Creative and Critical Studies, Faculty of (Okanagan)
DSpace
UBCO
Donald, Madeline Carroll
Doctor of Philosophy - PhD
University of British Columbia
This thesis is an investigation into human modes and methods of interaction with Okanagan riparian habitats. In it I tell two stories: 1) a story of doing research with riparian places, and 2) a story of a particular riparian place. The first story is about, and part of, research done by me, a visitor-scholar (non-Indigenous to this place), and prioritizes the ethics of multi-being relations and multimodality in its formulation and communication. The second story explores the riparian place forming in the margins of Brandt’s Creek, at the bottom of the Okanagan Valley, in syilx territory and Kelowna, British Columbia, Canada. The riparian here is in the process of becoming, a product of its unruly heritage and the spectral ecologies that both precede and co-exist with it. The research process described is one of creating thickness in relationships to place—both mine and others’—by layering varied ways-of-being and doing. These methods were learned and developed in multi-being conversation with and about the riparian and create an experience of corrugation, which amplifies attention in a time and place by making connections to prior experiences. In the semi-arid Okanagan, riparian habitats are the wettest places a non-aquatic being can be. As such, riparian places are important meshworks of relations and possibilities for habitation. They are also places of categorical inconsistency—seasonally contingent, neither land nor water—made marginal through settler colonial and capitalist practices of invasion and acquisition, and an imaginary of place that relies on place-as-property. These two stories explore modes and methods for the analysis of settler colonial socio-ecologies—manifestations of relations between humans and the multi-being and diverse material worlds in which we live—with a focus on living sustainably in and among wetness.
Human-riparian relating at valley-bottom: Modes, methods, and marshes by Madeline Carroll Donald BA&Sc, McGill University, 2015 MSc, Wageningen University and Research, 2019 A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY in THE COLLEGE OF GRADUATE STUDIES (Interdisciplinary Studies) (Sustainability) THE UNIVERSITY OF BRITISH COLUMBIA (Okanagan) May 2024 © Madeline Carroll Donald, 2024 ii The following individuals certify that they have read, and recommend to the College of Graduate Studies for acceptance, a dissertation entitled: Human-riparian relating at valley-bottom: Modes, methods, and marshes submitted by Madeline Carroll Donald in partial fulfillment of the requirements of the degree of Doctor of Philosophy . Dr. Greg Garrard, Faculty of Creative and Critical Studies Supervisor Dr. Natalie Forssman, Irving K. Barber Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences Co-Supervisor Dr. John Wagner, Irving K. Barber Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences Supervisory Committee Member Dr. Tess Lea, Irving K. Barber Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences Supervisory Committee Member Dr. Virginie Magnat, Faculty of Creative and Critical Studies University Examiner Dr. Catriona Sandilands, York University External Examiner iii abstract This thesis is an investigation into human modes and methods of interaction with Okanagan riparian habitats. In it I tell two stories: 1) a story of doing research with riparian places, and 2) a story of a particular riparian place. The first story is about, and part of, research done by me, a visitor-scholar (non-Indigenous to this place), and prioritizes the ethics of multi-being relations and multimodality in its formulation and communication. The second story explores the riparian place forming in the margins of Brandt’s Creek, at the bottom of the Okanagan Valley, in syilx territory and Kelowna, British Columbia, Canada. The riparian here is in the process of becoming, a product of its unruly heritage and the spectral ecologies that both precede and co-exist with it. The research process described is one of creating thickness in relationships to place—both mine and others’—by layering varied ways-of-being and doing. These methods were learned and developed in multi-being conversation with and about the riparian and create an experience of corrugation, which amplifies attention in a time and place by making connections to prior experiences. In the semi-arid Okanagan, riparian habitats are the wettest places a non-aquatic being can be. As such, riparian places are important meshworks of relations and possibilities for habitation. They are also places of categorical inconsistency—seasonally contingent, neither land nor water—made marginal through settler colonial and capitalist practices of invasion and acquisition, and an imaginary of place that relies on place-as-property. These two stories explore modes and methods for the analysis of settler colonial socio-ecologies—manifestations of relations between humans and the multi-being and diverse material worlds in which we live—with a focus on living sustainably in and among wetness. iv lay summary Riparian habitats grow in margins, alongside moving bodies of water, like creeks. In places without much rain, like the Okanagan Valley, in syilx territory, these habitats form important pockets of wetness and shelter. Settler colonial and capitalist priorities have damaged many riparian places. This research is curious about human relationship building with these places, including my own. It involved walking, talking, taking photos, thinking hard, and making puppets. The questions asked and answered here are about: 1) how to do ecologically specific research in this place as a visitor-scholar, for I am not syilx; 2) what happens when different modes of engagement are used to relate to riparian places; and 3) a story of the Northend Marsh, which was collected into, and presently flows as, a ditch called Brandt's Creek, through the city of Kelowna, at the bottom of the Okanagan Valley. v preface This research began as part of a project cluster referred to as “Enhancing Ecosystem Sustainability: a Syilx / Settler Science Collaboration,” which was lead by Dr. Jeannette Armstrong and Dr. Lael Parrott. It continued through association with Social Science and Humanities Research Council funded projects titled WaterWays (p.i. Dr. Aleksandra Dulic) and Kelownafornia: Cultures of Nature of the Okanagan Valley (p.i. Dr. Greg Garrard). The research program detailed here was designed, performed, and written by Madeline Donald. One portion of this thesis, “Part 6: fringe natures,” was co-written with Dr. Astrida Neimanis for publication in the Routledge “Handbook on Gender and Water Governance” edited by Tatiana Acevedo-Guerrero, Lisa Bossenbroek, Irene Leonardelli, Margreet Zwarteveen, and Seema Kulkarni (in press). Madeline is the first author listed on the published chapter and the research work was split equally between Madeline and Dr. Neimanis; the nature of the collaboration is detailed in footnote 170. vi table of contents abstract ...................................................................................................................................... iii lay summary ............................................................................................................................... iv preface. ....................................................................................................................................... v table of contents ......................................................................................................................... vi list of figures ................................................................................................................................. x 0 acknowledgements .......................................................................................................... 