Research Question

Research Question, due Feb. 16 

Based on this preliminary work, formulate a research question to drive the remainder of your data collection and analysis.

A good research question should be

- Narrow v. Broad

- an outline of what is to be studied

- passing the So What? test

- researchable

Research question v1: Is The Canadian Mountain as constructed by Canadian nationalism relevant to the mountain memories held by diasporic people who no longer dwell in the mountains of BC? 

-fails the so what? test

Research question v2: How does the reinforcement of The Canadian Mountain for Canadian nationalist imagery produce displacement and cause internal diasporas?

- can be narrower

Research question v3: What is the difference between the ways Canadian nationalist reinforcement of The Canadian Mountain image has produced Nikkei and Indigenous displacement?

- how is this researchable?

Object Social/Cultural Context

Object Social/Cultural Context, due Feb 9

How has your object or objects like it figured in cultural processes? How is it used? When is it used? How does its use vary with audience? What different meanings does it convey in different cultural contexts, in different spaces, and/or for different audiences?

The Mountains of BC are perhaps more a symbol succinctly summarized as The Canadian Mountain.  I say this because of how they are figured in the cultural process of nationalism. The mountains of BC become The Canadian Mountain through tourism campaigns, advertising Canada as a destination of choice for travelers, exploiting the awe and adventure non-mountain dwellers associate with mountains in general. If you search ‘Canada’ in a search engine set on retrieving only images, the first page will produce pictures of the Canadian flag, the map of Canada, and photos of mountains. Even though mountain terrain currently makes up only a small percentage of the ecosystems enclosed within Canadian borders, somehow, the mountains (for the most part located in BC) have come to mean Canada, more so than any other landscape. On the official tourism website of the Canadian Tourism Commission (an agency of the Government of Canada) http://www.canada.travel/selectCountry.html, the first page is filled with a photo of a skier, snow flying, and yes, mountains and more mountains stretching into the background.

The Canadian Mountain has also been taken up and resymbolized. Actually, it would make sense this process happened first before Canadian tourism picked up on it. North America being metaphorically referred to as Gold Mountain is a process that Chinese migrants started in the mid 1800s. With the onset of several gold rushes within the US and Canadian Rockies, as well as the nation building activities of the time such as the construction of the cross-Canada (and US) railway systems and subsequent logging and mining industries helping support the railway, North America was progressively pictured across the Pacific as a land in which to work and a land in which to prosper. And Gold Mountain was for the most part, a temporary space in which to make one’s fortune and eventually come back across the Pacific to retire and share the wealth with family.

So in both the tourism and early migrant worker context, The Canadian Mountain is used to attract temporary inhabitance to the nation. This message of temporary inhabitance reminds me of the sentiments surrounding Japanese-Canadian (from here on in referred to as Nikkei) incarceration in The Canadian Mountain. Underlying the war-time paranoia and xenophobia was a deeper xenophobic racism that had been nagging at the Nikkei ever since they started settling along the west coast in 1877. Amid anti-Asian riots, and laws barring Nikkei from voting and equal access to industrial fishing equipment (many were employed as fishermen), a racism against them thrived and was determined to squeeze them out of their jobs and their homes. The war was an opportune time to for Canada to achieve goal while maintaining a ‘colorblind’ peaceful image as a nation. Instead of pointing a finger at a particular group and saying, out – we don’t like your face…Canada could cry ‘national security’ and relocate over 90% of the Nikkei population to remote ghost towns (left over from gold rush days) in the mountains of BC (and also on the sugar beet farms of Alberta, working as free labour).

Object Historical Context

Who owned your object and/or similar objects? How has its ownership changed over time? What have its owners used this object for? Has your object traveled? What has been its historical route? How does interacting with the object shape your impression of it? How does its current use(s) relate to its uses in the past?

NOTE: I've had a change of concept from the 'rocky mountain range' to a more site specific object in the popular imagination that I will henceforth refer to as 'the BC mountains' or 'the mountains of BC'.

Mountains of BC are actually an agglomerate of separately classified ranges: the Cascade Range, the Coast Mountains, the Columbia Mountains, the Insular Mountains, Interior Mountains, Saint Elias Mountains, Vancouver Island Ranges, and more.

