Between Kitimat LNG Terminal and Monkey Beach: Literary-Geographic Methods and the Politics of Recognition in Resource Governance on Haisla Territory. Issue 1 (2nd January 2018)

• Record Type: Journal Article
• Authors: Milligan, Richard; McCreary, Tyler
• Is Part Of: GeoHumanities. Volume 4:Issue 1(2018)
• Page Start: 45
• Page End: 65
• Publication Date: 2018-01-02
• Subjects: Indigenous knowledge -- Indigenous literature -- literary-geographic methods -- ontology -- settler colonialism; 原住民知识 -- 原住民文学 -- 文学—地理学方法 -- 本体论 -- 迁佔式殖民主义; conocimiento indígena -- literatura indígena -- métodos literario–geográficos -- ontología -- colonialismo con pobladores; Arts and geography -- Periodicals; Human geography -- Periodicals; 304.2
• DOI: 10.1080/2373566X.2017.1386074
• Languages: English
• ISSNs: 2373-566X

Abstract

Abstract : This article uses a literary-geographic method to critique the recognition of Indigenous difference in settler-colonial resource governance. Situating analysis on Haisla traditional territories over which the Canadian state claims jurisdiction, we analyze how Indigenous culture is represented in an environmental assessment and a novel set in the same location. The environmental assessment of a liquefied natural gas terminal renders Haisla Indigeneity subject to forms of political economic calculation. In contrast, Haisla novelist Eden Robinson disrupts a colonial desire for Indigeneity as a contained and manageable object of governance. Placing these texts from different domains into productive interference, we expose the continued colonial captures that accompany recognition of Indigeneity in settler-colonial resource governance processes, and the necessity of thinking Indigeneity otherwise. This examination of the politics of recognition highlights how literary-geographic methods can be used to investigate both normative orderings and contestations of racial capitalism in the context of settler colonialism.