In episode 57 of Nature’s Past, a podcast on Canadian environmental history, three historians based outside of Canada explain their research and reasons for studying Canadian environmental history to Sean Kheraj.
Affrica Taylor, Veronica Pacini-Ketchabaw, Sandrina de Finney, and Mindy Blaise edit and introduce a special section on “Inheriting the Ecological Legacies of Settler Colonialism.” The three essays that follow ponder the question of ecological inheritance in the settler colonial contexts of Canada and Australia, cognizant of the fact that settler colonialism remains an incomplete project.
In this article for a special section on “Inheriting the Ecological Legacies of Settler Colonialism,” Lesley Instone and Affrica Taylor engage with the figure of the Anthropocene as the impetus for rethinking the messy environmental legacies of Australian settler colonialism.
In this article for a Special Section on “Inheriting the Ecological Legacies of Settler Colonialism,” Veronica Pacini-Ketchabaw and Fikile Nxumalo relate raccoon-child-educator encounters to consider how raccoons’ repeated boundary-crossing and the perception of raccoons as unruly subjects might reveal the impossibility of the nature/culture divide. They do so through a series of situated, everyday stories from childcare centers in Canada.
In this article for a Special Section on “Inheriting the Ecological Legacies of Settler Colonialism,” Alexander R. D. Zahara and Myra J. Hird explore the ways in which western and Inuit cosmologies differentially inform particular relationships with the inhuman, and “trash animals” in particular. They compare vermin control practiced in Canada’s waste sites with the freedom of ravens to explore waste sites within Inuit communities, arguing that waste and wasting exist within a complex set of historically embedded and contemporaneously contested neo-colonial structures and processes.