  

More research for more detailed and accurate description is needed here, but so far, the original peoples or at least the ones inhabiting the BC mountains before European contact with the continent, have been classified by archeologists as Northwest Coast, Plateau, Plains and the majority being Sub-Arctic Athapascan. I would like to know what Indigenous knowledge says about the first peoples in these areas and how they came to be there.

Today the First Nations who’s territory language areas are related to the BC mountain ranges are[i];

the Tagish,

the Tutchone,

the Inland TLingit,

the Tahltan,

the Dene-thah,

the Nisga'a,

the Gitxsan

the Sekani,

the Dunne-za,

the Nat'ooten,

the Wet'suwet'en,

the Dakelhne,

the Saulteaux Cree,

the Secwepemc,

the Stoney,

the Ktunaza Kinbasket,

the Xaadas Haida,

the Tsimshian,

the Haisla,

the Heiltsuk,

the Oweekeno,

the Kwakwaka’wakw,

the Tsilhqot’in,

the Stl’atl’imx,

the Nlaka’pamux,

the Nuu-chah-nulth,

the Ditidaht,

the Homalco,

the Klahoose,

the Sliammon,

the Comox,

the Qualicum,

the Se’shalt,

the Sne-Nay-Muxw

the Squamish,

the Quwutsun’,

the Sto:lo

the Semiahmoo,

the Tsleil-Waututh,

the Musqueam,

the Tsawwassen,

the T’Sou-ke,

the Esquimalt,

the Songhees,

the Saanich,

the Coquitlam, and

the Okanagan.

To look specifically at the Coast Mountains and Squamish traditional territory as an example, currently the owners or more accurately, relatives of the mountains within are Sub-alpine fir, mountain hemlock, black bear, grizzly bear, mountain goat, elk, deer, snowshoe hare, yellow-bellied marmot, heath and meadow alpine plants, Canada goose, grouse, ptarmigan, and salmon[ii]. The Squamish people have used the area for hunting, fishing, and gathering in temporary settlements in the summer for traditional use. Specifically, the Coast Salish people – of whom the Squamish people are a part – hunt Xwuxwelken[iii] (mountain goat) at the highest altitudes, including in the Ch’ich’iyu’y Elxwikn area mountains known by Vancouverites as ‘the Lions’[iv]. Hunting Xwuxwelken necessitates using other aspects of the mountains such as the rivers to bathe in often, cedar boughs to rub the hunter’s body in, and Xwuxwelken’s wool either from sheddings or from a blanket passed down from older hunters – all in order to keep Xwuxwelken from smelling the hunter while being tracked. Wind direction, large rocks and other hiding places, and cliffs to drive Xwuxwelken off of were also instrumental mountain elements used by the hunter[v]. In turn, blankets made from Xwuxwelken’s wool have held high ceremonial value and at potlatches have been distributed as a sign of wealth (Ibid).

When in the late 1700s with the beginning of European contact and colonial war, small pox epidemics killed 30% and later 50% of the Indigenous population in BC. This shift in population certainly shifted ‘ownership’ and use of the mountains. Since then many different people have lived in and used these mountains including British and American mining companies searching for various minerals including coal, diamonds, and gold. Forestry is another industry making its profit from the BC mountains. Migrant Chinese, South Asian, Japanese and freed diasporic African people have also been a part of the mining and forestry operations in these mountains. It was specifically the migrant Chinese who named the entire North American continent as ‘Gold Mountain’, a literal and metaphorical place of financial wealth and a desired migration spot. Indigenous people have continued to live and hunt among the BC mountains, as well as being employed in the above mentioned economic industries.

Specifically, it was the gold rushes in the 1800s that saw many towns spring up in the many mountain ranges. However, with the end of the rushes in the 1900s, many towns were abandoned and remained either empty or only sparsely populated and known as ‘ghost towns’ until the 1941 mass incarceration of Japanese-Canadians in these remote mountain towns. Meant as jail sites, these ghost towns were used by the interned Japanese-Canadians to build houses, and a new tradition of maa-take (pine mushroom) hunting formed, and considered these hard-to-get mushrooms a delicacy. Today they sell in the grocery store or at specialty markets for upwards of $40.00 per pound as they cannot be farmed, but merely harvested in their natural environment largely free of human contact.

