buried epistemologies: the politics of nature in (post ... · practices are marked by histories of...

Buried Epistemologies: The Politics ofNature in (Post)colonial British Columbia

Bruce Willems-Braun

Department of Geography, University of British Columbia

Postcolonial theory has asserted the need to carefully consider how present-day social and culturalpractices are marked by histories of colonialism. This paper explores representations of the ‘rainforest’and ‘nature’ in British Columbia, Canada, and traces a series of ‘buried epistemologies’ through whichneocolonial relations are asserted in the region. Drawing upon recent representations of the forestproffered by the forest industry and the environmental movement, and the historical writings of aprominent nineteenth-century geologist and amateur ethnologist, the author shows how ‘nature’ (‘wil-derness’) has been constructed as a realm separate from ‘culture.’ He locates in this the possibility forcontemporary practices that abstract and displace the ‘forest’ from its cultural surrounds and relocateit within the abstract spaces of the market, the nation, and, in recent ecological rhetorics, the biosphereand the global community. By so doing, the author contests assumptions that colonialism is only an‘ugly chapter’ of Canadian history and argues instead that colonialist practices and rhetorics remainpresent but unthought in many of the categories, identities, and representational practices that aredeployed today both in public debate and scientiªc management of ‘natural landscapes’ and ‘naturalresources.’ Thus, amid the current popularity of notions like sustainable development, biodiversitymanagement, ecosystem restoration, and so on—which risk abstracting natural ‘systems’ apart fromtheir cultural surrounds—it is essential to recognize the colonial histories and neocolonial rhetoricsthat continue to infuse ‘commonsense’ categories and identities like ‘nature’ and ‘resources.’ Key Words:cultural politics, environmentalism, nature, postcolonialism

Focusing attention on the presence of the colonialimagination in today’s post-colonial society is nota gesture of ahistoricism—on the contrary. Prob-lematizing historical distance, and analyzing theway streams of the past still infuse the present,make historical inquiry meaningful (Bal 1991:34).

A t what point can we be said to have en-tered the ‘postcolonial’? This question hasbeen raised recently by a number of writ-

ers who worry that with the recent acceptanceof ‘postcolonial’ criticism and theory into theacademy, the term is now applied so broadly(and uncritically) as to render it empty (Mishraand Hodge 1991; McClintock 1992). At itsbest, postcolonial theory has sought to bringcritical attention to bear on the contested ter-rains, global ºows, and hybrid identities of aworld undeniably marked by histories and lega-cies of colonization and decolonization, includ-ing even the spaces and identities of the met-ropolitan ‘core,’ its forms of consciousness andits theories (Spivak 1988a; Appadurai 1990;

Bhabha 1994). At its worst, postcolonial theoryassumes a temporality that suggests that coloni-alism is something that can be relegated to thepast, or, equally problematic, generalizes ªrst, acolonial discourse, and second, a subsequentpostcolonial condition, in ways that are inatten-tive to the unevenness and particularity of spe-ciªc colonial practices, processes of decoloniza-tion and continuing anticolonial struggleslocated at different sites; projecting globallywhat are but local practices (for critiques, seeMishra and Hodge 1991; McClintock 1992;Shohat 1992; Dirlik 1994; Thomas 1994; DeAlva 1995). Most useful, I think, are those in-stances where commentators have asserted theneed to think carefully about the continuity ofcolonial or neocolonial relations, tracing theway that streams of the past still infuse the pre-sent (Bal 1991; Shohat 1992), and also turningattention to differences between and within‘postcolonial’ societies whereby the legacies ofcolonialism are experienced unevenly between

Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 87(1), 1997, pp. 3–31©1997 by Association of American GeographersPublished by Blackwell Publishers, 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, and 108 Cowley Road, Oxford, OX4 1JF, UK.

social objects (Frankenberg and Mani 1993).‘Postcoloniality,’ after all, appears quite differentwhen applied to different social groups withinnow-independent white settler colonies like theU.S., to the mestizaje of Latin America or toindigenous peoples in Canada or Australia. Inthis paper, the ambivalence of the term post-colonial is explored along with its theoreticaland political relevance through a discussion ofthe ‘politics of nature’ in recent environmentalconºicts in British Columbia, Canada (hereafterBC).

In light of recent criticism, ‘postcoloniality’ isnow often taken to refer not only to a condition‘after colonialism’ but also to the ways that co-lonial pasts continue to organize experience inthe present. It signals, in other words, both con-tinuity and discontinuity in histories of colonialpower and decolonization. As Stuart Hall hasrecently noted, the temporalities (and, I wouldadd, spatialities) of colonialism/postcolonialismare neither singular nor universal.

What ‘post-colonial’ certainly is not is one of thoseperiodisations based on epochal ‘stages,’ wheneverything is reversed at the same moment, all theold relations disappear forever and entirely newones come to replace them. Clearly, the disen-gagement from the colonising process has been along, drawn-out and differentiated affair (Hall1996:247).

For Hall, postcolonial societies are characterizedby the persistence of the ‘aftereffects’ of colonial-ism. But, he cautions, its politics cannot bedeclared to be the same as they were during thetime of direct colonial occupation and rule, orassumed to take the same form across differentsites. I wish to draw out three implications thatfollow from Hall’s remarks, and which in turnframe the discussions that follow. First, in lightof the complex histories of colonialism/post-colonialism, it seems necessary that we renovateour conceptions of historical time. In otherwords, to comprehend how colonialist practicespersist in the present requires a shift from con-ceptions which understand the time of colonial-ism/postcolonialism to be singular and uniªedand where postcolonialism necessarily followsafter and supersedes colonialism as a subsequentstage in history, to an increased attention to themultiple temporalities of colonialism/postcolo-nialism, the many condensations and ellipsesthat arise when these different temporalities areconvened in relation to each other, and the vari-ous temporal rhythms and spatialities that gov-

ern the emergence of colonialist or counter-colonial representations and practices. Second,if there is indeed no singular time and spaceof colonialism/postcolonialism—but only thetransient moment of many intersecting tempo-ralities and spatialities drawn into relation—it isalso impossible to speak of a singular colonialdiscourse. If we take colonial discourse to referto the production and codiªcation of knowl-edge that underwrites and legitimates the de-ployment of Western power over colonial sub-jects (Williams and Chrisman 1994), it must berecognized that this also occurs differentiallythrough time and between places and thus canbe approached as neither a ªxed nor universalset of statements (see Thomas 1994). Quite theopposite—it can be argued that colonial power,far from monolithic, seizes upon, enlists, andcombines a range of discourses, knowledges, andsignifying practices (scientiªc, religious, aes-thetic) which are not formally or ideologicallyaligned with colonial administration, but fromwhich the demarcation and regulation of differ-ence can be appropriated and utilized by colo-nial power. In short, as Nicholas Thomas argues,there can be no global theory of colonial culture,only localized theories and historically speciªcaccounts that provide insight into varied articu-lations of colonialist and countercolonial rep-resentations and practices.1 Finally, it followsthat any politics of decolonization in the presentmust be attentive to these multiple temporalitiesand spatialities, and thus to the multiple formsthat colonialist practices take and to the differ-ential and nonidentical sites of resistance thatemerge in this colonial/postcolonial terrain.This is as true for North American societies asany other. As Ella Shohat and Robert Stam(1994) have demonstrated for North America,colonialist cultural practices, and Eurocentrismmore generally, remain endemic, present as “re-sidual traces of centuries of axiomatic Europeandomination” and therefore continue to inform“the general culture, the everyday language, andthe media.” Such “vestigial thinking,” to usetheir phrase, “permeates and structures contem-porary practices and representations even afterthe end of colonialism. . . . [It] embeds, takesfor granted, and ‘normalizes’ the hierarchicalpower relations generated by colonialism andimperialism” (p. 2). These traces are not alwaysimmediately visible, nor do they comprise a ho-mogeneous, internally consistent, (neo)colonialdiscourse. Instead, they take the form of “buried

4 Willems-Braun

epistemologies” or “bad epistemic habits” thathave been naturalized as “common sense” ineveryday relations and in social, economic, andpolitical institutions.2

For geographers, the claim that a colonialimagination can be found in the present, and,further, that it operates quietly and effectively inunquestioned identities and positive knowl-edges, has presented a challenge to the disci-pline’s self-understanding. Like anthropologistsearlier, geographers have come to recognize theirdiscipline’s complicity with colonialism and im-perialism (Driver 1992; Livingstone 1992;Godlewska and Smith 1994), although few havegiven this a contemporary focus. Indeed, thecritical project as a whole has followed certainpaths, while leaving others unexplored. Mostcommentators have mapped the links betweenindividual geographers, geographical institu-tions, and past colonial administration: geog-raphy as knowledge wielded in the interest ofempire. Others, drawing on a very different con-cept of power, have explored in more detail thecolonizing power inherent in particular ways ofrendering landscapes ‘visible’: in other words,the intersection of modalities of power, knowl-edge, and spatiality in speciªc colonial practices(Driver 1992; Gregory 1994; Ryan 1994). Inalmost all cases, however, colonialism is safelyrelegated to the past, although the motivationbehind this work often lies in the present(Driver 1988). Curiously, while geographershave paid considerable attention to the sig-niªcance of the production and representationof space for colonial practices, less attention hasbeen paid to the production and representationof nature. Geographers have had little to sayabout the role that the production of nature(rhetorically and materially) has played in thecolonization of particular social environments,how natural scientists (including geographers)made visible and available to colonial adminis-tration a discrete realm called ‘nature’ that couldbe seen as separate from colonized peoples, or,perhaps more important, how what counts as‘nature’ today is often constituted within, andinformed by, the legacies of colonialism. Nodoubt this is explained in part by the growingdistance between critical human geography(concerned primarily with spatiality) and envi-ronmental geography (concerned mostly withthe management of physical environments),such that both approaches all too often allow‘nature’ to stand as an unproblematized, ahisto-

rical ‘object.’ So, although geographers havewritten extensively on the representation of na-ture, and, equally as important, have linked thiswith nature’s transformation, this paper focuseson questions of representation for different rea-sons.3 Rather than explore changing ideas aboutnature, I am more interested in the emergence of‘nature’ as a discrete and separate object of aes-thetic reºection, scientiªc inquiry, and eco-nomic and political calculation at particular sitesand speciªc historical moments. By attending tonature’s construction in representational prac-tices, the cultural politics that accompany eachand every staging of ‘nature’ can be made ex-plicit. It may be necessary then—amid declara-tions of the postcolonial—to decolonize com-monsense notions of ‘nature’; that is, to locatethe operation of relations of colonial power inwhat has hitherto been seen as an inviolableidentity.

The ‘Fate’ of the TemperateRainforest: ‘Public’ Conºictsand Constitutive Silences

The most intense, mediatized, and interna-tionalized conºicts in British Columbia havesurrounded the ‘fate’ of the region’s temperaterainforest. These conºicts have conventionallybeen staged as struggles between the forest in-dustry and environmentalists, seen as an agonis-tic contest between two poles in the sort of bi-nary logic of ‘regulated opposition’ that Baudril-lard (1984) locates as both the form and contentof politics in what he calls highly “mediatized”societies (and without which the singular col-lapses under its own weight). This binary ‘stag-ing’ has focused much-needed attention on theecological consequences of forest modiªcation,on the responsibilities of forest users, and, to alesser extent, on the political economy of theforest industry. But it has also worked hand-in-hand with, and indeed relied heavily upon, themarginalization of other voices—labor, localcommunities, and, as I argue in this paper, in-digenous peoples (First Nations)4 who do notªt either of the ‘positions’ ascribed. Rather thanreferee these conºicts, I seek to interrupt thisbinary staging through a series of other ques-tions about what is left unthought in strugglesover ‘nature’ in a region like BC. In what waysand to what extent do these conºicts occur upon

Buried Epistemologies 5

and rework a material-semiotic terrain alreadyinscribed within and through the histories andtropes of past colonial practices? To what extentare these histories simultaneously present butburied within the conventional categories—‘na-ture,’ ‘resource,’ the ‘nation’—through whichthese struggles are mediated such that these cate-gories appear today in our public cultures asunmarked, self-evident ‘identities,’ leaving theirconstitutive moments in colonial histories, andtheir political signiªcance in the present, unex-amined? How do these identities, in turn, workto authorize certain voices (industry, environ-mentalists) while simultaneously marginalizingothers? In short, to what extent are politicalstruggles over nature in sites like British Colum-bia always already complicit in a politics of na-ture that risks reenacting colonial relations inthe present?