1 1 introduction ..................................................................................................................... 3 1.1 overview ...................................................................................................................... 3 1.2 *disciplinarity and positioning ....................................................................................... 5 1.3 Questions & outputs ...................................................................................................10 1.3.1 theory .....................................................................................................................12 1.3.2 place study & case study.........................................................................................13 1.3.3 photo-text ...............................................................................................................13 1.3.4 giant riparian character puppets ..............................................................................16 1.3.5 gratitude .................................................................................................................16 1.4 thesis structure & theoretical framework ......................................................................18 1.4.1 organization ............................................................................................................18 1.4.2 the Episodes ...........................................................................................................20 1.4.3 the Chapters ...........................................................................................................23 1.4.4 the Threads ............................................................................................................27 1.4.5 formatting ...............................................................................................................28 2 presearch .......................................................................................................................31 2.1 the ethic .....................................................................................................................33 2.2 educating riparian attention .........................................................................................35 vii 2.2.1 the education of attention ........................................................................................35 2.2.2 the practice ............................................................................................................38 2.3 k’əmcnitkw ..................................................................................................................41 3 habits of the Okanagan ...................................................................................................44 3.1 an overview ................................................................................................................44 3.2 vocabularies ...............................................................................................................49 3.3 place-as-property .......................................................................................................51 3.4 the riparian .................................................................................................................54 4 corrugation .....................................................................................................................57 4.1 educating riparian attention cont. ................................................................................57 4.1.1 process, protocols, and platforms ............................................................................57 4.1.2 alt-text ....................................................................................................................61 4.1.3 repetition ................................................................................................................67 4.2 Mini-dramas ...............................................................................................................73 5 inhabiting the Northend Marsh ........................................................................................76 5.1 the Northend Marsh ....................................................................................................77 5.2 the marsh in/and the (an)archive .................................................................................78 5.2.1 when the boundary dissolves, an example ...............................................................86 5.3 a waste place by unruly heritage ..................................................................................86 6 fringe natures .................................................................................................................94 6.1 introduction ................................................................................................................95 6.2 Semá:th X_ó:tsa: from Semá:th to settler colonial water governance .............................98 6.3 imagining Semá:th X_ó:tsa otherwise ........................................................................ 102 6.3.1 bodies of water ..................................................................................................... 102 6.3.2 transing water bodies ............................................................................................ 104 6.3.3 Semá:th X_ó:tsa as fringe nature ........................................................................... 108 viii 6.4 water governance for an expanded littoral zone ......................................................... 112 7 Brandt’s Creek’s habituation, becoming riparian ............................................................ 114 7.1 the Sections ............................................................................................................. 