person singular in their words. This resulted in something quite extraordinary: no longer did “their” experiences feel subjective, conditional, anecdotal, or idiosyncratic, but the use of “you” made it all seem more real, as if things were happening to you. The second person singular made their words compelling, imperative. It called you out. What you are about to read, therefore, is not the typical research report or a standard chapter. There are no quotation marks. There are no indentations. What you are about to read is a “collage” (Scotti and Chilton 2018) of long excerpts from our listening experiences, minimally edited to facilitate reading, improve flow, and create narrative continuity. What you are about to read are not paraphrases. They are not dramatizations. These words are about experiences, perspectives, reflections, and stories. In a very few instances, we have changed the form of address of the original words from “I” or “we” to “you” in order to generate a kind of affect that calls you to relate to what is happening in the Peace-Athabasca Delta, but for the most part, everything was addressed to you in the original words. And last but not least, we eschewed the standard practice of making research participants anonymous. Here, like everywhere else in this book, real names are used. If scholars are not rendered anonymous when we cite their knowledge, why should Indigenous Knowledge Keepers

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and non-Indigenous interviewees be anonymous? It should also be noted that, following informed consent, everyone whose words are quoted here can be identified in the notes.

bac k in t h e day Back in the day, your ancestors were not rich. They struggled to survive. After the treaty was signed, they had a guarantee they would have shells and stuff for their hunting. People had to pretty much beg for everything that they could get from the government. It was very difficult to deal with that. The only thing that helped them out was that they knew how to survive out in the bush and make things work.1 The Peace-Athabasca Delta, even before it was known as the Peace-Athabasca Delta, has been home to the Mikisew people since time immemorial. It’s where your ancestors come from. It’s your home. It is alive and vibrant. It is your grocery store, spiritual place, recreational place, and traditional place. It means everything.2 Your great-grandfather and great-grandmother went trapping there, in the bush, well before it was a park. They just lived out there trapping, doing whatever they could to survive. When trade began, they would sell the fur they got and buy supplies. There were no motors, so they paddled around. And walked. A lot of exercise. Your late mother and late father used to get a bear every so often in the fall. They would boil the fat and cut it into little slices. And then they used to hang fish to dry. Your dad would get a moose every so often, whenever he was lucky. And then you had dry meat. There were chickens, there were rabbits. There were moose berries, strawberries, cranberries. And your mother would bottle them, put them away for later use. So you and your family survived on the land. Life was good. Back then, way back then, you wouldn’t buy a bunch of groceries. The main things were lard, flour, baking powder. You got most of the other stuff from the bush. You would have to buy salt, pepper, and all that other stuff, but most of it you could get from the bush.3 Fort Chip is the oldest community in Alberta. It had its bicentennial in 1988. It used to be a trading post. The Hudson’s Bay Company and the fur traders set up camp here. The delta was so rich with beavers, muskrats, fur-bearing animals. The world wanted a lot of fur.4

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On Treaty Days, your family would go to town. You had a little powwow, celebrated, and got your five dollars there. There were tipis, drum music. There was no drinking back then. People drank tea. People danced and laughed. You could hear them from a long way. With your five bucks, you’d get flour, you’d get sugar, and tea. Then you went back in the bush again. You still have Treaty Day every year, even now. You still get your five bucks. Now you get a bag of chips and a pop.5

The existence of oil in northern Alberta has been known for centuries. In fact, the prospect of extraction was a key motivator to pursue Treaty 8 in 1899 (Willow 2016). Treaty 8 covers an immense area stretching from northeastern British Columbia, across northern Alberta, and into western Saskatchewan, reaching as far north as Great Slave Lake. When they signed it, First Nations were promised that they would be “as free to hunt and fish after the treaty as they would be if they never entered into it” (Fumoleau 2004, 87–8). Of course, they had little choice. Like all other First Nations in Canada, they felt that their land would be taken with or without their consent and thought that by entering into treaty negotiations, they at least would get something in return. Much of their hope was in vain. As Preston (2013, 47) has remarked, “The rapid and massive proliferation of pipelines, refineries, mining and in situ excavation of bitumen, the sheer amount of clean water used in the process, the oil spills and the billions of dollars made by oil companies working in the Athabasca tar sands have all been made possible by the outright dismissal of Indigenous treaty rights, self-determination and sovereignty.” In many ways, Treaty 8 differed from the other numbered treaties signed in western Canada at the time. With the exception of their reliance on the economy that had grown around the fur trade, the Cree and Dene largely lived a subsistence lifestyle that revolved around hunting, fishing, and gathering (Willow 2016). Neither group was optimistic about the prospect of a treaty, as they feared that they would be forced to settle on small reserves and abandon their ways of life. The Crown, in contrast, was keen on extinguishing Aboriginal title through a treaty. Negotiations began at Lesser Slave Lake on 20 June 1899. As the dialogue went on, it became clear to the Crown that the First Nations’

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delegates had to be reassured that their hunting, fishing, and gathering could go on after the treaty. Religious missionaries, Huseman and Short (2012) observe, played a critical role in convincing Indigenous leaders. Addressing them in Cree, Father Albert Lacombe, for example, assured them, “Your forest and river life will not be changed by the Treaty, and you will have your annuities, as well, year by year, as long as the sun shines and the earth remains” (cited at 219). The promises eventually worked even without clear legal assurances on paper, and elders signed the treaty with the belief that their rights to fish, hunt, and trap would be unrestricted (Fumoleau 2004, 18). Annuities, like those five bucks, would eventually amount to little more than a (small) bag of chips and a can of pop. Even promises written in black ink, such as assurances that Treaty 8 lands would not be spoiled by uncontrolled development, would however be broken over the next century.

b r e a k in g p romi s es Your grandfather remembers that years ago, when they were going to change this into a park, the Chief was consulted by somebody. They agreed with it that time. Your grandfather remembers that the government promised the people that they could get a buffalo a month. They thought it would have been a good deal, and so they all went out and they voted on it, and the park was born. And then the park warden started making all the rules and regulations, and you couldn’t kill any buffalo. If you did, you’d go to jail for six months. So that’s one part of the story about the park. And that was not just with the buffalo – that was with everything that you killed. Even with trapping; the wardens used to go and follow your trail. They had no business being in your trapline trail to see how you set your snares or set your traps or whatever, or what you used for bait, all that. They were constantly trying to find ways to keep you from trapping. That was their intent. It seemed like it. Things have changed. For the last few years now, there’ve been no more wardens that go out on the trapline. If they do now, they have to consult with you first. But there’s nobody that goes down to the traplines anymore. Well, there’s hardly any trappers, too, now. So in a way they succeeded in chasing the trappers and the animals away.6 Long ago, many families had a garden. People used to plant potatoes, turnips, and carrots. People had cellars, too. That’s where they kept their potatoes all winter. People had moose meat and rabbit

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some days. Your grandfather trapped “rats” – muskrats – so you always had “rats.” You also had beavers. Beavers are good eating. Once in a while, somebody would kill a porcupine, and they’re good eating, too. So that’s the way you lived. You lived right off the park. All your food was from the bush.7 With your mom and dad, you used to live out there year-round. It was the best place to live – Wood Buffalo National Park. Years back, there were no oil companies. There was no Bennett Dam or anything. The water was so clean. When you’d go out there, you’d trap and hunt and pick up berries and stuff like that. It was really, really good. You lived out there, you enjoyed the life, because you’d hear the birds singing in the morning, and you could hear the ducks flying at night and listen to the owls. It was a really good life out there. Really good memories, living out there, in wilderness.8 You and your family travelled by dog teams. You’d hang fish for dogs in the fall to feed them during the winter. You’d go hunting for moose sometimes or try to kill them for dog meat. Then you’d go trapping with dog teams. And then in the spring, they would open the area that they call Frog Lake. That’s where your family would spend spring, hunting for muskrats and for beavers. And then you’d trap until 1 May or 5 May, and after that you’d come back to Fort Chip by boat with all the dogs. And you’d move to Hay River or Dog Camp to spend the summer there. Your dad remembers that in the springtime, when the ducks and geese flew in, you’d stay in Frog Lake for about a month or a month and a half. In Frog Lake, you would eat duck, fish, and lots of birds. Big birds. Life was good. You were always busy hunting and doing bush work, like cutting wood and checking around where to trap. You were happy. And you knew it was going to be a good winter because there were a lot of wild animals around. Sometimes you’d go swimming in the lake – Lake Claire. The water was good. Clean water. And then you’d go for a paddle around on the canoe. The water was deep long ago. The water floated south to Lake Claire. That’s a big lake, Lake Claire. The water used to come down from Birch Mountain, down the rivers. That’s clean water from the mountain, snow water. You used the water all the time. It was always fresh, clean. Then you have Lake Mamawi. That’s where the water moves. Keeps moving. Doesn’t stay in one place. Goes up and down. Always

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clean water. In the springtime it moves, and in the fall time it moves. Back and forth. Always clean water. The animals used to like that. You got buffalo, ducks, birds. In the fall time, they all go south. But you still had buffalo year-round around Lake Claire. It was good when the water was good. Animals used to live there year-round.9 You know the bay where the town sits? The water used to be much higher. Those trees you can see down there was all sand beach. That’s where you swam as a kid. You could still see a little bit of sand there. And where trees are now, it was all water. No vegetation at all. Just clean, blue water. That’s where you’d swim. Lake Athabasca was six feet higher, straight across. It was all water. People used to park their boats there. See the sand beaches? That was all sand beach and they didn’t have that dug out. They’d just come flying in with their boats in the water, and it was all high enough to just park their boats there. Then the dam came and they drained the whole bay. You used to just run and play on the mud after that, in 1972, play in the mud, looking for a little pool to swim in, until it dried out. The dam affected the whole park, the whole delta, and water levels have never been the same.10 You have to go back to the late sixties, I guess, to the Bennett Dam. The bc Hydro dam was the first major project on the Peace River. So, since then, everything started to have incremental, cumulative impacts on the delta. And then on this side, on the Athabasca River side, we have huge mining activities. Since then, it’s just been growth after growth. All these activities continuously get approved without understanding the impacts on the Peace-Athabasca Delta and on Wood Buffalo and on the people.11 Still today a lot of the local people rely on country foods because the cost of living in Fort Chipewyan is so high. And a lot of people still collect traditional medicine. And all that stuff is part of the culture in Fort Chip, so that’s why you have really strong ties to the land. The delta is sort of like a big filter. It purifies the water all the way down the river system. It plays a big role. There used to be a lot of flooding on the Peace River and the Athabasca. This happened for, who knows, centuries. Now with the Bennett Dam, the ice doesn’t get as thick. The last big flood was in 1974. Some years the water is so low that you can’t access your hunting grounds in the fall. The water’s too low and you can’t cross Lake Mamawi.

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With the drying process and everything happening, you are kind of losing your culture. It’s your treaty right to access your land in order to continue practising your lifestyle: hunting, gathering, medicinal herbs, fishing, and so forth. This makes you more isolated, too. Right now in the delta, at Lake Mamawi, there is less than 3 feet of water. So if you put another dam in – like the Site C Dam in British Columbia – the water will drop another 6 feet or so, and you’ll have no more delta. You’ll lose everything, your whole way of life.12 It used to be straight grass here, all this. The ground was nice and level. And all this stuff now starts growing. There’re not many berries. There used to be lots of berries. You used to come pick berries out here with your mom. It’s been dry all summer, hardly any rain.13 When the water was high, there were a lot of muskrat. Before the Bennett Dam, it all flooded every two to three years. It cleaned the inland lake water. Everything was fresh, so there were a lot of animals. But since they built the Bennett Dam, it doesn’t really flood. And the inland lake water goes stale. So the muskrats aren’t really coming back. Today there are animals that are getting sick because the water isn’t healthy. It affects all the living creatures because in order to survive, you’ve got to drink. It affects you in all kinds of ways. Your friends last year got a moose during wintertime. They went to skin it, and the meat had little pusses and stuff on it. So that was that.14 The place where you could take the kids to show them something like trapping, fishing, or stuff like that, you can’t do that anymore. Lake Mamawi used to be about 15 feet of water, years back. Now you’ve got about 5 feet. It went down to about a foot of water a couple of years ago.15 When the water was high, everything was good. Animals travelled a long ways, came back and forth, back and forth. But now there is no water, nothing much to eat for them. They leave. There are no birds. A lot fewer. Nothing is as good as when the water was high. Water was running and going back and forth. It was good travelling. Easy travelling. Clean water to drink. You could drink water from the lakes – Lake Claire and Lake Mamawi. But now you can’t.16 A lot of changes over the last twenty years. A lot of changes. The pollution from the plants is killing everything. Kills off the berries in the bush. There are no cranberries now here. If there are, they’re very little. There’re no bugs. Not even grasshoppers. Down in the bay, every year you used to hear a frog singing. Nothing now.

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Even the shorebirds are gone. You could go there in the daytime at the warmest time of the day – nothing. No shorebirds. Even for the ducks now, migration is only three days. Everything’s changed. They used to come here and go in a park, the geese. They changed the system because there’s too much vegetation now, because of low water. So they don’t come over here anymore in the spring. They go toward Fort Vermillion and Peace River. Everything’s changed. Why? Well, they say – when they have meetings with the professors, they say that – they call it different. It’s something to do with the environment. They have a word for that. What is it? Climate change! Anytime you ask them, “Why is our water going down? We’re not getting fresh water! Why are the fish gone? Ducks are avoiding us!” That’s what they say: “climate change.” Two words. That’s their famous word. Yeah. I don’t know. In our Indian language, Cree, we call it “pollution.” Once in a while, if the wind comes this way, when the plants are all running, while you’re sitting outside, especially by the lakeshore, you can smell those fumes. Sulfur. Then you tell them and they say, “Oh, we’re not killing nothing. We watch our pollution.” The lake is just plugged with weeds. It seems that is the only thing that survives in this world – weeds. Even our medicine. Red root. That’s good for stomach aches, for sore throat. Now a guy went down there to check, and he said that red roots are turning black on the bottom from that water. So now any red root he finds along the main river he can’t touch. And somebody caught a jack fish with two heads. Two heads?17 Yeah there’s been some changes. There have been quite a few changes. The animals aren’t as plentiful. They also seem to be stressed. They’re not as fat as they used to be. There used to be thousands and thousands of geese. But since the oil sands expanded in the last fifteen to twenty years, fewer birds stop. Even the fish are thinner and there are fewer of them.18 Some years back, two men went hunting in Athabasca, and they got a moose. They noticed his lungs were white. There were cysts all over the meat. So, ever since then, you don’t hunt that way. You want to teach your kids how to live off the land. But all the pollution is getting closer and closer, and it’s getting worse and worse. You have to go farther and farther for fresh meat. You see oil sheens all over, like on top of the water. Drainage is coming out, and you see all the stuff coming out there. Even when you go up on the river,