The signiªcance of these questions has beenmade evident most recently in the highly pub-licized conºicts over the ‘fate’ of the forest inClayoquot Sound, a region that covers some350,000 ha on the west coast of Vancouver Is-land (Figure 1) and which contains large areasof “old-growth” forests.5 That the region hasbecome the focus of intense international atten-tion in the 1990s is due, in part, to a particularconªguration of local-global economic, cul-tural, and ecological dynamics that have com-bined to produce Clayoquot Sound as an‘event.’ These can be summarized brieºy. First,rates of timber harvest in BC have historicallyexceeded the annual reproduction of wood ªbrein the province’s “economically viable” forests.This, together with increased competition fromnew wood ªbre-producing regions (Southeast-ern United States, New Zealand, Indonesia,Brazil, and Chile, among others) has resulted ina situation where for transnational forest com-panies to maintain market share and proªtabil-ity, and for the provincial government to meetits social goal of sustaining local forest-depend-ent communities, the further exploitation of al-ready depleted old-growth forests is necessary.Second, just when the last remnants of so-called‘unmodiªed’ forests were scheduled to be re-made in the image of the commodity, thescience of ecology provided powerful new meta-phors and new ways of ‘envisioning’ the for-ests—and the earth—as ecological systems, andthereby brought within public discourse con-cerns over biodiversity, habitat fragmentation,and ecological ‘integrity.’ Yet other local-global

dynamics have emerged concurrently: thegrowth of Vancouver as an administrative, ª-nancial, and service center in globalizing econo-mies, increasingly detaching the city from theremainder of a resource-dependent province(Davis and Hutton 1989); linked to these trans-formations, the formation of a new middle classin Vancouver and elsewhere for whom ‘nature’could be given new meanings; and the develop-ment of international circuits of capital, com-modities, and images that have increasingly dis-placed sites like Clayoquot Sound into globalnetworks, and thus transformed local strugglesover BC forests into a global issue. Togetherthese conditions have worked to produce newpolitical spaces and constituencies.

For these reasons, among others, ClayoquotSound has become a ºashpoint for strugglesover the fate of the temperate rainforests, and,in the early 1990s, as transnational forest com-panies stood poised to increase the scale of for-estry operations in the region, environmental-ists—most from outside the region—declared a‘last stand’ in defense of the region’s old-growthforests. It is here, also, in the midst of politicalstruggles over ‘nature’ and the ‘fate’ of the tem-perate rainforest, that a speciªc silence can belocated and where we can begin to map waysthat present-day constructions of nature aremarked by a colonial past. These issues could beclearly seen in a series of events in 1993. Theincreasing intensity of the conºict over theSound, and the internationalization of protest

Figure 1. Location of Vancouver Island, British Co-lumbia, showing Clayoquot Sound and areas claimedas traditional territories by the Nuu-chah-nulth.

6 Willems-Braun

in the early 1990s prompted the provincial gov-ernment to prepare and release a land-use plan(British Columbia 1993a) that sought to medi-ate between the widely divergent demands ofindustry and environmentalists.6 The plan,which zoned the region for different uses—for-estry, recreation, preservation, and so on—failedto end conºict over the region, precipitating in-stead one of the largest collective actions of civildisobedience in Canada’s history: the arrest ofmore than 900 environmental protestors, andan equally emotional response by forestry work-ers who saw their livelihoods threatened. Muchhas been written about this, mostly from withinthe environmental movement and usually fo-cused on relations between the state, corporatecapital, law, citizenship, and the ‘rights’ of thenonhuman (Breen-Needham et al. 1994; Hatch1994; MacIsaac and Champagne 1994). Lessattention has been paid to a subsequent reportby the provincial ombudsman (British Colum-bia 1993b) which asserted that throughout theevents leading to the Clayoquot Sound decision,the Nuu-chah-nulth—a confederation of FirstNations that live on the west coast of VancouverIsland7—were not adequately consulted, eventhough the land at issue lay entirely within theirtraditional territories and had never been cededto colonial authorities or to the federal state.8

The marginalization of the Nuu-chah-nulthin decision-making processes around ClayoquotSound raises important questions that this essayseeks to address. How is it possible that amidthe many voices ‘speaking for’ nature in Clayo-quot Sound, the voices of indigenous peopleswere not adequately heard? What contributedto this ‘silencing’? The argument I make is thatthe ‘itineraries of silencing’ that contributed toNuu-chah-nulth concerns going unheeded arenot found primarily in administrative process orstate policy (although they are certainly evidentat this level).9 Rather, in order to locate the con-ditions of possibility for this absence, I turn myattention to a series of current and historicalrepresentational practices through which ‘na-ture’ is made to appear as an empty space ofeconomic and political calculation and particu-lar actors authorized to speak for it.10 I arguethat it is precisely such representational practicesthat have underwritten and legitimated the ab-straction and displacement of commodities(‘natural’ resources, visual ‘scenery,’ ‘ancient’trees, etc.) from one set of cultural relations andtheir relocation within others: the abstract

spaces of the ‘market,’ the ‘nation’ and, in recentecological rhetorics, the ‘biosphere’ and ‘theglobal community.’11 One effect has been thatall apparent (from a distance) ‘public’ and ‘un-constrained’ discussion over the fate of the foresthas been convened in precisely the binary logic(jobs vs. environment) that authorizes certainvoices while marginalizing others. Indeed, thisdisplacement has enabled the construction ofpolicy about a self-evident thing called ‘nature,’and its zoning between various users, to proceedas though it were simply the transparent expres-sion of a ‘national’ interest or a mediation be-tween various ‘public’ interests.

As I note later, these dynamics have not goneuncontested—a story increasingly told by FirstNations, historians, anthropologists, and ªlm-makers. First Nations in BC continue to articu-late other ways of imag(in)ing social natures thatare tied to their own cultural traditions and his-torical and spatial practices. My purpose here,however, is not to establish these as somehowmore ‘authentic.’12 Rather, I focus on thosepractices that work to limit possibilities for theirexpression, and thereby seek to problematizeand undermine assumptions of historical dis-tance between a colonial past and a postcolonialpresent in BC’s temperate rainforests. Begin-ning therefore with recent forest industrypromotional literature and ending with contem-porary constructions of ‘nature’ in environmen-talist rhetorics, I will show at both sites on whatcritical and constitutive absences the authorityto ‘speak for’ nature has been built. Betweenthese sections I interject the texts of the promi-nent late nineteenth-century geologist GeorgeDawson in order to map ‘genealogies’ or ‘pre-texts’ both of what counts as nature in BC today,and of present conªgurations of authority inBC’s forests. Certainly, Dawson’s texts do notlead directly to the present ‘war in the woods’between environmentalists, industry, and FirstNations, as one link in a chain of historicalevents, but they can be read to show the emer-gence of the ‘natural’ as an entity separate fromthe ‘cultural’ and the simultaneous marginaliza-tion of native presence in British Columbia. Be-hind present-day identities—as Foucault (1977)and others have noted—lie numberless begin-nings and myriad events, and Dawson’s textscan be made to subvert the easy play of recog-nition in the present. In short, this paper can beread as a cautionary tale; against what is now aºood tide of managerialism in BC and else-


where, organized around such notions as ‘sus-tainability,’ ‘ecological restoration,’ ‘bioregional-ism,’ and ‘landscape ecology,’ I sound a cautiouswarning that asks about the historical condi-tions that enable the management or preserva-tion of ‘nature’ to proceed in the ways that itdoes, that permit ‘authority’ to be constructedand legitimated in particular ways, and thatnaturalize a ‘post’colonial cultural and politicalterrain.

Staging ‘Pure’ Spaces ofEconomic and PoliticalCalculation

‘Custodians of the Forest’: The Rhetoricsand Rights of Access of TransnationalCapital

British Columbia’s environmental conºictsare today played out in a highly mediatized ter-rain in which actors vie for ‘public opinion.’Appropriately, then, I begin my inquiry with anartifact drawn from the midst of these mediawars.

Beyond the Cut—my ªrst exhibit in this storyof nature and its representatives—is a public re-lations document in which the forest industryconglomerate MacMillan Bloedel (MB) seeks tolegitimate its authority as the forest’s ‘custodian’in the face of strong criticism of industrial for-estry as practiced under advanced capitalism(MacMillan Bloedel n.d.). The document, oneof several that the company has produced, isattractively packaged and organized in an easy-to-read format that mixes glossy photographs,graphics, and written text (including boxedquotes from scientiªc ‘experts’). What intriguesme, however, is not this format—which appearsubiquitous today—but the two ‘invitations’ thatthis document offers readers and through whichMB’s authority is built. The ªrst is an invitationto evaluate MB’s forest management practices.The second, implicit in the ªrst, is an invitationto forget the colonial histories which have madeMacMillan Bloedel’s position as ‘custodian’ pos-sible. It is the second that enables the ªrst to betaken up as ‘common sense’ by the reader.

The booklet opens with a statement by RaySmith, then president and CEO of MacMillanBloedel:

At MacMillan Bloedel we are proud of our historyof forest management in BC—we believe that we

are among the best in the world when it comes toforestry practices and integrated resource manage-ment. We asked British Columbians about theirviews on managing and using the forests in thisprovince, and we are now convinced that MBshares the same constructive values, concerns, andexpectations for use of the forest resource as do themajority of people living in the province. . . . Weare committed to manage our forestlands in thebest interests of the public.

Smith’s statement sets the tone for the remain-der of the document, where, in a selºess act of‘corporate responsibility,’ MB turns the spot-light of public scrutiny on its own practices.This rhetoric of accountability pivots on themobilization of a potent political ªction—the‘public’—which at once posits a singular body,situates the reader within it, and assumes auniªed and collective interest in the forest, ºat-tening out any difference within BC society. Inturn, this permits an initial but crucial displace-ment: MB’s rights of access to the resource areto be legitimated through an evaluation of itsmanagement of the resource, shifting attentionaway from the more politically charged questionof tenure. This emphasis on management is inlarge part a response to critics who claim thatthe forest industry in BC is ecologically destruc-tive and unsustainable (Hammond 1991;Drushka et al. 1993), but it also carefully de-lineates what is at stake in BC’s forest disputes.

Organized thus, Beyond the Cut sets out topersuade the reader about MB’s expertise as aforest manager and its responsiveness to ‘publicconcerns.’ The ªrst is achieved through a rheto-ric of ‘expert,’ ‘scientiªc’ management. Thebooklet is ªlled with photographs of experts atwork. “MB road engineers,’ readers are told ina caption beside a photograph of road build-ers, “know that poor road construction prac-tices can cause erosion and mud build-up instreams.” Photographs depict environmentalscientists engaged in research “in the ªeld” orthe “lab,” or working with “computer simula-tions”—all privileged sites of ‘authority’ inWestern cultures of science (Haraway 1989).Other photographs depict “high-tech green-houses” (Figure 2) which grow “genetically su-perior offspring,” ‘assisting’ rather than ‘destroy-ing’ nature. LUPAT—a Land Use Planning Ad-visory Team—is introduced as a crack team of“environmental specialists” with expertise in“soils, wildlife, ªsh, water resources, and growthand yield projections.” Other experts, we areassured, are consulted about “recreation and aes-

8 Willems-Braun

thetics.” Finally, the corporation notes that itconsults with the state at every level: BC ForestService, Ministry of Environment and Parks,Heritage Branch, and the federal department ofFisheries and Ocean. What makes this repre-sentational strategy effective is what JürgenHabermas (1987) has described as the ‘splittingoff’ of expert cultures from the lifeworld, suchthat communicative action becomes truncatedor colonized by systems-imperatives. Questionsof politics and legitimation are therefore dis-placed from the social realm (‘value’ or moralreason) to technical realms (instrumental rea-son). Likewise, technical interests become es-tranged from what Habermas calls ‘enlightenedaction’ and come to be established themselves as‘values’ such that rationality (as technique) is nolonger critique but legitimation. The issue thenis not whether MB’s scientiªc credentials aresolid but how technical rationality becomes asurrogate for moral or political rationalities.Placed together with aesthetic displays of forest

renewal (inverting the ‘before’ and ‘after’ photosthat the environmental movement has used soeffectively), these rhetorics permit the companyto narrate a comforting story of rational man-agement and temporary disturbance of a ‘publicresource.’ The message is unmistakable: MB’sforest practices are ‘sustainable’; left to the com-pany, the forest will be renewed, if not im-proved, for future generations.

Pursuing the second tack, MB demonstratesits responsiveness to public concerns by notingthat it incorporates public input, opens ‘its’ for-ests to multiple users, and goes far beyond itslegislated responsibilities in preservation of for-ests and wildlife habitat. We are assured that thecompany holds the same concerns as the averagecitizen about preserving areas of “special impor-tance.” “The forests of British Columbia,” weread, “are a great source of pride and concernfor the people of the province. No one wants tosee them decimated or devoted exclusively totimber production.” MB therefore cooperates

Figure 2. Forestry issues in British Columbia are often framed by forestry companies in technical rather thansocial or ethical terms, thereby shifting attention away from contentious issues like land tenure. Images like thisone showing high-tech greenhouses are designed to convince viewers that the forests are being managed in themost efªcient manner and in the interests of an undifferentiated ‘public.’ Courtesy, MacMillan Bloedel Ltd.


with government agencies in preserving exam-ples of old-growth forests in areas of specialbeauty and in critical wildlife habitats. Thou-sands of hectares of forestland on Vancouver Is-land, it claims, have been transferred from MBownership or tenure to parks and ecological re-serves, while logging in other “sensitive” or “aes-thetic” regions has been deferred indeªnitely. Atthe end of the day, MB appears as the public’strusted spokesperson, possessing the most objec-tive knowledge and advanced technology, andmediating, in a disinterested manner, betweenthe claims of various “interest groups”:

As custodians of the forest, MB protects, cares for,and renews this great resource for the beneªt ofpresent and future generations. . . . The company’sforestry policies are based on achieving an optimumbalance for all users taking into account economic,recreational, and environmental factors. . . . (italicsmine)

In a world of competing demands and uncertaineconomic and ecological futures, MacMillanBloedel knows best.

