Writing People and Place in Banff National Park Adam Linnard

View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE provided by YorkSpace Running head: JUSTICE ON THE ROCKS i Justice on the Rocks: (Re)Writing People and Place in Banff National Park Adam Linnard Date of Submission: August 4, 2015 A Major Paper submitted to the Faculty of Environmental Studies in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master in Environmental Studies, York University, Toronto, Ontario, Canada. Student’s Signature: ___________________________ Supervisor’s Signature: ___________________________ JUSTICE ON THE ROCKS ii Acknowledgements I would first of all like to acknowledge that the lands on which this research focuses, known today as Banff National Park, include territories of Ĩyãħé Nakoda (Stoney Nako- da), Ktunaxa (Kootenay), Secwepemc (Shuswap), Piikani (Blackfoot), and Cree nations. I would like to thank the generous folks who gave me their time and shared their heart- breaking, inspiring and illuminating stories with me in Banff National Park: Tula Mata- pang, Joe Bembridge and Evanne Linnard. I hope my work honours and strengthens you. My supervisor, Catriona Sandilands, deserves all the thanks in the world for her compas- sionate and enthusiastic support, for incredibly interdisciplinary and politically ambitious insight, and for fully embracing my love for grizzly bears as an attribute to my social analysis rather than a distraction. Thanks also to my advisor, Stefan Kipfer, who made sure I checked all the necessary boxes and avoided meandering too far off course. Finally, I would like to thank my partner, Lauren Kepkiewicz, for being smarter, more conscientious and harder working than I am, and for contributing those incredible attrib- utes to discussing, debating, critiquing and celebrating my work with me. This research was supported by a Canadian Graduate Scholarship from the Social Scienc- es and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC). JUSTICE ON THE ROCKS iii Abstract Banff National Park is most commonly and powerfully represented as a place intended for wealthy tourists to experience leisure and for “all Canadians” to encounter “the es- sence of Canada,” representations that emphasize transience, leisure, safety and abstract notions of nature and nation. These institutional narratives of place validate management decisions that alienate residents and motivate them to assert special claims to belonging that distinguish between the local who belongs and those who are out of place. My first argument, developed through a survey of creative non-fiction and fiction literature of the Rocky Mountain Parks, is that literature has been a key site for articulating such claims and setting such distinctions, as evident in recurrent emphasis on permanence, work, risk and place-based knowledge. Supported by the work of scholars and activists in environmental justice and the related fields of critical race, gender, queer, disability and Indige- nous studies, my second argument is that the dominant narratives of Rocky Mountain literature, while resisting institutional narratives and promoting Banff National Park as a co-creation of more-than-human assemblage, inscribe a highly privileged framework for belonging. Such a framework naturalizes white, masculine, heterosexual and able bodies through their engagement with rugged wilderness landscapes and other-than-human ani- mals while negating, excluding or marginalizing those who do not conform. This paper goes on to present a series of Banff National Park stories, derived from walking inter- views and textual research, that historicize, politicize and otherwise confound naturalized normativity without abandoning efforts to narrate more-than-human co-creation of Banff National Park spaces. These stories are told in two sections – one which takes place in the wilderness setting of Saskatchewan River Crossing and the other within the urban Banff townsite – and attempt to disseminate experiences of making a home in the particular social and environmental landscapes of Banff National Park that are complicated by inter- sections of race, gender, sexuality, nationalism, capitalism, religion, Indigeneity and class. This paper argues that those resisting institutional processes of exclusion in Banff National Park must interrogate their own privilege if they hope to promote anything ap- proaching environmental justice in the Canadian Rockies, while simultaneously attempt- ing to model new narratives by engaging with and privileging a variety of claims to place that destabilize my own, including stories of Indigenous displacement, imprisoned labour, genderqueer performance and racialized migrant labour. JUSTICE ON THE ROCKS iv Foreword This Major Research Paper (MRP) strongly and thoroughly aligns with