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you see all those white bubbles all over. They say it’s not polluting anything. But even the meat tastes different. You taste it right away. You could tell by the meat, the texture of it: it’s tough.19 Once in a while, you go around paddling and you see all kinds of little yellow stuff floating around. Lake Claire used to be a nice lake. Now you go there at night and you see this big light over there in the distance. You can see it off in the sky there. And when it blows from that way, you can smell the oil sands.20 Not much trapping going on right now. It’s a dying thing. The muskrats come and go, but since the pollution, they haven’t really come back. Money. The almighty money. That’s what it’s about.21 There’s a fine line. You’ve got to have gas to run your boat, but it doesn’t mean that you have to pollute the river because of that boat. The tar sands have been there for who knows how long, millions of years. Why do we have to dig it up so quickly in fifty years or so? The water is used to oil because it runs through the tar sands. There is oil along the bank and stuff like that; it’s been there for millions of years. That water passing over just collects and mixes in there. When you speed up the process like that, well, it throws the balance of nature off. You have the right to access your land and continue your life, your way of life, your culture, your hunting, your trapping, your means, your access to the land. You have the right to go out and continue your way of life. But with governments putting in a dam, that takes away your water and you cannot actually get to your treaty territory. That is infringing on treaty rights. That limits you from continuing your way of life. You used to boat along, and you’d just dip your cup in the lake and drink the water. You never used to haul water out in the bush. Never. That’s how clean it was when you were a kid. Things have changed now. Nobody does that anymore. Everybody hauls water. You wouldn’t drink that water.22 It’s starting to come from the air. Before, it was just two companies. Forty years ago, your dad was told, “You can only eat the fish once a week.” They told your mom, “If you’re pregnant, you can only eat it once a week.” Those two companies. And then they quadrupled production. Now they’re all directly affecting the delta. Now you have lost a lot of family members and relatives with cancer.23 You’ve got no choice. You’ve got to go and work in the tar sands. It would be crazy not to work in the tar sands. Why just sit at home

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and twiddle your toes while the people next door are making a bunch of money and you’re getting all the crap coming down. So you’ve got to join the crowd. Don’t swim upstream because you’re going to get played out, so you’re going to drift down. So why not go with the flow? After all, you’ve got a boat, too. You pollute, too. You’ve got a truck, so you pollute. You’ve got skidoos, so you pollute. Because if you didn’t, you’d have your birchbark canoe down there and paddle around, but in the end, you’re still breathing the air, you’re still drinking the water, so go with the flow. You’ve got no choice.24

The W.A.C. Bennett Dam on the Peace River and the pollution of the Athabasca River by the tar sands have endangered “the cultural survival of Fort Chipewyan and other First Nation peoples living within the so-called tar sands ‘sacrifice zone’” (Huseman and Short 2012, 228). As the exhaustion of “natural resources” continues upstream – driven by ideologies of national security, economic development, job stability, and the War on Terror (with the related quest for energy independence) – First Nations downstream are sacrificed to the priorities of extractivist colonial capitalism. Their sacrifice is done in the name of what Wolfe (2006, 388) calls a “logic of elimination,” which is the same logic that informed the expansion of the western frontier and the massacres that ensued, the formulation of the assimilationist agenda of the nineteenth century, and more recently the natural and cultural extermination brought about by extractivism (see Churchill 2005; Huseman and Short 2012; and Smith 2005). What we are witnessing in boreal Canada today is not just a process of exhaustion of natural resources, as champions of extractivism would have us believe. The very notion of “natural resources” is short-sighted and ignorant of ecological relations. Nature and human society are inseparable, and when the land is exhausted, the vitality of its inhabitants is worn out, too. Land embodies and emplaces the being of Indigenous peoples, and alienation and separation from the land always inevitably results in exhausting the deeply rooted relations upon which physical and social health depend (Huseman and Short 2012). It is such exhaustion and all of its consequences that have prompted critics to call what is happening in boreal Canada a genocide (see

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Smith 2005). “Large-scale resource extraction processes not only alienate Native peoples from their land by driving them off of it in order to make room for industrial activities,” Huseman and Short (2012, 223–4) write, but also alienate them “by way of the concomitant toxic by-products that put water supplies, land cover and wildlife at serious risk, gravely jeopardizing the lives, cultures, and health of indigenous communities who depend on these resources for their continued existence ... The ongoing tar sands mining ‘project’ in Northern Alberta is, without a doubt, the most disastrous instance of this specifically contemporary genocidal phenomenon in North America to date.” Unlike conventional forms of oil, tar sands bitumen needs to be extracted from the ground either through strip mining or by forcing it to flow into wells using in situ techniques. These techniques loosely consist of reducing the viscosity of bitumen by injecting hot air, steam, and solvents into the sand, which requires water, and this water gets contaminated in the process and needs to be stored in tailings “ponds” afterward. Daily, 480 million gallons of toxic waste are channelled into tailings lakes. However, this toxic waste is not easy to contain. The Lower Athabasca River and Western Lake Athabasca receive toxic waste “from licensed discharges; from above-ground and below-ground pipeline leaks and breaks; and from tailings pond leaks,” the Nunee Health Board Society reports (Timoney 2007, 54). As Huseman and Short (2012) observe, accurate numbers are difficult to obtain given the secrecy in which tar sands operate, but an estimate by Suncor gives us an idea. In 1997, their Tar Island Pond leaked about “1,600 cubic metres of toxic waste into the Athabasca River every day” (Timoney 2007, 53). And that is just one tailings lake of one company. Moreover, tailings lakes have become deathbeds for countless migratory birds. Fish populations in Lake Athabasca are now constantly found to have deformities. Rivers, lakes, and wetlands are seeing their water levels drop as a result of the draining done to utilize water for in situ bitumen extraction. Forests are being stripped of trees and vegetation to mine new ground. And then there are the health effects on the people living downstream. Reports show that leukemia, lymphoma, lupus, reproductive cancers, colon cancer, Graves disease, and a rare form of bile duct cancer called cholangiocarcinoma are occurring in Fort Chipewyan at rates dramatically higher than in the general population (McLachlan 2014).

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The transformation of the ecosystem within the Peace-Athabasca Delta has also had dramatic consequences for Indigenous people’s ways of life and cultural traditions (McLachlan 2014; Willow 2016), showing how the exhaustion of wild lands is inseparable from the exhaustion of a whole way of life. Although many of them continue to hunt, fish, and trap, the frequency of these practices is decreasing sharply, and so is the amount of country food that families are able to safely obtain from the land each year (McLachlan 2014). The result is that more food needs to be imported, more expensive food. And so you can do the math. If the water is not safe to drink and the food that the land grows is becoming less and less safe to eat, you will need more cash to buy goods from the grocery store. A lot more cash. Soon realizing that you, too, have exhausted all your options and that you are forced to work for your oppressors, you maybe even move to Fort McMurray.

what d o yo u d o w h e n t he land, the people, an d a l l o t h e r o p t io n s are exhausted? When you are standing in the river as the water comes down and 80 kilometres up are all these projects, how do you determine which company is doing the damage?25 A lot of times, the company and the government put the onus on you: “Well, how are you impacted, Mikisew? How do you think the delta is impacted?” And it’s really frustrating because they should be the ones adequately doing assessments. They should be providing you with the necessary funding and capacity to do the proper assessments so that you can communicate back to them.26 And so it’s a lot of time, a lot of costs, a lot of energy. There were a number of opportunities prior to the petition to try to get the attention of the Government of Alberta and the Government of Canada, and then Parks Canada as an agency, to address the issues. And often you hear phrases like “public interest.” The government will make decisions in the best interest of the public. Are you not the public? Are Indigenous peoples not Canadians? Not peoples? You know what “public interest” is. The interest at the moment is development and jobs, and so that’s the way that goes.27 The petition says that Canada has to do a better job and that the World Heritage Committee should be made aware that Canada is

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not taking its job seriously in managing this site. The petition was accepted in Bonn in 2015 at the World Heritage Committee meeting. And there’s a list of certain things that Canada has to do now and report back to the World Heritage Committee. Canada has to finalize the action plan and commit to finalizing a strategic environmental assessment. So they actually have to do a cumulative effects assessment, understanding all of these activities – hydroelectric and oil sands and how all of those projects are impacting the delta. Finally! But no one has seen any action yet – no mitigation or direct action from Canada proving that they’re taking this seriously. The unesco decision on Wood Buffalo will probably be made in July 2019. By then, the World Heritage Committee will be able to see what action Canada has taken. And that will give the committee enough information to make a decision about Wood Buffalo for an endangered listing. At no point has Canada come to the Mikisew Cree and said, “We recognize that this is your home. We recognize that you petitioned unesco . Would you like to review the outstanding universal values with us? Would you like to review our operation guidelines, and would you like to be part of managing the site?” That conversation has never happened. If you were Canada, wouldn’t you be embarrassed?28

Han (2015) writes that the defining feeling of our contemporary world civilization is that of exhaustion. Our current burnout society, he writes, is producing individual disorders ranging from stress and depression to attention deficit disorder and borderline personality disorder. Rapidly advancing and increasingly pervasive communication technologies, the nature of competitive society, and the need to be “always on” and always ready to experience life and share everything that we do with others have all combined with capitalism’s expanding offer of consumer goods and services, its ongoing quest for greater convenience, and the expanding logic of customer service to generate the conditions of a busy, stressful, burned-out life. Although other societies and cultures have historically found reasons to feel exhaustion (Schaffner 2017), the contemporary moment is unique in that being tired and exhausted is viewed by many as a badge

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of pride and prestige. We are tired – thousands of people around the word announce on Facebook and Twitter every hour – because we are busy, and that makes us, seemingly, important and successful. However, neither Han (2015) nor Schaffner (2017) – or other philosophers and theorists of exhaustion and related ideas – have paid attention to the fact that we humans are far from alone in our exhaustion. As burned-out as humans may be, plants, animals, soil, rivers, bedrocks, watersheds, lakes, and oceans – in short, our planet – are infinitely more exhausted than we humans are. Exhaustion is neither a solely human condition nor an individual disorder but rather a diffused more-than-human malaise affecting all forms of life in the Anthropocene. In fact, exhaustion, rather than being an extraordinary condition, is akin to an ordinary and more-than-human affect. It is a feeling so banal and pervasive, yet so intense, as to be indistinguishable from the experience of everyday life (Stewart 2007). The exhaustion of “natural resources” is at the root of the problem of our planetary exhaustion. The very notion of “natural resources” – the idea that our shared land can be a “resource” providing services to us – is where the trouble originates. We live in a time and in a world dominated by the forces of colonial capitalism, and colonialism and capitalism – argues Betasamosake Simpson – depend on the extraction and assimilation of so-called “resources”: My land is seen as a resource. My relatives in the plant and animal worlds are seen as resources. My culture and knowledge is a resource. My body is a resource and my children are a resource because they are the potential to grow, maintain, and uphold the extraction-assimilation system. The act of extraction removes all of the relationships that give whatever is being extracted meaning. Extracting is taking. Actually, extracting is stealing – it is taking without consent, without thought, care or even knowledge of the impacts that extraction has on the other living things in that environment. That’s always been a part of colonialism and conquest. Colonialism has always extracted the indigenous – extraction of indigenous knowledge, indigenous women, indigenous peoples. (Betasamosake Simpson and Klein 2013) We need a word to describe extracting as stealing, extracting without free and informed consent, extracting the vitality of life

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without thought, care, or foresight. That word is “exhaustion.” Exhaustion originates in the act of careless extraction of energy, of vitality. Humans have always taken from the earth, of course, but in the time of colonial capitalism, taking from the earth means turning the earth into a massive inventory of resources. These resources are then separated from the relations that they have with each other and are removed from wherever they may originate (Willow 2016). As Naomi Klein (2011) explains, extractivism is rooted in “the central fiction on which our economic model is based: that nature is limitless, that we will always be able to find more of what we need, and that if something runs out it can be seamlessly replaced by another resource that we can endlessly extract.” Under the regime of extractivism, the earth is viewed as a pool of resources whose value is assessed not for the sake of deriving subsistence but for their potential to yield profit, strengthen national power and sovereignty, and increase personal and corporate wealth at the expense of other beings and their futures. Extractivism is a social, political, and economic system as much as it is a cultural mindset, a way of being and occupying the world. In an extractivist culture, land is real estate whose potential is to be exhausted at all costs – a mere possession that can be bought, sold, invested, and rearranged to suit need and scope. Although this perspective of course results in wealth concentration, it also and simultaneously results in local impoverishment, destabilization of traditional ways of life, dislocation, and mass extinction. In settler colonial states like Canada, the inequities provoked by extractivism are most intensely felt by Indigenous people, whose lives have long depended on regenerative – not exhaustive and extractive – relations with the lands that they occupy. North American colonial processes have “increasingly focused on the elimination of Indian peoples in order to gain access to their territory for the purpose of resource extraction” (Huseman and Short 2012, 222). In both Canada and the United States, Indigenous lands have become zones of sacrifice and exhaustion where the vitality of the earth has been destabilized for its resource commodity value and where human inhabitants’ lives have been dulled and sacrificed to make way for economic development. Extractivism, therefore, does not just exhaust “natural resources” but saps the vitality of all lives, too.

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e x h au s t in g wi ldnes s We travelled to Wood Buffalo National Park to understand wildness, but there we witnessed wildness being exhausted in myriad lives and in myriad ways. We realized that exhaustion is more than just about being tired or burned-out. Burned-out individuals are overworked and need rest before they can be productive again. But exhaustion has a quality that is different from burnout: it is a relational, not an individual, problem (see Brunner, Kuipers, and Pape 2017). Exhaustion transcends individual lives, whether human, animal, vegetal, or geological. Exhaustion is felt at the ecosystem level, where there is kinship among different forms of life. An exhausted kinship is one that is struggling to regenerate life, struggling to exercise its unique vitality, struggling to animate and feel animated. As Brunner, Kuipers, and Pape observe, “In what has been called the age of the Anthropocene, the bleak state of the environment, threatened by global warming, mass extinction, and forced displacement, drains individuals and collectives of their futurity, making it harder to imagine other futures. In that sense, the environmental exhaustion of the planet doubles in an exhaustion of the potential to think and act constructively” (ii). To be sure, exhaustion is something that can be felt. It is something that you can sense when you are worn out because you have had a long day. But when your entire planet is exhausted, it is something that you feel when you rise every day to realize that your land is being raped and that the government has once again found a way to justify the rape as a conquest and as a sign of economic progress. But exhaustion is not just yours to feel. Exhaustion is not just a feeling but also a structure of feeling (Straughan, Bissell, and Gorman-Murray forthcoming) – a diffused emotion and mood that pervade a community and its land. It is something that clings to the air, something that is the air itself. Exhaustion sticks to things. It is in the deformed fish that have been battling to survive in the polluted water. It is in the infected moose that cannot give you his life because it has none left in him. It is in the birds that have touched down on a tailings lake and are now unable to lift. It is in the dirt, the very soil underneath your feet, a soil uprooted, muddled, burned, poisoned, deprived, and exhausted of its nutrients. Exhaustion has been called a relational “field effect” (Brunner, Kuipers, and Pape 2017, iii). It is an “emergent effect of bodies