Normalizing the Forest: Public Fictionsand National Displacements

This is not the place to debate the sustainabil-ity of current forest practices, nor to ask whetherMacMillan Bloedel has been a good steward.Not that these are unworthy topics, but to doso would be to accept the ªrst invitation withoutrecognizing the second invitation that accompa-nies it—the invitation to forget the colonial his-tories that enable and legitimate present-dayconstructions of authority. How is it that theland appears in documents like this—and inmuch ‘public’ debate over forest management—as a puriªed space of economic and politicalcalculation (containing visual, ecological, andeconomic resources) without any other compet-ing claims? Why should this appear so ‘natural’?Why is it ‘common sense’ to debate rights ofaccess to forest resources in terms of technicalexpertise and the strategic interests of the ‘na-tion’ without any acknowledgment that other‘nations’—First Nations like the Nuu-chah-nulth—may dispute these territorial claims? Inturn, how is it that MacMillan Bloedel (or, forthat matter, the BC Ministry of Forests) appearsas the forest’s legitimate custodian? What dy-namics lie behind and establish this authority?Perhaps more to the point, how is it that in BC,

a discourse of resource management (bound toa new and powerful metanarrative of sustain-ability and tied to the administrative space ofthe nation) has been constructed and institu-tionalized in a conceptual and administrativespace entirely separate from another, unmarked,but certainly not unrelated, management dis-course that never appears in these discussions,yet which by its absence naturalizes the abstractspace of the Canadian state and economy: thedemarcation, segregation, and administration ofnative communities and lands?13

These are difªcult questions, but we can be-gin our inquiry into this invitation to forget byreturning to Beyond the Cut, and by paying at-tention to the absences and silences that struc-ture its narrative. What remains completely un-marked in the photographs, text, and ªgures isa subtle manoeuvre whereby the ‘land,’ the ‘for-est,’ and a commodity, ‘timber,’ are simultane-ously abstracted and displaced from existing lo-cal cultural and political contexts, and resituatedin the rhetorical space of the ‘nation’ and its‘public.’ The forest that MB discusses is at onceany forest and no forest at all. With the exceptionof a small map that superimposes MB’s foresttenures over the ‘empty’ space of the province,MB’s forests are devoid of speciªcity—geo-graphical or historical. Thus, in a neat symmetry,what MB authors, authorizes MB. Displacedfrom its cultural surroundings, the forest be-comes an unmarked, abstract category emptiedof other claims—a pure space that exists only asa ground and raw material for the self-creationand rational management of the nation-state. Assuch it is free to be inscribed and incorporatedwithin other territorializations and temporalitiesas the ‘nation’s’ forest, divided into units (TreeFarm Licences), allotted to leaseholders (likeMB) and subjected to rational management(computerized models, scientiªc and economicrationalities) so as to produce ‘sustained yield’through rationalized ‘forest rotations’ as part ofthe administration of a national ‘population’ and‘economy’ (Figure 3). Indeed, in one of themany ironies found in BC’s forests, foresters andeconomists today refer to this rationalized forestas the ‘normal’ forest.14

Ecologists have argued that the ‘normal’ forestis in many respects ‘abnormal,’ but in the pre-sent paper this is not my complaint. (Nor do Ishare belief in a ‘normal’ forest that can besi(gh)ted independent of regimes of knowl-edge—even the science of ecology.) Rather, in

10 Willems-Braun

the midst of a putatively ‘postcolonial’ context,I argue that this abstraction displaces discussionsof authority from questions of territory, tenure,and rights of access (and their constitutive colo-nial histories), and convenes them instead—pre-cisely through the normalization of the ‘forest’and its integration into the administration of the‘nation-state’ and its ‘populations’—aroundquestions of rational management and conser-vation. This, in turn, permits a particular logicof equivalence to circumscribe and apparentlyexhaust possibilities of public debate: the healthof the resource is the health of the nation. It isnot rights of access but the economic and eco-logical details of the ‘normal’ forest that are atstake.

MB’s rhetorics—and the normalization ofthe forest more generally—however, assumea priori the juridical, political, and geographicalspace of the nation-state and ignore its historico-geographical constitution (and contestation). Bystaging the nation-state as accomplished ratherthan continually articulated, the Tree Farm Li-cences which MB holds, and the ‘normal’ forestit manages, are rendered transparent and thus‘common sense.’ Detached from their local cul-tural relations, it becomes a short step to see

these territories as empty public lands (‘wilder-ness’), leased to transnational companies for the‘beneªt’ of the general population.15 In light ofincomplete decolonization in British Columbia,such rhetorics risk reinscribing colonial rela-tions, erasing present-day First Nation strugglesover ‘sovereignty,’ and ignoring their continualassertion that what appears as ‘wilderness’ in onerhetoric is a highly cultural landscape in another.Assuming the ªxity of these ‘national/natural’spaces (and their staging as an abstract ‘void’ andnormalization within a ‘national economy’) is, Isuggest, a bad epistemic habit, one that simul-taneously incorporates and renders invisible thecolonial histories through which these spaceshave been constituted and naturalized, andwhich in turn authorize certain voices—re-source managers, bureaucrats, nature’s defend-ers—to speak for nature.

Unthinking Neocolonial‘Cultures’ of Nature: Genealogiesof ‘Wilderness’

If the genealogist refuses to extend his faith inmetaphysics, if he listens to history, he ªnds thatthere is ‘something altogether different’ behindthings: not a timeless and essential secret, but thesecret that they have no essence or that their es-sence was fabricated in a piecemeal fashion fromalien forms. . . . What is found at the historicalbeginning of things is not the inviolable identityof their origins; it is the dissension of other things.It is disparity (Foucault 1977:142).

It is to these colonial histories and practicesthat I want to turn now. MacMillan Bloedel’s‘authority’ is built, in part, by establishing theforest as a ‘natural’ and ‘public’ resource. Butthis is facilitated, in turn, by histories of ‘seeingnature’ on Canada’s west coast that are deeplyimbricated with forms of colonial power. Inother words, the authority of corporate capitaltoday is related in important ways to historicalpractices of imagining, representing, and puri-fying ‘natural’ landscapes. As I will argue, thesepractices permitted ‘natural’ spaces to be appre-hended apart from forms of native territoriality.Wedded to a Western metaphysics of truth, suchrepresentations could be seen as revealing the‘real’ structure of the landscape, and could giverise, in turn, to forms of administration thataccepted this as a matter of course. By showingthe mechanics of the production of this rhetori-

Figure 3. In discourses of forest management, BC’sforests are displaced from their local contexts andrelocated into the abstract spaces of the nation-state.This effaces the many ways that BC’s forest land-scapes are contested. What lies ‘buried’ in models ofsilviculture are precisely the colonial histories bywhich the forests were made available as resourcelandscapes rather than cultural and historical land-scapes. Source: MacMillan Bloedel, n.d.


cal space called ‘nature,’ it becomes possibleboth to write a genealogy of ‘nature’ as the ab-sence of culture (‘wilderness’) in late twentieth-century British Columbia, and to destabilizeclaims of authority that are built on this ab-sence.16 I will be necessarily selective; to unthinkthe neocolonial assumptions buried in MB’stext, I will enlist the writings of George Dawson,a geologist and amateur ethnologist, who trav-eled the coast with the Geological Survey ofCanada in the 1870s–1880s. By readingDawson’s texts against the grain, the ªxity ofthis national/natural space—and its repre-sentation as a nonhumanized hinterland—ap-pears less certain; its construction as such, uponwhich subsequent ‘rights’ of access are built, ismade visible at the moment of its emergence.

Displacements: Bounding the ‘Native’ andProducing ‘Nature’

Dawson’s travels coincided roughly with theyears that the federal Indian Reserve Commis-sion (IRC) was allocating and demarcating In-dian Reserves in the province. This makesDawson’s texts particularly signiªcant. It is theReserve Commissions that cartographically in-scribed colonialist discourse onto the territoryof the province, bounding, within a quasi-legaldiscourse, the space of native villages and be-yond their extent, positing an empty natureopen to settlement or enterprise. This in turnhas authorized subsequent depictions of BC asa ‘resource landscape’ rather than a ‘culturallandscape.’ Considerable attention in BC histo-riography has focused on the Indian Land Ques-tion, debating the relative ‘generosity’ to the In-dians of successive colonial administrators, andlater, after the colony joined Canada in 1871,speciªc provincial and federal authorities (Fisher1977; Tenant 1990). However, as Gayatri Spi-vak (1990) reminds us, administrative practicepresupposes an irreducible theoretical moment.Practices such as those of the IRC occurred notsimply through administrative ªat, but weremade possible through a series of discoursesthrough which a ‘space’ of administration couldappear, and that at once invited and legitimatedthe actions of administrators. The cartographicinscription of colonialist rhetoric in the ‘reserve’was thus preªgured and facilitated by a moregeneral textualization which included not onlythe appearance of written records, but moreimportant, the emergence of a sense of order

and totality through the production and dis-semination of knowledge pertaining to the landand its inhabitants. In this way a ‘landscape’could be known and made available.

In this light, Dawson’s travels and writings—in part because he wrote as a ‘disinterested’ sci-entist, not a colonial apologist—provide a valu-able window into the extent of a colonialist visu-ality that at once ordered and naturalized BC’snatural/cultural landscapes, and at the sametime underwrote the bounding of native terri-tories and the shape and future direction of statepolicy. What I wish to trace in Dawson’s work,then, is the process by which the ‘land’ wasmade to appear as ‘nature’: a space that held nosigns of ‘culture’ and therefore could be appro-priated into the administrative space of the ‘na-tion.’ This occurred, I will argue, not throughthe denial by Dawson and others of nativeclaims to the land (Dawson personally suggestedthe opposite) but through a series of repre-sentational practices that at once located andcontained a native presence, dividing west coastterritories into the ‘primitive’ spaces of nativevillages, and the ‘modern’ spaces of the emerg-ing Canadian nation.

Dawson’s ofªcial writings took the form ofsurvey reports for the Geological Survey of Can-ada (GSC), fulªlling one of the conditions thatthe colony of British Columbia had attached tounion with the Dominion of Canada in 1871:that geological surveys be made of the new prov-ince’s ‘domain.’ Several scholars have shown thesigniªcance of these surveys in the developmentand spatial extension of the Canadian nation.Zaslov (1975) notes that the survey was a primeinstrument in “pushing back the frontiers” andthat it was, in many places, the “ªrst arm” ofthe Canadian government. More recently, Keller(1987) has tied the formation and activities ofthe GSC more closely to imagined geographiesof a ‘transcontinental’ Canadian nation, andalso to utilitarian concerns for national eco-nomic development. Both, however, view thesurvey primarily as a process of enumeration,documenting, through careful observation, thewealth of the new nation.

This the survey certainly was. But it was alsomuch more. The GSC not only enumerated,but brought a particular mode of intelligibility tobear on the landscape. This was no mere ac-counting, it was a means of simultaneously stag-ing and availing, a way of producing ‘spaces ofvisibility’ (Rajchmann 1988; Gregory 1994)and by extension ‘spaces of invisibility’ that in

12 Willems-Braun

turn authorized the activities of certain actors.The outline of Dawson’s (1880) report on his1878 explorations in the Queen Charlotte Is-lands (located north of Vancouver Island) makesthe construction of spaces of visibility/invisibil-ity in the practice of enumeration abundantlyclear. Like most GSC reports, it begins with ageneral description of the islands—a bird’s eyeview that situates them in relation to the rest ofthe nation, and provides a general outline oftheir physical geography—coastline, harbors,rivers, mountains, and so on. This providesreaders with a general ‘frame’ that can then beªlled with more detail. Subsequent chapters andappendices locate and describe the islands’ geol-ogy, Indians, zoology, and botany—divisions inthe text which apparently ‘mirrored’ what couldbe ‘found’ in nature. Plants, animals, Indians,rocks—each were separated and evaluated asdiscrete entities which, in turn, could be furthersubdivided, providing, through the enumera-tion of the ‘parts,’ a picture of the ‘whole.’ Geo-logical observations, for instance, were dividedinto further classiªcations: Triassic, Cretaceouscoal bearing, Tertiary, and glaciated and su-perªcial deposits. Likewise, Dawson’s notes onthe Haida Indians distinguish and analyzephysical appearance, social organization, relig-ion and ‘medicine,’ the potlatch and distribu-tion of property, folklore, villages, and popula-tion. Through the construction of particular cir-cumscribed knowledge domains, these land-scapes were encountered, organized, andenumerated.

More than enumeration, Dawson’s surveyalso stood as a remarkable case of ‘anticipatoryvision.’ At the time he undertook this task, thewhite settler population in BC was still outnum-bered by natives, and, further, this settler popu-lation was clustered almost entirely at the ex-treme southwest corner of the province (Galoisand Harris 1994). Beyond its extent, the landwas still known and experienced through nativeterritorialities and temporalities. The surveytherefore embodied and inscribed a national tele-ology on a landscape that, although bounded bythe cartographic abstraction of national borders,had not yet been rationalized in relation to them.Yet these boundaries—however abstract—wereof great signiªcance. As Benedict Anderson(1991) persuasively argues, it is only subsequentto the demarcation of a ‘national territory’ thatsurveys like Dawson’s could become part of theaccounting ledgers of the nation. Only sub-sequent to this bounding could ‘interiors’ ap-

pear ‘empty’ and available to be ‘ªlled.’17 In aseries of telling metaphors, Robert Brown, anexplorer on Vancouver Island who precededDawson by ªfteen years, makes this anticipatoryªlling explicit.

