Power and Restructuring: Canada’s Coastal Society and Environment (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Power and Restructuring: Canada’s Coastal Society and Environment Raymond Rogers Power and Restructuring: Canada’s Coastal Society and Environment. Edited by Peter R. SinclairRosemary E. Ommer. St John’s: Institute for Social and Economic Research, 2006. Pp. 336, illus., $31.95 As the introduction to this very interesting book on life on Canada’s east and west coasts states, ‘This is a book about power in [End Page 286] small places.’ By focusing on Aboriginal communities and coastal resource-based communities – the two most socially engineered groups in Canada – the series of case studies presented here highlight the deep colonial legacy that still exists in governmental agencies such as the Federal Department of Indian Affairs and the Federal Department of Fisheries and Oceans. As Sinclair and Ommer state, ‘Our purpose is to frame and understand the current context through processes of early development [of colonization and resource exploitation] and later restructuring [in the aftermath of collapse].’ As such, this book is part of a larger research project entitled Coasts under Stress: Restructuring and Social-Ecological Health, and the current book is one of three thematic collections that has come out of the research. The other two collections are entitled Making and Moving Knowledge and Resetting the Kitchen Table: Food Security, Culture, Health, and Resilience in Coastal Communities. In a chapter entitled ‘Colonial Territoriality: The Spatial Restructuring of Native Land and Fisheries on the Pacific Coast,’ Douglas Harris provides a graphic analysis of the way the ‘cartographic caging’ of Native people on reserves (and the extension of private property rights to settlers), and the creation of the category of the Aboriginal food fishery (and their exclusion from the extension of licensing in the commercial fishery) worked in conjunction to provide colonial regimes with the capability to enclose the commons so that the land-based and marine-based resources could be subjected to modern forces of production. Harris concludes that the ‘principal instrument of state control was the law’ as it carried out this process of twin marginalization of Aboriginal communities. A sample of quotations from the other case studies in section 1 of the book reflect similar patterns of domination and marginalization: • In the case of White Bay [nl], capitalists in the forestry sector used their power and influence to dominate the overall structure of the industry (Cadigan, 76). • A single mining company oversaw the province’s second largest regional centre [bc’s Anyox mine in the 1930s], which produced tons of poisonous chemicals, millions of tons of copper, and wealth for distant owners (Griffin, 82). • At the same time as settlement grew, missionaries on both coasts delivered Anglo-European ideas of health care infused with [End Page 287] colonial assumptions of the superiority of these practices and ideas (Kealey, Coombs, Turner, and Yeomans, 128). • The story of the past three decades also involves the successive elimination of species from the ecosystem, often by non-resident fishers, thus eroding the ability of Labrador communities to survive (Kennedy, 142). Is there an elected politician or a policy maker in the provincial or federal governments in any of these areas who will speak about these issues in this way? The authors of this book challenge the enclosure of discussion within the categories that have served the more powerful members of Canadian society: ‘Here we offer a new interdisciplinary state-society analysis that should make it easier to highlight those problematic aspects of restructuring that are obvious to coastal communities, but seldom appear on the bureaucratic radar screen’ (Tomblin, Ommer, and Sinclair, 276). Whereas section 1 of the book focuses on ‘power over’ (the capacity to modify, use, consume, or channel outcomes), section 2 focuses on the ‘power to’ (the social relations that are brought into play in response to the exercise of ‘power over’) (MacDonald, Neis, and Grzetic, 188). As neo-liberal initiatives increase poverty and shift demographics, supporters of such things as local schools find it necessary to ‘resist – with their actions and discourse – proposed changes that threaten them. The question remains as to how long the resisters can withstand the new language and its accompanying patterns of action and understanding’ (Harris, Riley, and Robinson, 231). Similar issues confront...