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coming together” (Straughan, Bissell, and Gorman-Murray forthcoming), a destabilization of relations (Pelbart 2015), a realization of our collective vulnerability, our constant exposure, and our susceptibility to what we have neither chosen nor foreseen (Straughan, Bissell, and Gorman-Murray forthcoming, citing P. Harrison 2008). But this account is only partly true, as the exhaustion that has arisen from living in the era of extractivism was easy to foresee. You have to be a fool to think that you can take as much as you like and that you can abuse as much as you wish without ever having to pay for the consequences. You have to be a fool, or an oil baron, or a governing colonist to think that you can take without giving back and that you can exhaust the land without exhausting your own way of life and your futures. Wildness is aliveness, and aliveness can never be fully killed. Wildness can be exhausted, but it retains the vitalist potential to be reanimated, to become whole again, to be rewilded. That will not happen easily. But it may happen if we learn what exhaustion does. Compare exhaustion with the idea of sakaw pimacihiwin, a Mikisew Cree term meaning simultaneously “traditional knowledge” and “bush way of life” (Candler et al. 2013, 123). Asked to share his knowledge of bitumen, including how much to take and what to take it for, an unnamed Mikisew Cree Elder said, Native people when we take, we give back. We only take what we need. We don’t kill a whole bunch of animals for nothing and just leave them to rot. You’ve just got to take what you need and that’s it, to survive. These guys are taking it all. My grandfather used to tell me, bitumen, they used to use it as a medicine, put it on a cut or something that was infected, it would suck all the infection out, he said that. They don’t know that, Syncrude don’t know that. They say, ah, we used to use it for canoes, patching canoes, that’s not all. We respected that, we knew, leave it. You use it when you have to, leave the rest, leave it natural. Now they break it all up and take all these chemicals and the shit out of it, like they create it. But if they just left it naturally, it doesn’t hurt you. (111) But exhaust the bitumen, and the cut becomes as big as the entire earth, all of it infected. Exhaustion is the result of selfish, irresponsible, ego-centric, anthropocentric, disrespectful colonial extractivism and the separation of

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life forms from all their relations. It is the result of the Western view that nature and society are separate, the view that we humans are above our relations with our “resources”: the land and all its relations. Better yet, it is the result of a colonial capitalist worldview that sees wild lands either as useless and thus best reserved for them, Indigenous people, or as resources and thus useful for us. Indeed, exhaustion is no accident. It is planned, budgeted for, invested in. As Toscano (2018, 132) writes, it is well known that “the time required for the reproduction of nature is generally too long for capital, and indeed is in contradiction with its turnover times.” He notes that “capital accumulation requires an accelerating exhaustion of nature; and that, most significantly, such exhaustion can only be prevented by the social planning of this metabolism” (132). Wildness is vitality. Wildness is the aliveness of a meshwork of different forms of life entangled in complex relations with one another. A wild life is one whose freedom to be, to become, and to give forth life is respected and revered. Exhaustion is the opposite of all these things. Exhaustion is the inability to regenerate and give forth new life. Exhaustion – beyond fatigue, beyond burnout – is unliveliness, weakening of vitality, the severing of the relations that give us relational autonomy, respect, and reciprocity. Exhaustion is frustration – the realization that one’s agency has been curtailed. Exhaustion is debilitation – the feeling that action will not yield any desired outcomes. Exhaustion is found in the feebleness of a meshwork, an ecosystem, a kinship. Exhaustion is the overconsumption of possibility and the impending collapse of a system of taking and never giving back. Exhaustion is a feeling that life has been drawn out, drained, and gone up in smoke, in exhaust.

Interlude: NOT Alone

Alone is an American reality television series broadcast on the History Channel. It follows a format similar to many other wilderness survival shows. A group of individuals are dropped in a so-called wilderness, become isolated from one another, and are then tasked with surviving in an unfamiliar environment for as long as possible with a limited amount of survival equipment. If you think of wilderness as remote, scary, uncivilized, and foreign, then the logic behind Alone makes sense. If you think of wilderness as disconnection, then experiencing wild places alone – maybe even “naked and afraid” – is the only way to understand wildness and possibly to tame it. But what else might wildness be? Might wild places be lands where life, rather than death, reverberates in its highest intensity? Might wild places be lands where kinship rather than disconnection, comfort rather than fear, and relationality rather than aloneness reign supreme? Might these be lands where you are called upon to build ties in order to survive rather than running around killing things? And if so, how would you research wildness there – alone or relationally? Ethnographers weave relations. Seldom do they learn alone. Ethnographers introduce themselves, opening up honestly and authentically to those from whom they wish to learn. And multisite ethnographers do so over and over with every visit to a new place. April, who was mostly in charge of finding and establishing contacts, had to start building relations from scratch ten times. But in addition, doing fieldwork in large nature parks presented its unique challenges. Unlike doing participant observation at a coffee shop or in a school setting – where the “research subjects” naturally hang

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out – doing fieldwork in the wild often meant asking people to guide us there. And often that meant establishing relations with First Nation communities that have been researched to death and have become rightly skeptical of outside researchers popping in to collect data. Anything but alone. It might take guts to run around in the wilderness naked and alone, but it also takes guts to answer the call of an ethnographer who does not want to study wildness alone. Why guts? Ask yourself how you would react. A stranger from the other side of the country emails you or phones you. She tells you that she wants to learn about your place, and she asks you to donate time, to donate your knowledge, and if possible to go on a walkabout. And maybe, she says, we can film everything. Maybe we can have a conversation at your house. And maybe your words can be featured in a book or a movie. What would you say? Over the past three years, 150 Canadians somehow said yes to us. Over 150 Canadians (not to count people we met abroad) gave us their trust, their hospitality, and their permission. These are sets of raw fragments drawn from our research journals: bits of stories and experiences that contain revelations about trust, hospitality, and permission.

t ru s t 31 March 2018 We shared lunch with Elder Charles Crowchief, Mike Bruisedhead, and Elliott Fox at the Silver Grill Cafe in downtown Fort Macleod, Alberta. Elliot has been working in natural resource conservation and land management for over twenty years. He is a member of the Kainai (Blood Tribe) First Nation (Blackfoot Confederacy), and upon our request to meet in order to talk about Waterton Lakes National Park, he suggested that we also meet with Elder Charles and Mike. We sat at a table in the back and had a two-hour chat over heaping plates of Chinese-Canadian food. After lunch, we moved tables and began our interview, with cameras rolling. After handing out – over the course of a career – hundreds of informed consent forms for research participant signature, it’s easy to take these things for granted. Ninety-five per cent of people seem to scan them quickly and just sign off. They more or less blindly

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trust us. They blindly trust the process. But today we learned a lesson on “unblindness.” These pieces of paper can be more than just formalities; they are unblind acts of trust. Over lunch, Elder Charles, Mike, and Elliot told us about times in the past when researchers have shown up in their communities, taken their knowledge, and left, only to later claim the knowledge that they had collected was their own. No acknowledgment, no recognition of ownership, no respect. Stolen knowledge from stolen lands. Hearing these stories, we are reminded of the bond that unites us ethnographers with our teachers – all the people who share their knowledge with us. We are reminded of our obligation to do good with it, to recognize our debt, to acknowledge our sources, much like we would acknowledge the scholars we cite and revere. We are reminded of the value of keeping our promises. We told Elder Charles, Mike, and Elliot that before anything is published, they will be able to review what we have written or edited on film. We reassured them that their approval is essential and that we will make modifications to our work if they feel that we have not represented them fairly or if they feel that we have gotten anything wrong. Often these words are unneeded reassurances but not today. Today we are faced with the realization that some colleagues before us have done this community wrong. We are reminded of the weight of unblind trust and the visible wounds of broken words. We exchanged ceremonial tobacco, and with the hands of both parties over our still unsigned consent forms, Elder Charles led us in prayer, a nondenominational prayer for our promise to be kept, a prayer for our mutual respect to remain strong. A prayer to mark our shared will to do our work in a good way, to mark our commitment, and to signal our hope that we would be cared for along our journey and in meeting new people and that people would share with us knowledge that would teach us well. This small ritual was about trust as much as it was about kindness and care and about continuing to have the courage to build trust. It was only after consent had been fully cemented by the ritualization of trust and care that the forms were signed. Never have we felt nude before a research participant. These clothes we wear to display our identity, to mark our professionalism, to disguise our flesh and bones seemed as though they were tossed to the floor with that prayer. There we were, free of cloaks, free of pretense, free of disguise – just sharing a handshake and a bare promise to be who we are, unclothed of any shroud of doubt.

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We say blind trust, but trust felt anything but blind today. Trust felt visible, transparent, weighted down by the full force of looking into someone’s eyes and believing their word.

h o s p ita li ty 3 July 2017 Can’t find any accommodation in Fort Chipewyan. There is one bed and breakfast, but it’s booked. Oh, there are no car rental companies either. We’re screwed. Don’t know what to do. 7 July 2017 Great news! Our Fort Chip gatekeeper said that she’ll rent her pick-up truck to us for the entire time that we’re there AND that we can stay at her auntie Lynda’s!!! Apparently, she has a spare room in her house. 29 August 2017 Auntie Lynda’s place is great. It’s really close to the water, with a nice garden and a lovely view over the water. It’s a very nice home with a spacious living room, a cozy basement room where the three of us can sleep, and an immaculate kitchen where we can cook. We have to learn from Lynda how to keep our Tupperware tidy like she does. Lynda is very kind, soft spoken, and remarkably hospitable. We also met her sister tonight, Terry. Terry has experience with helping visiting journalists and researchers. She will be our Cree translator and cultural guide, and she will accompany us to all interviews for which she thinks her assistance is necessary. Her presence is invaluable; there is a great degree of skepticism in town toward media people and researchers from down south, and tonight we had a good open-hearted conversation with Terry about our values and our understanding of protocol. 31 August 2017, Fort Chip Lynda had to leave. We’re not entirely sure what happened. There were some phone calls, and there was some detectable anxiety in tense words that we tried not to eavesdrop on. We think that

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someone fell ill. All we know is that Lynda had to leave in a hurry for Fort Macleod. And Terry had to go with her. We owe Lynda big time. When she told us that she had to go, she didn’t even consider for a moment asking us to leave her house. “You stay here,” she said as she made her way out the door, “and help yourself to whatever fresh food there is in the house or it’ll get spoiled by the time I get back.” Would we have left three strangers in our house for a week without us and given them free licence over our twelve-dollar bananas? 10 September 2017, Fort Macleod Airport We ran into Lynda and Terry! They were coming back from Edmonton and en route back to Fort Chip. We exchanged a big hug. We thanked them for all that they did for us.

p e r m is si on 1 October 2016 Finally received the email that we were waiting for. Bad news. Apparently, there is no way that we can get a blanket research approval from Parks Canada to do our research at all the national park sites. We have to reapply each time, one park at a time. 6 December 2016 The park permit application process is different from park to park. Sometimes we’re asked to apply as filmmakers. Another time we’re asked to apply as researchers. The next time we’re asked to apply as both. Applying for a permit as filmmakers is the most demanding of the three. Parks are used to dealing with “real” film crews and “real” production companies, not a family of three with just two backpacks worth of gear. Our job requires that we meet someone and develop a rapport, and if that goes well, then we manage to set a time and a place so that we can go exploring together somewhere that the weather and local conditions allow and some time when research participants can take time off from their regular, everyday life. And obviously, sometimes so-and-so has something that comes up, and we have to reschedule.

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It’s hard to apply for a permit when you work like that. We have no script, no shooting locations determined in advance. We do not know months in advance where exactly in the park we’ll be going on what day and at what time. 3 February 2017 More permits. Doing research in the Northwest Territories requires that we apply for permits from the Aurora Research Institute. I looked up the verb “to permit” because I got curious. It comes from the Latin permittere. Per- means “through.” Mittere means “to send,” “to let go.” So “to permit” means to “let through.” This connotation got me thinking. When we enter someone’s home in Canada, we typically say “hello?” The homeowner responds with a greeting and a “come in!” Interestingly enough, it’s not the same in Italy, where the word permesso is used. If you enter someone’s home in Italy, it is rude to say anything other than permesso? – which essentially means “am I permitted to come in?” It’s similar in Spanish, where you say con permiso? And it works the same way. Is there a difference, however, between the words “permit” and “permission”? I can’t seem to find any dictionary that points to a meaningful difference. Yet they don’t feel the same to me. 15 May 2018 You have to love provincial parks! Dealing with their permit process is so much easier! Some don’t even have a form; an email exchange or a phone conversation seems to be enough for them to get a feel of who we are and what we’re doing. And no licensing fees! 9 June 2019 We received the last permit to do research at Nahanni National Park. The process was very different there. Parks Canada has an extensive co-management model in place, and all the various First Nations have to be consulted on research projects. This is a real “consultation,” not the phony stuff that provincial and federal governments pull off before they start building pipelines on people’s territories. If First Nations do not want to allow certain research projects to take

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place on their territories, that research won’t happen. They need to give you their permission. But here’s what’s really interesting about this whole experience. Parks Canada has an online form. If you want a research permit, you fill out the form. If you want a filming permit, you fill out a different form and pay a fee. There are closed-ended questions and openended questions. You need to prove that you have insurance, and if all goes well, they email you a signed, scanned copy of your permit, which you need to keep with you at all times while you’re in the park. This authorization, to me, feels like a permit, not a permission. 26 March 2020 I think that I finally sorted it out after a conversation with April, who noted the difference between permits and permissions as she reviewed these notes. A permit is to a permission what a passport is to a permesso? Here’s what I mean. A permit, like a passport, is an expression of bureaucracy. It’s formality in its purest form. A permit is essentially an allowance given by a territorial power – an impersonal, written, instrumental tool to be let through. The choice of words is essential here, with to be let through meaning to be allowed temporary access and then to get out. Applying for a permit to visit a park is like applying to enter a foreign country and having to answer, “How soon are you going back?” A permesso? feels completely different. In Italian and Spanish, you ask respectively permesso? or con permiso? whenever you’re about to enter someone’s home. You don’t say it at the border to the customs and border people. You ask it, with a humble tone, to a homeowner. And you know what feels like that? When you arrive in an Indigenous community and you go introduce yourself. You ask, in essence, permesso? to a First Nation’s members when you wish to enter their home. You say it as a question, with your voice, with your presence. You don’t say it on paper; you don’t it say through a form. You say it with humility and respect, and then you wait to be considered not by an impersonal bureaucracy but also by a homeowner. You say it not to be let through but to be let in.