115 7.1.1 Section 1 .............................................................................................................. 116 7.1.2 Section 2 .............................................................................................................. 118 7.1.3 Section 3 .............................................................................................................. 119 7.1.4 Section 4 .............................................................................................................. 120 7.1.5 Section 5 .............................................................................................................. 124 7.1.6 Section 6 .............................................................................................................. 126 7.1.7 Section 7 .............................................................................................................. 127 7.2 a swampy aesthetic .................................................................................................. 128 7.3 becoming more riparian ............................................................................................ 132 8 Riparian ReAnimation ................................................................................................... 135 8.1 plotting and planning ................................................................................................. 136 8.1.1 Round 1, 2020 ...................................................................................................... 137 8.1.2 Round 2, 2022-2023 ............................................................................................. 140 8.1.3 a shift ................................................................................................................... 143 8.2 making in workshop, making Workshop ..................................................................... 144 8.3 puppets, created and animated ................................................................................. 148 9 more room ................................................................................................................... 153 9.1 What is an ethic for place-based inquiry as a visitor-scholar in this settler-colonial context? ............................................................................................................................... 153 9.2 How have people in the past, do people in the present, and might people in the future interact with and relate to the various ecologies of Brandt’s Creek and the Northend Marsh? .. 156 9.3 What does it look like to prioritize multimodality, mediation, and remediation, and what implications has this commitment had for this research? ........................................................ 157 10 glossary ....................................................................................................................... 159 ix Appendices.............................................................................................................................. 169 Appendix A: list of Mini-dramas ............................................................................................. 169 Appendix B: Brandt’s Creek biodiversity survey ..................................................................... 176 Works cited .............................................................................................................................. 181 x list of figures Figure 1: freshet……………………………………………………………………………………………4 Figure 2: cottonwoods…………………………………………………………………………………….9 Figure 3: Kelowna’s Northend Marsh and surroundings…………………………………………...….26 Figure 4: thesis structure……………………………………………………………………………...…30 Figure 5: commentary on the colour green…………………………………………………………….36 Figure 6: the Okanagan Valley…………………………………………………………………………..50 Figure 7: photograph anything…………………………………………………………………………..60 Figure 8: caption the photo………………………………………………………………………..…….60 Figure 9: “A Vision in Monochrome”………………………………………………………….…………67 Figure 10: a reflection on sharing……………………………………………………………………….72 Figure 11: Mini-dramas on display…………………………………………………………….………..75 Figure 12: the Northend Marsh, 1900ish……………………………………………………….………77 Figure 13: the Northend Marsh, 1938…………………………………………………….……………84 Figure 14: “CNR Rails Enter City Limits Today”……………………………………………….……….85 Figure 15: “New Industrial Section”……………………………………………………….……………88 Figure 16: the Northend Marsh, 1969………………………………………………………………….89 Figure 17: Brandt’s Creek’s unceremonious connection with Okanagan Lake, July 1977………….90 Figure 18: overflowing in the Sumas Valley…………………………………………………………….97 Figure 19: boundary (di)solutions…………………………………………………………...…………108 Figure 20: Brandt’s Creek study area……………………………………………………………..…..115 Figure 21: Section 1, train watching…………………………………………………………………..117 Figure 22: Section 1, revitalization plans………………………………………………………..…….117 xi Figure 23: Northend Neighbourhood Plan project boundary………………………………………..121 Figure 24: satellite view………………………………………………………………………….……..123 Figure 25: street view…………………………………………………………………………………..123 Figure 26: riding Fire……………………………………………………………………………………134 Figure 27: the cottonwood jingle…………………………………………………………………..…..138 Figure 28: materials collected………………………………………………………………..………..139 Figure 29: Painted Turtle and Rubber Boa……………………………………………………..……..141 Figure 30: Saskatoons……………………………………………………………………………….…149 Figure 31: a forest in a forest………………………………………………………………….……….152 Figure 32: taking things seriously…………………………………………………………….………..158 1 0 acknowledgements Dear Dad, I did it, I finished school! It took a while, but I’m done now. Thank you for believing in me enough to support me, and holding a sliver of doubt, and supporting me more. I’m writing to tell you about the last few years; we didn’t get to talk much about them. As you know, Moos and I moved back from the Netherlands so I could do this PhD within driving distance of you and Mom. That’s how we came to be in the Okanagan. It’s really different here than it is on the coast. So much less rain and lots of different plants—it’s a little bit like Petaluma actually. Some people even call it “Kelownafornia” or “Napa of the North.” The people of this place have cared for it beautifully. I’ve had some opportunities to learn from and with some of these people—often they identify as syilx, which I’ve been told is a word about different critters drinking water. Pretty cool etymology, right? I feel very grateful for those opportunities and the things I’ve learned while living here. At the university I got lucky to have a group of people supporting me in different ways that worked at different times. There was always someone to talk to when I needed it. COVID started pretty soon after we arrived here, so we couldn’t visit you as much as I thought we’d be able to. And then there were the series of atmospheric rivers that cut off the roads. You called and left a message to ask if we were okay in the storm. I