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) - Milligan, Richard
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.