9

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Wilderness is a witness, Dean Moore (2004) writes. In a short, creative nonfiction essay, she takes readers on a walk along a West Coast trail while she reflects on what logging does to old-growth forests. She tells of the struggle to ensure that old-growth forests do not die at the hands of bulldozers, chainsaws, and slash-andburn practices. Forests have stories to share. The wild forest “is a witness,” she writes, that “reminds us of what we have lost. And it gives us a vision of what – in some way – might live again” (214). Tsing (2015), in reflecting on the lives of mushrooms thriving in disturbing environments, tells us something similar. “To walk attentively through a forest, even a damaged one, is to be caught by the abundance of life: ancient and new; underfoot and reaching into the light,” she writes. “But how does one tell the life of the forest?” Tsing wonders (155). It is through acts of noticing that one can tell these stories. But acts of noticing do not come easily to most observers. Scholars, social scientists especially, require human protagonists to tell stories, Tsing argues. Yet there are other, nonhuman voices – silent voices willing to share their stories, willing to share the forms of life that they have witnessed. “Telling stories of landscape requires getting to know the inhabitants of the landscape,” Tsing urges, both “human and not human” (159). So far in this book, we have listened repeatedly to the voices of human inhabitants of the land and learned about their various visions of wildness. But we have also listened to nonhuman perspectives. We have heard the tales of bison and bears, for example, as well as the stories of mountains, inland waters, and badlands. There

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is a tendency in nature writing, in the environmental humanities, and in the literature on wilderness and wildness to forget that it is not just biotic species that are able to witness. Abiotic species are witnesses as well. They, too, wish to remind us what we have lost. They, too, want to give us a vision of what might live again through our relations. In this chapter, then, we turn to the lives of fossils and their relations with humans, and we listen to their stories about the distant worlds that they have witnessed. Four of the ten Canadian natural World Heritage sites are recognized for the outstanding universal value of their fossil deposits: Dinosaur Provincial Park in Alberta, Joggins Cliffs in Nova Scotia, Miguasha National Park in Quebec, and Mistaken Point in Newfoundland. In this chapter, we share narratives about some of the fossils and people living at these sites. We use the word “living” deliberately as we think of fossils as alive – as vibrant, vitalist matter capable of affecting and being affected by the geosocial meshworks in which they are entangled. This approach entails encountering people who care about fossils and listening to their common stories – people whose narratives, memories, and actions enliven fossils and the lands that they inhabit. This approach allows us to become attuned to the affective ecology entangling fossils and people. In this chapter, we refer to this entanglement and affective connection as geophilia. In his recent essay on geophilia, Cohen (2015, 19) urges us to think about how “the lithic inhabits the secret interiors of the earth.” Enchanted by the appeal of this secrecy and its affective power, we characterize geophilia as a life embedded in and emergent in the vibrant materiality of fossils and fossil landscapes. Our three short ethnographic fragments thus portray geophilia as an ordinary affect that is vibrant with a unique lithic vitality. We are among a very small number of geographers and ethnographers who have dedicated empirical research attention to fossils (Breakey 2012; Clark 2017; Elden n.d.; Ferraby 2015; Slater 2011). In writing about fossils, we hope to alert others to take greater notice of the wild lives of fossils and fossil sites around the world, as we believe that studying how fossils are alive is particularly revealing of broader more-thanhuman entanglements. The three ethnographic fragments that we share in this chapter are intended to work as ruptures in the way that we think of fossils. These are ruptures that allow us to reimagine fossils as witnesses.

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t h e ro c k cycle “There was a time that you could actually take fossils from the beach. I have a small collection of my own. But you’re not allowed to do that now,” Len tells us with a quiet hint of nostalgia in his soft-spoken words. “But I still come down and I still look.” He pauses and turns around to look toward the cliff in the distance. “Anything important, I’ll pass it over to the museum up there.” Len is the son of Don Reid, the man who was known around Joggins as the “keeper of the cliffs.” Don Reid has died recently at the age of ninety-four. Don was a miner, not a paleontologist. He would go to the beach, look for fossils, and bring them home. He started as a young boy and never stopped, Len recounts. “He did that until the day he died.” The wound left by his departure is still raw. It’s a hazy summer day. We are less than a kilometre away from the main beach, where every summer day the museum leads small groups of visitors on short guided tours. We stroll on the beach in search of fossils, unhurried. “It’s very peaceful for me to be here, relaxing,” Len reveals as we walk just steps away from the Atlantic waters. We are alone here, away from the visitors and the guides, alone with the fossils and Len’s memories of his father. “People, geologists, paleontologists, scientists – they would come here and they’d ask him questions,” Len recalls. “And he had questions of his own, too. That’s how he got his education.” Over time, Don collected enough fossils and enough knowledge to open a small private museum in the backyard of the family’s house. “So many people came to see it that the community decided to build a bigger one. So they built a bigger one on Main Street. He ran that for a number of years. Then he decided, ‘Well I’m getting too old for this.’ So he passed his entire collection over to this new museum that was just recently built” by the provincially funded Joggins Fossils Institute. Len stops to collect his thoughts, gazing at the waves as they softly hit the shore at low tide. “That’s how it all came together.” Joggins Cliffs was inscribed as a unesco World Heritage site in 2008. That was a big day for the Reid family, as Don had played an instrumental role in getting the unesco recognition. Joggins was once a booming coal-mining town. But like happened elsewhere in Atlantic Canada, the mine eventually shut down. People and business started moving away. Only a few hundred people remain today.

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“So I guess being a World Heritage site meant people would be coming back,” Len reflects pensively. “Has it turned out that way?” we inquire. “I think eventually it will. It’s not happening as fast as I thought. I thought that perhaps there would be more souvenir shops, cafes, and that sort of thing. That’s coming slowly.” But all of that seems to matter little to Len. The fossils aren’t commodities for him. The reason why he comes down to the beach is different. “It’s for peace,” he says. “I can come down here and not see anybody for hours. I come here in a bad mood and when I leave, that’s gone away.” Highway 242, coming in from Maccan, intersects with Pit Road and eventually with Lower Cove Road, and that is where the town of Joggins comes together. Reid’s General Store is there, just down the road from the Crab Apple Inn – the only hotel in Joggins – and Fundy Treasures Gifts and Tours is up the street. The new museum and visitor centre is a short walk away, confidently perched above the cliff facing Chignecto Bay, part of the Bay of Fundy. There is no Starbucks here, not even a single Tim Horton’s coffee and donut shop in a 35-kilometre radius. But there are millions of fossils. And alongside Len Reid, the only other person alive who has connected with most of them is arguably Brian Hebert – the guy behind Fundy Treasures Gifts and Tours. “I started when I was twelve. I started quite late,” Brian tells us as we hike the northern side of the beach. He is in his thirties now. “My dad was very much an outdoorsman. I found a set of tracks on the beach one day with him in rock, and it really caught my attention. And then I found a tooth. It was my first fossil ever. And I found a fern and all these really amazing little fossils for someone that’s twelve years old who really didn’t know how they formed. So I went to the library. I really got interested in scientific papers from the beginning. I think that helped me develop the obsession I had with them because I was seeing things that were found in other countries, on other continents, and they were similar things to what I was finding here.” Brian (figure 9.1) is known among geologists doing research at Joggins Cliffs for being an indefatigable and inextinguishable resource of knowledge. His thoughts race as we scrutinize rock after rock, just steps away from the cliff. The tide is dropping, so we decide to push farther. Brian tells us that we’re in a very special area, as it was here that he found his very first set of footprints. We pause

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9.1 Brian Hebert on the beach

to take a picture. “These rocks weren’t like this,” he says. “This is eroded back far enough for us to see all this. The cliffs here erode quite quickly. In certain areas around the corner, there’s 20 feet of erosion sometimes where it’s very sandy. So we’re constantly looking for new things.” Brian picks a rock made of limestone and starts knocking it apart in search of fossils that it may reveal. He tells us that some of his favourite fossils are hidden in limestone. “Remember how I said Joggins was like a coal swamp at one time? So imagine this 100-kilometre-wide coal swamp, like a basin. And over here are the Caledonia Mountains, which are more like hills, but back then they were as big as the Rockies. All that sediment coming down into these rivers are overflooding the banks. Anything that’s on the ground, be it a dead animal or a plant, would get buried time and time and time again.” Brian’s own animated manners seem to make the earth around us come to life. He goes on: “At one time, this was sand. So under compression and the depth, it’s turned into sandstone. And then eventually this will erode back into sand, and the rock cycle starts over again. As a kid, the rock cycle really impressed me. Being able

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to take a rock and break it down and have it turned into something else, and then heat up and turn into something else, and erode and turn into something. It’s – yeah.” “The rock cycle – things turning into something else and then into something else. And it’s still doing that under our feet, before our eyes. Just like the ripples made by the tides,” Brian tells us. “They form the same way they do now as they did millions of years ago. There’s a term for that and I learned this as a kid, and at the time it was the biggest word I ever knew. It’s called uniformitarianism. It means things that formed the way they did millions of years ago are still forming the same way today.” We follow Brian’s gaze as he turns back toward the cliff. He points to a large tree with a swinging root sticking out of the cliff. It’s not a normal tree; it’s a fossil tree. “It’s a lycopod tree,” he explains, “it’s one of the largest ones in Joggins history. It just showed itself just over a month ago, and you’re one of the first people ever to see it.” It “showed itself,” he says, as if the tree was in the mood for some new company. Like everything else, the tree could be there for a while, and it could be destroyed by the tides, Brian explains. Everything moves, everything shifts, everything gets reassembled. “Three to five days and it could be gone. Nobody will ever see that fossil again,” Brian predicts. And it has always been this way: The cliff is constantly eroding, and there’s new fossils all the time. Also, on the edges of them, where they curb up, there’s trackways. It’s like the sides of the river where the water doesn’t reach: the animals might be walking along – salamanders and reptiles – and then the sun comes out, bakes that, and then the river will kind of slosh around and more sediment will flow into those little prints and they harden. And then another one will go across again, so every layer has little tracks going along. Eventually they may become fossilized. And when you split them open like a book, you can see those tracks. If you think about that, in that small little section, it’s a specific thing that happened in time. And if they’re well-preserved, you can tell the speed of the animal, the size of the animal based on the size of the tracks, the spread, and the pace. It’s pretty incredible stuff.

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Palsson and Swanson (2016) call the entanglements of the earth with multiple forms of life “geosocialities.” Geosocialities are not only material, organic meshworks of geological and biological lives but also co-minglings of the multiple sensibilities inherent in these forms of life. Examinations of geosocialities are sensitive to issues of distributed agency, the vibrancy of materials, vitality, and affect. A study of geosocialities opens reflections on nonlinear geologic time scales and on how human and nonhuman lives are enmeshed in relations of becoming that exceed the limits of present time and space. As they put it, “Geosocialities are always down to earth, grounded in particular encounters, and they also draw attention to questions of scale. They attend to the intertwinings of bodies and biographies with earth systems and deep time histories” (155). “The vastness of geologic time is incomprehensible,” and interestingly, it also feels somewhat “banal” (Raffles 2012, 526). Such banality is perhaps best revealed by the ordinary affective way that people like Len and Brian so habitually, so mundanely, seem to relate to deep geological time. Simultaneous incomprehensibility and banality are what appear to slow down Len’s days, burying his bad moods, allowing for relaxation. It’s the liveliness of fossils – their animated elán vital under his very feet as he walks on the beach – that energizes Brian every time, invoking his enchantment. Perhaps this liveliness is what’s most incredible about it all – that fossils, seemingly so inert, can do so much. “What can a stone do?” Raffles (2012, 527) asks. And, relatedly, we ask, what can a fossil do? Brian and Len teach us that a fossil can heal and that it can calm. A fossil can remind us, and it can teach us. A fossil can open up a path into a deep past that can be activated only by the most fertile imagination and the most insightful geological reconstruction. “A fossil is a time traveller and a spark, an interpenetration of epochs” (Cohen 2015, 19). Plucked from its bed and brought into a home or a museum, a fossil can bring a dollar to a home or a town. A fossil can help people to become friends. It can bind together a parent and a child, a dweller and a place. A fossil can knot the mineral and the bodily. Geophilia can take many shapes. Rocky cliffs and the fossils that they host can be loved for the way that they cement a bond between two people or a bond between one person and the immensity of time and all of life. Fossils can also be loved for the way that they embed us in a place, ensconcing the geo-genealogy of our life within

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the earth. And they can also be loved for the way that they bring memories to life. In this sense, fossils are more than the natures that they reveal. As “petrified remnants that upon excavation start moving again” (Cohen 2015, 99), fossils engender new geosocialities through old and new stories told and retold about them. Through these narratives, fossils remind us of the presence of life, and they yield traces of the absence of this life from modern times. As people like Len and Brian pick up a fossil from a beach and wonder about the presences and absences that it may reveal, they perform the memories of a nonanthropocentric past, evoking actual and possible resonances of deep time. As they crack a rock open, they hold material memories in their hands, apprehending the past by engaging with its solid materiality and its capacity to be opened up like a book. In this manner, fossils reveal a world not of firm fact but of malleable possibility, not so much of historical evidence but of narrative potential. Edensor (2012b) argues that a stone’s relationality is such that it is not fixed, finished, or bounded but rather a growing knot tying together eternal flows of multiple time scales. The same can be said of fossils. A fossil is forever exposed to erosion, the breaking of rock into multiple pieces, the flow of tides. Like a stone in a building, a fossil in a cliff, in a basin, or on a beach slowly but continuously sheds and takes on previous and new incarnations “as it becomes repositioned and resituated within a host of changing co-constituents and agencies” (449). In this manner, a fossil exercises its properties and capacity to change connections, to make and remake places, revealing and hiding the historical depth of its actions. What may appear to us to be slow movement is temporality on a scale that we humans are simply not accustomed to, Brian reminds us, yet it is an ecology where everything moves, everything shifts, everything gets reassembled. Geophilia is enchantment with such animacy, such fervour, such vitality. “Geophilia is the lithic in the creaturely and the lively in the stone,” Cohen (2015, 19) writes. “Expansive, dilatory, recursive, semicyclical from a long perspective, full of residuum, temporal intimacies, intermixed strata,” he continues, “geophilia entwines the modern and the ancient, the contemporary and the medieval, the primordial with expansive futurity” (21). In relation to fossils, geophilia finds itself connected to the multiple temporalities of earth’s lively inhabitants, whose organic lives become inscribed on

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the surface of fossils. Fossils are traces from different times whose imagined recollections spark “a play of temporal juxtapositions that incites an improvisational and fragmented account rather than a sequential narrative” (Edensor 2012b, 450). Therein lies the thrill. Fossils have left us with fractured traces, blurry memories that we cannot quite remember yet wish to recall.

t h e b e au t y o f t he rocks Like the landscape at Joggins Cliffs, there is not much to the narrow strip of beach below the Miguasha Cliffs. This is not a place for sandy holidays, sunbathing, or snorkelling. Yet this quiet, pebbly bay that faces the Restigouche River as it bends southwest, separating Quebec’s Gaspé Peninsula from New Brunswick, is where many of the Plourde family’s memories still live today. Like Don and Len Reid did in Nova Scotia, Ralph used to come to the small beach at Miguasha to look for fossils with his dad, Clyde – just like Clyde had done with his own dad, Ralph’s grandfather Anthony. Now retired, Ralph spent most of his life in nearby New Richmond working at a paper mill. His father, Clyde, was a fisherman. Even in his adult years, Clyde and Ralph would come to the beach at Miguasha to look for fossils, like they had done for years when Ralph was a child. Ralph laughs as he tells us the story about when he asked tourists to pay $500 for a fossil. People could freely collect them from the beach back then. Upon finding out that Ralph had sold a good one, his dad told him, “My God! I should always ask you to make the price from my fossils! I’d be rich!” Over time, the Plourde family became well known for their fossil expertise not only by tourists but by researchers, too. Years ago, Ralph’s grandfather Anthony began a friendship with the then-renowned, late Scottish archaeologist Hugh Miller and later with other visiting fossil researchers. Anthony, Ralph tells us, “used to pick fossils and bring them home. And the people around here would say, ‘Well, Anthony is picking rocks again, why?’ But he would continue to bring them to the house and talk with Dad, his son, and he would say, ‘Well they won’t laugh at me one day. People are going to find that they are very important and that they’re going to be looking for these fossils!’ And here we are today.” Miguasha was inscribed on the World Heritage List in 1999 as the most outstanding fossil site in the world for the way that it represents

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9.2 Ralph Plourde with fossil

the Devonian period, known as the Age of Fishes. Many of the fossils still preserved, studied, and displayed today were found by the Plourde family. Clyde in fact donated his collection to Université Laval, and he later worked for the museum – very happily, Ralph tells us – for a few years before he died. As we continue strolling on the beach, with Ralph (figure 9.2) looking by his feet as he scans for fossils, he tells us that his dad “had a pif to find” fossils – what French people in Quebec call the “nose”: He’d walk on the beach with archaeologists, and they’d walk on the fossils, and they’d look at Dad and they’d say, “Well, Mr Plourde, did you find anything?” “Well, I found two or three!” “But Mr Plourde, we never saw you going in the bank!” “Well,” he’d say, “you were walking on them!” Dad just had a pif to find them. Me and him would walk on the beach, and he’d say, “You see that concretion there, Ralph?