It was the intention . . . that we should strikethrough the unexplored sections of the Island,carefully examine that tract as a specimen, and thusform a skeleton to be ªlled up afterwards (Hayman1989:9) [italics mine].

Later, Brown described the ªndings of his ex-plorations as “tests of the whole” (1869), bywhich the regions between his traverses could be“judged.” On more than one occasion he fanta-sized of its future transformation at the handsof settlers:

The trail from Victoria to Comox crosses theQuall-e-hum River close to the coast, and an ex-tension of this would form a transinsular road con-necting coal miners of Nanaimo and the farmersof Comox with the wild savage of Nootka, Klay-o-quot [Clayoquot] and Barclay Sound (1864:25)[italics mine].

Likewise, Dawson (1880a:38) speculated that inthe Queen Charlottes “before many years exten-sive saw-mills will doubtless be established. . . .The quality of the spruce timber is excellent,and beside the immediate shores of the harbour,logs might probably be run down the NadenRiver from the lake above.” Both Brown andDawson assume and enact the bounded spaceof the colony and nation respectively, reproduc-ing in a speculative fantasy what had alreadybeen accomplished elsewhere in the Americas.The GSC, then, in Dawson’s writings more spe-ciªcally, must be seen not only as an enumera-tion, but also, quite literally, as a means of in-corporation—constructing and ªlling the ‘body’(skeleton) of the ‘nation’ (specimen), and in-scribing these new territorializations onto WestCoast lands.

Signiªcantly, in the colonial context, the in-corporation of the nation (as a body) and the‘visualization’ of its ‘internal structure’ involvedalso a fundamental division and displacement.These occurred in two ways. First, at the sametime that the skeleton of the nation was beinggiven ºesh, it was also anatomized—dividedinto its component parts. The divisions of thesurvey introduced categories by which the landcould be known and appropriated. Second, byconstructing discrete entities—minerals, trees,Indians—these could be apprehended entirelyapart from their surrounding, displacing and


resituating objects within quite speciªc, but verydifferent, orders of signiªcation. These processesof division and displacement can be seen inDawson’s journals. In these, Dawson recordedobservations and kept a daily account of hismovements, including descriptions of the socialand technical mediations that made his move-ment and his scientiªc observations possible:people he met, how he traveled, where hestayed, who acted as his guides, instrumentsused, measurements made, and so on. On thereverse side of his journal pages, Dawson occa-sionally inserted details that he had missed.More often, Dawson used these blank spaces towrite a second ‘parallel’ text. In this he elabo-rated upon aspects of the physical landscape ornative culture. Much of the information foundon the back of these pages was later incorporatedinto his ‘scientiªc’ texts on the geology, re-sources, and native cultures of the west coast,but it is the organization of these parallel textsthat is of interest. Some passages dealt exclu-sively with geology or botany, others only withnative culture, while yet others synthesized bothinto an enumeration of different aspects of thecountry (but even here, as in his reports, the twoidentities were rarely brought into relation; na-tives appeared as yet another element to bedocumented).

One example will sufªce. From August 8–10,1878, Dawson, accompanied by his brotherRankine, an Indian guide named Mills, and thecrew of the schooner Wanderer, traveled fromSkidegate to Masset, along the east and northcoast of Graham Island. On August 11, the dayfollowing his arrival in Masset, Dawson at-tended church, dined with the missionary Mr.Collison, read recent newspapers, and “wrote upnotes.” The events of the four days are dulyrecorded in his daily journal entries. On thereverse, two parallel texts are found (see Ta-ble 1). In one text we ªnd an enumeration ofthe ‘wealth of nature.’ Here the sciences of bot-any and geology play a larger part. Specimensare located and related in space. Physical proc-esses are described and possibilities for estab-lishing communications (or lack thereof ) dulynoted. In the parallel text, Dawson describesnative peoples, their customs and behavior (and,on other occasions, their villages). This appears,quite literally, as a turning of Dawson’s gazefrom one ‘object domain’ to another.

The same separation is found in his photo-graphs: geological sites and landscape vistas on

the one hand (Figure 4) and native villages andindividuals on the other (Figure 5).18 So, whileindigenous peoples were at once described ingreat detail—their physical features and culturalforms documented and enumerated—they weresimultaneously detached from the landscape,which could then be subsequently encounteredand described as devoid of human occupation.In other words, Dawson distills the complex so-cial-ecological worlds of his travels into neat un-ambiguous categories: primitive culture andpristine nature. No relations are drawn betweenthe two. Instead, the former is contained withinthe ‘village,’ ªxing a native presence in ‘place,’while beyond the bounds of the native villages,Dawson ªlled the blank spaces of the imperialmap with the colored spaces of geological andbotanical maps. In turn, these latter spaces couldbe subject to new visual regimes which saw theland in terms of stratigraphy and geologicaltime, ‘revealing’ an ‘environmental architecture’that could be appropriated as yet new frontiersfor capital. The enterprising settler, armed witha rudimentary knowledge of geology, couldtherefore ‘read the rocks’ according to an as-sumed plan, and indeed was encouraged to doso.19 Dawson himself would go on to write textsabout Canada as a “ªeld for mining investment”(1896), and create provincial maps of the re-gion’s “important trees” (1880b)—importantnot for native inhabitants, but for the nascentforest industry. What we ªnd in Dawson’s writ-ings, then, is the unveiling of nature’s ‘plan,’ aplan which both preceded and lay external to anative presence and which would be fulªlledonly through the judicious mixing of European(Canadian) capital and labor.

The Appearance of Natural Order and theOrdering of Nature’s Appearance

Dawson’s texts suggest the possibility of writ-ing genealogies of unmarked categories such as‘nature,’ the ‘land,’ and the ‘nation.’ But theyalso help clarify how colonizing power works. AsTimothy Mitchell (1988) notes, the illusion ofrepresentations like the survey, the journal, orthe map was that they appeared to be withoutillusion: they were faithful to the ‘things’ repre-sented, promising complete and certain knowl-edge (even if this was continually deferred, asRobert Brown [1869] noted, leaving “details” to“more minute after inspection”). This promise

14 Willems-Braun

allowed readers (and writers) to apprehend anappearance of order that was thought to emanatefrom nature itself, rather than from the orderingof appearances in representational practices.Reading the survey only as a more-or-less ac-curate ‘record’ within a story of progressiveEuropean acquaintance with west coast landsobscures the manner by which the survey en-framed the land within regimes of visibility. It is

important to be clear: what is at issue is notwhether Dawson’s surveys represented the land-scape accurately. As Mitchell notes (1988:18),the problem with explanations that reveal powerto work only through misrepresentation is thatrepresentation is itself left unquestioned. Power,he argues, operates precisely in the novelty ofcontinuously creating the effect of an ‘externalreality.’ Thus, the force of Dawson’s surveys lay

Table 1. Parallel Texts Found on the Reverse Pages of George Dawson’s Journals

Text 1: Physical Landscape Text 2: Cultural Landscape

The Coast between Skidegate & Masset, in some re-spects resembles that between Cumshewa & Skide-gate. A bare open stretch with no harbour & scarcelyeven a Creek or protected bay for Canoes or boats,for long distances. The beach is gravelly & sometimescoarsely stony to a point near windbound camp oftrack Survey. Beyond this it becomes sandy, & thoughnot without gravel continues generally of Sand, all theway to Masset.

Lawn Hill is evidently Caused by the outcrop of vol-canic rock described in ªeld book, is probably Terti-ary. Beyond this for some distance, & including theregion about Cape Ball, cliffs, or low banks of drift-clay, & sands characterize. They are generally wearingaway under the action of the waves, & trees &stumps may be seen in various stages of descent to thebeach. In some places dense woods of ªne uprightclear trees, are thus exposed in section, & there mustbe much ªne spruce lumber back from the sea every-where. Very frequently the timber seen on the imme-diate verge of the cliffs, & shore is of an inferior qual-ity, rather scrubby & full of knots. The soil isgenerally very Sandy where shown in the cliffs, orpeaty in bottom places where water has Collected.Sand hills or sandy elevations resembling Such, areseen in some places on the cliffs, in section, & thereis nothing to show that the Soil away from the Coastis universally sandy, but the fact that the upper depos-its of the drift spread very uniformly & are of thischaracter. Further north the shore is almost every-where bordered by higher or lower sand hills, Coveredwith rank Coarse grass; beach peas, &c. &c. Beyondthese are woods, generally living though burnt insome places. The trees are of various degrees of excel-lince, but most generally rather undersized & scrubby.This part of the coast is also characterized by lagoons,& is evidently making, under the frequent action ofthe heavy South East sea.

Potlatch. Mr. Collinson gives me some additionallight on this custom.

When a man is about to make a potlatch, for anyreason, such as raising a house &c. &c. he ªrst, someMonths before hand, gives out property, money &c.,So much to each man, in proportion to their variousranks & standing. Some time before the potlatch,this is all returned, with interest. Thus a manreceiving four dollars, gives back six, & so on. All theproperty & funds thus collected are then given awayat the potlatch. The more times a man potlatches, themore important he becomes in the eyes of his tribe,& the more is owing to him when next some onedistributes property & potlatches.

The blankets, ictus &c. are not torn up & destroyedexcept on certain special occasions. If for instance acontest is to be carried on between two men or threeas to who is to be chief, One may tear up tenblankets, scattering the fragments, the others must dothe same, or retire, & so on till one has mastered theothers. It really amounts to voting in most cases, forin such trial a mans personal property soon becomesexhausted, but there an under-current of supply fromhis friends who would wish him to be chief, & he inmost popular favour is likely to be the chosen one.

At Masset last winter, a young man made someimproper advances to a young woman, whose fatherhearing of the matter, was very angry, & immediatelytore up twenty blankets. This was not merely to givevent to his feelings, for the young man had to followsuite, & in this Case not having the requisite amountof property, the others of his tribe had to subscribe &furnish it, or leave a lasting disgrace in the tribe.Their feelings toward the young man were notnaturally, of the Kindest, though they did not turnhim out of the tribe as they might have done afterhaving atoned for his fault.

Totems are found among the indians here aselsewhere. The chief ones about Masset are the Bear& the Eagle. Those of one totem must marry in theother.

Source: Cole and Lockner (1993:57–59). Emphasis in original.


not in whether they got it right or wrong.Rather, it lay in the production of an ‘effect’ oftruthfulness that was tied to a metaphysicswhich assumed that behind representation lay anorder that representation continually ap-proached. Through the hold of this metaphysic,the survey could be taken as approaching ‘na-ture’ itself, effacing the particular technologiesof vision through which it was produced, andªnding in the ‘order’ of representation the orderof ‘reality’ itself.

Dawson’s surveys and journals did not inventobjects and landscapes in ºights of fancy. Thesewere material practices that engaged materialworlds. Rather, in rendering the land visible, thesurveys constructed from what was encounteredan ordered scene that could be read. Such prac-tices, as Paul Carter (1987) notes, were not sim-ply textual, but highly material; they did notleave the land untouched. Instead they activelydisplaced and resituated landscapes within new

orders of vision and visuality, and within re-gimes of power and knowledge that at onceauthorized particular activities and facilitatednew forms of governmentality. It was only afterthe land was staged as a ‘theatre’ of ‘nature,’ afterall, that it could be made available to politicaland economic calculation.20

Signiªcantly, the production of ‘nature’ incolonial discourse did not occur through astraightforward erasure of native presence. InDawson’s texts (as in others of his time), indige-nous ‘populations’ were identiªed and describedin great detail. This presence, however, was or-dered and contained in a discourse of ‘primitiveculture’: a culture that lay outside, and had noplace in, the unfolding history of the modern‘nation.’ At the same time that Dawson placednative peoples ‘on view,’ he displaced them bothtemporally and geographically from their sur-roundings. Concurrently, Dawson described anational (physical) landscape consisting of cer-

Figure 4. ‘Basaltic columns, Tow Hill.’ Photograph by George Dawson, 9 August 1878. As a geologist, Dawsonwas trained to evaluate BC’s landscapes in terms of geological formations, revealing an ‘environmental architec-ture’ that could be mapped entirely separate from the cultural landscape and appropriated as yet new frontiersfor capital. Source: National Archives of Canada, C51371.

16 Willems-Braun

tain geological and botanical entities, containingcertain landforms and waterways, and subject toparticular climates and meteorological phenom-ena. What resulted, then, was a textual and spa-tial separation of the ‘tribal’ village from the‘modern’ nation. Native village sites became tiedto a traditional, nonhistorical culture, and sepa-rated from a surrounding landscape that wasªgured, in turn, as a ªeld for the enterprise of adynamic modern culture. Colonial discourse inthis instance did not erase, it displaced. Erasureoccurred, to be certain, but not through lack ofattention. Rather it occurred in the move-ment/translation between different orders of sig-niªcation.

