The session will consist of a series of responses to a pre-circulated question, followed by a question and answer period.

These material are being posted in advance with the hope of cultivating a richer discussion at the conference. Please submit any questions or comments to Shannon Stunden Bower at stundenb@ualberta.ca. Selected questions may be addressed during the questions and answer session.

Interested individuals may also wish to participate in a forum hosted on the Network in Canadian History and Environment website node.

Pre-Circulated Question

'Settlement'- An Environmental History Perspective

Historical geographer Cole Harris has argued the term 'settlement' should be replaced with 'resettlement', as an acknowledgement of the aboriginal occupancy that predates European arrival in North America. Whether Harris' correction is accepted, most contemporary scholars recognize that, insofar as it fails to acknowledge the aboriginal fact, the phrase 'settlement' is flawed.

For historians particularly concerned with the environmental history of the west, are there other ways this phrase is inadequate? Are there longer term or larger scale processes that must be acknowledged, if the environmental history of the region is to be understood? Does 'settlement' imply a focus on agricultural activity, disregarding other environmentally significant activities such as mining and hydroelectric development and orienting inquiry away from less fertile areas such as the provincial norths? Or are there advantages to the phrase 'settlement' that deserve recognition? In rethinking the process of settlement, can a more environmentally attuned perspective reorient historical inquiry of the west?

Chair:
Shannon Stunden Bower
Grant Notley Postdoctoral Fellow
History, University of Alberta

Organizers
Liza Piper and Shannon Stunden Bower

Respondents

Claire Campbell
Assistant Professor
History
Dalhousie University

My contribution to this panel will be to show how questioning the historical definition of settlement challenges not only our understanding of environmental history but also our usual practices of public history. Revisiting the meaning of settlement in the historical narrative also means questioning its place in public memory and, more generally, how we traditionally have commemorated prairie history, because settlement is a ubiquitous theme in historic site designation. In part this is because the agricultural frontier and urban prosperity reflects core values shared by Anglo-Canadian prairie audiences and historians through the twentieth century, but also because of the mechanisms or limits of designation: what kind of artifact or landscape we can choose to preserve. Thus at the panel I want to discuss the range of historic sites that might (or do) speak to a broader meaning of settlement, or that commemorate a contrasting aboriginal era of occupation. And perhaps most importantly, we need to consider how site interpretation might discuss settlement as an environmental phenomenon, with its benefits and costs.

Joshua D. MacFadyen
PhD Candidate
History
University of Guelph

Reconciling Business and Environmental History:
Flax in the Prairie Plow-up

New research in agricultural resettlement is at a critical crossroads of business and environmental history. Recent scholarship from Enterprise & Society, Business History Review, and the Business History Conference suggests that business historians are beginning to borrow the tools of environmental history. Studies of primary and manufacturing sectors are considering the influence of both organizations and the natural environment. I argue that redefining 'settlement' in the west requires the help of business and environmental history.

Liza Piper
Assistant Professor
History
University of Alberta

Resource Frontiers in the Northwest: Who was doing the settling?

The traditional emphasis upon agricultural settlement obscures the importance of resource exploitation and mineral, oil, and gas development in particular, to the creation of a Euro-Canadian Northwest. Economic and ecological relationships across the Northwest were a direct outcome of natural resource economies after 1860. This paper will examine the central role played by resource exploitation in the political economy of the Canadian Northwest in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries in contrast to the role played by agricultural settlement. The new resource geographies that emerged embraced property regimes and economic relationships that encouraged the sedentarization of aboriginal peoples at the same time that they depended upon a transient, predominantly non-Native population for labour. This led to the segregation of native/non-industrial and non-native/industrial communities and the mis-representation of the former as embodying archaic relationships and a decaying social fabric and the latter as epitomizing the ephemeral dynamism of Canada in the modern age.


John Thistle
PhD Candidate
Geography
University of British Columbia

Panel on Settlement, Resettlement and Environmental History

This paper seeks to 'unsettle' traditional settlement and more recent resettlement narratives by emphasizing some of the ways in which non-human nature has shaped the social history and historical geography of British Columbia's interior grasslands. Drawing from recent work in environmental history and science studies I suggest that although people manipulate elements of nature, the consequences of doing so are rarely if ever completely known in advance, not just because our science and knowledge is constructed in particular historical and geographical contexts, but also because environments have histories and geographies of their own.

Time and again environmental historians, especially, have illustrated the unintended consequences of autonomous (and obviously in many cases, human-induced) environmental change, as, for example, when El Nino events expose and exacerbate social divisions in a fishery, when irrigation projects inadvertently provide habitat for muskrats that, in turn, undermine agriculture production, or, when overgrazing by cattle combines with drought and other ecological processes to produce grasshopper irruptions that further deplete the range. Whether these or any of the intended consequences of environmental history suggest a kind of 'agency' on the part of non-humans may be less important than the historical reality they reveal: namely that human societies not only shape but also are shaped by their encounters with nonhuman nature. Historians and geographers concerned with processes of settlement and resettlement will gain greater perspective on the past by incorporating non-human nature into their narratives.

Frank Tough
Professor
Native Studies
University of Alberta

"There were more forgeries and potential extent of impersonations in scrip in Western Canada than you can even realize": the Historical Geography of Metis entitlements or extinguishment, claim, grant, transfer, dispossession and the purloining of an Aboriginal birth right in ten easy documents in ten quick minutes

While the use of transferable bounty and scrip certificates can be traced back
to revolutionary America Republic of the 1780s, how this unique type of frontier land entitlement was developed and then applied to the Metis of western Canada is not well known. The implementation of the land scrip system is tainted with allegations of fraud. An account of the historical geography of Metis scrip is not fully developed as it would entail an explanation of the property tenures devised by the Dominion Land Acts, the nature of the scrip entitlement, the use of scrip coupons to obtain homestead lands, the middlemen role of land speculators in transferring and registering interest in land obtained by Metis scrip coupons, and a political/legal struggle waged between 1913 and 1926 by some Metis and their allies against those that had assumedly profited from shady transactions. However, ten key documents have been selected to highlight a process of
extinguishment, individual claim, fraud, and finally a judicial re-confirmation of
dispossession. Ironically then, it can be purposed for future research that the
Anglo-Canadian version of the Rule of Law-which aimed to settle and civilize the west by extinguishing Indian title, running cadastral surveys, allocating land to bona fide immigrant settlers, and organizing property by title registration-had the effect of providing security for small scale settlers, but then denied the same legal protection to those that were granted entitlements as Metis British subjects.

top