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Can you go up there and get it?” I was twelve or thirteen years old. I’d just run up the bank and he’d say, “Don’t throw it down there. Just let it slide down the bank.” And he’d open it, and it was a fossil almost every time. As the memories flow, Ralph’s eyes light up. “Yeah. It was beautiful. At the time, I didn’t see how important it was, but it was. When my dad passed, oh God. He was my chum, my friend, my fossil, it was everything.” In 1951, archaeologists realized that the Plourde’s had found a fossil no one had a name for. To honour the Plourde family, Swedish paleontologist Tor Ørvig named a Miguasha placoderm Plourdosteus. “My dad was my friend, my buddy, my pal,” he tells us with a soft smile. “I mean I was always behind him, and I was the only boy in the family. And if he went in the woods, I went in the woods. And if he went fishing for salmon, I went fishing for salmon. I was always with him, you know. We passed our life down here. We’d run in those banks and we’d make bonfires and we’d cook fish on the beach. I wouldn’t trade my young life here in Miguasha with no one. You know, it was paradise. We’d grab a sleeping bag and sleep on the beach and whatever. It was wonderful.” “What do you think you dad would say to us if we asked him what’s special about this place?” He would probably say that he wouldn’t trade it for anywhere, any other place. He just loved what he did, and he dug fossils and he lived one day at a time. He used to come down to the beach here and pass hours and hours and hours. And just sat there on the beach, and my mom would say, “Go down and see what your dad’s doing!” I’d come down. I’d say, “Dad, Mom told me to come and see what you were doing.” He’d say, “I’m not doing that much. I’m sitting on the beach and I’m looking at the beauty of the rocks.”

Fossils are petrified remains of organisms that began their life millions of years ago. Geographers like Ferraby (2015) have shown that fossils’ lives continue to this day. Many people around the world collect fossils and bring them into their homes and gardens, whereas

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others collect them to sell for profit. Regardless of motive, fossils hold distinct meanings for different groups of people that transcend their scientific value. From “devil’s toenails” to “snakestones,” fossils have long been valued by people for their magical and medicinal properties (Cohen 2015). These kinds of connections show how fossils hold a personal and intimate value, connecting lives of humans and nonhumans over geological time (Ferraby 2015). When multiple generations within a family are involved in collecting fossils, the family’s stories, memories, and personal bonds become materialized in the fossils themselves. Thus, unlike the fossils that we may observe for the first time in a museum exhibit, fossils found and collected by people like the Plourdes or the Reids are alive with passions, intentionality, memories, and intimate ties that weave them with the lives of their human companions. “This human link brings these assemblages of stone to life in a way that reflects the cultural and geological, and the inspiring inter-weavings that form between them” (Ferraby 2015, 189). Our encounters with people like Len, Brian, and Ralph show the depth of the geosocial connection among people, places, and rock, a depth made all the more meaningful by their knowledge. This affective ecology is especially profound because the intimacy of such place-based knowledge shows how humans are “not distinct from materiality but are actively and passively imbricated in its continuous emergence” (Edensor 2012b, 448). It is such continuous emergence and relationality that contribute to the vitality of fossils. As a kind of rock, fossils may seem still, quiescent, and unmoving, but they are “aquiver with an activity that is usually imperceptible to humans” (449) – or at least, most humans. Our encounters with Brian, Ralph, and Don alert us to the capacities of fossils to affect people through a vitality emergent in their constant entanglement with human and nonhuman lives. Fossils are like rocks, but they are different from them. Fossils are alive with a distinct vitality that no ordinary rock can possess. Pick up a fossil, Brian teaches us, and you will feel the will of a wildlife that wants to persevere. This is a life, a wild life – whether a tree, a fish, a bug, a dinosaur, or whatever – that in its petrified form is still striving to persist. A fossil is a type of conative nature – a wild, uncanny, and ornery thing with the power to continue its own life (Bennett 2010). Even as a fragment disjointed from the totality of its body, a fossil retains a vital materiality that can never vanish. This kind of vitality

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reveals “the curious ability of inanimate things to animate, to act, to produce effects dramatic and subtle” (6). A fossil is perhaps neither alive nor dead but “ontologically multiple” (8), exhibiting a vital materiality that hints at the animate (and its death), hints at the vegetal and animal (and their petrification), and hints at the fossil’s kinetic power (and its stillness). More than just a trace of a bygone ecosystem, more than a memento, a fossil is continuity itself – unstoppable becoming, a wild life that refuses to be domesticated into oblivion. In their conative nature, fossils are alive. Loosened from their moorings in a cliff or a beach and freed from eons of solitude – solitude from humans – fossils reveal the material and ecological companionships that have shaped their existence, telling us stories of cataclysmic and mundane environmental impacts through their simple material imprint. “Active matter, a fossil contains energy and radiates agency” (Cohen 2015, 22). Once dug out, a fossil opens itself up to new relations, intimate and reciprocal bonds, affiliation and connection. A fossil has a “promiscuous desire to affiliate with other forms of matter, regardless of organic composition or resemblance to human vitality” (27).

s e c o n d l i fe A dense, moody fog envelops Mistaken Point for nearly half of the year. The landscape of much of the Avalon Peninsula’s eastern shore, on the island of Newfoundland’s east coast, is almost unimaginable without its thick cloud of white mist. Mistaken Point’s history drips in the fog’s blurry traces, too; from St Mary’s Bay and Bay Bulls, 356 shipwrecks have been recorded in modern times, and nearly 2,000 mariners have lost their lives. Many of these bodies have never been recovered. Amid the steep cliff walls that look south on Portugal Cove, facing the opposite direction of the nearby Cape Race Lighthouse and out toward the violent sea waters, is a cliff of mudstone and sandstone unlike others. Cleaved onto the hard rock at a slant is a smooth floor inhabited by “fossils of the oldest, large, complex life-forms found anywhere on Earth” (Government of Newfoundland and Labrador n.d.). These Ediacara biota lived from 580 to 560 million years ago, when all of the planet’s life was in the sea. For nearly all of their existence, the fossils lived quietly, with their human neighbours unaware of their presence in the misty shore. They were discovered in 1967.

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9.3 Richard Thomas with fossils

By the time we visited the place in July 2017, Mistaken Point was celebrating its first birthday as a unesco site. A wooden sandwich board decorated with a red balloon had been placed on the shoulder of Highway 10 – steps away from the new Edge of Avalon Interpretive Centre – to alert visitors that this was “Now a World Heritage Site!” Excitement was in the foggy air. When fishing was in full swing, about 400 people lived in Portugal Cove South and nearly 1,000 in Trepassey. That was back in the early 1990s. After the collapse of the cod industry, the population was cut by twothirds, and many began to look at the fossils as a way of bringing economic life back to these shores. Richard Thomas (figure 9.3) was one of the people directly involved with preparing the World Heritage application. Now working as the chief conservation geologist for the Mistaken Point Ecological Reserve, he is worried about tourism growth. “All I see is feet on the surfaces wearing away the fossils,” he tells us as we hike our way into the mist and head toward the cliff. “At Joggins, every day you’ve got

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the chance of finding new fossils exposed by the previous night’s erosion or whatever,” he continues. “Here, it’s not like that. Fossils do get uncovered but it’s a very, very gradual process. So we have to be extra careful. We can’t afford to damage fossils because they’re essentially lost, and we won’t have them replaced by erosion and uncovering of the fossil bearing surface for decades and decades.” Nearly an hour later, we reach the cliff that only researchers and small groups of people with an official guide are allowed to visit. Richard instructs us to remove our shoes and put booties on. We can detect anger in his words as he tells us that recently a pupil on a school field trip was dumb enough to carve his name on the fossil bed with a pebble. On top of that, he says, “the power of the sea here is unbelievable. We had a tropical cyclone in 2010, and the waves were bursting 25 metres in the air. I see that, and I just go, ‘Oohh, those poor fossils!’” Fossils’ lives are entangled with those of their researchers. Beyond an intellectual and scientific interest, it is easy to detect a personal relationship between geologists or paleontologists and their favourite fossils, a relationship based on profound care. “Plus, it’s the aesthetics of the place,” Richard reveals. “I mean look at this. One of the magical properties of this place for me is the lack of technological noise, and the peace and solitude. I mean, it’s magical.” We begin to explore the fossil bed, and Richard points out fossils, providing their names. As we direct our cameras to the ground, he tells us that “the amazing thing about these surfaces in particular is that you have a community of deep-sea organisms that were killed and buried and preserved where they lived.” The word “killed” stands out, seeming to linger in the air for a moment. Organisms died here. In a way, this is a graveyard, a cemetery of tombstones engraved with the mementos of lives identified through generic nouns but no proper names. Geologists and paleontologists are the caretakers here, their geophilia giving these organisms a new afterlife. But is that really a life? In Miguasha National Park, during an interview with park staff – paleontologist France Charest, a conservation and research manager, and geologist Olivier Matton, a conservation and education manager – we asked this very question: “Are the fossils alive?” They had their own life 380 million years ago. They were alive. They lived a few months, a few years, in a very warm estuary

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that was on the south shore of the Gaspé Peninsula. So they had their first life, their biological living life, and one day unfortunately for them, they died from natural causes or accidental ones. But in their cases, something strange happened for some of these animals. They were caught in sedimentary layers of mud or sand, and what was their predicted end – that they would be destroyed by scavengers and decomposition – is something they avoided not for one season but for 380 million years until we found them. So today we find remains of dead plants and animals, but actually we can say that they get some kind of a new life because we take time to collect information about their death context, and after that they will live inside the Miguasha National Park museum. They will be cleaned by Jason in the laboratory. They are going to be cherished by Joanna, who is going to put them in their own section in the collection. And one day, if this animal is lucky enough – maybe it was very unlucky in the Devonian period, [and] it was stuck by a great turbidity current in the bottom of the water and it died very quickly and in awful conditions – today it’s going to have its revenge and it’s going to be put inside a display in the exhibition room and thousands of visitors will have the chance to discover it. So it’s a chance for us and for visitors to learn about the second life of these animals. In Olivier’s words, a second life is an enchanting “mystery” of a wild life, “an extinct one that raises questions about us,” animating our curiosity, filling us with empathy for its life and its death, for our life and our death. Such wild lives ask us for their ongoing care as they dot our sea cliffs and edge lands with signs of their demise and will to persist. Dense with lost lives now found again, they are a gift to us with foggy memories.

The environment, Lingis (2000) writes, is dense with energies. These are fleeting vitalist energies, impossible to harness. They are geological energies inherent in the forces of volcanic explosions, ocean tides, drifting glaciers, and rumbling tectonic plates. They are vitalist energies that intermingle with the winds, the patches of fog, the affective registers of animals. Lingis asks, “So how can the passions of penguins, albatrosses, jaguars, and humans not lift

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their eyes beyond the nests and the lairs and the horizons? How can these passions not sink into volcanic rock and the oceanic deserts?” (21). How can windswept cliffs not be swept by the same energies – by the hauntings of shipwrecked sailors, of forsaken fishing communities forgotten by the world economy, of extinct animals petrified into rock? These are experiments of thought, of course, little more than mystifications driven by curiosity and possibility – a subjunctive “what if” asked in order to shock and thereby animate a moment of doubt. These are ordinary affects, in the language of Stewart (2007), committed to speculation, impact, and the power of the subjunctive. Ordinary affects are “the varied, surging capacities to affect and be affected that give everyday life the quality of a continual motion of relations, scenes, contingencies, and emergences” (1–2). And maybe these are also feelings blurred by the fog. Ordinary affects after all, like foggy days, just happen, just come and go. Ordinary affects happen to humans. But what if they do not just happen to humans? What if they also happen to animals, to rock cliffs, and even to fossils? What if the contagion of affect does not stop at the human threshold? Ordinary affects are immanent and erratic; “they work not through ‘meanings’ per se, but rather in the way that they pick up density and texture as they move through bodies, dreams, dramas, and social worldings of all kinds” (3). Folklore across the ages has portrayed fossils as magical, mysterious forces capable of doing things like detecting poison and indicating the presence of riches. Fossils render the commonplace strange, making nature seem unnatural. They are a mystery, like Olivier says. Although a fossil is as solid as rock, certainty becomes blurred in the speculation required for a fossil to tell a story that we can recognize. Like a live animal, a fossil seeks companionship and affiliation while also revelling in the failures of understanding. Like a stone, a fossil is “a thing that makes demands, scripts stories, and does not fully yield to human enframing” (Cohen 2015, 31). Perhaps that is so because humans need stories to make sense of the world, yet all that fossils can reveal are pictorial remains with no prose at all – nothing but a lapidarian sketch telling the mysterious story of an undead thing. This is a vexing narrative that draws us humans into a world to which we never belonged, “a world indifferent to us, a world that excludes us, and a world that impinges with discomforting intimacy” (36).

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Geophilia is a conjoining force, one that draws landscapes and seascapes, animal and vegetal, human and petrous into a generative union “to create, compose, produce” (Cohen 2015, 26). This is a vitalist force but not one whose effects one can isolate. The people, the fossils, the economy, and everything else are all drenched in the impulses, passions, daydreams, visions, deaths, and memories that have circulated in these parts for years, even millions of years. These are fleeting vitalist energies that feel like something neither we nor our research participants can quite describe. But the fossils and the rocky cliffs that are imbued with these affective registers have a habit of letting us all feel something that has been in the making for a long time. And what is significant about this something is the intensity of whatever it is – the tension that intimacy with lives lost so long ago builds up – and the ordinary affects that such tension makes possible. Ordinary affects after all are an “animate circuit that conducts force and maps connections, routes, and disjunctures,” and the question that we ought to ask of them is not what they mean “but where they might go and what potential modes of knowing, relating, and attending to things are already somehow present in them in a state of potentiality and resonance” (Stewart 2007, 3).

a l in g e r in g feeli ng The vitality of fossils does not stop at the bodies of individuals like those we have met in this chapter. Fossils have a way of bringing hope to entire communities, where people are perhaps less enchanted with the vibrant materiality of fossils than with their instrumental value. In some places, fossils, dinosaur bones, and their museums in fact draw big crowds. In places like much of rural Atlantic Canada, villages and towns in search of their economic identity after the collapse of coal and cod may view fossils and the recognition granted by unesco as harbingers of hope, even tourist magnets. Yes, magnets. We could be using this word metaphorically, of course. But we could use it literally, too. For what is geophilia if not an attraction? What is vital matter if not a pull? What is affect if not a draw? Economic analyses could now be tallied, the contribution of natural heritage sites to regional economies budgeted and computed. But we will leave the task to others. In search not of economics but of something that we have called geophilia here, we want simply to ask why the pull of the earth exists – why the magnetic draw of its

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elements takes place. So what is it again that fossils can do? What is it about geophilia that is so rich with vitality? Perhaps it is its conative power, its will to persist across echelons of time. “A life,” Bennett (2010, 53) writes, echoing Deleuze, “inhabits that uncanny nontime existing between the various moments of biographical or morphological time.” Bennett might as well be writing about fossils. The pure power of fossils resides in fact in a restlessness – an active force that draws humans to witness the destruction that led to their extinction. It resides in a vitality that somehow resisted annihilation, in an obstinacy to leave a trace. This power, too, is part of geophilia – a fascination with the vibrant materiality of an earthly life, with a lithic matter that bonded with us, with a petrified will that transformed itself to be something other than it once was. In its inorganic unfamiliarity, Cohen (2015, 19) argues, stone has a tendency to remain aloof, yet “a mutuality is always possible, some narrative of companionship and concurrency.” Unlike stone, a fossil is seemingly sociable, somehow seeking companionship, demanding to be kept present, pulling us closer to the depth of unfathomable time. Herein lies the magnetic pull of fossils, which draws us humans to become entangled with long webs of time as they divulge secrets about long-lost places and memories that wish to be told, inviting us to contemplate obscure cosmic powers unaffected by human force. There is something wild about this pull, something self-willed enough to seek affiliation while remaining confident of an irreducibly larger autonomous existence. Fossils constitute a wild life that, even after all this time, all these encounters, all these words, and all these theories, is still capricious enough to escape our understanding – a failure of human explanatory power that somehow, deep down, you feel that fossils are enjoying.