Here lies the signiªcance—in the present—ofrereading historical texts like Dawson. MaryLouise Pratt (1992) has argued that this dis-

placement of the ‘native’ from their physical sur-roundings was a common trope in nineteenth-century travel writings produced by Europeansmoving through the ‘primitive’ spaces of Africaand the Americas. As Pratt notes, scientiªc ac-counts—like Dawson’s—did not exist in arealm apart from imperialism and European ex-pansion, they actively facilitated both. “Naturalhistory,” she writes, “extracted specimens notonly from their organic or ecological relationswith each other, but also from their place inother people’s economies, histories, social andsymbolic systems” (1992:31). In Dawson’stexts, native peoples were spatially ‘ªxed’ at cer-tain sites—usually villages or resource procure-ment sites—and surrounded solely by what ap-peared as the empty space of nature. Across thisempty space, primitive peoples only ‘moved,’

Figure 5. ‘Skedans Indian village.’ Photograph by George Dawson, 18 July, 1878. In his photographs, as inhis journals, Dawson divided the land into ‘natural’ and ‘cultural’ landscapes. Dawson was fascinated by thetotems at Skedans and took ªve photographs of the village. The following day, he examined the surroundinglandscape for mineral deposits. Source: National Archives of Canada, PA38148.


leaving little trace of occupation or, in the samediscourse, few claims of possession. As peoplepossessing only a transient, undisciplined gaze,it could be assumed that they had no real knowl-edge of the tremendous riches that lay upon orbeneath the “face of the country.” In this way,Pratt writes, the Americas were reinvented as “aprimal world of nature, an unclaimed and time-less space occupied by plants and creatures(some of them human), but not organized bysocieties and economies; a world whose only his-tory was the one about to begin” (1992:126).Dawson’s textual divisions and rhetorical dis-placements were, in effect, agents of deterritori-alization, rendering invisible existing relationsbetween native peoples, their immediate sur-roundings, and the complex cultural/politicalinstitutions that organized these relations.21 Inturn, other notions of property and ownershipparticular to European societies could be in-scribed over the extent of the territory and in-stitutionalized in legal and political discourse.

Indeed, there is an entire institutional/admin-istrative history to the construction of ‘natu-ral/national’ space that I have explicitly not fo-cused on here. The separation of the ‘land’ andits ‘resources’ from native peoples and theircommunities and its relocation into the abstractspace of the nation is not solely, or even primar-ily, the result of juridico-political statements andpublic administration (colonialism proper). Noris the persistence of colonialist practices todaysolely the result of administrative policy. Theconditions of possibility for modern Tree FarmLicences, abstracted as ahistorical, rationalizedspaces, are multiple and disparate. In part, theywere preªgured and facilitated in the mannerthat the BC landscape was encountered and de-scribed by explorers, travelers, scientists, and set-tlers and the cultural, economic, and institu-tional forms that were subsequently inscribedand reproduced in BC society. “The act [prac-tice] of language,” Paul Carter (1987:144)notes, “[brings] a living space into being andrender[s] it habitable, a place that [can] be com-municated, a place where communication [can]occur.” This is an important point to make inthe political present. In legal struggles today, andin recent “government to government” negotia-tions, First Nations must always deal with thequestion of ‘evidence’ for native claims. Mostcommentators on native ‘dispossession’ have de-bated colonial policy and legal pronouncements(Tenant 1990). While this is important for trac-ing the quasi-legal apparatus of dispossession, it

leaves what Spivak calls the theoretical momentcontained in administrative practice intact. Itfails to sufªciently identify the many ways thatpast colonial policy (and administrative prac-tices today) relied upon and incorporated repre-sentational practices that as a matter of coursealready depicted the land through colonialistrhetorics which narrowly circumscribed notionsof native territoriality within a larger narrativeof the emerging nation. The displacement thatoccurred in the ‘spatial writings’ of settler socie-ties rendered invisible existing territorializations,making the land appear “as Eden.” This was,ªguratively and materially, the “worlding of aworld on a supposedly uninscribed territory,part of an imperialist project which had to as-sume that the earth that it [re]territorialized wasin fact previously uninscribed” (Spivak 1990:1).Native land rights have been notoriouslydifªcult for Western colonial cultures to see. In-deed, countering such colonialist rhetorics—both historical and contemporary—was a cen-tral task faced by the Gitksan and Wet’suwet’ennations in their early 1990s land claims case(Solnick 1992). If these founding rhetorics andterritorializations are left unexamined, then pastcolonial authority appears legitimate, and by ex-tension, so also does the authority claimed todayby transnational forest companies. By notingthat dispossession occurred not simply throughlegal pronouncements, but also, and primarily,through a visuality that at once geographicallylocated and spatially contained native presence(and therefore authorized European claims to anempty land), a narrative that sees the land asunoccupied wilderness can be contested and dis-mantled, creating a conceptual space within ju-ridico-political discourses in which past and pre-sent forms of native territoriality and possessionmight be made visible.

Saving ‘Wilderness’: Nature asthe Absence of (Modern) Culture

The continuing colonial legacy of extractivecapital and state-economic planning found to-day in BC is not unique within Canada. FromClayoquot Sound in BC to the Great Whalehydro project in Quebec, race, colonial histo-ries, and staples development have been closelyintertwined. At least until recently, the explicitenvironmental racism of such projects has beencontained through a silent colonial violence that

18 Willems-Braun

marked the bodies but denied the voices of FirstNations.

Let me return to the present, but in order toask a different question. If, as many First Na-tions speakers have argued, the economic ex-ploitation of nature-as-resource has tended torely on, and reproduce, colonial relations in BC,might the same be said of environmentalistrhetorics articulated in the defense of nature? Towhat extent does the defense of nature mirror,albeit inversely, the staging of nature-as-resourcein staples economies, a staging that is itself tiedto the nation’s colonial legacy? Here I am re-sponding to criticisms leveled by a number ofFirst Nations speakers—perhaps most promi-nently by George Watts during the Europeantour of the BC Premier in February 1994—thatthe environmental movement is guilty of its ownforms of neocolonialism.22 To explore Watts’scomplaint, I return to the same ‘media wars’from which I drew my ªrst ‘exhibit.’

On the Wild Side

Clayoquot: On the Wild Side (Dorst andYoung 1990) is one of the most popular coffee-table books recently published by the WesternCanada Wilderness Committee. Although it hasa substantial text, the 160-odd photographs areclearly asked to bear the narrative burden. Thisbook, and others like it, have been immenselysuccessful in raising public awareness about en-vironmental issues in British Columbia, not theleast because the landscapes that the photogra-phers ‘capture’ are some of the most ‘scenic’ (ac-cording to certain Western aesthetics) that theprovince has to offer.

Photographic collections have been used ef-fectively to mobilize support for the preservationof certain landscapes in the U.S. and Canadasince the 1930s, when the Sierra Club ªrst pub-lished Ansel Adams’s photographs in its struggleto preserve Kings Canyon, California, from re-source development. It is important to note,however, that photographs, even in documen-tary photography, do not ‘mirror’ nature; theyactively construct landscapes that observers areinvited to grasp as the ‘real.’ As cultural criticand historian of photography John Tagg notes,

The photographer turns his or her camera on aworld of objects already constructed as a world ofuses, values and meanings, though in the percep-tual process these may not appear as such but only

as qualities discerned in the “natural” recognitionof “what is there”. . . . The image is therefore tobe seen as a composite of signs. . . . Its meaningsare multiple, concrete and most important, con-structed (1988:8).

So, although Clayoquot: On the Wild Side dis-rupts the representational logic of extractivecapital, it does not necessarily reveal an essential‘reality’ that is obscured behind the commodityform. Rather, it invites the viewer to engage thelandscape of Clayoquot Sound in highly selec-tive ways. In itself this is not a problem—it isthe nature of all representational practices. Butit means that rather than accept these photo-graphs as a transparent reºection of ‘nature it-self,’ we should read such images as texts organ-ized through a particular optic.

The book opens with a series of spectacular-ized landscapes. Here the photographer, AdrianDorst, displays his substantial talents and ªnelytuned aesthetic sensibilities as a nature photog-rapher. From the ªrst page on, scenes unfold ofa sublime, complex, enchanting landscape ªlledwith powerful forces and intricate, even delicaterelations (Figure 6). This is a fantastic display ofthe ‘wild side’ of Vancouver Island, what Young,in the text, declares a “showcase of environ-mental elegance and diversity” (p. 20). From thewide sweep of crescent beaches to wave-pounded coastal headlands; from shoreline treessculpted by the lashing winds of ªerce winterstorms to the unimaginable, soft silence andteeming, luxuriant growth of its ancient forests,Dorst ‘captures’ a spectacular landscape. Land,forests, animals, and sea are brought togetherinto a symphony of natural harmony. This is aland that is resolutely ‘wild’ and ‘nonhuman-ized,’ the last stand of a pristine nature externalto and threatened by the juggernaut of indus-trial society.

In light of recent millennial pronouncementsof the ‘end’ of Nature (McKibben 1990),Dorst’s images are not only striking but containa sense of political urgency. Yet as important asthe authors’ political commitments are, theseimages are deeply problematic. This is true notbecause they set out to defend ‘nature.’ Rather,what is equally striking about the images—although at ªrst this only seems ‘natural’—is theabsence of people, including the photographerhimself. With the exception of one chapter, fewphotographs contain people, and only a fewmore contain signs of human activity. This al-lows the region to appear as the ‘other’ to indus-trial society: untrammeled wilderness. In turn,


the absence of Dorst allows the camera to appearas an unmediated extension of the ‘eye,’ an ap-paratus that simply records for the viewer whatis ‘there’ to be seen: a timeless, nonhumanizednature. As the Wilderness Committee’s popularposter declares, “Wild beaches. Wild rainforests.Wild forever.”

Tropes of Traditional Culture

They cannot represent themselves; they must berepresented (Karl Marx 1965[1852]:106).

Clayoquot Sound, of course, is far from un-occupied. Today, some 1,800 people live in theregion, of which the Nuu-chah-nulth accountfor about half. The non-Native population livesalmost exclusively at the south end of the Soundin the town of Toªno, which is also the Paciªcterminus of the Trans-Canada Highway, and

thereby stands, for many non-Native Canadi-ans, as the symbolic end of ‘humanized’ nature.Beyond this lies ‘wilderness.’ Native communi-ties in Clayoquot Sound are today centralized atAhousat, Optisat, Hesquiaht, and Esowista. Allbut the latter are located beyond Toªno.

Although the ªrst few chapters of the bookdepict landscapes that contain no signs of hu-man occupation, Dorst and Young are morethan casually aware of a native presence. In themiddle of the book, they include a chapter thatfocuses at some length on the Nuu-chah-nulth.Here lies a crucial tension: a cultural presencelies at the heart of this ‘natural paradise.’ Howthis tension is negotiated and resolved points tounderlying differences between the environ-mental movement and First Nations in BC andreveals some insidious neocolonial tropes that lieat the heart of environmental representations of‘nature’ in the region. These are not immedi-ately apparent and have generally been over-

Figure 6. Old-growth, Clayoquot Sound. Photographer, Adrian Dorst. Images of ‘ancient,’ ‘pristine’ rainforestsare frequently used in struggles to preserve ‘wilderness’ areas like Clayoquot Sound. In these, ‘wilderness’ isframed through a constitutive absence: signs of modern culture and technologies. Courtesy, Adrian Dorst andthe Western Canada Wilderness Committee.

FPO

20 Willems-Braun

shadowed by the support that most sectors ofthe environmental movement have given toFirst Nations’ land claims in BC. Indeed, Dorstand Young reiterate this support. Their book isitself dedicated to the Nuu-chah-nulth, and thetext, at least in this chapter, is clearly sympa-thetic to Nuu-chah-nulth struggles within a ju-diciary that has often refused to recognize nativesovereignty. The author, Cameron Young, cele-brates precontact Nuu-chah-nulth life, which,he writes, subverting a discourse of primitivism,was “lived on a grand scale.” He also relatesrecent work by anthropologists that estimatedpopulations on the so-called wild side of Van-couver Island to have stood at 70,000 at thetime of contact. Prior to contact, Young contin-ues, “these people developed a cultural philoso-phy and a life-support system [that was] subtleand complex” (p. 41). Placed against the com-ments of a BC judge who claimed that precon-tact native life was “to quote Hobbs (sic) . . . atbest ‘nasty, brutish and short’” (Delgamuukw v.the Queen 13:129), Young’s text weighs in onthe side of anticolonial struggle.

Yet despite such assertions, this chapter ishighly ambiguous at several levels. Inserted intothe book as it is, it gives the impression of simply‘inserting’ native people into, and as part of, apreexisting natural landscape. Other chaptersfocus on the rainforest, wildlife, coastal ecology,and so on. This is mirrored in the text of thechapter itself, which begins with a brief accountof the region’s natural history and ends with theappearance of what amounts to one of nature’sconstituent parts: native peoples (summarizedbest by the chapter title: At Home in the Wild ).It is not that native people are erased from rep-resentations of Clayoquot Sound. Rather, just aswith the writings of George Dawson at the endof the nineteenth century, it is how they are madepresent that matters.

