On “Buried Epistemologies: The Politics of Nature in (Post)colonial British Columbia”: On Excavating and Burying Epistemologies

Abstract

In Buried Epistemologies: The Politics of Nature in (Post)colonial British Columbia, Willems-Braun (Annals, AAG 87:3-31) reveals how colonizers defined nature as a category distinct from culture, not through the power of the state per se but through a taken-for-granted process of resource classification evocative of Borges's certain Chinese encyclopedia (Foucault 1973, xv). In doing so, the colonizers created a logic that made the arrogation of natural resources to themselves and the relegation of native peoples to reservations seem quite, well, natural. That colonial categorization tenaciously continues to constrain the thoughts and actions of British Columbians in their struggles over the forests fringing Clayoquot Sound. Logging companies conceptualize nature as a resource to be managed; environmentalists conceptualize nature as a wilderness to be preserved. Neither pole in that struggle seems capable of conceptualizing a relation between nature and native peoples except for such static, romanticized impositions as traditional. The colonizers' categorization of nature as distinct from culture thus continues to deny both the millennia-old cultural landscape the Spaniards and British encountered in the eighteenth century as well as any major role for native peoples in creating future cultural landscapes. Indeed, growing up on the coast just south of the Alaska Panhandle, I witnessed the persistent landscape manifestations of such colonial thinking-vestiges sketching a spatial genealogy of power. With the Indian Village on the reservation facing the company town across the chuck, the continuity of state power plainly stuck out. Recognition of the continuity of a subtler kind of power, the power of the taken-for-granted categories that concerns Willems-Braun, remained more in the gut than the head. Hints hid amid the tumble-down log buildings of a farm along the river, out of the wilderness, so the story went, a pioneer family taking a chance on the frontier of Juxtaposed, just upstream a reach, the landscape contradicted the category termed wilderness: the salmon-berries choked the bank and concealed the silvered planks of the Old Indian Village, but you could still make out the carved figures, as beautiful and skillful as any painting of the colonizers' civilization. The topographic maps also echoed the contradictory categories of colonizer and colonized. Many of the rivers and mountains bore the names of geologists who had surveyed the wilderness for the resources that were to sustain civilization; others bore the names of the resources themselves: Gold Creek, Copper Mountain. Again juxtaposed, other toponyms contradicted those elemental categories with evidence of a landscape long occupied, classified, and named according to a different logic. Yet in his avid digging up of the colonizers' taken-for-granted epistemologies, WillemsBraun indiscriminately buries other epistemologies. In concert with many smitten by the uptown cooliality of postmodernism, he negates the work of other geographers who striven to understand the ways in which colonizers rhetorically and materially invented colonized peoples and natures. Geographers, claims Willems-Braun, have had little to say about the role that the production of nature (rhetorically and materially)