HIKING ALONG THE GREAT DIVIDE EXPLORING SOCIO-NATURES IN THE CANADIAN ROCKIES LAUREN HARDING A THESIS SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF GRADUATE STUDIES IN PARTIAL FUFILMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF MASTER OF ARTS GRADUATE PROGRAM IN SOCIAL ANTHROPOLOGY YORK UNIVERSITY TORONTO ONTARIO NOVEMBER 2010 Library and Archives Bibliotheque et 1*1 Canada Archives Canada Published Heritage Direction du Branch Patrimoine de I'edition 395 Wellington Street 395, rue Wellington Ottawa ON K1A 0N4 Ottawa ON K1A 0N4 Canada Canada Your file Votre reference ISBN: 978-0-494-71289-4 Our file Notre reference ISBN: 978-0-494-71289-4 NOTICE: AVIS: The author has granted a non­ L'auteur a accorde une licence non exclusive exclusive license allowing Library and permettant a la Bibliotheque et Archives Archives Canada to reproduce, Canada de reproduire, publier, archiver, publish, archive, preserve, conserve, sauvegarder, conserver, transmettre au public communicate to the public by par telecommunication ou par I'lnternet, prefer, telecommunication or on the Internet, distribuer et vendre des theses partout dans le loan, distribute and sell theses monde, a des fins commerciales ou autres, sur worldwide, for commercial or non­ support microforme, papier, electronique et/ou commercial purposes, in microform, autres formats. paper, electronic and/or any other formats. The author retains copyright L'auteur conserve la propriete du droit d'auteur ownership and moral rights in this et des droits moraux qui protege cette these. Ni thesis. Neither the thesis nor la these ni des extraits substantiels de celle-ci substantial extracts from it may be ne doivent etre imprimes ou autrement printed or otherwise reproduced reproduits sans son autorisation. without the author's permission. In compliance with the Canadian Conformement a la loi canadienne sur la Privacy Act some supporting forms protection de la vie privee, quelques may have been removed from this formulaires secondaires ont ete enleves de thesis. cette these. While these forms may be included Bien que ces formulaires aient inclus dans in the document page count, their la pagination, il n'y aura aucun contenu removal does not represent any loss manquant. of content from the thesis. ••I Canada Abstract This thesis explores the multiple discourses surrounding cultural conceptions of nature, wilderness, and place in the Canadian Rockies. Canada. I suggest that National Parks of the Canadian Rockies are symbolically constructed as 'pure wilderness', and yet are a site of production for nature/culture hybrids which are intricately entangled with facets of Canadian identity, colonial/post-colonial concepts of modernity, and the territorialisation of space and place. In exploring this possibility, I focused on those who are participating in a both literal and figurative exploration of wilderness through the activity of hiking. I have conducted interviews with individual hikers on non-guided trips to discover how they construct their conceptions of wilderness and how the practice of backcountry hiking both refies and challenges dualisms of nature/culture, modern/pre- modern, and wild/civilized. IV Table of Contents Introduction 1 Chapter One: Mountain Places ; 13 Chapter Two: Making and Re-making Wilderness: Studying People in a 'People- less' Place 44 Chapter Three: Why Backpack?... .....75 Chapter Four: What Good is A Bear to Society? 106 Conclusion 141 Bibliography 146 Table of Figures Figures 1-10 68- Introduction My project began on the picket line. Hours of marching back and forth in the cold, and what I perceived as the hostile, climate of Toronto made me long (with rose-coloured glasses) for the craggy peaks and crisp, clean air of home. Well, not home in the sense of the place I was born and lived most of life in, but home as, to use a cliche, where my heart has always been: my beloved Rocky Mountains. In the fall of 2008,1 uprooted my life in the Rockies and attempted to transplant myself and my partner to Toronto, in order to undertake a Masters degree in Anthropology at York University. I found it difficult to put down roots in a landscape that was not only aesthetically unfamiliar, but politically tumultuous due to a teaching and graduate assistant strike which postponed my studies for three months. As I attempted to 'keep my head in the game' despite the disruption of my studies, the homesickness 1 felt turned into an anthropological curiosity as to why I felt such attachment to the Rocky Mountains. What made this place meaningful to me? Why did I find those cold rocks so inviting and the concrete of Toronto so hostile? Growing up in Edmonton, the national parks of Jasper and Banff were places of recreation and respite. My parents first took me camping in the Rockies when I was 3 months old, and I've been addicted since. As a child, I always felt