Most problematic, I think, is that the authorsremain within the thrall of a transcendentalnaturalism that requires that nature appear in itsmost ‘pure’ form as the absence of culture. “Inmany places,” Young writes, “this is still a virginlandscape lost in time and governed by theunequivocal laws of nature.” On this, muchturns. Within this rhetoric—a mainstay ofmuch North American environmentalism(Guha 1989)—the text and photographs canpresent native culture only in narrowly circum-scribed ways. If we look at Dorst’s photographsin more detail, we can locate a well-rehearsed

series of distinctions that at once mark a tradi-tional native presence but erase all signs of amodern Nuu-chah-nulth culture. As the chapterunfolds, it becomes clear that human presenceis not the problem in the Sound but the pres-ence of modern technological societies. This re-quires that the author and photographer main-tain and police a careful distinction between the‘traditional’ and the ‘modern.’ All photographsthat depict Nuu-chah-nulth culture thereforeªrmly bind this culture to history, not to thepresent. Eight photographs in the chapter con-tain ‘native’ content. In the only one to show‘live’ natives, members of the Tla-o-qui-ahtband are shown paddling a traditional canoe(Figure 7). In another a fallen totem pole isreclaimed by nature. A moss-covered skull isidentiªed as the remains of a Nuu-chah-nulthmember, while another photograph depicts thedecaying corner post of a traditional longhouse.A single dugout canoe is shown on a beach asdusk falls. In a similar scene, a canoe ºoats a fewmeters offshore, silent and empty in the fadinglight. A whale bone is located at an old villagesite. A lone totem is found standing in theforest.

The book’s photographs are clearly designedto be the focal point of the publication, but theycontain no signs of ongoing struggles by theNuu-chah-nulth to forge a cultural existencethat is at once continuous and modern. WhereNuu-chah-nulth activity is present, it is only asa picturesque traditional life, threatened by anintrusive modernity.23 These photographs inviteviewers to encounter the region through a well-organized, historically speciªc optic that tradesheavily upon distinctions drawn between natureand culture, the modern and the traditional.Through lenses ground in histories of colonial(and colonizing) practices, natural and culturalidentities are constructed, puriªed, and dissemi-nated. From the contested multiple identities ofsocial life in the Sound are captured a timelessseries of ‘pure’ forms. This optic can be dis-played as operating along two axes (Figure 8).Together with the nature-culture (or wilderness-city) axis that Roderick Nash (1973) mapped inWilderness and the American Mind can be founda second continuum: traditional-modern. Oneach axis identities are invested with meaning bythe antipodal identity of the other. Identities aremore ‘pure’ the further they can be separated.Nature is the absence of culture. The traditionalis the absence of the modern. In turn, once these


dualisms are established, a logic of equivalencecan link ‘similar’ terms: nature/traditional; cul-ture/modern. The two axes—nature-culture,and traditional-modern—become conºatedinto a singular story of modern, Western cul-tures and traditional, non-Western, natures.Once established, other dualisms can bemapped onto this grid: science-ethnoscience,fact-myth, civilized-primitive, spoiled-pristine,and so on (Hall 1992).

Dorst and Young set out to establish theunique wilderness character of ClayoquotSound. As such they map a metropolitan anxietyover the space of its hinterland. Despite cele-brating native culture, the authors’ overarchingrepresentational logic requires that native pres-ence not exceed the bounds of the traditional.The language and visual representation of“natural harmony,” of a nature “as yet untram-meled wild and free,” becomes a language ofcultural invisibility. The Nuu-chah-nulth, rele-

gated to the traditional, remain only as place-holders in a larger, natural drama. By removingsigns of modern Native culture from the land-scape, the same rhetorical manoeuvres which

Figure 7. Tla-o-qui-aht [Clayoquot] paddlers. Photographer, Adrian Dorst. While the presence of First Nationsin supposedly ‘wild’ regions of BC is noted by environmental groups, this presence is contained through theirrepresentation as ‘traditional’ or ‘ecological’ cultures. Courtesy, Adrian Dorst and Western Canada WildernessCommittee.

Figure 8. The colonial rhetorics of ‘wilderness.’ Bymapping these dualisms onto each other (culture-nature, modern-traditional) native peoples areconºated with nature and areas are seen to remain‘natural’ only if the cultures that live there remain‘traditional.’

22 Willems-Braun

enabled the region to be seen as a resource land-scape in the ªrst place are again deployed just aswith Dawson a century prior; native presence isat once marked, contained, and marginalized,and this landscape becomes simply a “gift ofnature to humanity” (p. 20).

Ironically, by locating native culture reso-lutely in the realm of the ‘traditional,’ the writerand photographer can retain a contradictory po-litical posture that articulates support for landclaims as well as a desire for preservation. Thesevery different political struggles becomeconºated through the assertion that traditionalnative culture was not ecologically disruptiveand, if it remains ‘authentic,’ should never be.In turn, by staging this region as ‘nature’ andthe Nuu-chah-nulth as ‘traditional,’ the envi-ronmental movement establishes its own rightto be modern, scientiªc, and enlightenedspokespersons for nature (and ‘natives’) in theregion, and the legitimate opponents to corpo-rate capital. The distinction between the ‘tradi-

tional’ and the ‘modern’ thus becomes whatHaraway (1992:312) has described as a ‘distanc-ing operation’ whereby the represented is “dis-engaged from surrounding and constituting dis-cursive and non-discursive nexuses and relo-cated in the authorial domain of the repre-sentative.” Ironically, the only ‘modern’intrusion into the Sound that is authorized be-comes that of ‘disinterested’ photographers andscientists (Figure 9). Zodiacs, it appears, are re-served only for these. In a preface to the book,the wildlife artist Robert Bateman assumes theposition of nature’s ‘ventriloquist,’ abstractingnature into the rhetorical space of the nation ina maneuver remarkably similar to MacMillanBloedel’s:

The world recognizes Canada as containing one ofthe last great remnants of wilderness and we Cana-dians have always prided ourselves in our naturalhistory. . . . This decade will see them saved or lost.Our generation must draw the line for all of them[italics mine].

Figure 9. Nature’s representative. Photographer, Ron Grover. Within the frame of ‘wilderness,’ only two actorsare authorized to ‘speak for’ nature: ‘traditional’ native peoples, and ‘disinterested’ ecologists. In essence, becausethe former is often an identity imposed on First Nations rather than ascribed by them, ‘wilderness’ becomes theauthorial domain solely of the ecologist. Courtesy, Western Canada Wilderness Committee.

FPO


Likewise, a recent Greenpeace UK (1994) pub-lication extends this further:

Clayoquot Sound . . . is at the center of an eco-logical catastrophe of global signiªcance. . . . Anarea of stunning natural beauty, Clayoquot Soundis the largest remaining area of intact ancient rain-forest left on Vancouver Island. The people of Brit-ish Columbia therefore have in Clayoquot Soundthe best opportunity to protect an irreplaceable partof their natural heritage before it is destroyed bylogging [italics mine].

While I also am concerned about the rainforestsand their inhabitants, human and nonhuman, Iworry about the representational practices inthis last publication, where, despite the familiarrefrains of support for land claims, the photo-graphs actually do erase native presence from theSound, reducing the conºict for British viewersto one between logging and preservation: naturespoiled or nature saved.

Within rhetorics of “nature as the absence ofculture,” First Nations are provided with fewpossible subject positions, and these few arehighly circumscribed. While nineteenth-century colonial rhetorics simultaneouslymarked and contained native presence andvoice, this representational logic ‘gives back’ anative voice only to ask it to speak the languageof traditional culture and cultural authenticity.Native peoples are asked to occupy subject po-sitions demarcated by others. For First Nationsto forge a modern future within the staples-based economies of the west coast is to risk ‘los-ing’ what many non-Natives consider ‘authen-tic’ native culture and thereby also their right tospeak as native people for their lands. On theother hand, to refuse modernization—to consti-tute identity around the ‘traditional’ as the en-vironmental movement implicitly asks—is toremain forever outside the economic circuits ofthe global economy, situated where Europeancultures have always placed indigenous popula-tions: back in nature, always outside modernforms of rationality, as undeveloped, primitiveprecursors to modern cultures. As a Hesquiahtwoman noted, both rhetorics easily lead to as-sumptions that aboriginal people are “incapableof being maintainers of our own territory”(Charleson 1992). In a region whose future ap-pears destined to be tied to staples production(and its associated industry, nature tourism),these rhetorics are deeply problematic. My ar-gument is not that cultural traditions should beabandoned, or that native people should neitherappropriate the languages of Western culture

nor speak from the various ‘positions’ availablewithin these discourses. As Cree Chief Whap-magoostui explained in a context that has dis-tinct parallels (the Great Whale project in Que-bec), when necessary the Cree played the Danceswith Wolves card to great effect (Cohen 1994).Rather, attention must be paid to whether thesedistinctions—nature-culture, traditional-mod-ern—among others, are externally ascribed orinternally claimed by a people for whom thecategories may have little salience, or may, atcertain moments, become mechanisms for cul-tural invisibility.

Conclusion: The Cultural Politicsof Nature

“Nature,” Donna Haraway (1992:296) ar-gues, “cannot pre-exist its construction.” Whatcounts as nature is always something attained,not found in passive observation. It is givenform and meaning, identity and speciªcity,through a series of speciªc, embodied practices.Through these, not despite them, nature is“made to speak.”

I emphasize Haraway’s point not to arguethat nature can be represented in many ways,which is obviously true, nor to turn materialistaccounts on their head by insisting on the ma-teriality of representation (without emphasizingthat this is always also a representation of mate-riality), but instead to insist that how nature isconstructed matters. Poststructuralists have in-sisted upon the ‘unªxity’ of social identities likenature, in part to move away from notions ofªxed ‘identities,’ ahistorical ‘essences,’ or under-lying ‘structure.’ While it has led at times toarcane debates over ‘social constructivism’—anunfortunate phrase which, as Bruno Latour(1993) has shown, displaces everything into the‘social’ without attention paid to the practicesof puriªcation by which the ‘social’ itself is madeto appear self-evident—I wish to highlight moreexplicitly the political usefulness of certain post-structuralist insights.

Emphasizing the unªxity of identities suggeststhat they are always in the process of being con-stituted and that attention must be paid to theprocesses by which identities assume degrees ofªxity. Hence, what counts as nature is alwaysonly ‘unstably ªxed,’ the many ways that it hasbeen constructed, and, more important, the po-litical effects of each always open to contest-

24 Willems-Braun

ation. Yet contesting the construction of nature,despite widely held assumptions, is not simplya matter of speaking nature’s truth. Somewhatironically, given their mistrust of modernity, en-vironmentalists have remained under the thrallof this most modern mythology. Nature is not‘hidden’ through misrepresentation. Nor is thereany environmental ‘ethic’ that preexists a way ofvaluing, enframing, or disclosure (Heidegger1977). Environmental politics is not solely amatter of ‘speaking for’ a ‘mute’ nature, or be-coming nature’s ‘voice’ in the midst of, andagainst, what is thought to be, in modern indus-trialized societies, a narrowly instrumental rela-tion to the nonhuman world. This is becausespeaking for ‘nature’ is always simultaneously anenframing of ‘nature.’ There is always, as bothDerrida (1976) and Spivak (1988b) have noted,a ‘double session’ to representation; to representas a proxy is always already to frame a constitu-ency. Both aspects of representation, speaking ofand speaking for, are present simultaneously.Failure to attend to this, as I have sought todemonstrate, risks engaging in an unacknowl-edged, hidden, or buried politics that a meta-physics of presence renders invisible. Yet we can-not simply avoid the problem of representation:one cannot not represent. Responsibility (politi-cal and academic) therefore lies at that point ofinternal tension that marks the ‘double session’of representation; one needs to be vigilant aboutthe problem and politics of representation.

As I have shown in this paper, Nature is nevera ‘pure’ category. It is always invested with, andembedded in, social histories. Indeed, it is pre-cisely when it appears as a pure category that itoperates most ideologically (Smith 1984). FirstNations in BC know this well. The ambivalentnatural/cultural landscapes of the Paciªc North-west have been distilled into ‘natural’ and ‘cul-tural’ landscapes by European explorers, scien-tists, and settlers since the time of ªrst contactin the second half of the eighteenth century.Today the marginalization of native voices canbe found, despite important differences, in therhetorics and practices of both extractive capitaland environmentalism. Each constitutes natureas external to human communities, a rhetoricalmanoeuver that authorizes certain ‘disinterested’voices—the resource manager, the ecologist, ornature’s ‘defender’—to speak as nature’s ‘repre-sentatives.’ From an anticolonial perspective, ex-tractive capital and environmentalism are inmany ways mirror images, sharing common ele-ments of a culture of nature. In the case of the

former, the BC landscape is staged as a ‘natural’landscape ªlled with ‘natural’ resources butempty of people. In the case of the latter, natureis also emptied of cultural content, understoodas existing in its most purely ‘natural’ state onlyin the absence of (modern) culture. Taken to-gether, these rhetorics constitute a ‘natural’ ªeldand divide it between opposing non-Native in-terests.

