Wild settler colonialism: Tiffany Dang, Nature Unsettled: the making of the wilderness imaginary and the Canadian settler state, PhD dissertation, Cambridge University, 2024 | settler colonial studies blog

Wild settler colonialism: Tiffany Dang, Nature Unsettled: the making of the wilderness imaginary and the Canadian settler state, PhD dissertation, Cambridge University, 2024

15Nov24

Abstract: Despite the economic significance of extractive resource industries to the national economy, Canadians hold their national parks—as spaces of untouched nature—in high regard as a key aspect of national pride and identity. By critically investigating the cultural framing of nature in Canada as contextualized within the structure of settler colonialism, I attempt a fuller understanding of these landscapes. Paying particular attention to how settler colonial difference has historically intersected with the cultural framing of nature in Canada, this thesis aims to bring to light histories of racialized labour and non-settler migration alongside histories of Indigenous dispossession regarding the design and control of natural landscapes. Three intersecting themes drive the core of this thesis: (1) landscape representation as a tool of colonisation, (2) the relationship between urbanization, infrastructure, and settler colonisation, and (3) the potential for landscapes futures engaged in decolonial and other-than-human knowledges. This work has primarily focused on the development of landscapes in the Canadian Rocky Mountains as a hinge between Indigenous dispossession and racialized migrant work regimes at the turn of the twentieth century. This is achieved by achieved by an analysis of three historically significant moments in Canadian history. The first considers the development of the earliest national parks in the Rocky Mountains at the turn of the twentieth century as discursive landscapes of settler colonial nationalism. The second recounts the significant racial component of the labour behind infrastructure construction and facilitation i.e. the work of accessing the wilderness. In the third, a major flood event reveals tensions between other-than-human agencies and the material infrastructures of settler colonialism. The scale of these settler colonial landscapes not only encompass Canada as a settler nation, but also the broader geographies of the British Empire. The historical aspects of this thesis have been informed by archival research conducted in Canada and the UK, with significant attention paid to the marketing materials produced by the Canadian Pacific Company and the Canadian Parks Department. These archival sources are complimented by readings of contemporary news media and scientific papers on river hydrology and ecology. Ultimately, this thesis unsettles the nature imaginary in Canada by bringing together landscape studies, urban theory, and settler colonial studies; it expands landscape studies through new considerations around labour, poses a spatial-power link between processes of urbanization and settler colonisation, and moves beyond Indigenous-settler binaries in settler colonial studies by intersecting it with racial histories and other-than-human futures.

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