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Over the course of our research, we had regular opportunities to share insights drawn from our fieldwork with several colleagues as part of the peer review process for journal article submissions. A handful of these colleagues, although sympathetic toward the intent of our project, challenged us to rethink one of our research choices. “You want people to re-envision wildness, to imagine it anew,” we were told a few times, “yet you are still looking for wildness in places like national parks, where the dominant ideas of wilderness and wildness reign supreme.” The critique made sense, but we felt that it was partly misplaced. In fact, as time went on, journey after journey, encounter after encounter, park after park, we started to feel as though the choice behind the selection of our destinations was no longer just driven by a quest for wildness as it might have been in the beginning. We had realized early on that wildness could be found anywhere, without the need to travel to remote and iconic nature parks. But we had also found that travelling to those sites, to some of those prototypical wilderness areas, had taken on a different aim for us. Feelings of wildness, it had become apparent, were characterized not by a sense of absence but by a sense of presence, a distinct feeling that wild places were inhabited places. Former Chief Gerald Antoine of the Liidlii Kue First Nation was raised in a Dene community called Rabbitskin. At the time of our interview in the summer of 2018, he had just been re-elected Chief, after serving for many years. Liidlii Kue and the Dehcho region were his “home,” and “home” was not a lightly chosen word, he pointed out at the very beginning of the conversation. The Dene “all look

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at this as home. We always have this special, unique spiritual connection with a place that we call home.” But this land wasn’t what people in the city referred to when they said “home,” he clarified; rather, this was a land shared by humans and nonhumans, as well as by spirits that made this home special, “sacred,” he underlined. His words echoed those of Indigenous people we had met in the Yukon, the Northwest Territories, and Alberta. Liidlii Kue is a community located in the Dehcho region of the Northwest Territories. Colonizers chose to call it Fort Simpson, after Hudson’s Bay Company governor Sir George Simpson. The name Liidlii Kue refers to the “place where the rivers come together.” The rivers are the Dehcho (which colonizers called the Mackenzie) and the Liard. The community lies on a small island where the Dene people would traditionally gather in the summer to meet, trade, and hold ceremonies. Today Liidlii Kue also serves as the major entry point into Nahanni National Park. The members of the Liidlii Kue First Nation are the Dene people of five tribes living across the Denendeh region: the Gwich’in of the Mackenzie Delta region, the North Slavey of the Sathu region, the South Slavey of the Dehcho region, the Chipewyan of the South Slave region, and the Dogrib of the North Slave region. “Denendeh” means “the Creator’s spirit flows through this land.” “We are Dene, we’re special curators here,” Chief Gerald Antoine continued in his introduction. “We have this special relationship. We come from this special relationship.” The verb “to curate” is often used in art or museum settings in reference to the activities of “curators” who select and organize collections for public display. But “to curate” has another important meaning: to care, to heal. The word “curate” comes from the Latin cura, meaning “care.” Dene people care for the Denendeh, but the special relationship goes both ways, as their home, the Denendeh, also cares for the Dene. This is a mutually affective, reciprocally caring ecology through which the vitality of a people and their land become entangled. It is an ecological relationship that is deeply spiritual and in fact sacred. It’s this special, sacred relation with which we want to conclude our book. We begin with Chief Gerald Antoine and pay close attention to his words, as they bring up many of the themes that have been featured in several chapters of this book. Among some of the carefully chosen words that Chief Antoine bequeathed to us is the expression “ways of life,” and it is with this idea that we begin.

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Understanding both natures and cultures as ways of life is an essential step toward the curation of wildness and wild places for present and future generations. Next, we return to Waterton Lakes National Park and bring the words of two people we met in the area – Mike Bruisedhead and Barb Johnston – into a dialogue with the thought of late Australian philosopher Val Plumwood, whose ideas are instrumental to our re-envisioning of both wilderness and wildness.

n at u r e s as ways of li fe Liidlii is a verb, Chief Gerald Antoine explained. It is an “action describing this whole spontaneous mixture of these two rivers.” The word kue is a reference to fire, or the hearth, a symbol of home. The two rivers meet, and in virtue of their meeting, they form a functional area where people can make a home. Home, in other words, is something that has been willed by the actions of the rivers, something accomplished by the two rivers forming a relation with one another and the rest of the land. In contrast to the Chief’s words, few of the popular discourses surrounding Nahanni National Park make reference to it as home to anyone. The place is a true Canadian “wilderness,” according to countless voices. Take this National Geographic (2011) writing about the park: “In the summer of 1928, American adventurer Fenley Hunter paddled up the South Nahanni River hoping to find a huge waterfall that seemed largely the stuff of Dene legend at the time. Hunter thought he would never make it. Halfway upstream he wrote: ‘The Nahanni is unknown and will remain so until another age brings a change in the conformation of these mountains. It is an impossible stream, and a stiff rapid is met on average every mile, and they seem countless.’” Hunter was an outsider, an American visitor of European descent exploring a challenging, allegedly unknown, and still uncolonized river awaiting conquest. In this setting, Dene history and culture, in the writer’s words, are reduced to a “legend” rendered irrelevant by their invisibility, or more properly, by this adventurer’s incapacity to listen to the river’s stories. “The subsequent decades have proved Hunter wrong,” National Geographic (2011) goes on. However, Hunter was wrong not in regard to his colonial ignorance, the writer implies, but in regard to his inability to predict influxes of tourism, which finally made the river well known and

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passable. “Multiday canoeing, kayaking, and rafting trips on the South Nahanni, and to a lesser extent on the Flat and Little Nahanni Rivers, are now the main attractions in Nahanni National Park Reserve,” National Geographic declares. As for the Dene, their “legends and lore” remain a colourful presence next to other “legends of lost gold, murder, and headless men.” The National Geographic voice is just one among many depicting Nahanni as the ultimate untouched wilderness. Nahanni’s “visitors are really excited” because “they are going into the wild,” into the “unknown,” Chief Gerald Antoine stated. He had worked for several years as an interpreter for Parks Canada, and he knew this excitement from personal experience. But he was not upset by the attitude. He understood that travel to Nahanni was a great way for visitors to reconnect with the environment, as long as this connection took place in an appropriate way. So “one thing that we’ve done,” he outlined, “is to look at how we could have them introduce themselves to the area. Out here, everything is alive.” Everything may have been unknown to colonizers, adventurers, explorers, and visitors, but nothing was unknown to those for whom the place was home. “There’s so much to share, and this visit is a window of opportunity for them to open up this understanding,” he said. “It really helps them to go away with that experience that they were visiting us” – not an unknown, uninhabited wilderness but someone’s home. “So is Nahanni National Park Reserve a wild place or maybe a wilderness?” “Nahanni is a special place,” he answered. “It has a lot to offer everybody. And I think one of the things that really interests people is that whole experience. And from where they come from, they see that as something really wild. And for us as Dene people, we don’t necessarily look at it as wild. We look at it as something very special and very sacred.” The Chief’s words seemed to echo those of Kristen Tanché, with whom we opened this book. The place was not wild for her but “powerful.” The Chief had a similar perspective: “Our people have a lot of stories. When you travel on the river with people, you’ll hear lots of stories – and these stories tell you that there are people who live in those areas. All these stories are interrelated. And it tells you about the functions of this home, of people that live here ... And living in those ways, it has not been easy. It’s been really, really tough. And some of the people that you get to meet, they’ll also share those stories with you about that. You know, things

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were – it was hard work, doing those things. And so if you look at these things, this is our way of life. It’s a way of life.” The expression “a way of life” recurred throughout the Chief’s interview. It was used continually and in different contexts. It was clearly, as qualitative researchers like to say, a key theme. Most of us ethnographers – whether anthropologists, geographers, sociologists, or what have you – customarily teach our students that culture can be defined as “a way of life” (see Williams 1985). It is a simple definition that every student, even the youngest, can easily grasp. From that point on, we tell them, different theories on culture emphasize certain aspects of this way of life as being more central than others. Some emphasize symbols and some customs, whereas others point to law, or structures, or conflict. In contrast, many Indigenous worldviews emphasize the centrality of the land where these ways of life take place. The land is the cornerstone of Indigenous peoples’ knowledges and of their sacred ecological worldviews (Berkes 2012). Chief Gerald Antoine pointed out, “What we do is we look at how we could be able to feed our family. How do you put food on the table? You know, you look around the world, that’s one of the things that we all do as human beings, is put food on the table. And the Dene people here are no different. This is our land, the river. The relationship with the river, the relationship with the land is very important.” The Dene people’s way of life would be impossible without their land and the sacred relations that they have developed with it. Dene principles of morality and legality are in fact entangled with the land. As outlined in the Liidlii Kue First Nation’s (2021) principles of governance,

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“This land was created ‘by the one who provides for all,’ and we come from this land. We recognize our equality with this land and all living creatures.” “We recognize and respect the natural laws which regulate the cycle of the seasons, the rhythms of the earth, and the ways of the animals.” “No one individual has the right to own the land. As the ones who come from this land, we have a collective right to use the land and its resources to ensure our survival as a people. We also have a collective responsibility to protect the land and resources for our children and grandchildren.”

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“We take only what we need from the land. We honour and give thanks to the spirit of the land and that which we take from the land. We do not waste anything that we have taken from the land, but share it with all who are in need.”

The land curates the people, and the people are to curate the land. This is the Dene way of life. This is the land’s way of life. “From a Dene point of view,” Chief Antoine articulated, “people really live with nature, live with the land, and live with the river. And you’ll notice that with different things, people – when they need to travel out there – depend on the weather. As a Dene person, you need to work with all these different seasonal elements. There’s knowledge that you start acquiring as you’re journeying with the land and the water. And so you begin to acquire this knowledge, and the knowledge from the land and the river and the relationship with it – it’s part of our life.” It was obvious from the Chief’s words that “our life” did not include just the people but the life of their land, too. Although “culture” for Williams (1985) has a beautifully simple definition – “a way of life” – nature is a much different concept. Indeed, it may very well be the most difficult concept in the English dictionary. In regard to Williams’s struggle to define “nature,” van Dooren (2016) writes that in the West nature is often intended to mean two things: an essence or the realm of the nonhuman. In the latter sense, “wilderness is often understood to be the purest form of nature. This is probably the dominant way that the term is used today. In this view, ‘nature’ is perceived to be a place out there, beyond the borders of the city, untouched by human hands” (original emphasis). One cannot help but wonder why a definition of culture could be so clear and simple, whereas a definition of nature could be so challenging and ultimately so problematic. But it is easy to see a way out of this problem. If culture is a way of life, why can’t nature be as well? “This land, this water has a story, a journey, and also the things that develop on this land,” Chief Antoine explained. People are not the only ones to have stories and make journeys, he seemed to say. People are not the only ones to have ways of life. He continued, And then there’s also the animals. They all have a relationship. The human beings, when they came, they also began to learn a relationship. And the animals and the living things also had

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provided a relationship that they needed to have. So one thing that our elders talk about is that there’s things out here that are alive. And so you’ll notice that in that language, we hardly use any noun words. We always use verb words. So if you use a verb, then [everything] is always alive. It’s always constant. It’s always flowing. So here Liidlii Kue, it’s always – it’s flowing into each other. So, the wind is blowing, the clouds are moving, the river is flowing, things are growing, and yes, we’re breathing. And so we have this special relationship, and it’s connected in a spiritual way. We all have that as a human being. And so that’s how we relate with this land. And that’s why we call this home. Call a river an “impossible stream,” call a land “unknown,” call a mountain impassable, call a valley a wasteland, call a bear a ferocious beast, call spirits “lore” and stories mere “legends,” and you will call nature the counterpart of culture. Call culture a way of life and nature the nonhuman, and you will inevitably call somebody’s home a wilderness. But what would it mean to do something different and call nature a way of life?

it ’ s a way o f li fe The Liidlii Kue First Nation did not make a home “in the wilderness” out of thin air. We must dwell before we can build, Ingold (2000) argues. It was thanks to the will of the rivers, which afforded an ideal place for the Liidlii Kue, that they made a home. It was thanks to how the two rivers flowed and to how they met that the Liidlii Kue, too, could meet as a community and inhabit a space on the land. The rivers gave people and animals a chance to meet, to eat, to rest, and to hold ceremonies. The waters fed the trees, and the trees fed the hearth. Home and culture were born from the will of the land. When you think of how the land shelters people, how it feeds them, how it quenches their thirst, how it gives them heat, you realize that the Liidlii’s way of life was born out of the way of life of the rivers. Where the rivers meet, the people meet. Where the rivers come together, the people come together. Where the rivers become a community, individuals and families become a community. Where nature is alive, culture is alive. To say that nature is a way of life, or better yet, that different natures are different ways of life, is to recognize the inseparability of

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all the relations among inhabitants and their lands. It is to recognize the blurring of the distinction between the concepts of nature and culture. To say that nature is a way of life is to recognize, as Chief Gerald Antoine and so many of our research participants across Canada told us, that “things are alive.” Bison are alive, bears are alive, and so are fossils, lakes, rivers, glaciers, mountains, people, the sky, and all the “things” that inhabit a place. When we say that natures are ways of life, we recognize the sacred individuality of these beings, whether human or nonhuman, the depth of their entanglements with other species, and consequently the respect that they are owed as living beings. When we say that cultures are ways of life, we recognize the complexity and richness of their differences from one another. By doing so, we pay respect to cultural diversity and acknowledge the value of every community of being. By doing so, we also celebrate the immanence of life among human communities and its sacredness. By not calling nature a way of life, we disregard the complexity and richness of nonhuman life and we risk reducing unique individual beings to collective species governed by mechanical laws. By not calling natures ways of life, we become oblivious to the diversity of nonhuman ways of being and we risk becoming insensitive to the sacredness of all forms of life. By calling culture a way of life and nature something else, we give ourselves the ideological tools to dominate the nonhuman world, and we give ourselves the permission to disrespect the sacredness of what nourishes us and shelters us. In defining both culture and nature as ways of life, we acknowledge the entanglement of the two concepts. But we also accomplish something else that has been our main concern in this entire book. By treating both cultures and natures as ways of life, we transcend the idea of an untouched space – a wilderness existing as a natural domain separate and disconnected from the cultural sphere. A land that may appear to be free of human inhabitation, that may look pristine and untouched, that may seem ahistorical and outside of the sphere of human civilization is not always only a land rich with stories – as we have learned throughout this book – but also a land whose vitality is deeply entangled with human vitality, a land whose diverse, sacred lives ought to be afforded the same respect granted to diverse human lives. We believe that it makes no sense to try to delete words from the dictionary. The erasure of “wilderness,” “wildness,” and “wild”

