Yesterday, I listened to a simple but a profound and compelling speech by Wet’suwet’en activist Jennifer Pighin in support of the rights of her people to protect a part of their traditional territory from a natural gas pipeline being forced through it. The pipeline will connect the fracked natural gas from the Peace Region to Kitimat, the town where the BC NDP is paying Royal Dutch Shell over a billion dollars to build a massive carbon bomb called LNG Canada, a megaproject that will ship fossil fuels to East Asia.
But this article is not about my furious and ongoing opposition to that particular crime against humanity. The arguments against Kitimat LNG and against doing business with apartheid shills and murderers of the Ogoni people have been made elsewhere.
What struck me most was what Pighin had to say about the process of connecting with her Indigenous identity. Her mother, like so many Indigenous Canadians (and a surprising number of non-Indigenous ones) was a victim of the “Sixties Scoop,” the mass abduction and institutionalization of the children of Canada’s underclass. Her mom, like so many others, lost her fluency in the Wet’suwet’en language and, through protracted separation, her sense of connection with her people’s traditional territory.
Pighin talked about how, to regain that connection, to make herself fully Wet’suwet’en, she had to return to that territory, to live in it, to walk through it, to swim in it, to physically reconnect with the land. She was talking, in essence, about reinhabitation.
Too often, when we think about colonialism, we think of it as being about importing a new population to seize and build on the lands of indigenous peoples. But the reality is that, in a place like British Columbia, colonialism more often means the opposite. It means finding indigenous people inhabiting the land and expelling them from that space. Beginning with the congregación projects of the Spanish Conquest in the 1550s, when Indigenous villages were amalgamated into a single settlement and the original settlements burned, disinhabitation has been the Janus face of the settler occupation we associate with colonialism.
Whether in the service of logging, mining, industrial agriculture or tourism, the main business of the settler state, when it comes to land in BC, has been to clear that land of human habitation and human activity: the disinhabitation of the land. Today, the Wet’suwet’en people who have been living and working on their trap lines for centuries are being evicted to make way for the pipeline.
They will be replaced, Pighin tells us, by a “man camp,” a particular kind of extractive, temporary community. Men will live there, often in a twenty-day or thirty-day cycle, spending half of their time working long hours at the camp and the other half at their real home hundreds or even thousands of kilometres away. Such communities are designed to be impermanent, not just physically and economically but socially. No families live in them. No children grow up there. Government and business look the other way when it comes to the drug abuse and gender-based violence against nearby indigenous populations that we know they will bring.
Then the man camp will be gone and all that will remain will be the pipeline. A pipe buried under an emptied land.
It is no coincidence that the beginnings of modern capitalism coincide in time and space with the start of this process of disinhabitation. The project began on the other side of the Atlantic in the first two Calvinist nation-states, Tudor England and the Dutch Republic. The new economy of Northern Europe that we associate with the Protestant Reformation and the domination of the countryside by central governments was fueled by what we call the “Wool Boom.”
In the 1400s, specialized winter clothing became a major item of trade throughout Europe and this clothing was made almost exclusively of wool. Finally the long-term north-south trade deficit vanished. And soon, more value in wool was flowing south than wine flowing north. The countries that made the most money during that boom were those that were most effective in converting land into sheep pasturage.
And it was in this that the English and Dutch excelled. As I wrote in the last post in this series, a decade ago, this meant the mass dislocation of rural peasants. The common lands they farmed were seized and sold. As Thomas More then observed, men no longer eat sheep; “now sheep eat men.” In my last piece, I focused on what happened to the people, the women and men whose lives and homes were eaten by sheep. They became the world’s first “neighbours.”
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We refer to these vistas as landscapes. The corollary of the neighbour is the landscape.
The story of how the term entered the English language might surprise you: it is a loan word from the Dutch Landschap. Its original meaning was: a vista resembling a Dutch landscape painting. Long before the French and English Romantics, it was the Dutch who first aestheticized the disinhabitation of the capitalist project. There was a strange, haunted beauty to lands from which human beings had been evicted, leaving minute traces or none at all. The first landscapes aestheticized the eviction and pauperization of the European peasant, and everywhere they have appeared since has arisen from a capitalist project of disinhabitation, forced eviction and human suffering.
Landscapes are not “natural” in the sense that the term sometimes means (when it is able to mean anything at all) “non-anthropogenic” because the absence of humans is not caused by human absence but rather by the creation of a state powerful enough to evict humans from huge swaths of territory to make way for some larger economic objective.
When the environmental movement first appeared in the United States, it arose from an intersection of the romantic movement, the spiritualist movement, the growth of the power of the central government and its massive subsidies to railway companies. The first modern park, Yosemite, we must remember, was created through the genocide of the people for whom it is named—a genocide motivated by the commodification of an aesthetic.
When transcontinental railway companies reached the places we today call Yellowstone, Jasper, and Banff, they were faced with places that lacked high-value timber, easily accessible subsoil minerals and no real estate development potential. They were turned into landscapes, so that they could enter capitalism, as an experience purchased by the guests of the four-star hotels the rail companies were permitted to build inside the parks whose boundaries they chose. By that, I mean that the indigenous people living inside their boundaries were all evicted like the Nez Pierce of Yellowstone or murdered like the Ahwahnee of Yosemite. The only way the companies could make money was by turning beautiful places into landscapes, by disinhabiting them. That required guns. That required money.
Stanley Park in Vancouver, Central Park in New York: these places were also rendered landscapes, their boundaries chosen because they were the places the poorest people with the fewest property rights were living. Today, they are landscapes—places which the state uses all of its power to keep uninhabited. That’s the thing about disinhabitation; it is continuous, relentless.
Landscape painting, as an aesthetic project, is, among many other things, the documentation of the loss, grief and alienation that capitalism inflicts. It is, in a way, the corollary of the aestheticization of post-industrial sites as in Vancouver’s Granville Island Market or Providence’s India Point Park. But instead of showing the vanished and failing power of the mythologized industrial workplace with its union halls and family-supporting jobs, they show not only the resilience and beauty of ecosystems; they also show the power of capitalism regnant, triumphant, still able to empty a land, not just of its resources but of its human inhabitants. It is this paradox that causes vistas that should be haunting and foreboding to be misinterpreted as reassuring and nostalgic in the capitalist imaginary.
It is the task, not just of Indigenous people, to reverse this, to reinhabit and restore our lands.
Los Altos Institute will soon be accepting registrations to its spring landscape intensive course co-taught by my partner, Corey Hardeman, one of Canada’s premier landscape painters, and me. To join the Wet’suwet’en defense of their land or learn more about it, go here.