the Area of Con- centration that has guided my research throughout the MES program: to build interdisciplinary understanding of the ways wilderness environments – especially Canadian national parks – are created (politically, symbolically and materially, by human and other- than-human forces) and how they currently and may in the future intersect with the con- cerns of environmental justice. To that end, my Area of Concentration includes the following Components that are also the central elements of this MRP: 1) Philosophical and Political Perspectives on Wilderness; 2) Environmental Justice; and 3) Recent Develop- ments in Ecocriticism. This MRP uses environmental justice ecocriticism and, to a lesser extent, material ecocriticism as an entry point into evaluating and advancing environmental justice in the Ca- nadian Rocky Mountain Parks. In particular, I investigate the ways Banff National Park’s self-narration as a wilderness area resists narratives that validate touristic exploitation and exclusion of the park’s contemporary residents (including me), but replicates privileges of race, gender, sexuality, class, ability and nationality (which benefit me). I seek to ad- vance alternative narratives that better reflect the diverse positionality of people who, amidst narrative and institutional violence, see Banff as home. I attempt to do so without relegating other-than-human forces to the backdrop of human sociality or the clay of human construction. This MRP is a culminating project that integrates the lessons I have learned in a diverse range of courses and learning opportunities at York University under the direction of a profoundly interdisciplinary faculty. In particular, this project owes a debt to: Catriona Sandilands’ “Culture and the Environment” for exploring the ways narrative can model cause and effect in inter-species relations; Jinthana Haritaworn’s “New Social Move- ments, Activism and Social Change” for detailing (and implicating me within) intersec- tions of power, privilege and violent structures of oppression; Ravindra de Costa’s “Na- tive/Canadian Relations” for better contextualizing my work in settler-colonialism; Liora Salter’s “Applied Research” and Paul Wilkinson’s “Protected Area Management” for im- proving my understanding of how national parks function institutionally; Peter Timmer- man’s “Readings in Philosophy, Religion and Environment” for the opportunity to ex- plore Canadian environmental justice literature in-depth; independent reading courses with Catriona Sandilands and Stefan Kipfer for allowing me to wander at length – with a pack full of critical theory – through the makeshift canon of Rocky Mountain literature; and conversations with my MES peers, particularly Genevieve Fullan and Jacob McLean, for helping to clarify and condense the purpose of my project and to see it in concert with very different projects in very different places. JUSTICE ON THE ROCKS v Table of Contents Introduction: Banff National Park as Home 1 Chapter 1: Belonging in Books 8 Banff as Institution: State and Capital 8 A Safe Wilderness Playground Escape: Institutional Narratives of Banff 13 Transience 14 Leisure 14 Safety 16 Abstract nature and the nation 16 Response from Locals 18 Affirmation in Rocky Mountain Literature 19 Drinking with dead wardens: Asexual permanence in place 22 Learning the land through labour: Gender and work 26 Dangerous for real: Risk, disability and race 34 Anti-education agenda: Place-based knowledge and colonialism 43 Grizzly Bear Assemblage and Rocky Mountain Co-Construction 52 Chapter 2: Buried in the Wilderness at Saskatchewan River Crossing 56 Becoming a Mountain Man in the Wide Open Wilderness 56 Wilderness Incorporated: Three Generations at the Crossing 59 Colonialism and Complicity 66 In Closing 73 Chapter 3: Colouring Outside the Lines in Cosmopolitan Banff 75 “We Don’t Have to be Natural”: Queering Banff with Joe Bembridge 75 “Temporary” “Foreign” “Worker”: Seeking Home with Tula Matapang 88 In Closing 99 Conclusion: At Home in Banff National Park 101 References 103 JUSTICE ON THE ROCKS 1 Introduction: Banff National Park as Home It is not easy to feel securely at home in Banff National Park, but stories can help. In an influential Rocky Mountain treatise, Robert Sandford (2008) outlines the ways amenity migration and tourism undermine conservation, local culture and long-term residents’ capacity to stay amidst rising living costs.1 He argues that, in order to resist this trend, those who see the Canadian Rockies as home must fortify a collective identity bound to our unique history and environment. Following the work of Wes Jackson (1991), Sand- ford proposes identifying and celebrating “local characters” who demonstrate ideals of who we aim to be,

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