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would be impossible and utterly undesirable. To continue to speak of wild places after recognizing that they have been touched by humans, as Banff-based author Harvey Locke reminded us in January 2017, is to acknowledge that there are places where we humans are still not in charge. It is to acknowledge the sacredness of the land’s will. It is to restrict our will to dominate and control. It is to humbly say, “I’m not in charge here.” Rather than erase words like “wild,” “wilderness,” and “wildness,” we can re-envision their meanings. Wildness can remind us that there are more-than-human ways of life that are messy and uncontrollable, free-spirited and unpredictable, whimsical and enchanting, magical and beautiful, alive and vibrant yet also subject to abuse, disrespect, and ultimately exhaustion. Ways of life that are intelligent, sensuous, and affective – and ultimately sacred – demand our respect. A vitalist perspective is essential if we wish to hold on to the sacredness of wildness without reverting to ideas of the wild as the nonhuman, the uncivilized, the untouched and disconnected. A vitalist understanding of the world is foundational to recognizing our limited understanding of what wildness is, what it can do, and what it may become. Vitalism humbly acknowledges the spiritual – not religious, but spiritual – dimensions of all relations. It values the sacredness of such relations and what may emerge out of them. Wild places are the sacred lands where more-than-human relations unfold in their complexity and unpredictability, free from human control but not outside human connection. Wild places – not just protected areas but all wild places – are then simply lands where things are alive and free to become entangled in new relations. They are places where the sacred vitality of all inhabitants unfolds as it has been unfolding since time immemorial. Nothing about this outlook or about anything that we write in this chapter is particularly original. We could trace our praise of the sacred in all things that are alive in most Indigenous worldviews, according to which the land refers to everything in an ecosystem that has life and spirit (see Berkes 2012; Little Bear 2000). We could trace our ideas in the development of a kincentric ecology (Salmón 2017), a relational ecology (Ingold 2010), or perhaps a post-dualist and post-colonial feminist approach to wilderness (Plumwood 1998). We could also find traces of the sacred ecological worldview that we embrace here in land ethics (Leopold 1949), in parts of deep ecology

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(Naess 1989), or even in ideas on topophilia (Tuan 1974) or biophilia (Kellert and Wilson 1993). But tracing all these philosophical parallels would take us well beyond the scope of what a concluding chapter can and should do. The simple point with which we want to end this book is that life is “immanent in the very process of [the] world’s continual generation or coming-into-being” (Ingold 2006, 10) and therefore extended to all things that inhabit the multiple lands of the world. To recognize their wildness is to recognize their relational autonomy (Collard 2014) and the sacredness of their ways of life, and hopefully to inject “the sense of astonishment banished from official science” (Ingold 2011, 64) back into our collective understanding of wilderness, wildness, and all things wild. To say that natures are ways of life, just like cultures are, is not to say that natures and cultures are the same thing but to underscore their interrelatedness and the openness of nature-culture relations to emerging and unfolding in respectful, nondominant, wild ways. In the words of Little Bear (2000, 78), “If everything has spirit and knowledge, then all are like me. If all are like me, then all are my relations.”

r e c o n n e c t in g wi th the sac r e d n e s s o f the land Mike Bruisedhead respectfully waited for Elder Charles Crowchief to say his piece, and as the floor was yielded to him, he made it a point to begin by underlining the value of what Elder Charles had just taught us. “Charles mentioned the hunting and gathering of Waterton, and before the settlers, the colonizers arrived, that was our territory,” he told us firmly. We had just met Mike a few hours before, but in the little time that we had known him, we had quickly realized that his voice was strong, confident, and backed by a bottomless pool of facts. Mike was in the midst of his doctoral studies at the University of Lethbridge in cultural, social, and political thought, and he was focused on completing a dissertation on place thought. “‘Knowing from Place: The Colonial Impact of Blackfoot Names Removed in the Mountains Geographically Located in Waterton National Park’ – that’s my dissertation’s full title,” he told us in nearly a single breath. We silently marvelled, in the way academics do, at his ability to remember his work’s subtitle so effortlessly.

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“We’ve been taken out of the equation as Blackfoot people,” Mike continued, part of a “calculated manoeuvre to attempt to remove us from our association with the mountains and Waterton and the waters.” It had all begun in the nineteenth century. Waterton Lakes National Park had been named after British naturalist Squire Charles Waterton (1782–1865). Charles Waterton never set foot in the area, but Lieutenant Thomas Blakiston of the Palliser Expedition decided to call a chain of lakes after the naturalist he admired. The name eventually expanded to the park a few years later. “Blakiston then named a mountain after himself, a creek, a little waterway and then changed a valley to his name, Blakiston Valley. But all those mountains and passes had names,” Mike said. This was not unusual, of course. Colonizers viewed the vast expanses of land foreign to them as terra nullius – nobody’s land. They regarded the Indigenous people they met along their “explorations” as little more than animals whose way of life was not separate from that of nature at large, their culture uncivilized and ultimately irrelevant. Indigenous people were viewed as wild, their lands as nothing but a wilderness empty of signs of social development, and their history as meaningless. The few remaining lunch patrons at the quiet Silver Grill Cafe in downtown Fort Macleod left as Mike went on, “But, concentrating on Waterton, we were Indigenous to that area.” And because Indigenous Knowledge was rooted there, Mike explained, “Waterton is a sacred place. You heard about vision quests from Elder Charlie, you heard about hunting and gathering, and buffalo jumps. Those have been there long before colonizers stepped in and started renaming the area and the mappers and early surveyors started naming mountains and geographical points of interest in Waterton, putting their label on it, their name.” The park was formed in 1895, the fourth national park in the country. But, Mike stated, that protection was kind of misleading; it didn’t protect us. And so imagine – thousands of years, we’ve maintained the best conservation and environmental practices of all times, of all humanity, and Waterton was held as a special place. We didn’t need any European legislation or acts of law to protect it. We had a duty, a real Indigenous stewardship of the land. And so, when we were pushed away, it marginalized our people [and] it alienated us from the actual continued occupancy, settlement,

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hunting, and gathering of our medicines, and our spiritual affiliation to Waterton, by now having a very protected area. A protected area is okay. But it’s not okay when the very lands some people were actually born in, the mountains where they had their sacred birth grounds, were all removed. Concluding as strongly as he had begun, Mike told us, “That was our land. And it would still be the same environmentally protected area but according to us. We held it special, we held it sacred, and we did not abuse it. And so today we feel like foreigners to our own land.” The apologists among our readers might think that times have changed. They might point out the increasing cooperation between Indigenous peoples and park agencies. They might argue that we, as a nation, have learned the mistakes of our colonial past. But as we write these last few pages of the book in the spring of 2020, the Governments of Canada and British Columbia are still removing Indigenous peoples from lands that they never ceded, are still lying about their intent to pursue reconciliation with Indigenous people, and are still doing these things in the name of imperial law and order, in the name of resource development, and in the name of putting nature to work for the “benefit of all Canadians.” The obvious cultural reality is clear: whereas Indigenous people recognize that the land is alive and therefore sacred, colonial powers perceive lands as resources to be exploited. And although we might find it easy to blame governments for their preoccupation with economic development, we believe that too many non-Indigenous Canadians at large still remain ignorant about the sacredness of the lands that they claim and call their country. As Plumwood (1998, 654) writes, Indigenous people and their lands have been victimized by a “virulently imperial form of culture, one that held them to be nature, not fully inhabitants of a space empty of culture.” Driven by a dualist concept of nature and culture as well as by a vision of humans as morally superior to nonhuman inhabitants of the land and therefore entitled to their domination and exploitation as “resources,” European colonizers “did not begin to comprehend the mutual nourishment of the land and the people that made up the country” (654). In denying the presence and the aliveness of nonhuman ways of life, colonizers treated wilderness as an empty, ahistorical place waiting to be filled by imperial expansion. And they are still doing so today, removing the “overburden”

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of the land to get at mineral or fossil fuel deposits or simply to make way for pipelines or highways. Wild lands are not just subject to consumptive exploitation, of course. Environmental conservation is often allied with tourism promotion in our contemporary neoliberal world. This is a world where park agencies – federal or provincial – and local tourism governance bodies are often mandated to preserve spaces for the sake of budget lines. In such a world, ideas of wildness no longer just serve colonial purposes of territorial expansion but also advance capitalist objectives of recreational penetration. In a tourist world saturated with ever-expanding destination choices, the view of lands as “virginal” places still awaiting discovery by adventurous travellers turns them into profitable commodities for a multitude of parties large and small, from outfitters and developers to restaurateurs and hoteliers. This view generates a concept of wild places as alternatives to crowded beaches, busy museums, and noisy cities. Wild places, in this narcissistic digital world, quickly become Instagram-ready backdrops for new territorial conquests validating the social capital of modern-day explorers. But every such conquest, once again, denies the interweaving of nature and culture. As Plumwood (1998, 670) writes, to overcome the modern-day creation and commodification of the wild as “pure nature,” its isolation into patches cordoned off from the rest of the social world, and “its conceptual confinement to pristine situations which entirely lack, or have rendered invisible, cultural influence,” we “need to reclaim the ground of continuity, to recognize both the culture which has been denied in the sphere conceived as pure nature, and to recognize the nature which has been denied in the sphere conceived as pure culture.” Erasing binary divisions of heritage into either cultural or natural should be one of the very first steps toward this reconciliation between nature and culture. And this step, we believe, might go a long way toward truly understanding and honouring the ways of life of Indigenous peoples and Indigenous lands. Waterton Lakes National Park wildlife biologist Barb Johnston told us that what attracted her to wild places was a feeling of being somewhat away from human influence. This feeling is something that we can clearly relate to, and so could many of our other research participants. The reason why these places were interesting to her was “not just about the wilderness,” she reflected, but also “about how the people can live in that place without having negative impacts.

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And that’s, I think, what makes a biosphere really special because it says we can live here alongside nature and not impact it in a negative way.” We nodded in agreement as we stood outside her house in the small town of Waterton. But there was something that Barb – and we, too – were unable to come to terms with. A wild place for her, she had just told us, “is a place of solitude, of escapism ... a spiritual place ... where I feel connected to the whole.” But why, she wondered, did she feel that she and so many other people had to escape from one another to feel this way? She told us that she felt “really at peace and connected to [her] inner self when disconnected from the rest of society,” but where did that need for remove come from? Why had we felt this way, too, ever since we realized how “unwild” it felt to line up in a queue to take a picture of a sloth in a Costa Rica park? Why is it that so many people feel that they can find wildness only in settings like large nature parks that have to look and sound like the prototypical pristine wilderness that so many of us believe to be a myth? For many of our research participants, especially those of us of European descent, the idea of wilderness as a place that is at least on the surface devoid of human presence still exerts a definite kind of pull, a seductive pull. This desire for solitude is not problematic per se, but it becomes an issue insofar as we allow ourselves to slide into anthropocentric and androcentric attitudes that deny places their vitalist presence, their aliveness, their being on their own terms. But it does not have to be this way. We can still be enchanted by a wild place after we have come to terms with the multiple entanglements of human and nonhuman life that take place there. We can still honour and respect wildness after we realize that it unfolds not by way of disconnection or absence but through relations based on mutuality, reciprocity, and co-presence. Wild places can thus be envisioned and appreciated as places inhabited by “the presence of the Other, the presence of the long-evolving biotic communities and animal species which reside there, the presence of ancient biospheric forces and of the unique combination of them which has shaped that particular, unique place” (Plumwood 1998, 682, original emphasis). It is not the absence of humans that we ought to seek in our quests for a feeling of wildness but the absence of those human companions who are unwilling to honour and respect the sacredness of the vitality of the land. In honouring and respecting the sacred vitality of the

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land, we enter a new relational quest, a quest not for absences but for the presence of nature and the presence of culture – the presence of multiple ways of life that shape a land. When we treat our fascination with wildness not of as a pull from an allegedly untouched virgin land owned by nobody but as a pull exerted by the vitality of the kinship between nature and culture and by the vitality of the ways of life that have unfolded without human domination since time immemorial, we honour and respect the wild on its own terms. These are terms that humans cannot control, that value wild life rather than fear it, and that respect the potential of wildness to emerge and unfold everywhere that it wills. As we mentioned in the opening chapter, it would be easy to suggest that we erase any notion of wilderness or wildness as a way of redeeming ourselves of colonial violence. But doing so would be a mistake; it would simply give colonial forces and extractivist powers another ideological tool to rape more lands under the justification that they are no longer virgin anyway. Instead of rejecting the notion of wildness wholesale, we must reject ideas of wildness that are rooted in colonial visions of terra nullius or in predatorial visions of lands as “resources.” We agree with Plumwood (1998, 659) that “we need to create new, non-colonizing understandings and situate them within the context of a renewed, radical ecology committed to healing the nature/culture split and ending the war on the Other,” whether Indigenous, animal, or abiotic. Throughout this book, we have endeavoured to amplify the voices of those who have taught us to re-envision wildness, as well as natural heritage, wilderness, and land. These were the voices of Indigenous and non-Indigenous people, and at times these were also the voices of bison, bears, fossils, mountains, bodies of water, and the sky. These voices have taught us to re-envision wildness as presence, as aliveness, as atmosphere, as connectedness. These vitalist and relational ideas have pushed us to reimagine wildness as something felt, performed, and richly diverse from person to person, community to community, and situation to situation. Rather than positioning wilderness as something definitive and universal, as something that either is or is not, we have outlined ways of being and becoming wild. These are both natural and cultural ways of life that respect and honour the sacredness of the wild as a vitalist force entangling human and nonhuman in kinship with the lands that they inhabit.

Notes

We have capitalized Chief, Elder, Knowledge Holder, Knowledge Keeper, Indigenous Knowledge/s, and Traditional Knowledge following the style recommendations outlined in Younging (2018).

c h a p t e r t wo 1 More-than-human geographies attend to the connectivity and complexity of life by drawing upon Indigenous, post-human, and post-structural concepts, thus transcending binaries of nature and culture, of other species and humans (Panelli 2010). 2 The World Heritage description reads that “the property as a whole retains its wilderness values and character, and its scenic beauty” (unesco 2021a).

chapter eight 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11

Joseph Gibot, Fort Chipewyan. Melody Lepine, Fort McMurray. Gerald Gibot, Fort Chipewyan. Ronnie Campbell, Peace-Athabasca Delta, Wood Buffalo National Park. Floyd Tourangeau, Peace-Athabasca Delta, Wood Buffalo National Park. Joseph Gibot, Fort Chipewyan. Jackson Whiteknife, Fort Chipewyan. Johnny Courtoreille, Fort Chipewyan. Sammy Marten, Fort Chipewyan. David Campbell, Fort Chipewyan. Melody Lepine, Fort McMurray.