was in a meeting; I’m sorry I missed your call. Thank you for checking in. The storm went right around us in the end. A friend and I wrote a chapter about the spectacle of the event though, probably because you drew my attention to it. The friends I have made here are so cool; I wish you could meet them all. They’ve been an amazing comfort through these tumultuous years. There are too many to name (lucky me!). One particularly became family, another teamed up with me to become mini-farmers. Someone even lived with Mom and River for a while. River’s not as much of a nuisance as he used to be. I promise. Plus, he and Mom are really cute together. Some of these friends I met while working on a big project that involved lots of planting baby trees as if they were octopuses. There I really learned a lot. It was so cool that they let me hang out with them. 2 Lots of my friends are artists too. Really, I’ve never met so many artists—they must cluster—they’re all so talented. Even the ones who don’t tell you they’re artists usually have some practice or another up their sleeve. It’s super neat. Since we’ve been here, I’ve gotten to do some pretty cool things. I helped start a lab, took a bunch of walks, house sat in a very windy and dramatic valley, trained with some fancy athletes, and communicated with a pen pal for the first time in my life. I also worked with a bunch of people to make some really big puppets. Gosh, that was an enormous project! So worth the effort though; we had a lot of fun. Recently a friend and I made a two-person support group for ourselves while thesis-writing. Turns out you really had that nailed—near weekly coffee “meetings” go a long way. Moos is doing well. He finally found a teaching job that he likes and is working really hard to do the best he can for his students. I’m really proud of him. You would be too. Even while teaching he manages to be the best ever support animal. If it weren’t for Moos and Mom I would definitely not be finished yet—maybe one day, but I know I’d be in big trouble if I made it to 50 and wasn’t done school—so it’s a darn good thing I have them around. That’s all for now. I love you. -Madi 3 1 introduction 1.1 overview In this place with little rain and a deceiving abundance of water (Wagner 2008; Rhenisch 2016), the places where land and water meet are particular. These are riparian habitats, the ecological assemblages that emerge alongside flowing bodies of water as “interfaces between terrestrial and aquatic systems” (Naiman, Décamps, and Pollock 1993, 209).1 Here in the Okanagan, home of the syilx—the Indigenous people of this place—wetness arrives primarily as snow in the cold months, collecting in the mountains’ forests to rest. When the weathers warm, the snow melts, slowly at first, then quicker, filling the streams, creeks, rivers, and ditches. Flowing down, always down. This quickening we call freshet (a phenomenon made ever quicker when, as a combined result of intense fires and clearcut logging, there are few trees to catch the snow in the first place). After gravity, there is a large lake, where water collects. This lake draws people here, to farm, to feast, to drink, to play, to settle. This we call Okanagan Lake. Traditionally, syilx people have lived in the hills in the slow-growing months—where water can be accessed as flows that find and create divots in the land—and moved throughout their territory in the months of harvest. The Europeans who were drawn to this place in the 19th century thought that all a bit of a hassle. They decided to settle at the bottom of the valley and snuggle up close to Okanagan Lake, the place where all the waters flow to, year-round (Armstrong, 2000; Rhenisch, 2021). These settlers brought with them agricultural practices of crop cultivation and animal husbandry. Agriculture, however, requires not just any water, but the right amount; too much or too little and plants don’t grow. So, ditches were dug, such that water would not “flood” the land.2 What they initially perceived to be land, however, was neither; it was, it is, a function of time and a question of 1 In the ecological sciences, terms like boundary, buffer, ecotone, littoral, and transition zone describe such interfaces. These are words with specific, if contested, definitions as ecological phenomena. Here I tend to preferentially use words from geography and ecological humanities scholarship, such as assemblage, in-between, margin, and fringe (see Part 6) to describe these riparian places. Words in the humanities are often used as “flexible, open signifiers, drawing readers through the charismatic and suggestive multiplicity of their referents” (Tsing et al. 2020a), this flexibility is something I embrace in my scholarship and find productive for transdisciplinary inquiry. While all words can be employed flexibly, I choose words and define the words I use in an effort to not alienate readers more used to fixed and firm ecological definitions. 2 See Emily O’Gorman’s books “Flood Country” (2012) and “Wetlands in Dry Land” (2021) for detailed examples of changing relationships with, and understandings of, floods, rivers, and floodplains in a settler colonial and agricultural context. 4 whether you’d best get around by canoe or foot. Kelowna, the Okanagan’s largest municipality, located a the bottom of a valley, between hills and lake, is a flood-plain: yes (this, water), and (that, land). The assertion of land here, water over there, is a story common to settler colonial land-making patterns, a story often underlined by anthropocentric and functionally impermeable infrastructure, which materializes the transition from a marshy, squelchy, seasonal “yes, and,” into one, or the other, water or land. In so doing, the in-between places—the riparian places, the marshy, swampy, and seasonally fluctuating places—suffer. Riparian habitats temper seasonal fluctuations. As places where trees grow tall, creating moistness and shade, making possible deciduous thriving, these ecological communities hold water in and as themselves, absorbing in times of plenty and releasing in scarcity, mitigating flood and drought. Figure 1: This is freshet, the most dramatic hydrological happening of the year in the Okanagan. This swelling of the waterways often goes unnoticed by dominant discourses, until it participates in a flood. On the left is a photo I took on a walk in the spring, of Bellevue Creek in Kelowna. The creek rushes by in a scoured -out channel, on its way to a new housing development downstream. On the right is a photo, taken by Joanne Gervais, of (from left to right) Annie Furman, me, and Ray Tonn, working on the puppet/costume/skirt Freshet at our very first Riparian ReAnimation event. This day, sitting on the ground giving Freshet a haircut, we created space for a conversation about wetness, waterways, inundation, and how flooding comes to be. 5 Enormous harm has come to the riparian through decisions to stay at valley-bottom year-round, and the anthropocentric infrastructures that made that possible (Ted Lea 2008). I use the past tense here intentionally, if this situation could ever be said to have worked, it is no longer working. An increasingly erratic climate and no end to clear cut logging and concrete pouring means, in many settled places, sustained year-round living at valley-bottom is becoming an unsustainably dramatic, and often catastrophic way of life. This research sits in the unruly heritage of this place and alongside bodies of water, looking toward a version of living sustainably here as humans, again. 