Neocolonialist practices persist in ‘postcolo-nial’ societies like Canada, surfacing time andagain in everyday practices of representation,producing and legitimating new forms of colo-nial domination. These have not gone unchal-lenged. Long before the contact periods (fromtime ‘immemorial’), First Nations peoples hadclear conceptions of ownership, political author-ity, and social and ecological responsibilities(Monet and Skann’u 1992; Marshall 1994).The landscape that a member of Captain Cook’screw thought in 1778 “remained in a state ofnature” was already a fully social and politicallandscape. These relations did not disappearwith the cartographic and quasi-legal separationof native peoples from their lands. Today, in aseries of interventions—from commissioned ar-chaeological studies to documentary ªlmmak-ing, from deconstructing maps to building roadblockades—First Nations are contesting theburied colonial epistemologies that enframe na-ture through a deªning absence (Arcas Consult-ants 1986; Nuu-chah-nulth Tribal Council1990; Wild 1993; Brody 1994; Blomley, forth-coming). At these sites can be found repre-sentational practices that construct nature as so-cial, relating physical environments to historicalnarratives and cultural practices. In these cases,to speak of nature is immediately to invoke andarticulate a series of other intertwined culturalidentities, while at the same time placing inquestion those representations that constructnature as external to cultural and social rela-tions.

The earth, Haraway (1992:315) writes, is a“semiotic place.” If, as she insists, Nature is oneof those impossible things that we cannot notdesire but can never have, we must always attendto its making—rhetorically and materially, andthe two always together.

Acknowledgments

The author wishes to acknowledge MichaelBrown, Dan Clayton, Derek Gregory, Sarah Jain, and


two anonymous referees for helpful comments onearlier versions of this paper. Eric Leinberger pro-vided cartographic support. Research was supportedthrough a doctoral fellowship from the Social Sci-ences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.

Notes

1. As Williams and Chrisman (1994) note, “colo-nial discourse” emerged as a ªeld of academicinquiry with the publication of Edward Said’sOrientalism (1979). Although scholars have ar-gued over whether colonial discourse can orshould be understood as coherent or uniªed,two general assumptions are widely accepted.The ªrst, drawing on Foucault, is that it is pos-sible to locate a series of Western discourses(whether or not formally aligned with colonialadministration) that produced and codiªedknowledge about non-Western cultures, andthus established rules governing what could orcould not be said. And, second, it is generallyacknowledged that these knowledges could beutilized in, or worked to facilitate, the deploy-ment of colonial power.

2. Colonial discourse theory has drawn extensivelyon Foucault and Gramsci, perhaps most produc-tively by Said (1979; for a critique of Said’smethod of drawing these two together, see Porter1983). Both locate power at all levels of society.Gramsci emphasizes that relations of power arefound in the taken-for-granted and that this islinked to the hegemony of a certain class; Fou-cault documents how power operates in thenomination of the visible, and how this makes‘objects’ (the body, populations, etc.) available todisciplinary practices. Without conºating thetwo, and thus effacing important differences, itis useful to see how both can be resources fortheories of colonial (and colonizing) practices.Foucault provides tools by which to show howcolonial subjects (and colonial natures!) could bemade available to administrative practices, or inother words, how power/knowledge was itselfcolonizing. Gramsci, on the other hand, pro-vides a framework by which to see how colonialpractices were legitimated and naturalizedthrough the ascendancy of certain ideas.

3. For the classic history of how nature has beenrepresented in Western cultures, see Glacken(1967). David Livingstone (1995) is one amongmany recent examples of a renewed interest inthis topic.

4. First Nations is the term preferred by BC abo-riginal communities, deliberately subverting theprimitivist tropes of ‘tribe’ found in anthropo-logical literatures. In addition, the term is usedto assert an organized, political presence that

preexists European contact while simultaneouslyplacing in question the territorial claims of theCanadian nation-state.

5. What constitutes ‘old-growth’ forests—and theirsigniªcance—is widely debated. Most generally,‘old-growth’ forests are characterized by the fol-lowing: huge accumulations of biomass; largetrees exceeding 1–2 m diameter at 1.3 m heightand reaching 60–80 m total height; old trees,often older than 200 years and occasionally ex-ceeding 1,000 years; and structural diversity, in-cluding various tree sizes, snags (dead standingtrees), down logs, and so on. The latter is oftenconsidered its most important feature sinceecologists link it to the abundance of habitatsfor specialized species, higher biodiversity,and within this ‘web’ of relations, higher eco-system resiliency (see Klinka et al. 1990; Frank-lin and Spies 1991; Kimmins 1992; Franklin1993).

6. Various unsuccessful attempts at reaching con-sensus occurred between 1989 and 1993. Mostimportant were the Clayoquot Sound IntegratedResource Management Planning Process, andthe Clayoquot Sound Sustainable DevelopmentTask Force.

7. The Nuu-chah-nulth Tribal Council is an um-brella organization that represents various tribalgroups on the west coast of Vancouver Island. Itis itself divided into a northern, central, andsouthern district. Clayoquot Sound lies in thecentral district, and the government land-use de-cision affected the traditional territories of ªvebands (Tla-o-qui-aht, Ahousaht, Hesquiaht, To-quaht, and Ucluelet).

8. The issue of Nuu-chah-nulth sovereignty inClayoquot Sound is still before the courts. SeeMartin v B.C. (Govt.). Recently, treaty negotia-tions have begun between the Nuu-chah-nulthand the provincial and federal governments.

9. This argument is made most forcefully byNicholas Thomas (1994:2).

Colonialism is not best understood primarily as apolitical or economic relationship that is legiti-mated or justiªed through ideologies of racism orprogress. Rather, colonialism has always equallyimportantly and deeply been a cultural process; itsdiscoveries and trespasses are imagined and ener-gized through signs, metaphors, and narratives;even what would seem its purest moments of proªtand violence have been mediated and enframed bystructures of meaning. Colonial cultures are notsimply ideologies that mask, mystify, or rationalizeforms of oppression that are external to them; theyare also expressive and constitutive of colonial re-lationships in themselves.

10. Here I depart from the current fascination with‘round tables’ on the environment, which as-sume that such arenas provide possibilities for‘ideal speech situations.’ Although these arenas

26 Willems-Braun

do often increase possibilities for participation,they do not by themselves mitigate the relationsof power that are inscribed into public debatethrough the categories and identities by whichconºicts are organized and understood. By es-tablishing their resolutions as products of ‘open’public processes, existing relations are often le-gitimated.

11. The abstraction and displacement of the localinto the global has become a well-rehearsedtheme and it is not only aboriginal communitiesthat are marginalized by such processes (seeHecht and Cockburn 1989). My argument issomewhat different: for this abstraction and dis-placement to proceed as it does in BC, a nativepresence must be at once erased or marked inways that de-link indigenous peoples from theirsurroundings. This occurs in different ways andis enabled through different knowledges and sig-nifying practices (i.e., primitivism) than the mar-ginalization of other social groups. My argument,in other words, is not that marginalization isunique or limited to indigenous peoples, butthat by paying attention to these practices we canbegin to identify how colonial relations are per-petuated in the present.

12. The phrase ‘social nature’ should ward againstsimplistic interpretations that locate aboriginalpeoples as ‘closer to’ nature or as necessarily hav-ing an environmental ethic of sustainability. Likeany other social group, the production of natureby individual First Nations groups is mediatedthrough cultural practices, epistemologies, andtechnologies.

13. The legislative vehicle for administering Indiansand Indians lands in Canada has been the federalIndian Act, which was administered by the fed-eral Department of Indian Affairs. For a historyof its early years, see Brian Titley (1986).

14. The normalization of nature in forms of modernpower remains undertheorized. Michel Foucault(1979, 1980), for instance, rarely looked beyondhuman subjects, bodies, and institutions, butclearly the normalization of ‘life’ that he docu-mented with such brilliance—its ordering anddisciplining through modalities of power,knowledge, and spatiality—extends to and in-corporates not only human subjects but ‘nature’itself. The regulation of populations and econ-omy in BC required not simply the exploitationof the ‘forest’ but its construction in discursivepractices that at once constituted, rendered avail-able, and rationalized the ‘forest’ within an ad-ministrative apparatus, making it adequate formodels of social and ecological productivity. Therelation between modernity, modernization, andnature has generally been discussed in terms ofthe domination (even death) of nature in the faceof instrumental reason (Leiss 1972; Merchant1980). One of the problems with such work is

that it assumes that modernity marks a transitionfrom harmony with, to exploitation of, nature.While the scale and intensity of nature’s produc-tion by human societies has certainly changed,an argument can be made that what differenti-ates premodern from modern relations with na-ture is not harmony versus domination so muchas different knowledges and technologies that ar-ticulated nature as a social object and made itavailable to economic and political calculationin new ways.

15. Various Royal Commissions have been commis-sioned to evaluate BC’s forest tenure system andpractices. Each has based its ªndings on twofounding assumptions: that the forests are“Crown” land, and that they are to be managedin the “public” interest.

16. Foucault (1977) develops his notion of geneal-ogy to trace the ‘emergence’ of objects and iden-tities in the present, rather than understandingthese as preexisting their construction.

17. It is no accident that Dawson ªrst traveled to thewest coast as part of a joint British and Americansurvey of the international boundary betweenCanada and the United States.

18. Dawson’s photographs are collected in the Na-tional Archives of Canada, Ottawa, Ontario.

19. An editorial in the Victoria newspaper BritishColonist from June 27, 1863 makes this explicit,

Every school in the colonies where boys are taughtshould make these branches [geology and mineral-ogy] part and parcel of its curriculum. Small cabi-nets of rocks and ores could be easily made orimported for the purpose of giving the pupils apractical acquaintance with the subject matter ofthose sciences. . . . The mountains, the hills, andthe rocks of the island and the mainland would beno longer trodden over in ignorance without atten-tion. . . . Combining this acquaintance with theorythey may learn from books, they would in theirprospecting tours be alive to metaliferous indica-tions, and would no longer walk blindfolded, pass-ing unconsciously material for untold wealth, asmust now be often the case (de Cosmos 1863).

20. Cultural geographers have recently placed con-siderable attention on ‘reading’ the landscape asa ‘text’ (Duncan 1990; see also the edited collec-tions by Cosgrove and Daniels 1988; Barnes andDuncan 1992). This has had the important ef-fect of shifting attention away from the previousconcerns of cultural geographers with mappingthe material transformation of ‘natural’ land-scapes into ‘cultural’ landscapes by successiveculture groups, and instead has drawn attentionto the cultural construction of landscapethrough contested practices of signiªcation. De-meritt (1994), drawing on Latour and Haraway,has recently criticized the ‘new’ cultural geogra-phy for locating agency wholly in humans(or the ‘social’). I share Demeritt’s concerns


(although caution that the agency of non-humans—animals and machines—can never bemarked apart from a further set of contestedpractices of signiªcation). However, I ªnd thenew cultural geography problematic in otherways. First, by its almost exclusive focus on‘cultural’ landscapes, it has left unexplainedhow so-called ‘natural’ landscapes have them-selves been constructed and contested. Second,and perhaps more important, by presuming thelandscape as a ‘text’ to be decoded, much atten-tion has been given to ‘interpreting’ landscapesand less attention paid to how the ‘landscape’ ismade to appear as a text to be read in the ªrstplace. In this section I have sought to demon-strate how landscapes are made intelligible. Al-though focusing on different ‘mechanisms’ oflandscape production, I share Mitchell’s (1994)desire to retain within the concept of landscapea clear focus on “how landscapes are producedand in what ways they structure social action”(p. 10).

21. The erasure of native presence—textually andphysically—occurred in many ways, and was inany case uneven across the Americas. Historiansof the American West, for instance, have empha-sized how the frontier mythology was central tothe removal of native people from their lands(Drinnon 1980; Slotkin 1985; Limerick 1987;Limerick argues that this continues to under-write American imperialism). In Canada, thismythology did not take hold in any comparableway. Regardless, what I trace here is not theevacuation of the ‘real’ into ‘mythology’ (andthus into the realm of the ‘untruthful’), but thevery ways that locating the ‘real’ or the ‘truthful’through representational practices becamealigned with colonialism. In a sense the subtitleto Drinnon’s book—The Metaphysics of Indian-hating—captures this conjoining of knowledgeand power in the marginalization of natives,even if his account does not work directly withthis constellation of ideas.

22. Premier Harcourt’s tour of European cities wasintended to forestall a boycott of BC forest prod-ucts which Greenpeace had threatened to organ-ize. Watts’s statements became the most pro-vocative aspect of the trip, both in Europe andin British Columbia. The ‘accuracy’ of news re-ports and Watts’s own position as a Nuu-chah-nulth spokesperson came under considerable at-tack in the days and weeks that followed.Regardless of how either issue is answered,Watts’s comments brought to the fore the prob-lem of conºating two very different politicalstruggles.

23. This contains echoes of nineteenth-centuryAmerican painter George Catlin’s desire to ‘pre-serve’ Indians who were fated to become ‘tainted’

by the ‘contaminating’ vices and dispositions ofcivilization (see Limerick 1987).

References

Anderson, B. 1991. Imagined Communities: Reºec-tions on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism.London: Verso.

Appadurai, A. 1990. Disjuncture and Difference inthe Global Cultural Economy. Public Culture2(2):1–24.

Arcas Associates. 1986. Native Tree Use on MearesIsland, BC. Report in four volumes for theAhousaht and Clayoquot Indian Bands. Van-couver.

Bal, M. 1991. The Politics of Citation. Diacritics21:25–45.

Barnes, T., and Duncan, J., eds. 1992. WritingWorlds: Discourse, Text and Metaphor in the Rep-resentation of Landscape. London: Routledge.

Baudrillard, J. 1984. Symbolic Exchange and Death,trans. C. Levin. In The Structural Allegory, ed.J. Fekete. Minneapolis: University of MinnesotaPress.