a deep, profound love for those cold hunks of rock. I had a ritual where on the way back home to Edmonton I would stare out the back window, never glancing away, until the last limestone spire faded from site. When I had the opportunity to work in Yoho National Park for the summer during my undergraduate studies I leapt at the chance. I greeted the surrounding peaks each morning: Field, Burgess, Duscheny, and my favourite, the towering Stephen, whose glacial meltwater fed the Kicking Horse River which 1 separated my home from my workplace. Living in the tiny village of Field, in an old CP rail bunkhouse, I was in heaven. Back on the picket line, and then later on (finally) in the classroom, I attempted to explain my passion for the mountains. And, in the attempted explanation, I began to see a project forming. Was I enamoured with a place, or with an idea of a place? Why? How was that idea formed? Who shares my view of that place and who doesn't and why? My academic orientation in anthropology on the study of the exotic and the foreign began to transform as I focused my critical gaze on my own backyard. What makes my mountains meaningful? How? And for whom? I began to become aware of the complexities landscapes that were familiar instead foreign. I also became aware of the more troubling aspects of an idealization of a landscape, as the processes and practices behind that idealization became more apparent. The place I love is a multifaceted place, troubled by a colonial past, political forces, the demands of the tourism industry and changing cultural attitudes towards nature. Wilderness or Socio-Nature? My project focuses on those who are participating in a both literal and figurative exploration of wilderness through the activity of hiking. From May- November of 2009 I residing in the town of Banff, in Banff National Park, one of the primary 'base-camps' for hikers and backpackers in the Canadian Rockies. From July to September of 2009 I hiked into the backcountry on nine different occasions, following trails both little-used and popular, for only one night and for up to five nights. Most of my steps were taken alone, but on one trip and for several day hikes I had a companion. This was my fourth consecutive summer spent living in the Rockies. 2 I had camped in the Rockies throughout my childhood, and later, spent my summer university terms working for the provincial government and hiking in my spare time. However, unlike the backpacking trips in previous years where I sought out unspoiled vistas and wilderness treasures, in the summer of 2009 I was on the hunt for socio-natures. Bruce Braun defines social nature as indicative of "the inevitable intertwining of society and nature in any and all social and ecological projects (Braun 2002:10, see also Fitzsimmons 1989; Harvey 1996). Although the idea of a social nature may undermine the strategic essentialization of nature espoused by many environmentalists, I agree with Braun in stating that it is a concept of "important analytic and political hope in the face of the radical social and ecological displacements effected by postcolonial [and neo-colonial] capitalisms" (Braun 2002:10). Furthermore, it is important to recognize the forces of power which also strategically essentialize nature, specifically colonialism, which as Braun points out, in the Canadian context is highly intertwined with the discursive rendering of nature. "Accepting nature as inevitably marked by humans does not mean that any and all human environmental practices are the same or equally desirable" (Braun 2002:14). Banff National Park proved to be a useful site for exploring the way in which certain practices maintain or challenge particular discourses of nature. I argue that backpacking, an activity that physically and literally travels over and between areas categorized as nature and culture, wild and civilized, and modern and pre-modern, both re-ifies and challenges these dualism simultaneously. As I shall attempt to show, the activity itself is founded upon a modernist (and colonial) separation between nature and culture, and backpackers continue to reify this separation through their idealization of wilderness. However, through a direct engagement with the landscape, backpackers are often simultaneously confronted with places, moments, and 3 actions that do not fit clearly into this paradigm. Like Latour's (1993) argument that an investment in the modern/pre-modern binary leads to a proliferation of hybrids which fail to fit into either dualistic category, I found that the more backpackers invest in a search for pure nature, the more the cultural and the natural are revealed to be deeply intertwined. The idea of a bounded wilderness pervades many of the representations of, and discourses surrounding, the Canadian National Parks of the Rocky Mountains: Banff, Jasper, Yoho, Kootenay, and Waterton.