1.2 *disciplinarity and positioning The research presented here and the dissertation you are reading came to be through a program at the University of British Columbia Okanagan entitled “Interdisciplinary Graduate Studies” in the theme of “Sustainability.” The university’s website describes this degree as “transcend[ing] conventional approaches, bringing together diverse perspectives, insights, tools, and techniques to seek solutions to the challenges of sustainability” (College of Graduate Studies n.d.). In many ways my experience has held true to that description; the many people and organizations who have supported this research have indeed made it possible for me, as an early-career researcher, to transcend conventional approaches and bring together diverse perspectives. Interdisciplinarity itself is many things. Fields are referred to as being interdisciplinary (Barry, Born, and Weszkalnys 2008), methods are coined in this space (Parker and Samuel 2019), and interdisciplinarity is said to exist in the recognition of value in antagonistic difference (Taddei and Haines 2019). In line with scholars such as Simon Penny, who acquiesce to using the term “loosely” (Penny 2009), in the case of this research, interdisciplinary is an accurate description only in its formulation as an umbrella term, encompassing interdisciplinarity, multidisciplinarity, and transdisciplinarity, even antidisciplinarity.3 3 Here I borrow Celia Lury’s efficient definitions of these first three terms: “Multidisciplinarity is understood to be an additive approach – using knowledge from more than one discipline which are not themselves transformed by being used in conjunction with one another. Transdisciplinarity aspires to be a more holistic approach and aims to displace disciplinary formations. Interdisciplinarity is characterized as interaction across and between disciplines. Importantly, this interaction is not oriented toward either a synthesis or a disappearance of disciplines. Instead, interdisciplinarity emerges through interferences between disciplines and between disciplines and other forms of knowledge” (2018, 1). Antidisciplinarity is a sort of fed-up-ness with the constraints of disciplinarity that comes up now and again, though seems to have little sticking power (Lugo 1997; Pickering 2010). 6 Personally, I came to participate in academic space without specificity, more discipline-agnostic than interdisciplinary. They called this undergraduate degree an “interfaculty program,” it amounted to a Bachelor of Arts & Science, and it was all about “the environment.” It wasn’t science and it wasn’t not science. We took core courses with malleable titles—such as “Society, Environment, and Sustainability,” “Environmental Research Design,” and “Geographical Excursion”—often taught by teams of faculty whose offices were hundreds of meters apart from one another. I learned to code in a class on the economics of happiness and about optimal foraging theory from a pipe-smoking, geographer-anthropologist with toes on only one of his two feet. One influential course, taken at the height of my climate grief (before that was a widely used term) was orchestrated by a philosopher, a lawyer, and a psychologist. In that class we were asked to read William Cronon’s (1996) essay “The trouble with wilderness: or, getting back to the wrong nature.” I remember my excitement over the idea that words didn’t always mean what you thought they meant. That excitement, I think, provided a foothold out of the melancholy. Some years later, bored with an essay assignment, I wrote a poem of rhyming couplets instead. Pleased with myself, I knocked on the professor’s door asking for five minutes of time to read the submission aloud. When I looked up from my paper there were tears in his eyes which he explained simply by saying, “this is why I do this job.” The program was at once rigorous and accommodating, allowing for those undisciplined enough to fit poorly elsewhere to keep going with their studies. It never felt necessary to choose one or two disciplines in which to settle; everything was mixed together and that was normal and flexible and homley. As a result, I did not learn—certainly not with a course schedule as murky and marvelous at that described above—to recognize the separations between disciplines. I figured that understanding would eventually come, but it never did. This circumstantial ignorance has been both liberating and embarrassing at times.4 The work I do now identifies linkages between inquiry and practice while bridging disciplinary discourses. I rely on perception, relationships, and communication as fundamental skills for my research. These skills are what make my research 4 This is one reason I have chosen not to identify the people I cite in this document with disciplinary markers. I am not only ill equipped to identify these markers, I also believe it is not my place to do so. How people identify—whether disciplinarily or with gender, race, (dis)ability, class—is a quintessentially personal question likely to change in time and/or depend on context (e.g. M. Y. Chen 2020; Mortimer-Sandilands 2005; Clark 2021). I have therefore, as a convention, used names only. Additional markers are included when necessary for the meaning of this text. 7 possible. What results is best described as transdisciplinary.5 I have become, it seems, a “transdisciplinary individual” (Augsburg 2014).6 While working towards a Master’s of Science in “Communication, Health, and Life Sciences,” I took one ethnobotany class. It was in that class that I was, for the first time, able to see myself doing research as a job: I like talking to people, hanging out with plants, and being outside. By way of that vision I sorted a situation that would allow me to do ethnobotanical research about how people move through and interact with their environments, environments I came to refer to as “cultivationscapes of affordances” (see Rietveld and Kiverstein 2014; M. Donald 2019). In 2017, testing the applicability of my plentiful-though-undisciplined archive of (theoretical) research skills, I organized, troubleshooted, and executed an ethnobotanical project about cacao agroforestry practitioners and their relationships with the plants among which they worked on the island of Trinidad. I was an unusual character in the space, asking odd questions, with the