Excerpt from Siteseeing

1997

O Noelle Chorney 1997 National Library l*l ofCanada Bibliothèque nationale du Canada Acquisitions and Acquisitions et Bibliographie Services services bibliographiques 395 Wellington Street 395, rue Wellington Ottawa ON K1A ON4 ûüawâ ON K1A ON4 Canada canada The author has granted a nonexclusive licence allowing the National Library of Canada to reproduce, loan, distriibute or sell copies of this thesis in microform, paper or electronic formats. The author retains ownership of the copyright in thîs thesis. Neither the thesis nor substantial extracts fkom it may be printed or otherwise reproduced without the author's pemïssion. 1 beckon, I cal1 Corne to me, love, [ will love you with rny sands, With my sunset, With my winter and its storms. My wind blows through you. Al1 are extreme as my love for you is so. I may not know who I am, but I know where I am frorn. Wallace Stegner, Wolf Willow: A Historv. A Storv. and A Mernon, of the Last Plains Frontier ArÏtha van Herk, personai interview, November 3. 1997. Refemng to his childhood on die prairie. Wallace Stegner. h e s , *Unless everything in a mans memory of childhood is mideading, there is a time somewhere berneen the aga of five and twehe which corresponds to the phase ethologïsts have isolami in the deveIopment of bu&, when an impression lasting ody a few seconds may be irnprinted on the young bird for Life." For more, read Anyone who gows up on the prairie knows the power of the landscape. Experiencing its expanse forces a quick intake of air that is sometimes so sharp that it tears at your lunçs, and other times is so sweet and clean and fresh that it wakens senses you did not even know you had Stegner cites that amazinç combination of land and air, and the effect that it has on an individual: The drama of this landscape is in the sky, pounng with light and always moving. The earth is passive. And yet the beauty 1 am stnick by, both as present fact and as revived memory, is a fusion: this sky would not be so spectacular without this earth to change and glow and darken under it. And whatever the sky may do, however the eaarth is shaken or darkened, the Euclidean perfection abides. The very scale, the huseness of simple f o n s , rmphasizes stability. It is not hills and mountains which we should cal1 etemal, Nature abhors elevation as much as it abhors a vacuum; a hi11 is no sooner elevated than the forces oferosion begin tearing it dom. These prairies are quiescent, close to static: looked at for any length of tirne, they beçin to impose their awful perfection on the observer's mind. Etemity is a peneplain.' It serrns that the prairie's effect on the psyche lasts almost as long as the pnine itselE An outsider's response to prairie cm be profoundly negative. It is flat, dry, windy, blisteringly hot in sumrner, icy cold in winter , and frighteteningly rmpty. Its secrets are revealed to those who live in it. The prairie c m be scary and forbidding, but Stegner dismisses any thought of condemning it: Desolate? Forbidding? There was never a country that in its good moments was more beautiful. Even in drouth or dust stom or blizzard it is the reverse of monotonou, once you have submitted to it with al1 the senses. You don? set out of the wind, but learn to lean and squint against it. You don? escape siq and sun, but Wear them in your ryeballs and on your back You become acutely aware of yourselE The world is very large, the sky even larger, and you are very small. But aiso the world is Bat, empty, nearly abstract, and in its flatness you are a "History 1s a Pontoon Bridge" in Wolf Willow A Historv. A S t o q~ and a Memorv of the Last Plans Frontier (New York: The Viking Press. 1971) pp. 21-30. ' Steger. WolFWtllow, p. 7 ' See alsa-htmductionq in Dick Hanisoa Uiuiamed Country The Smicde for a Canadian Prairie fiction (Edmonton: Univwsiry orAlbena Press, 1977). ' Aian C. Cairns and Edwin R Black,-A Différent Perjpenive on Canadian Federalistn,' Canadian Public Administration 9. No-1 (March 19661, p. 28. Davey. p. 2 1-22-' tbid., p. 22, ' Barry Cooper, in his ani-cles-Western Political Consfioumess" in Political Thou& in Canada and *ïhe West: A Political ~Minoritf' in Minorities and the Canadian State, also notes the significance of economics on the prairies: "From the start, then, the West has fclt the impact of the most advanceci techoIogy of the da-" W C , 220) and "The most cornprehensive context for Western as weU as Canadian poIitics, the context withùi wtu'ch the fortunes of Canada the political unit, as weU as the imaginative reaiïties of Canada and the West unfold, is given by technotogy" (TW:APM, S 13). The material reahties mate the society. Edward A McCoun also rnakes an important point about the connection between economics and the expression otidentity through titerature: "It i s a common but Iargely fdacious theory that until a society achieves a subsantiai degree of econom-c security it cannot be expected to show much progras in the arts.-ne mth is that the prime interest of the peopfe who constarte a fiontier society i s and aiways has been materiai gain; and that even after secunty, and perhaps rnodest weaith, have been attained, ' ' ibid. (Londonr Routledge. 1989). p. 36. ' 6 Ibid, p. 35. 58 Edward McCourt Saskatchewan (Toronto: MacmiUan of Canada 1968), p. 974. 59-McCourt p. 9. rio Ibid., p. 10-1 1. 6 1 Rico y pp. 6-7-*-. Chapter Five Aritha van Aerk and Guy Vanderhaeghe 1.

