Settler colonial ecologies: Timothy L Fosbury, Shouhei Tanaka, ‘Ecologies of Empire: Annie Proulx’s Climate Colonial Realism’, ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment, 2023 | settler colonial studies blog

Settler colonial ecologies: Timothy L Fosbury, Shouhei Tanaka, ‘Ecologies of Empire: Annie Proulx’s Climate Colonial Realism’, ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment, 2023

07Jan23

Excerpt: At the end of Annie Proulx’s Barkskins (2016), Sapatisia Outger, a Métis forest ecologist, witnesses glaciers disintegrate off the coast of Kalaallit Nunaat (Greenland) with her fellow environmental activists. Seized by the unsettling episode in this moment, she apprehends the historical confluence of settler colonialism and climate change: ‘she suffered a full-force shock of recognition—the coming disappearance of a world believed immutable. She had heard for years that the earth and its life-forms were sensitive to slight temperature changes, that species prospered and disappeared as weather and climate varied, but dismissed these alarms as environmental determinism. On the ice her thinking shifted as the moon shifts its position in the sky … . “My God, how violently it is melting,” she had whispered to herself. Great fissures thousands of feet deep opened by meltwater that eroded the hard blue ice, fissures that gaped open to receive the cataract’s plunge, down to the rock beneath the great frozen bed, forcing its under-ice way to the sea, lubricating the huge cap from below. Standing near the brink of one ghastly thundering abyss someone said, “We are looking at something never before seen.” That night … everyone admitted being shaken by the living evidence’.

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