After the 1946 release of the internees, since they were denied permission to move back to their homes on the west coast of BC, many Japanese-Canadian families stayed behind in the mountain towns, and today make up a notable facet of BC mountain population. The mountains remain in the nation’s imagination, as popular images of remoteness. Tourism ads promoting Canada as a travel destination highlight BC’s mountains and associate them with the ‘natural beauty’ and ruggedness that constructs the Canadian international image. Currently, in addition to all the activities already mentioned, the mountains are being used as recreation sites for hiking, sport fishing, skiing, and other winter sports. In the previously referenced Squamish territory, a world-known luxury resort at Whistler has been built by a private company and is being run in tandem with outdoor sports at Whistler and surrounding mountains. Many other ski resorts have been built in the mountains, and most recently due to the Vancouver 2010 Winter Olympics site in the mountains, much media attention has been given to the Sun Peaks resort and its degradation and destruction of Secwepemc traditional territory.

Being in the mountains from time to time in my life my impressions of them have changed. Within them, they no longer become a national symbol. Everything is very localized when you are inside. Especially being descended from survivors of internment, interacting with the mountains in BC make me think of family and familiarity, something wholly detached from nationalism. In fact, being in the mountains triggers/heightens a kind of anti-nationalism in me, hearing the silence of a people-less stretch reflects the emptiness left from the brutal colonization and purposeful extraction of Indigenous populations from these ranges.

---

[i] http://www.kstrom.net/isk/maps/cultmap.html

[ii] From “Alpine Archaeology and Oral History of the Squamish”. Squamish Nation & Rudy Reimer (2003). In Archaeology of Coastal British Columbia: Essays in Honor of Phillip M. Hobler. Roy L. Carlson (ed). SFU Archaeology Press, Burnaby BC. P47.

[iii] Where indigenous language has been provided to name that which is related to the indigenous population referenced, the indigenous language name is privileged to stay true to the relation. English translations are provided after the term in brackets.

[iv] Alpine Archaeology and Oral History of the Squamish. P49.

[v] Alpine Archaeology and Oral History of the Squamish. P49-50.

object description

"Describe your object’s materiality (e.g., size, weight, design, style, and decoration) and mode of production in the most precise language possible. What is your object made of? How was it made? List and describe relevant production methods. When was it made? Where was it made? How much did your object cost when it was made? How much did it cost to make your object?"

My object is immense in size. It is over four thousand eight hundred and thirty kilometers long, crosses two countries, and the tallest point of it being four thousand four hundred and one meters above sea level. Large dramatic collisions of tectonic plates and the slow melting and refreezing of glaciers have helped produce my object. From a distance, parts of my object have been described as looking like a woman's back, two lions, two sisters, teeth, a wall, the heavens. Parts of my object are covered in a green carpeting of coniferous trees, other parts are black and grey stone, while others still are the brown remnants of land slides where part of its face has slipped away. Most famously, my object is known for the glaciers resting in its uppermost regions. No one really agrees on when my object was made, but the range 80 to 55 million years ago crops up in discussion. It was made all between the Laird River in BC and the Rio Grande in New Mexico. When it was made, no people were around to evaluate it. When people discovered it, it's cost still couldn't be defined outside of the cost of life for endless generations, as it became sustenance and people, their children, their grandchildren, their children's grandchildren and so on. I also can't comment on what it cost to make the object, I imagine it cost millions of organisms their lives in the earthquakes that shifted the plates and the ice ages that spurred the glacial movement. I suppose my object, the Rocky Mountain Range, raises some interesting questions about production and initial cost. 