236 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28

Notes

Ronnie Campbell, Peace-Athabasca Delta, Wood Buffalo National Park. Floyd Tourangeau, Peace-Athabasca Delta, Wood Buffalo National Park. Gerald Gibot, Fort Chipewyan. Johnny Courtoreille, Fort Chipewyan. Sammy Marten, Fort Chipewyan. Jackson Whiteknife, Fort Chipewyan. David Campbell, Fort Chipewyan Derek Touraugeau, Fort Chipewyan. Floyd Tourangeau, Peace-Athabasca Delta, Wood Buffalo National Park. Gerald Gibot, Fort Chipewyan. Ronnie Campbell, Peace-Athabasca Delta, Wood Buffalo National Park. David Campbell, Fort Chipewyan. Gerald Gibot, Fort Chipewyan. Carl Braun, Fort McMurray. Melody Lepine, Fort McMurray. Carl Braun, Fort McMurray. Melody Lepine, Fort McMurray.

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Index

activists, 13, 101 affective ecology, 74, 92–3, 103, 105, 115, 201, 211 affective identification, 81, 83 Alaska, 35, 102 Alberta, 13, 25, 28, 40, 73, 75, 78–9, 103–4, 108, 113, 119, 124, 143, 159, 163, 165, 169, 172, 176–7, 185–6, 194, 201, 220 Alsek, 18–19, 34–5 anachronistic, 21, 35; spaces, 63 androcentrism, 7, 51, 232 Anishnaabe, 64–5 Antarctica, 97, 112 Anthropocene, 21, 27, 91, 188, 190 anthropocentric, 8, 21, 51, 81, 146, 165, 191, 207, 232 anthropologists, 27, 223 artists, 40, 58, 98n10, 102, 120, 123 Assiniboine: First Nation, 77; Mount, 17, 106 Athabasca, 169; River, 14, 171, 173, 185; Western Lake, 185 Atlantic, 202, 217 attunement, 149, 156, 158, 161–3 Avalon, 105, 212–13

Banff, 28, 39, 77, 84, 86, 106, 111, 136, 139, 227; Avenue, 135; National Park, 25, 28, 73–7, 84–5, 97, 107–8, 111, 123, 135 bears, 17, 43, 74, 78–81, 86–7, 90–2, 99, 108, 114, 118, 144–9, 176, 200, 225–6, 233; black, 73, 144, 172; grizzly, 14, 17, 73, 75, 78–9, 86–7, 144–5, 154; polar, 144, 154; Russian, 79 beavers, 36, 176, 179 Betasamosake Simpson, Leanne, 32, 40, 188 birds, 71, 76, 86, 97, 145, 167, 179–82, 185, 190 bison, 28, 30, 74–7, 81, 84–6, 88–92, 107, 111, 172, 200, 226, 233 Bison Belong, 73, 77, 85, 111 Blackfoot, 40, 73, 81, 103, 110, 193, 228–9 Blood Tribe, 77, 165, 194 Bonne Bay, 58, 105, 130 British Columbia, 12, 79, 120, 177, 181, 230 Bruisedhead, Mike, 194–5, 221, 228–30

256

Index

buffalo, 19, 85–6, 166, 178, 180, 229 Burwash Landing, 35, 102 Calgary, 106–7, 125, 137 Canada National Parks Act, 97–8 Canadian Rockies, 79, 87, 119, 135, 139, 204 Canmore, 28, 104, 136, 139 Cape Race Lighthouse, 70, 212 capitalism, 24–7, 46, 184, 187–9, 192, 231 Carnivores and Communities Program, 73, 79 ceremony, 11, 32, 61, 195, 220, 225 Chambers, Ron, 102–3, 110, 151–2 climate change, 96, 182 coexistence, 39, 73–4, 87, 90–2, 103, 154 collaborative: approaches, 26; decision making, 27 Collard, Rosemary-Claire, 27, 30, 38, 36, 93 colonialism, 7, 25, 188 colonizers, 23, 30–1, 173, 220, 222, 228–30. See also settlers conservationists, 13, 17, 101, 107, 112 Convention Concerning the Protection of the World Cultural and Natural Heritage, 18, 48, 67 Cottonwood Trail, 143–5 Cow Head, 55, 59, 62–3; Historical Society, 62; Lighthouse, 62 Creator, 60, 220 Cree, 23, 40, 73, 81, 89, 160, 172, 177–8, 182, 196. See also Mikisew Cree First Nation Cronon, William, 26, 54, 104, 112,

Crowchief, Charles, Elder, 40–1, 44, 47, 165, 194, 228 cultural heritage, 10, 19, 27, 35, 45, 48–9, 54, 58–9, 64–5, 68–9, 110; in performances, 120, 130. See also natural heritage Dalton Range, 143 Dehcho: First Nation, 3–4, 219–20; River, 3, 6 Deleuze, Gilles, 115, 118, 218 Dempsey, Jessica, 21, 46 Dene Athabaskan, 160; Chipewyan, 173; First Nations, 73, 177, 219–24 Devonian period, 209, 215 Dinosaur Provincial Park, 18, 103, 110, 119–20, 123–5, 127–30, 155–6, 161, 201 Dog Camp, 160, 179 domestication, 85, 87–8 dualist ideology, 20, 26, 32, 33, 42, 44, 48–9, 91, 122, 231; postdualist, 227 ducks, 168, 179–80, 182 Edensor, Tim, 129, 139, 140, 207 Edmonton, 75, 197 Elk Island National Park, 73, 75–6, 85, 143 enclave, 57, 59, 130 environmental conservation, 9, 12, 15, 231 environmental humanities, 7, 8, 201 Erickson, Bruce, 52, 64 ethnos, 82, 83 etho-ethnographic, 81–2, 92 ethos, 82, 84, 92 Eurasia, 31

Index extractivism, 8, 168, 184, 189, 191, 233 fieldwork, 9–10, 13, 23, 38, 40, 74–5, 82, 143, 162, 173, 193–4, 219 fish, 36, 55, 62, 71, 132–3, 176–7, 179, 182–3, 185, 190, 210 fisheries, 112, 131 fishers, 13, 53, 132–3, 208 fjords, 50–1, 54–55 folklore, 59, 216 Fort Chipewyan, 23, 103, 159–60, 163, 166, 169, 172–6, 179–80, 184–5, 196–7, 235n1, 235n3, 235nn6–10, 236nn14–19, 236n21, 236nn23–4 Fort Macleod, 194, 197, 229 Fort McMurray, 13, 169–72, 174, 186, 235n2, 235n11, 236nn25–8 Fort Simpson, 3–4, 220 Gaspé Peninsula, 208, 215 geese, 168, 179, 182 genocide, 76, 184 geographers, 21, 27, 44, 88, 201, 210, 223 geophilia, 201, 206–7, 214, 217–18 gifts, 16, 94–5 Glacier Bay, 18–19, 34 Gros Morne National Park, 18–19, 48–51, 53–5, 57–60, 63–4, 68, 105, 119, 124, 130, 134 Haines, 35, 102; Junction, 99, 102, 143, 147 hoodoos, 154, 156–8 Hudson’s Bay Company, 176, 220 hunting and gathering, 25, 53, 228, 231

257

Hutchings, Bonnie-Lou, 55–9, 131–4 Hutchings, Wade, 59, 132–4 imperialism, 7; in culture, 230; expansion, 8, 230; in law, 230; states, 46 Indigenous ecological knowledge, 27, 50 Indigenous Elders, 13, 31. See also Indigenous Knowledge Keepers; Knowledge Holders Indigenous Knowledge Keepers, 11, 174–5. See also Indigenous Elders; Knowledge Holders Ingold, Tim, 32, 66, 68, 88, 90, 117–18, 164, 225 International Union for Conservation of Nature (iucn ), 16–18, 95–7, 111 Inuit, 6, 25, 81 Jasper, 106; National Park, 143 Joggins Fossil Cliffs, 18, 201, 202–5, 208, 213 Johnson, Mary Jane, 35–6, 43–4, 47, 102 Johnston, Barb, 108–10, 114, 153, 221, 231–2 Kathleen Lake, 143–4, 152 kincentric ecology, 43, 50, 67–8, 89, 227 Kluane, 18–19, 34–8, 99–100, 102, 105, 143, 151–2, 161; First Nation, 35; Lake, 35 Knowledge Holders, 4–5, 13. See also Indigenous Elders; Indigenous Knowledge Keepers

258

Index

Lake Claire, 179–81, 183 Lake Mamawi, 159, 161, 163–4, 179–81 Lash, Scott, 44, 116 Liidlii Kue First Nation, 219–21, 223–5 Little Bear, Leroy, 32–3, 40, 42, 65, 228 Lobster Cove Head, 55, 57–8, 61 Locke, Harvey, 111–13, 227 Lorimer, Jamie, 21, 45, 82, 84 Louise Lake, 143, 152 MacDonald, Christina, 101, 150, 158 Manuel Antonio National Park, 11–12 Marchand, Marie-Eve, 77, 111 Menominee language, 42–3 meshwork, 20–1, 32–4, 40, 43–5, 49, 68, 192, 201, 206 Métis, 25, 73, 89, 160, 172–3 migration, 168, 182 Miguasha, 18, 201, 208, 210; Cliffs, 208; National Park, 214–15 Mikisew Cree First Nation, 23, 160, 168–9, 173–4, 176, 186–7, 191. See also Cree Mistaken Point, 18, 71, 105, 201, 212–13 mixed sites, 48, 68–9 Montana, 76, 79 moose, 43, 61, 99, 131, 172, 176, 178–9, 181–2, 190 more-than-human, 27, 32, 36, 42, 45, 47, 82–4, 92, 134, 188, 227, 235n1 Mount Logan, 14, 99, 151–2 multinatural approach, 21–2, 45–6, 116

multisite ethnography, 12; ethnographers, 193 multispecies, 43, 82, 88 musicians, 11, 58–9 muskrats, 36, 176, 179, 181, 183 Nahanni: National Park, 3, 6, 18, 198, 220–2; River, 3, 221, 222 Nakoda First Nation, 38, 73, 84, 86 National Geographic, 5, 221–2 nationalism. See imperialism natural heritage, 8–9, 13, 18–20, 35, 45, 48–52, 54, 64, 67–8, 104, 217; in performance, 119–21, 128–30. See also cultural heritage natural history, 65, 120–1, 130, 133 natural resources, 98, 168, 184, 188–9 Newfoundland, 50, 53–6, 58–9, 63, 104–5, 130–2, 134, 201, 212 Nisling: Mountains, 35; River, 36 njals, 35–6 nonrepresentational, 15, 33, 43, 66, 81, 83 Northwest Territories, 3, 159, 166, 172, 198, 220 oil sands, 171, 182–3, 187 Ontario, 42, 52, 98 Otis (bison), 75–8, 89, 92 owls, 172–3 Panther Valley, 73, 76–7 Peace-Athabasca Delta, 172, 175– 7, 180, 182, 184, 186, 235nn4– 5, 236nn12–13, 236n20, 236n22 Peace River, 163, 180, 182, 184 pipeline, 96, 177, 185, 198, 231

Index pollution, 153, 163, 181–4 post-colonial, 21; feminist approach, 227 post-natural, 21, 28, 46, 89, 91 Prairies, 17, 79, 87, 89, 154, 158, 172 protected areas, 15–17, 20, 25–7, 47, 66, 84, 97, 99, 111, 120, 129, 133, 227 Quebec, 42, 201, 208–9 rabbit, 131, 176, 178 reciprocity, 11, 84, 86–7, 91, 192 relational autonomy, 42–3, 47, 90–2, 192, 228; relational theory, 15, 20; relational view, 21, 27, 34, 159 representation, 11, 16, 156, 161, 174; ethnographic, 83; knowledge, 83 Romanticism, 24–5, 123, 157 Russell, Charlie, 79, 86, 113, 116, 147 sacred ecology, 50, 223, 227 St Elias Mountains, 35–6, 38, 149, 152 Sally’s Cove, 55–7 Salmón, Enrique, 43, 89 sediments, 63, 127–8, 204–5, 215 settlers, 10–11, 25, 38, 42, 62–3, 104, 110, 122, 146, 169, 174, 189, 228. See also colonizers Shallow Bay, 57, 62 Snow, Bill, 38, 84 social history, 52, 61, 64, 120, 130 solitude, 12, 96, 101, 109, 148, 154, 212, 214, 232 spirit, 21, 40, 42, 60–1, 64, 71, 73, 110, 220, 224, 227–8

259

spirituality, 4, 39–40, 123 Stewart, Kathleen, 158, 216 Stoney Nakoda Nation. See Nakoda First Nation storyless spaces, 49, 64–5 storytellers, 59, 120, 131 subjunctive, 75, 81, 83, 92, 216 Suncor, 169, 185 Sundberg, Juanita, 21, 46 symbol, 77, 99n18, 221, 223; symbolic, 65, 85, 91, 93 Syncrude, 169–70, 191 Tablelands Trail, 58, 130 tailings: lakes, 185, 190; ponds, 170–1, 185 talks and events, 54–5, 120, 124, 129, 132, 143–4, 155 Tanché, Kristen, 3–8, 222 tar sands, 13, 163, 168–71, 174–5, 178, 183–5 Tatshenshini, 18–19, 35 Temple of the Moon, 155, 157, 161 theatre, 59, 120–1 Tourangeau, Derek, 103, 160, 236n19 Traditional Knowledge paradigm, 38–9, 191, 235 trapping, 132, 172, 176, 178–9, 181, 183 Trout River, 55, 59, 124, 130–4; Bay, 130; Campground, 60–2, 120, 130; Heritage Committee, 131; Small Pond, 130 trust, 15, 75, 81, 84, 87, 90–1, 93, 128, 194–6 Tsing, Anna, 86, 88, 200 uncultivated, 6, 24, 51, 152

260

Index

unesco, 18–20, 35, 48–51, 54, 57, 63–5, 67–8, 73, 87, 105, 109, 168, 172, 187, 202, 213, 217, 235n2 United States, 76, 122, 189 untamed, 24, 152 Ursula (bear), 75, 78–80, 86, 92 US Wilderness Act, 28, 98 W.A.C. Bennett Dam, 163, 168, 174, 179–81, 184 Waterton, 108, 228–30, 232; Biosphere Reserve, 73–4, 80; Glacier International Peace Park, 18, 73; Lakes, 41; Lakes National Park, 40, 45, 74, 78–80, 86–7, 108–9, 153, 165, 194, 221, 231; National Park, 228 Watts, Vanessa, 38, 64–5 Wave Over Wave, 59, 131, 134 White, Cliff, 28–32, 45–6, 91 Whitehorse, 100–2 wild play, 135, 139, 140

wilderness areas, 16, 51, 97–8, 107, 219 Wilderness Areas Act, 98 wolves, 73, 78, 172 Wood Buffalo National Park, 18, 23, 103, 159, 161, 166, 168–9, 171–5, 179–80, 187, 190, 235nn4–5, 236nn12–13, 236n20, 236n22 World Heritage: Committee, 186– 7; List, 17–19, 48, 50, 58, 67–8, 87, 105, 172, 208; site, 34, 48, 53, 63, 68, 73, 100, 109, 168, 201–3, 213 Wrangell-St Elias, 18–19, 34 Yellowstone to Yukon Initiative, 73, 77, 111 Yukon, 14, 17, 34, 36, 99–103, 105, 143, 151, 220; First Nations, 38, 40. See also Yellowstone to Yukon Initiative