Bhabha, H. 1994. The Location of Culture. London:Routledge.

Blomley, N. 1997. ‘Shut the Province Down’: FirstNation’s Blockades in British Columbia. BCStudies: The British Columbian Quarterly 111:forthcoming.

Breen-Needham, H.; Duncan, S.; Ferens, D.; Reeve,P.; and Yates, S., eds. 1994. Witness to Wilder-ness: The Clayoquot Sound Anthology. Vancouver:Arsenal.

British Columbia. 1993a. Clayoquot Sound: A Bal-anced Decision, A Sustainable Future. Reportfrom the British Columbia Government. Victo-ria.

———. 1993b. Administrative Fairness of the Proc-ess Leading to the Clayoquot Sound Land Use De-cision. Victoria: Ofªce of the Ombudsman.

Brody, H. 1995. The Washing of Tears. Montreal:National Film Board of Canada, ªlm.

Brown, R. 1864. Vancouver Island Exploration Expe-dition. Victoria: Harris and Company.

———. 1869. Memoir on the Geography of the Inte-rior of British Columbia. Holograph, BrownCollections, I, 10, Public Archives of BritishColumbia.

Carter, P. 1987. The Road to Botany Bay: An Essayin Spatial History. London: Faber.

Charleson, K. 1992. Parks: Another Insult to Na-tives. Vancouver Sun, January 15, p. A19.

Cohen, B. 1994. Technological Colonialism andthe politics of water. Cultural Studies 8(1):32–55.

Cole, D., and Lockner, B., eds. 1993. To the Char-

28 Willems-Braun

lottes: George Dawson’s 1878 Survey of the QueenCharlotte Islands. Vancouver: UBC Press.

Cosgrove, D., and Daniels, S., eds. 1988. The Icon-ography of Landscape: Essays on the Symbolic Rep-resentation, Design and the Use of Past Environ-ments. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Davis, H., and Hutton, T. 1989. The Two Econo-mies of British Columbia. BC Studies 82:3–15.

Dawson, G. 1880a. Report on the Queen CharlotteIslands. Montreal: Geological Survey of Canada.

———. 1880b. Note on the Distribution of Someof the More Important Trees of British Colum-bia. Canadian Naturalist 9(6):1–11.

———. 1896. Canada as a Field for Mining Invest-ment. The National Review, pp. 242–51.

De Alva, J. 1995. The Postcolonialization of the(Latin) American Experience: A Reconsidera-tion of “Colonialism,” “Postcolonialism,” and“Mestizaje.” In After Colonialism: Imperial His-tories and Postcolonial Displacements, ed.G. Prakash, pp. 241–75. Princeton, NJ: Prince-ton University Press.

de Cosmos, A. 1863. Regarding Geological Mat-ters. British Colonist June 27:2.

Delgamuukw v. Her Majesty the Queen in Right of theProvince of British Columbia and the AttorneyGeneral of Canada. 1991. Unreported judgmentof Chief Justice Allan McEachern (B.C.S.C.),No. 0843 Smithers.

Demeritt, D. 1994. The Nature of Metaphors inCultural Geography and Environmental His-tory. Progress in Human Geography 18:163–85.

Derrida, J. 1976. Of Grammatology, trans. G. Spi-vak. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.

Dirlik, A. 1994. The Postcolonial Aura: ThirdWorld Criticism in the Age of Global Capital-ism. Critical Inquiry 20:328–56.

Dorst, A., and Young, C. 1990. Clayoquot: On theWild Side. Vancouver: Western Canada Wilder-ness Committee, 1990.

Drinnon, R. 1980. Facing West: The Metaphysics ofIndian-Hating and Empire Building. Minneapo-lis: University of Minnesota Press.

Driver, F. 1988. The Historicity of Human Geo-graphy. Progress in Human Geography 12:497–506.

———. 1992. Geography’s Empire: Histories ofGeographical Knowledge. Environment andPlanning D: Society and Space 10:23–40.

Druskha, K.; Nixon, B.; and Travers, R. 1993. TouchWood: BC Forests at the Crossroads. Madiera Park,BC: Harbour Publishing.

Duncan, J. 1990. The City as Text: The Politicsof Landscape Interpretation in the KandyanKingdom. Cambridge: Cambridge UniversityPress.

Fisher, R. 1977. Contact and Conºict: Indian-Euro-pean Relations in British Columbia, 1774–1890.

Vancouver: University of British ColumbiaPress.

Foucault, M. 1977. Nietzsche, Genealogy, History.In Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: SelectedEssays and Interviews, ed. D. Bouchard. Ithaca:Cornell University Press.

———. 1979. Discipline and Punish: The Birth ofthe Prison, trans. A. Sheridan. New York: Vin-tage.

———. 1980. The History of Sexuality, Vol. 1: AnIntroduction, trans. Robert Hurley (New York:Vintage, 1980).

Frankenberg, R., and Mani, L. 1993. Crosscur-rents, Crosstalk: Race, ‘Postcoloniality’ and thePolitics of Location. Cultural Studies 7(2):292–310.

Franklin, J. 1993. Lessons from Old Growth. Jour-nal of Forestry 91(12):10–13.

Franklin, J., and Spies, T. 1991. Ecological Deªni-tions of Old-Growth Douglas-Fir Forests. InWildlife and Vegetation of Unmanaged Douglas-ªr Forests, eds. L. Ruggierro. Portland: U.S. De-partment of Agriculture, Forest Service. GeneralTechnical Report, PNW-GTR 285.

Galois, B. and Harris, C. 1994. Recalibrating Soci-ety: The Population Geography of British Co-lumbia in 1881. The Canadian Geographer38(1):37–53.

Glacken, C. 1967. Traces on the Rhodian Shore: Na-ture and Culture in Western Thought to the Endof the Eighteenth Century. Berkeley: University ofCalifornia Press.

Godlewska, A., and Smith, N., eds. 1994. Geogra-phy and Empire. Oxford: Blackwell.

Greenpeace, UK. 1994. Clayoquot Sound: ClearcutSound. London.

Gregory, D. 1994. Geographical Imaginations. Cam-bridge: Blackwell.

Guha, R. 1989. Radical American Environmental-ism and Wilderness Preservation: A ThirdWorld Critique. Environmental Ethics 11:71–84.

Habermas, J. 1987. Theory of Communicative Ac-tion: Vol. 2. Boston: Beacon Press.

Hall, S. 1992. The West and the Rest: Discourseand Power. In Formations of Modernity, ed.S. Hall and B. Gieben, pp. 275–332. Cam-bridge: Polity Press.

———. 1996. When Was the “Post-Colonial”?Thinking at the Limit. In The Post-ColonialQuestion: Common Skin, Divided Horizons, ed.I. Chambers and L. Curti, pp. 242–60. Lon-don: Routledge.

Hammond, H. 1991. Seeing the Forest among theTrees. Winlaw, BC: Polestar Press.

Haraway, D. 1989. Primate Vision: Gender, Race andNature in the World of Modern Science. NewYork: Routledge.

———. 1992. The Promises of Monsters: A Re-


generative Politics for Inappropriate/d Others.In Cultural Studies, ed. L. Grossberg, C. Nelsonand P. Treicher, pp. 275–332. New York: Rout-ledge.

Hatch, R., ed. 1994. Clayoquot and Dissent. Van-couver: Ronsdale.

Hayman, J., ed. 1989. Robert Brown and the Van-couver Island Exploring Expedition. Vancouver:University of British Columbia Press.

Hecht, S., and Cockburn, A. 1989. The Fate of theForest: Developers, Destroyers and Defenders of theAmazon. New York: HarperCollins.

Heidegger, M. 1977. Letter on Humanism. InM. Heidegger, Basic Writings, ed. D. Krell,pp. 193–242. New York: HarperCollins.

Keller, S. 1987. Inventing Canada: Early VictorianScience and the Idea of a Transcontinental Nation.Toronto: University of Toronto Press.

Kimmins, H. 1992. Balancing Act: EnvironmentalIssues in Forestry. Vancouver: UBC Press.

Klinka, K.; Carter, R.; and Feller, M. 1990. Old-growth Forests. Northwest Environmental Jour-nal 6(2):221–32.

Latour, B. 1993. We Have Never Been Modern,trans. C. Porter. Cambridge: Harvard UniversityPress.

Leiss, W. 1972. The Domination of Nature. NewYork: George Braziller.

Limerick, P. 1987. The Legacy of Conquest: The Un-broken Past of the American West. New York:Norton.

Livingstone, D. 1992. The Geographical Tradition:Episodes in the History of a Contested Enterprise.Oxford: Blackwell.

———. 1995. The Polity of Nature: Repre-sentation, Virtue, Strategy. Ecumene 2(4):353–77.

McClintock, A. 1992. The Angel of Progress: Pit-falls of the Term Post-colonialism. Social Text31/32:84–98.

MacIsaac, R., and Champagne, A., eds. 1994. Clayo-quot Mass Trials: Defending the Rainforest. Gabri-ola, BC: New Society Publishers.

McKibben, B. 1990. The End of Nature. New York:Anchor Books.

MacMillan Bloedel. n.d. Beyond the Cut: MacMil-lan Bloedel’s Forest Management Program. Van-couver.

Marshall, Y. 1994. A Political History of the Nuu-chah-nulth People: A Case Study of theMowachaht and Muchalaht Tribes. Ph.D. disser-tation, Simon Fraser University, 1993.

Marx, K. 1965. The Eighteenth Brumaire of LouisBonaparte. Moscow: Progress Publishers.

Merchant, C. 1980. The Death of Nature: Women,Ecology, and the Scientiªc Revolution. San Fran-cisco: Harper and Row.

Mishra, V., and Hodge, B. 1991. What is Post(-)co-lonialism? Textual Practice 5(3):399–414.

Mitchell, D. 1994. Landscape and Surplus Value:The Making of the Ordinary in Brentwood, CA.Environment and Planning D: Society and Space12(1):7–30.

Mitchell, T. 1988. Colonizing Egypt. Cambridge:Cambridge University Press.

Monet, D., and Skan’nu. 1992. Colonialism onTrial: Indigenous Land Rights and the GitksanWet’suwet’en Sovereignty Case. Philadelphia: NewSociety Publishers.

Nash, R. 1973. Wilderness and the American Mind.New Haven: Yale University Press.

Nuu-chah-nulth Tribal Council. 1990. The LandQuestion: Land, Sea and Resources. Port Alberni.

Porter, D. 1983. Orientalism and Its Problems. InThe Politics of Theory, ed. F. Barker. P. Hulme,M. Iverse and D. Loxley. Colchester: Proceed-ings of the Essex Sociology of Literature Con-ference, University of Essex.

Pratt, M. L. 1992. Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing andTransculturation. London: Routledge.

Rajchman, J. 1988. Foucault’s Art of Seeing. Octo-ber 44:89–117.

Ryan, J. 1994. Visualizing Imperial Geography:Halford Mackinder and the Colonial Ofªce Vis-ual Instruction Committee; 1902–1911. Ecu-mene 1(2):157–76.

Said, E. 1979. Orientalism. New York: VintageBooks.

Shohat, E. 1992. Notes on the Post-Colonial. SocialText 31/32:99–113.

——— and Stam, R. 1994. Unthinking Eurocen-trism: Multiculturalism and the Media. London:Routledge.

Slotkins, R. 1985. The Fatal Environment: TheMyth of the Frontier in the Age of Industrializa-tion, 1800–1890. New York: Atheneum.

Smith, N. 1984. Uneven Development: Nature,Capital and the Production of Space. Oxford:Blackwell.

Solnick, T. 1992. Power, Resistance, and the Law ina British Columbia Land Title Trial. MastersThesis. Vancouver: UBC Department of Geog-raphy.

Spivak, G. 1988a. In Other Worlds: Essays in Cul-tural Politics. New York: Routledge.

———. 1988b. Can the Subaltern Speak? In Marx-ism and the Interpretation of Culture, ed. C. Nel-son and L. Grossberg, pp. 271–313. Urbana:University of Illinois Press.

———. 1990. The Post-Colonial Critic: Interviews,Strategies, Dialogues, ed. S. Harasym. New York:Routledge.

Tagg, J. 1988. The Burden of Representation. Min-neapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Tenant, P. 1990. Aboriginal Peoples and Politics: TheIndian Land Question in British Columbia,1849–1989. Vancouver: University of BritishColumbia Press.

30 Willems-Braun

Thomas, N. 1994. Colonialism’s Culture: Anthropol-ogy, Travel and Government. Princeton, NJ:Princeton University Press.

Titley, B. 1986. A Narrow Vision: Duncan CampbellScott and the Administration of Indian Affairs inCanada. Vancouver: University of British Co-lumbia Press.

Wild, N. 1993. Blockade. Montreal: National FilmBoard of Canada, ªlm.

Williams, P. and Chrisman, L. 1994. Introduction.In Colonial Discourse and Post-Colonial Theory:A Reader, ed. P. Williams and L. Chrisman. NewYork: Columbia University Press.

Zaslov, M. 1975. Reading the Rocks: The Story of theGeological Survey of Canada. Ottawa: Informa-tion Canada.

Correspondence: Department of Geography, University of California, Berkeley, CA 94720.


buried epistemologies: the politics of nature in (post ... · practices are marked by histories of...

Documents