Assembling Infrastructure, Detotalizing Communities: Provincial Infrastructure as Situated History and Landscape in British Columbia

Summary

Investigation of the material, spatial and temporal distributedness of large-scale, infrastructure projects holds significant potential to lay bare histories of underlying political rationales and practices that challenge overtly utilitarian narratives of public welfare and economic good. This paper investigates the differential experience and perception of a sample of state-initiated or sanctioned infrastructure projects (e.g., Hydro power lines and substations, pipelines, highways and railroads) on First Nations and non-First Nations communities in southern interior region of British Columbia. I examine 19th through 21st century intersections of settlement and other places with those of state-imposed or sponsored infrastructure as situated histories. The detotalizing effects of large-scale infrastructural projects and their conscious and unconscious rendering of ethno-centric political rationales on First Nation’s settlement communities is ongoing in the face of multi-sited resistance, including community-initiated heritage management. Ironically, today, archaeological practices, situated in late 20th Century normative systematics and the constraining objectives of compliance-initiated archaeological field projects (often undertaken in the interests of furthering large-scale infrastructure), unwittingly contribute to both reductive understandings of the region’s rich pre-colonial past and an overly biased sample of the archaeological record, one in which in which past cultural landscapes are analytically difficult to conceive.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 83rd Annual Meeting, Washington, DC (2018)

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 21710