Seascape Stories
Decolonial Water Relations
For coastal people, coastlines call us home.
The waves beckon us in constant rhythm. Kissing the shoreline with a gentle pulse, or matching the passion and depth of the sea. Coastlines are places of abundant life in all forms. Cultivating an appreciation for this human and more-than-human existence in Oceania generates a unique ocean citizenship sensibility, “one based on fluidity of being in the world,” that flows from an awareness of one’s place as rooted within webs of kinship with all of creation. Abundant, vibrant, and lively seascapes offer a relational orientation to the world that challenges extractivist, neoliberal settler colonial governmentality across colonial jurisdictions and boundaries.
Seascapes are contested, abundant places of vibrant life.
As global demands for energy rise, British Columbia’s (BC) resource-rich land and waters generate increased debate about precisely how energy development will take place. In recent years, three high-profile pipeline proposals have attracted particular debate: Enbridge Inc.’s Northern Gateway, Kinder Morgan and Keystone XL.
These energy infrastructure projects offer new opportunities and connections and also impose new environmental, social, and cultural challenges. While energy companies have mapped the anticipated impact of energy development on Indigenous communities in BC, many communities have expressed that these representations are inadequate. In particular, coastal communities have identified that there remains a scarcity of engaged research tools to examine the lived impact of offshore oil and tanker traffic on marine environments.
Seascapes are contested, abundant places of vibrant life.
As global demands for energy rise, British Columbia’s (BC) resource-rich land and waters generate increased debate about precisely how energy development will take place. In recent years, three high-profile pipeline proposals have attracted particular debate: Enbridge Inc.’s Northern Gateway, Kinder Morgan and Keystone XL.
These energy infrastructure projects offer new opportunities and connections and also impose new environmental, social, and cultural challenges. While energy companies have mapped the anticipated impact of energy development on Indigenous communities in BC, many communities have expressed that these representations are inadequate. In particular, coastal communities have identified that there remains a scarcity of engaged research tools to examine the lived impact of offshore oil and tanker traffic on marine environments.
It is our goal to understand these limitations and enhance coastal Indigenous peoples’ capacity to document and publicly communicate their own experiences.
Our project co-develops innovative research tools with coastal communities to facilitate much needed reconciliation on the pressing question of resource development in Canada.
It is essential to promote modes of representation that are developed with and by Indigenous communities, and in the places that they live.
Our project develops an interactive Indigenous-led research toolkit: the Seascape Indigenous Storytelling Studio designed to facilitate meaningful assessment of community’s thoughts on, and representations of, energy development.
Meet the Team
Community-engaged research is deeply personal.
It is simultaneously gut-wrenchingly political. As a team of global collaborators, the “Seascape crew” or team brings together a diverse set of skills, interests and lived-experiences.
To Know & Understand Seascapes
The ocean serves as a site of transportation, source of food, medicine, shelter and migration. In the ocean, people dance, harvest, cleanse, train, play and die. It is full of abundant life.
Seascapes connect past, present and futures. As is well known, the ocean brought colonizers, missionaries, merchants and naval ships to the shoreline in their quest for power and dominance across Oceania.
Simultaneously, this oceanic pathway connects humans and sealife to constellations of islands, gathered in an archipelago. The ocean connects a sea of islands and contends with discrete boundaries and disconnection.
In these ways, seascape epistemology challenges the primacy of linear, property-centric, landlocked liberal individualism and colonial governmentality.
This approach to knowing is visual, spiritual, intellectual and embodied.
It does not treat the ocean as a thing or resource; rather, seascape epistemology is a philosophy of knowledge about the interconnected relations between humans and the more-than-human world, connecting human experience to the continuous movement of shifting tides and currents.
This approach to knowing is visual, spiritual, intellectual and embodied.
It does not treat the ocean as a thing or resource; rather, seascape epistemology is a philosophy of knowledge about the interconnected relations between humans and the more-than-human world, connecting human experience to the continuous movement of shifting tides and currents.
Paddling Together: Voyaging as Embodied Research
Seascapes cast light on multiple angles of vision, creating space for diverse perspectives and a spectrum of voices and experiences to articulate, enact and embody the many fluid meanings of sealife. There is no one singular, monolithic, coherent framework of seascape analysis.
As such, we can anchor this analysis in the canoe or wayfinding ship, a voyaging vessel that carries a crew through multiple worlds, encounters and relationships.
Informed by Indigenous and decolonizing methodologies and interpretive research methods that seek to document and give presence to subtle meaning-making practices through political ethnography and visual storytelling, as well as community engagement with human and more-than-human seaworlds, the seascape methodology discussed here is experimental and experiential.
The Moonbeam Canoe
Moonbeam was carved by Kw’umut Lelum youth under the mentorship of master caver Luke Marston as part of the Medicine of the Cedar project. It was the largest canoe ever carved by Luke. Several Kw’umut Lelum youth traveled with Luke to the Royal BC Museum to learn about traditional canoes from the 1800s. The young paddlers met weekly with Luke and his brother John Marston while practicing the Hu’lqu’minum language and learning to carve their own paddle for the upcoming journey.
As a canoe family, Kw’umut Lelum has participated in over eight Tribal Journeys.
The resurgence of Tribal Journeys began alongside Expo 1986 under the leadership of Frank Brown of the Heiltsuk Nation. It is a voyage that brings together paddlers from all walks of life across generations. Canoe families represent unique nations and voyage nation-to-nation in an act of cultural continuity that transcends imposed colonial boundaries.
Boundaryless Lifeworlds
While traveling with the Kw’umut Lelum youth during Tribal Journeys, an elder reminded our Seascapes team that we cannot have a discussion about resource extraction and exploitation without an intimate knowledge and understanding of our relationship with the water. To think first about the impacts of resource exploitation without the knowledge of this relationship would be “doing it backwards”.
Coastal communities are connected through migration, voyaging, kinship, and stories that travel beyond and challenge Western boundaries. These oceanic connections contend with rigid, hierarchical, top-down imposed forms of citizenship from bureaucratic state governments. As Jess Housty from the Heiltsuk Nation explains, “building connection is building community”; oceanic kinship centers on reciprocity and connection, thus presenting a challenge to Western ideals of citizenship and ways of being and knowing. Rather, these fluid, kin connections interrupt and shift possessive, property-driven forms of citizenship and instead center reciprocal relations of abundance and care with and among human and more-than-human lifeworlds.
Indigenous communities articulate and enact cultural resurgence and vitalization in ongoing practices of everyday resurgence. Whether we look to the migratory pathways of humpback whales from Haida Gwaii to Hawaiʻi, the gifting of a cedar log to Hawaiʻi voyagers, or language exchange programs, we can see how communities share experiences that cultivate a sense of affinity and community while challenging conventional rigid, state-centric settler-colonial borders.
Seascapes mean relationships based on reciprocity and responsibility. They represent and reflect moving, iterative, unfinished forces that unsettle. Fluid seascapes open up horizons of possibility for how to conceptualize and enact ocean citizenship across the shifting currents and tides of more-than-human worlds.