goal of contributing to operations that I could barely see into let alone participate in. I compiled ethnobotanical data, used analytical tools from ecological psychology, and created some socioecological theory for tropical agroforestry settings. And the project worked; so well, in fact, I hope to return to it in the near future. Transdisciplinarity has been lauded for its potential to contribute to ecologically focused research (Raphael 2019; Bubandt, Andersen, and Cypher 2022; Chilisa 2017; Pohl 2005; Cundill, Fabricius, and Marti 2005) and today, within the institutionalized academic context, many more learners have access to explicitly inter/transdisciplinary post-secondary education than was available in the past.7 While widely recognized as methodologically important, research describing the process and outcomes of transdisciplinarity have focused most often on 1) teams of researcher-practitioners as opposed to the transdisciplinary individual (Jacobs and Nienaber 2011), and 2) the process, not the 5 While this term is multiply interpretable by nature, a general overview and wide-ranging description was provided by the “Charter of Transdisciplinarity,” and adopted at the First World Congress of Trandisciplinarity, Convento da Arrábida, Portugal, November 2-6, 1994 (de Freitas, Morin, and Nicolescu 1994). 6 By tracing the contemporary currents of transdisciplinary scholarship, beginning with publications resulting from the First International Conference on Interdisciplinarity that took place in Paris in 1970, Augsburg defines four dimensions of the character know as the transdisciplinary individual: “(a) an appreciation of an array of skills, characteristics, and personality traits aligned with a transdisciplinary attitude; (b) acceptance of the idea that transdisciplinary individuals are intellectual risk takers and institutional transgressors; (c) insights into the nuances of transdisciplinary practice and attendant virtues; (d) a respect for the role of creative inquiry, cultural diversity, and cultural relativism” (2014, 233). 7 In education that takes place outside of an institutionalized academic context, disciplines are often beside the point and prefixal modifications unnecessary. 8 product. While all of the research presented in this thesis has been conducted in transdisciplinary and multi-being collaborations, the nature of the thesis as an artifact and output necessitates an individual author. I, Madeline Donald, am the person being assessed for this work and I will hold the degree that validates the process. The inclusion of this section on *disciplinarity is necessary due to this circumstance of single authorship. The identity of “transdisciplinary individual” is described by Augsburg (2014) as a role someone plays, to facilitate collaboration, not a default mode of being. The individual who is always already transdisciplinary appears to be an inherent contradiction in terms, yet here I am, and I’m not the only one.8 Not discerning, not being able to discern, the cleavages between disciplines in and through which I am operating has often caused communicative friction between myself and other scholars, as well as other people, who would simply like to know “what I do” or “what my research is about.”9 While “[e]very field knows which are the departments to come from or to go to, which are the hot topics, which theories can be mentioned in polite company, and in which journals one has to publish” (Schoenberger 2001, 368), and each discipline is a “conversational community” (Shotter 1997), no such parameters exists for transdisciplinary scholarship. There are no journals that conveniently collect the publications a given transdisciplinary individual is likely to find interesting or relevant. Instead, they/we follow citational trails, lean on key-word searches, and learn to find almost everything relevant in one way or another, identifying coherence and correspondences across difference.10, 11 8 While visiting the University of Exeter’s Penryn campus in the first winter of 2023, I mentioned to Caitlin DeSilvey, the professor of cultural geography hosting my visit, that I suspected myself to be of the first generation of scholar brought up through the academy in a transdisciplinary soup, as it has often been mentioned or implied to me that this is unusual. She promptly rejected this proposition, having graduated from her own soupy bachelor’s program a full two decades before I had from mine. 9 Once, at a gathering for Interdisciplinary Graduate Studies students, staff, and faculty I was asked which fields I combine in my research. I must have groaned audibly, for my supervisor, from metres away, chimed in to explain to the asker “she really doesn’t like to answer that question.” And while it is true that I often find myself tongue-tied by such questions, that does not stem from a disavowal of the value of naming and claiming disciplinary approaches, but instead from a lack of practice doing so. 10 The entire theoretical framework for my master’s thesis and a subsequent years-long collaboration (see M. Donald and Bruineberg 2022), for example, was developed from an accidental reading of a computer science paper’s abstract (Ryu and Monk 2009). 11 The way I interact with academic literature, for example, is distinct from what it could look like if I worked within a discipline, or even interdisciplinarily. Instead of keeping track of specific publications or venues, the material I read comes to me in two ways; either I search specifically for it using a keyword or phrase in a database or repository, or I have seen it cited elsewhere and pursue that specific piece for continued interest. Over the years I have developed a practice of downloading and saving anything that seems like it might one 9 My superpower, I am told, is identifying, creating, and nurturing relationships. This co-respondence across difference is a “way of knowing that is grounded in active, intimate, hands-on participation and personal connection” (Conquergood 2002, 146). These skills can be seen as an asset, and are often portrayed that way (Wickson, Carew, and Russell 2006; Augsburg 2014), though the circumstances that make them possible—flexibility, creativity, a touch of brazenness, and institutional and supervisory trust—can also be troublesome. Without a discursive norm or default vocabulary, it is easy to remain unaware of relevant conversations happening just outside of what you have read or been in conversation about, even within English language scholarship.12 It is day be relevant or interesting to my personal library. With thousands of digital files collected in this way, today I often search my own collection as a database first—an action that allows in-text search, as opposed to searching just abstracts or titles—before moving to online repositories. This practice makes reading like swimming in a pool with a selective overflow valve, the selection of literature like maintaining