Ecocene: Cappadocia Journal of Environmental Humanities 1, no. 2 (December), 2020

I propose that Gary Snyder’s bioregional project can contribute to recent ecopoetic thought with its argument for poetry as embodied practice and with its definition of community as place-based, transnational, and multi-species. I start by showing continuities between bioregionalism and ecocriticism with the concept of place. I then turn to Snyder’s conceptualization of place as a dialectics between the biotic and sociopolitical dimensions. For Snyder poetry is a situated and embodied practice of investigation and creation of place. It therefore relates with recent discussions on ecopoetics as a critical and poetic practice extended to ecologically oriented forms of community action and activism (Hume and Osborne 2018,2). As an example of how current ecopoetry practices a poetics of place I briefly discuss Allison Cobb’s Plastic: An Autobiography (2015)

2015

This dissertation develops a "Northern Textual Ecology," a methodological approach that posits a correlation between the geo/meteorological forces of the north and the literary texts, Indigenous and other, of the north. I suggest that both the actual land and literary texts are environments: both are comprised of participants in a continuously transforming space of activity, and both are territories of expression. As a territory of expression, a text can be composed by a range of living participants, including human, animal, or plant, as well as atmosphere. However, this dissertation uses the term text primarily in the context of human artistic compositions. This dissertation navigates two kinds of weather: the actual weather and textual, or composed, weather. Textual weather engages affective, rather than atmospheric, becomings. However, in the context of the literary north, these two forms of weather become indistinguishable, the atmospheric feeding into the affective, because so much of life in the north depends on actual weather. In Chapter One, I discuss Taqralik Partridge's spoken word poem "I Picked Berries" and Glenn Gould's tonal poem The Idea of North as compositions of the forces of Sila. These poems blur the lines between human, land, and animal and disorganize the categories of subject and object. In Chapter Two, I discuss Isuma Igloolik Productions' Atanarjuat: The Fast Runner as a demonstration of the wisdom of isuma. In this film, the land is neither human nor nonhuman, but a range of active bodies in various organic and non-organic forms. Finally, in Chapter Three, I discuss Alootook Ipellie's Arctic Dreams and Nightmares as narrative enactment of the creative and destructive powers of Sedna. The constellation of literary texts that appear in this dissertation compose their weather via techniques of elision, layers of sound, lines of variation, blurred subjectivities, and the transversal connection of bodies. These texts (from the late 1970s and thereafter) connect both explicitly and implicitly to northern Indigenous cosmologies of land and weather, specifically to the Inuit concepts of Sila, isuma, and Sedna. These texts body forth from their environments in a way that demonstrates a range of perception and understanding that surpasses discursive forms. v ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I have been incredibly fortunate to work with many remarkable people. Thank you all for materializing this project with me. I want to thank my committee, beginning with my supervisor, Dianne Chisholm, who tirelessly supported me and always challenged me to exceed my own expectations. I also want to thank Elena del Rio, who gave me abundant and perceptive feedback. Thanks, next, to Rob Appleford, who agreed to join my committee on short notice. I would also like to acknowledge and thank my internal-external examiner, Liza Piper, and my external examiner, Tim Ingold, for their generous and instructive comments. I am thankful to Keavy Martin, who was my third reader for the biggest part of this project. I probably wouldn't have gone to the University of Manitoba's Pangnirtung Summer School without Keavy's encouragement, and so many of my experiences in Pangnirtung have fed into this project and have also affected me on countless levels that exceed this project. I am also grateful to the community of Pangnirtung. I would like to particularly thank elders Ooleepeeka Ishulutaq, Jaco Ishulutaq, Taina Nowdlak, Nevee Nowdlak, Joanasie Qappik, Evie Anilniliak, and Inuusiq Nashalik. Also, special thanks to Margaret Nakashuk for her kindness and friendship, to Silasie Anilniliak for letting me help him with the nets, to Paulette Metuq for her awesome cooking, to Kelly Karpik for her teaching, to Moe Evic for his hospitality ("hello people!"), and to the late Petrosie Kakee, who is one of the most capable and caring human beings I've had the honour to know. Thanks to the program leader Peter Kulchyski for having the endurance to keep the summer vi school going and to Warren Bernauer for his activism. Thanks to Christine Graff for helping me with everything and for making me laugh. A huge qujannamiippaaluk to all of you. I would also like to thank the English and Film Studies support staff, especially Kim Brown and Mary Marshall Durrell. I want to thank my friends from the University of Alberta, particularly Amie Shirkie, Janis Ledwell-Hunt, Alison Hurlburt, Lucas Crawford, Greg Bechtel, and Heather MacLeod. Thanks for being funny and outrageous and calming and instructive and challenging, and for sometimes making me feel "too much affect." Special thanks to Alison and Heather for reading and commenting on this project. Thanks to my friends beyond the university, Ben Löf, Jill Connell, and Jasmina Odor. Thanks for being inspiring and loving, for talking about writing and ideas, and for playing kick the can at midnight in the river valley. I also want to thank my parents Kay and Bill Fredrickson for telling me stories and teaching me to care about the world. Finally, thanks to Joel Katelnikoff for making a wayfaring life with me, for being innovative and generous and creative and insightful, and for seeing this project through each step. vii

Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment, 2011

Many nature writers over the past half century have conveyed the news that nature is dead; the titles alone, from Silent Spring to The End of Nature inform us that the "old verities" (including belief in nature's essential purity, stability, abundance, and ability to rejuvenate and heal) have given way to an era when the turn of the seasons and even the kind of weather we experience are no longer certain. Humans have entered an anthropogenic stage when all of nature appears to bear the mark of human activity. Salmon swimming to the remotest lakes in Northern British Columbia have contaminated those lakes with dioxins from their bodies; DDT sprayed in southern Asia to fight malaria ends up in the flesh of humans in the far north. Even stranger is the fact that new wildlife refuges have spontaneously arisen in the most contaminated and dangerous sites in the world: Chernobyl now has a flourishing animal population and the Korean DMZ is alive with animal and bird life. How do contemporary nature writers respond to this new Post Natural Wilderness? What does this landscape tell us about the natural world and our ability to live with it? Using the works of several contemporary writers who have investigated the Post Natural Wilderness, this paper examines the strategies used by contemporary writers to chronicle their encounters with this strange new landscape, along with the surprises and occasional bitter ironies that emerge from it.

The Dalhousie Review, 2010

Literary and cinematic elegies abound for northern landscapes and lifeways presumed ‘lost’ to modernization. These narratives are part of a wider elegiac trend representing the North as a place of disappearance, or a place itself disappearing. Such melancholy narratives not only still subtend much of American environmental art, but often shape scholarly discourse on literature and environment. Yet in recent years, a few Alaskan writers are taking a much different attitude toward environmental change. I focus on contemporary voices that are shifting focus from elegizing what is lost to articulating how contemporary northerners, human and non-human, are going on living in the midst of ecosocial emergency.

2014

According to researchers from North Carolina State University and the University of Georgia, Wednesday 23rd May 2007 marked a 'major demographic shift'. These researchers calculated that on this date the global population, 'for the first time in human history', would tip from a rural to an urban majority.1 From the point of view of environmental psychology this is cause for consternation. Clive Hamilton points out that '[t]here is persuasive evidence that our concerns about the environment, as well as our attitudes and values, are influenced by the extent to which we feel ourselves to be part of the natural world'. 2 It is self-evident that a growing urbanised majority population would equate to a wider disconnection of humankind from the natural world. In the light of impending ecological catastrophe - particularly that of climate change, habitat destruction, species extinction, industrial pollution and finite resource depletion- this demographic shift marks...