Salvage cartographies : mapping, futures, and landscapes in northwest British Columbia

Abstract

This dissertation examines how the proliferation of digital mapping technologies and the contraction of government research institutions have reformatted contests over resources, sovereignty, and local belonging in the neoliberal era. The two groups at the heart of this multilocale ethnography, government forest ecologists and Indigenous Geographic Information Systems (GIS) specialists, share entangled histories throughout rural North America. This is particularly true on the Gitxsan and Gitanyow traditional territories in northwest British Columbia. As climate change and emergent forest diseases destabilize both Indigenous and settler communities' abilities to predict and plan for environmental shifts, disparate experts are learning to leverage marginalized maps and ecological succession models to reconstitute modes of professional succession rendered precarious by government reforms and internal tribal conflicts. The opening chapters of the dissertation examine two experimental institutions - an independent forest ecology research center in Smithers, B.C., and a defunct GIS analysis team based on a nearby Gitxsan reserve - to examine how rural scenes of collaboration complicate the modalities of influence and organizational coherency often attributed to professional scientific networks. Later chapters explore experimental forest and traditional territories where ecologists and Indigenous GIS specialists have sought to articulate risks and project landscape futures by producing technical knowledge. For both communities, transects, grids, and other techniques of marking space have forced them to negotiate tensions between the temporal decay of these spaces and the lifespans of individual researchers. The concluding chapter examine the agencies of archives and simulations produced by two separate long-term forestry modeling groups. By treating their discarded models as anchors of a kind of professional legitimacy no longer stably recognized by a changing provincial government, I argue that senior forestry modelers are struggling to frame their work within longer historical narratives which supersede the temporalities of the state. Twentieth century conservationism drew heavily on essentialized discourses of "nature" and "culture" to construct old-growth rainforests and other contested spaces as objects worthy of protection. This dissertation examines the destabilization of these classification systems, and the palimpsest of legal definitions and lived concepts of territory left behind as regulatory responsibilities devolve and dissolve.