the pool’s infrastructure. I think of each paper I read as a glass of water and each book a bucket-full. The act of reading empties the vessel into the pool, either adding to the contents, flowing directly out as overflow (if irrelevant or uninteresting), or displacing some other content. My job is to swim competently in this pool. 12 This is the case for me, as an anglophone, with a high level of academic literacy and the privilege to have always had the option to study in my first language throughout my post-secondary schooling. Figure 2: These are cottonwoods. The image on the left is one I took of a particularly dramatic cottonwood alongside Munson Pond, in the valley-bottom Landmark neighbourhood of Kelowna. When I first met this tree, I was sure it was dead or dying , but no, it is just leaning a bit . The image on the right was taken by Ziv Wei in one of our early Riparian ReAnimation Workshops (Part 8). In it, Beats, a keen project collaborator (right) and I (left) are cutting and gluing cottonwood leaves for a life size (in diameter, not height) cottonwood puppet (see Mini-drama 24, page 135). 10 possible, for example, that all of the theory I introduce in this thesis has already been said/written, in language I did not know to look for, or a language I do not read.13 Similarly, for the transdisciplinary individual, it will never be possible to have a level of fluency with the bodies of work they draw on that is on par with who has had the experience of the recursion described in the Schoenberger quote above. This shortcoming does not imply that research from transdisciplinary scholars will always be subpar; instead, there must be different expectations for what it means to create and share quality research in transdisciplinary contexts. Graduate studies, particularly in programs that welcome or encourage transdisciplinary inquiry, make for a particular kind of room. Having room to explore connect dots, realize those dots don’t connect well and try another set, is a privilege. As written in Article 3 of the “Charter of Transdisciplinarity,” “[t]ransdisciplinarity does not strive for mastery of several disciplines but aims to open all disciplines to that which they share and to that which lies beyond them” (de Freitas, Morin, and Nicolescu 1994). That is what I’ve tried to do in this thesis. 1.3 Questions & outputs This is an investigation into human modes and methods of interaction with Okanagan riparian habitats. In what follows I tell two stories: 1) a story of doing research and 2) a story of a particular riparian place. Upon beginning my doctoral work at the University of British Columbia Okanagan, I was given the opportunity to slot my own research into a project cluster referred to as “Enhancing Ecosystem Sustainability: a Syilx / Settler Science Collaboration,” which intended to help heal the disruptions to the land and traditional socio-ecological relationships wrought by settler colonialism in the Okanagan and Columbia River Basins, and develop tools for resilience in the face of environmental change. This ambitious collaboration included an objective to integrate the restoration of riparian habitats with efforts to restore healthy salmon populations in the Okanagan River system (see Correia, Alexis, and Dulic 2024). My research was to be situated in and with the riparian habitats of Syilx Okanagan territory. Though only loosely defined at the beginning, I knew the project would require my asking questions of and in the riparian, communicating with both human and other-than-human beings. 13 That said, I also almost never look for research literature in the non-English languages I do read. Doing so would multiply an already overwhelming number of possible vocabularies and directions of inquiry. 11 However, having just arrived from far away, I was—I am—a visitor in this place, in the dual sense of being both non-Indigenous and newly arrived. Also, I had never spent time attending to riparian habitats anywhere, let alone here. This context formed my first Question: What is an ethic for ecologically specific, place-based14 inquiry as a visitor-scholar15 in this settler colonial context? As I tried to define a research project, a series of circumstances lead me to be working with media both familiar and new to me: photographs, wheelbarrows, text, papier mâché, conversation, and more. The multiplicity and coordination of these practices became a topic of much interest and lead to my second Question: What does it look like to prioritize multimodality, mediation, and remediation in place-based research, and what implications has this commitment had for this research? If I was going to do research, especially this research in this place, I wanted to think hard about how to go about it, both ethically and practically.16 All of that thinking and doing lead to the theoretical, visual-textual, and community art contributions presented here. These outputs tell the first story, the one about me, doing this research, in this place. The second story is different. The second story is location (as opposed to habitat) specific, historical, and optimistic. Told through a local place study, the second story answers the Question: How have people in the past, do people in the present, and might people in the future interact with and relate to the various ecologies of Brandt’s Creek and the Northend Marsh?17 14 As described in the glossary, place is an important concept here. While I acknowledge the long conversation about place and space in the field of geography (Casey 1996; Janz 2017; Martin 2014; Tuan 1977), its intricacies are not within the scope of this thesis and my choice of term has been primarily influenced by other literatures (e.g. MacDonald and Wiebe 2011; Chambers 2008; DeSilvey 2006; Tuck and McKenzie 2014). The more relevant terminological friction here is between “place” and “Land.” Though I have chosen to use “place” to connote the concept in a way accessible to screen readers, which often do not make note of punctuation or capitalization, my understanding of the term “place” has been imbued with descriptions of Land, with a capital “L.” See also paperson (2017) for a firm description of the differences between land and place in some pedagogical circles. 15 I use this composite term to refer specifically to people like myself, who live and conduct research in settler colonized places as non-Indigenous visitors. Often the phrase “uninvited guest” is used for this purpose. After hearing a syilx person, toward the beginning of my time in the Okanagan, point out the paradox in that phrase, for in order to be a guest one must necessarily be invited, I’ve preferred the descriptor of “visitor.” 16 For my interest in thinking deeply about research methodology I thank Hilde Tobi and Peter Tamas, both of whom generously shared their enthusiasm for their methodologically focused work with me at a time when my own was difficult to muster. 