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 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.