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Book Review
| The Archive of Place: Unearthing the Pasts of the Chilcotin Plateau. By William J. Turkel. Vancouver and Toronto: UBC Press, 2007. xxvi + 322 pp. Nature History Society Series. Illustrations, notes, tables, maps, bibliography, glossary, toponymic index, general index. Cloth $85.00.
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| In this unorthodox and intriguing book, William Turkel uses the Chilcotin Plateau, an arid and sparsely settled region of west-central British Columbia, to ask a series of questions about how we acquire and use knowledge of the past. In particular, he is interested in "material evidence of place," and how it interacts with "representational evidence" (myths, stories, and histories) to create meaning. |
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Part 1 considers how knowledge of the geological, ecological, and First Nations pasts were used to bolster property rights in the context of a controversial mine development. Part 2 focuses on the attempt to build a trail tracing the route of eighteenth century explorer Alexander Mackenzie. Trail supporters had "representations"—Mackenzie's maps and his journal—which they wished to set down in place. But Mackenzie had traveled but one route in a vast network used by the Tsilhqot'in people. These "grease trails" (a major trade good was Oolichan fish oil) anchored "systems of understandings, ways to negotiate with others ...; shared ideas about travel, trade, and usufruct rights," in other words, a whole cultural and political system. Controversy arose, Turkel explains, as a problem of "ground truth." There was a gap between the multiple meanings embedded in this place and the univocal representation favored by the trail builders. |
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Part 3 considers the Chilcotin War. In 1864 a group of Tsilhqot'in tried to protect their territory by ambushing and killing several members of a road building crew. From this incident developed a discourse of the Chilcotin as a dark and violent landscape, a form of "place fetishism" that was then used to justify taking land and putting the Tsilhqot'in on reserves. The way the place was imagined, concludes Turkel, shaped its history. |
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In this last section, Turkel moves from exploring stories attached to specific, identifiable places—Fish Lake, the grease trails—to stories about the entire region. Perhaps as a result, the links between representation and material evidence, so solid in earlier sections, slip a bit. The Tsilhqot'in (as Turkel acknowledges) were subject to the same overwhelming pressures, driven by colonial hunger for land, as were First Nations people elsewhere in British Columbia. Just how the memory of the Chilcotin War eased the process of dispossession is not made entirely clear. |
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Turkel shies away from the overarching conclusions about place and its representations that one might expect. Nevertheless this is an engaging and rewarding book. Like much recent work in British Columbia history, it writes First Nations people into the general history of the province, a hugely important project for North American history more generally. Environmental historians' tendency to use science as authoritative knowledge is challenged by the presentation of science as a set of discourses tied to particular stakeholders. As important is Turkel's use of the concept of place. An amalgam of the material and the representational, the natural and the human, place allows Turkel to move some way toward transcending the old human-environment dichotomy that bedevils the writing of environmental history. |
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Turkel is, finally, an engaging writer, and this book may be safely given to upper-year undergraduates. Their environmental history, ethnohistory, and Canadian history professors would benefit from close attention as well. |
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James Murton is assistant professor in the Department of History at Nipissing University, North Bay, Ontario. His most recent publication is Creating a Modern Countryside: Liberalism and Land Resettlement in British Columbia (UBC Press, 2007). His current project, funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, examines the Canadian role in the British empire food system prior to World War II. |
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