The first thing that strikes anyone looking at the Alberta oilsands developments in Northern Alberta is the scale. Everything is big. The equipment is big, the social and environmental impact is big, the profits are big. The sustained impact on Aboriginal people struggling through the madness is most troubling. As the earth itself, or in mining terms, “overburden”, is removed, the life it sustains is gone too. The Athabasca oilsands production region provides a fascinating yet lurid display of the clash between two kinds of cultural landscapes: the homeland of First Nation and Métis peoples, and the source of raw materials for industrial capital accumulation.

 

My work of the past twenty years has been with indigenous communities whose way of life draws from the forest as much as or more than what is cultivated in the field. For communities in the Bolivian Amazon and in the boreal forest of northwestern Ontario, fishing is an important part of that way of life. However, my interests have largely involved plant harvesters. This changed recently when a student of mine wanted to undertake a project in the Caribbean where she had previously worked. One of the things that I pleasantly learned, it is hard to learn unpleasantly in the Caribbean, is that going to look at a cultural landscape that is completely new can bring out new insights.

 

An enduring tension, and often a contradiction, regarding cultural landscapes is whether we should conserve the form of a cultural landscape or the processes that allow cultural landscapes to emerge and adapt. I thought about this a lot as I travelled through northern California from Fort Bragg through the Anderson Valley, past San Francisco and into the area around Paso Robles.

 

This is a follow-up to an earlier post on paths (). The full article discusses the value of the cultural landscape concept in understanding the inter-relationship between paths and health. Paths can be read as a reflection of cultural values of health, and they can also be advocated as routes to good health, in all it’s physical, social and spiritual aspects.

 

For Inuit, songs are a form of oral tradition. They are passed on stories that embody people’s relationships with the landscape. Narrating about hunting journeys, the chores of butchering and flensing animals, as well as unusual events, singing embraces people experiences on the land. Music becomes a milieu that connects the proximal environment with individual and collective “memoryscape”.

Pathways, such as portages, trails and roads, are an excellent representation of the ongoing process of accretion of layers of meaning in a cultural landscape. Over time, the appearance and meaning of paths change in response to natural and cultural cycles. Layers of meaning shift in their tangibility, in part depending on the perspective of who is remembering or interpreting the land.

Read the full pdf version.

Nature says stop - a winter trail awaits the snowfall

 

The interdisciplinary framework of political ecology focuses on how relations of power mediate interactions between people and their environment. In particular, they focus on the conflicts that emerge over resources and access to resources, as well as on conflicts over meanings attached to landscape. Political ecologists would ask, who defines what a landscape represents? going further, who defines what a landscape should look like? In the boreal forest of Ontario there is a visible conflict between provincial interests for a variety of development opportunities, and conservation groups who condemn industrial development as a concrete threat to the boreal forest, while supporting the creation of preserves containing large, untouched wilderness areas.

 

July in Pikangikum is normally a time when few people go to the bush for more than a couple of days. Many are employed in the community, or are away firefighting. The constant hum of boat motors on Pikangikum Lake is contrasted with relative silence on traplines away from the major waterway routes which connect communities. When the opportunity came up for Catie and me to go with Timmy K. Strang to his trapline in the northwest corner of Pikangikum’s traditional territories, I felt the rising anticipation of travelling to areas I had yet only seen on maps, and heard about through interviews. I was also thinking about my approach to appropriately capture the travelling and seeing.

One of the complexities of cultural landscapes is that they are not just the physical or tangible things that we can see but the way in which meaning inheres in the tangible. One way that meaning can be expressed is through the stories people tell about the landscape. In the Anishinaabe corpus of oral knowledge ideas, ethics and meaning are often expressed through Weeskay Jak and his adventures on the land. This is one such story told by Oliver Hill in Anishinaabe with the English version told by Paddy Peters. This is a test to see how podcasts can be used to share these stories.

One of the confounding issues of cultural landscapes is how we deal with the issue of scale and the terminology we use to describe different aspects of a cultural landscape. Obviously, a key thing about cultural landscapes is how meaning is created in relationship to landscape. One of the problems is that there are many ways to think about landscape and we are often specific about what we mean when we use the term.