Finding Oil in Southwestern Saskatchewan

Abstract

This paper is a visual and textual attempt by one writer to understand his own entanglement with southwestern Saskatchewan's oil industry. While much media and critical attention has been rightly devoted to Alberta's tarsands, this paper explores a much smaller, more hidden oil field that lies next door to the author's home and workplace. Embarking on a 1 200 kilometre road trip over two days, this paper presents selected reflections from that trip, a brief history of this oil field, on-the-ground photographs, and some critical musings about what it means to see oil in one's own backyard.

Bio

Matthew would like to acknowledge that he lives and works on Treaty 4 territory, traditional lands of the nêhiyawak, Anihšināpēk, Dakota, Nakoda, Lakota, and the Métis/Michif nation.

Matthew Zantingh teaches North American literature, comics, and film studies at Briercrest College and Seminary in Caronport, Saskatchewan. His most recent work was co-editing a special issue on art and the environment for Hamilton Arts & Letters, an open-access online creative arts journal.

Countermapping the Bighorn Watershed: Shifting divisive politics to a poetics of flourishing

Abstract

This presentation describes the motivations for and one of the methodologies being utilized in a research project focused on ‘(re)storying Indigenous storyscapes’ about bull trout in the Bighorn backcountry of Alberta. The Bighorn is the headwaters for the North Saskatchewan River watershed, supplying water to over 1.5 people downstream of it, and an important landscape to many including Indigenous peoples, ranchers, recreationalists, forestry, oil and gas, etc. Additionally, the area serves as critical habitat to aquatic species like the bull trout and large mammals such as wolves, ungulates, and grizzly bears. Yet as Alberta’s population has grown, recreational and industrial pressures on the Bighorn have increased. In 2018, the New Democrats proposed a new plan for the Bighorn that was highly contentious. The UCP have since shelved that plan alongside creating a new $30 million Energy War Room to fight back against any opposition to oil and gas development in Alberta.  It is in this context that this research project was conceived to use counter-mapping to engage Albertans in rethinking the management of the Bighorn. I’ll discuss and provide some examples of counter-mapping and its potential as a cartographic tool for advancing social justice.

Bio

Lorelei Hanson is associate professor of Environmental Studies at Athabasca University. She has extensive experience undertaking interdisciplinary community-university environmental research with Alberta Climate Dialogue (2009-2015) and the BC-Alberta Social Economy Research Alliance (2006 -2011). Hanson served as fellow with the Energy Futures Lab (2015- 2019), a social learning lab focused on identifying innovation pathways to transition Alberta’s energy system. Her publications include Public Deliberation on Climate Change: Lessons from Alberta Climate Dialogue (2018), an edited volume that evaluates the tensions, challenges and opportunities that emerge when publics are convened to deliberate on wicked issues like climate change. Her current research focuses on solar community energy in Alberta and utilizing counter-mapping to advance environmental justice. Hanson lives and works on Treaty 6 lands, the traditional territory of the Indigenous Peoples (Inuit, First Nations and, Métis) of Canada. She honours their ancestry, heritage and gifts, and give thanks to them.

Salmon, Science, and Knowledge Across Borders in The Kings of the Yukon

Abstract

This presentation will examine British author Adam Weymouth’s recent book, Kings of the Yukon: An Alaskan River Journey (2018). Weymouth’s travel narrative traces a 3000-km canoe trip from the headwaters of the Yukon River to its mouth, exploring the history, significance, and current ecological plight of the Chinook along the way. I propose that the central issue in Weymouth’s text concerns the problem of knowing when it comes to salmon – namely, what can be known for certain about Chinook populations, including how they work, where they go, and what’s affecting them. Although the text introduces nonspecialist readers to many of the complexities surrounding this fish species, it also leans heavily on vocabularies of wildness and wilderness; such language reinforces the outdoor adventurer narrative whilst diminishing the idea that salmon have been a managed set of species along the Yukon River for a very long time. The paper will therefore explore how some alternative Indigenous concepts might serve as guiding epistemes that could more effectively bridge the boundaries between different human populations that use the river, as well as offering ethical modes of approaching salmon that challenges colonial-capitalist models of management.

Bio

Jenny Kerber is an Associate Professor in the Dept. of English and Film Studies at Wilfrid Laurier University in Waterloo, Ontario. She is working on a book project that examines literary and cultural depictions of environmental phenomena that cross the Canada-US border. She grew up in Treaty 6 Territory and now makes her home in Toronto, on the traditional territory of many nations, including the Mississaugas of the Credit, the Anishinabe, the Chippewa, the Haudenosaunee, and Wendat peoples.

Caragana: Colonial and Feral Natures in Edmonton’s River Valley

Abstract

This scholarly meditation begins to weave together literary analysis (of Caragana bushes and their literary ecologies), ecocritical theory (of colonial “natures,” habitat studies, and the feral plants that define and complicate them), and a contemplation of inhabiting and thinking with this place (Amiskwacîwâskahikan / Edmonton / Treaty 6 Territory / Métis Nation District 4, the parkland biome and North Saskatchewan River Valley ecosystem….) and its complex animal and plant ecologies. ALECC’s conference call asserts that “the ‘gathering grounds’ of ecological, material, and historical knowledge matter in crafting personal and collective responses and interventions in this ‘critical time’ of climate, biodiversity, and political crisis.” Habitat study, as conceived by Laurie Ricou in The Arbutus/Madrone Files and Salal: Listening for the Northwest Understory, is a method of gathering such knowledge around a single species. My paper will begin a habitat study of the Caragana arborescens, an introduced species that has proliferated across North America, where it has been valued as a drought-tolerant shelterbelt and edible plant that feeds bees and chickens, while also being reviled as an invasive species. As figured in writings (including the poet Alice Major’s The Occupied World), and as a living feature of the landscape, Caragana tells a story of colonial expansion, immigration history, and the “natures in translation” (as Alan Bewell so aptly calls them) that accompanied these processes, disturbing Indigenous species and life-ways along the way. Caragana’s persistence and proliferation through the North Saskatchewan River valley is also an example of how plants become “feral,” to quote Matthew Battles in his recent study, Tree. What does contemplating this plant in its adopted and feral habitats reveal about our ongoing ecological relationships? What might it mean to “listen” to this species, among other local non-human cohabitants of our world, particularly in this time of ecological crisis? What does a naturalist’s or habitat studies view of a small part of our local nature help us to perceive, afresh, at a moment when we are also called upon to imagine on a planetary scale?  This talk will begin a small part of this work, which is itself part of a larger project exploring what I call “Wordy Ecologies,” or the linguistic and literary threads that forge our relations with the non-human beings who share our habitats, both small and large.

Bio

Sarah Wylie Krotz resides on Treaty 6 Territory in Edmonton, Alberta, where she is an associate professor of English at the University of Alberta and the interim director of the Canadian Literature Centre. She is the author of Mapping with Words: Anglo-Canadian Literary Cartographies, 1789-1916 (U of T, 2018) and co-editor with Bruce Erickson (Geography, University of Manitoba) of The Politics of the Canoe (forthcoming with U of Manitoba Press). Her recent articles such as “The Affective Geography of Wild Rice: A Literary Study” (Studies in Canadian Literature, 2017) and “A Natural History of Loss: Reading ‘The Last Bison’ in the Age of Loneliness” (Canadian Poetry, 2019) explore Canada’s literary ecologies.