| Summary: | Specialization: English Degree: Doctor of Philosophy Abstract: This study examines settler culture representations of the mixed-pine forests and the anomalous mountain pine beetle in the northern interior forests of British Columbia, Canada. Primary materials are discussed as potential or existing examples of art and literature as which contributes to BC northern interior bioregional culture. The primary sources include settler memoirs, a back to the land narrative, interviews with nine settler culture residents, and contemporary poetry, installation art, and drawing set in the BC northern interior. This project examines the anomalous mountain pine beetle population of 2004 – 2011 in the context of a culture focused on resource extraction, and postulates that the anomalous mountain pine beetle brings unique, if unsettling, challenges to the development of a sustainable bioregional culture in the BC northern interior. Bioregionalism is the practice of attaching to and learning and living in a home bioregion with the intention of developing ecologically and socially sustainable culture and reinhabiting formerly ecologically harmed or otherwise altered ecosystems. This study brings the ideas of bioregionalism to a colonized state and recognizes the complexity of bioregionalism in a politically and ecologically complex region. To this end, this project addresses settler culture disregard for indigenous land rights and knowledge. Since a bioregion is a cultural as well as a biological ecology, this study acknowledges the ongoing repression and genocide of indigenous people and First Nations culture in British Columbia. Further, contemporary and historical settler culture art and literature do not adequately address indigenous land claims and colonial violence, but do show potential for creative alternatives to reductive ecological relationships.
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