facilitation environments and re-memory in Turan and Tolia-Kelly's articles

    Turan’s article surveys the homes of four Palestinian Americans to document their ‘facilitation environments’ (real places created by displaced peoples through objects that evoke their collective identity, and usually also collective action) using the “transitional objects” theory of Donald W. Winnicott for relating material objects to dislocated people’s efforts of easing their transition to a new place of residence.  Turan structures the paper around interviews, picking up on themes within each interview that reinforce objects as gathering elements through their relation to humanity, or the evolving “material confirmation of the existence of Palestinians people [sic]” (Turan): one interviewee, Warda, comments on the Ramallah regional dress (not her family's regional dress) as being a thing whose invention becomes necessary away from home as a marker of identity: and she does not like the dress but lends it as a more ‘authentic’ home setting for her guests. Here the tension being address by Warda’s interview is who one performs their identity for and why. As well, Winnicott’s ‘transnational objects’ theory is being addressed, in that later generations experience these objects not specifically as provisions of comfort to east transition for themselves, but rather as providing a sense of continuity.
    Concerning in this article, is that though the Palestinians the author used are quoted as being eager participants in hopes to bring "greater attention to their cause", the history backgrounder of displacement that the author gives is unexplained and does not do ‘their cause’ justice: "1.4 million Palestinians were dispossessed and more than 10,000 homes were confiscated" by some invisible force for some mysterious reasons unknown to humankind? As well, here in mentioning the ""intifada" ...against Israeli occupation that began in 1987" the reader is left without the reason for uprising, and the essential injustice of the settlements being illegal in international law. It is disconcerting that the Palestinian participants have been swindled out of their anticipated trade-off, the author’s ethics being questionable.
    Later, however, the author writes a particularly provocative section about interviewing Mariam Haddad. Haddad talks about the disconnect between her image of her ethnicity passed down through objects and the popular image she learned she was i.e. kids throwing rocks...and the disparity in awareness between her and the other kids who'd say "I am Scotch," "I am Irish," "We are Polish" or "My grandparents survived the Holocaust." The popular images of these identities match more directly with the objects of identity the people have had passed down to them.   The urgency of the objects being a "material confirmation of the existence of Palestinians people [sic]" is made very apparent through these statements.


In Tolia-Kelly’s article, rather than focusing on dispossessed people, uses ‘post-colonial’ groups of South Asian women living in North London to illustrate the home as a site of memory activation, interpreted through Toni Morrison’s theory of re-memory (which can be memories of others told to you, absorbed by daily life, not just a linear narrative of events that make the self, i.e. re-memories of slavery experienced socially and manifest materially and collectively among the African-American community). The article is structured around objects (the mandir/home shrine, and crafts/curios) that function as stages for emitting the vernacular history of this marginalized group who’s been excluded from official recorded history.
    A few pieces are missing in this paper structurally in linking the object analysis to the section on ‘race politics of culture’. Here the author has a confused understanding of double-consciousness exampling "Black artists, writers and musicians have engaged with the 'doubleness' of being the heart of the West, but figered as 'other' within that nation's history and society" (322) – where double consciousness speaks more to the consciousness one has of one’s self on top of the consciousness one has of how the white world sees/positions the one.  This is not addressed in the essay. Concurrently, the author glosses over the different ways that British South Asians have been constituted as black citing political alliances between black and South Asian Brits, essentialist counter-arguements, and 'new ethnicities': However, what is lacking is the linkage of this term’s complexity with the author’s sample heavily influenced by East African South Asians and the intensely divisive colonial heirarchy between blacks and South Asians in East Africa, making it unclear how this section is linked to the rest of the paper.
    Yet the author does do a good job of illustrating the evolving of meaning in objects with the first focus on the mandirs (home shrines) of Hindu households. They contain not only metonymical symbols from India i.e. water from the Ganga or incense dust from India's shrines (re-memory), but family objects which symbolize moments of the family's life, allowing the shrine to be used as a site for tracing family history. Here the significance of the shrine grows in time and with collection of objects within it while the daily viewing of a mandir triggers memories and produce new meanings and memories of the families. It becomes a site of cultural education and reference points.


Questions:

According to Turan and Winnicott, facilitation environments are constructed can claim collective identity, often associated with a sense of political consciousness and collective action. While making the creator feel less displaced, is it possible for facilitated environments to displace other people? Examples?


This one is particularly personal to me, and I find it a bit amusing. In reading this scenario please think about the idea in Tolia-Kelly’s paper - ‘re-memory’ and the creation of the collective and individual self: Random person is introduced to me and starts telling me about how her boyfriend is really into learning ‘all about’ Japanese culture. She says, ‘he’s so into it, he’s more Japanese than Japanese people!’ (Implied here is that the boyfriend is not Japanese himself). In defense of my ethnicity, I cry, ‘I highly doubt that,’ to which she unwaveringly responds, ‘no! it’s true! He is more Japanese than Japanese people themselves!’. I continue to cry, ‘But no! It is layers and layers of history that create a people – not going to language classes and attending Anime conventions!’ Is there any saliency to either of our arguments?

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