17 This particular riparian place came to be central to this research for reasons of timing and proximity, both political and personal. 12 Pursuing these three Questions has resulted in five distinct and interrelated output modalities. All are described below; only some of are contained within this document. What is an ethic for ecologically specific, place-based inquiry as a visitor-scholar in this settler colonial context? What does it look like to prioritize multimodality, mediation, and remediation in place-based research, and what implications has this commitment had for this research? How have people in the past, do people in the present, and might people in the future interact with and relate to the various ecologies of Brandt’s Creek and the Northend Marsh? 1.3.1 theory “Presearch” and “corrugation,” detailed in Parts 2 and 4 respectively, are two ethical and methodological contributions to transdisciplinary sustainability studies. Together, these contributions address the Questions of place-based research ethics and prioritizing multimodality, detailing the need for visitor-scholars to attentively engage with their research assemblages and providing a multimodal, access-oriented example of how that can be done.18 Part 6 details the figuration of “fringe natures,” a work of theory developed in close collaboration with Astrida Neimanis. While explored through a story of a different place, Semá:th X_ó:tsa in the Fraser River watershed, fringe natures represent an answer to what possibilities there are for living at valley’s bottoms. Using trans theories and creatively expanding ecological concepts, we learn from the past and think into the future to describe an orientation for living with wetness. Part 8 does not introduce any new theory. Instead, it brings together work from critical disability/accessibility studies, research-creation, and performance-as-research to detail an effort of community-embedded research praxis and describe an example of prioritizing multimodality, mediation, and remediation in place-based research. All of the (p)research undertaken to develop these chapters was conducted with the priority of respect for this place and the people of this place, which is itself an ethic for conducting place-based inquiry as a visitor-scholar in a settler colonial context. 18 Like Kelly et al. (2021), I think in my research practice about accessibility as an esthetic practice, not as a checklist, and use artistic and interpretive ways of communicating through multiple sensory channels. 13 1.3.2 place study & case study This thesis presents a place study19 of the valley-bottom extent of Brandt’s Creek and a marsh I’ve called the “Northend Marsh,” after the neighbourhood that now resides on its imagined and hardened surface.20 These overlapping socioecologies are located in the City of Kelowna, which is located within traditional, unceded, and occupied syilx territory and British Columbia, Canada. To the best of my knowledge, this document is the first in which the details of this story will be collected together. While directly addressing how people are relating to the ecologies of Brandt’s Creek and the Northend Marsh, this place study is also guided by the Questions of how to do respectful place-based research here as a visitor-scholar and what it looks like to prioritize multimodality in this work. This research involved engagement with varied media and its writing was assembled with particular attention to how the research assemblage is portrayed, and which stories shine through.21 Another place, some 215km as the crow flies to the east south east of Kelowna, is also brought into the story-fold. The Sumas Valley and its resident body of water, Semá:th X_ó:tsa, are presented in Part 6 as a case study, a story told from some distance. This case amplifies and diversifies the Questions of remediation in relation to future interactions with and relations to valley-bottom riparian life. 1.3.3 photo-text As a result of my presearch and corrugation praxes, I produced a collection of 1405 photos taken in riparian habitats, primarily in the Okanagan, between November 2020 and November 2023. Each photo carries a caption, descriptive alternative text (alt-text), and a series of thematic tags, which, 19 I have used this phrase to emphasize the similarities and differences between it and the more common “case study,” though, for a robust articulation of the methodological concept I refer the reader to Eve Tuck and Marcia Mackenzie’s (2014) book “Place in Research,” in which they preferentially use the term “critical place inquiry.” 20 The neighbourhood itself is variously called Kelowna’s Northend, though sometimes written as two words, ‘North End.’ Here I have chosen to use the single word Northend in following the City of Kelowna’s current Northend Neighbourhood Plan documentation (Policy and Planning Department 2021). 21 The stories we choose to share and how we share them is important. “Story is governance,” spoke Lee Maracle, “so when we hear a good story, we look for the teaching in it, without mentioning the creator (author), then we conjure a new story, different but the same. We know we have succeeded when our audience gets excited. We also, as we listen, seek to add to the story, to shift the direction of the story and challenge the teller to create a new one from our interventions. The creator is also the audience. Understanding story is the point; recreating life from that understanding is the goal” (Ayed 2021). “We must recognize,” riparian researcher Henri Decamps writes, “that riparian landscapes, as other landscapes, evolve from a series of events over time which are influenced by our feelings of responsibility to them and our interest in them” (2001) 14 taken together, make 1405 Mini-dramas of life in wetness (see Mini-drama 1 on page 14).22 Cataloguing Mini-dramas—as opposed to photos alone—adds “view from a body” (Haraway 1991, 196) context and creates multimodal, layered possibilities for engagement with the material. This is the documentation of process as product. They are summaries of my perception (see Mathews 2018) anchored in the places and times each layer (photo, caption, alt-text, and tags) was added; together these Mini-dramas form a catalogue of the education of my riparian attention. The dates listed as part of each Mini-drama’s title, are the date on which each initial encounter occurred and the photo was taken. These dates provide seasonal context for the Okanagan’s riparian foliage and locate the point in the trajectory of Educating Riparian Attention (ERA)—a project I conducted from November 2020 to November 2023—at which each caption and alt-text description was written. A reader’s close attention would show how the style and content of both my captions and alt-text have changed with time, practice, and conversation. 22 This phrase, “Mini-drama,” is one I use to represent a moment of observation, encounter, and improvised storying. This is storying as in a making up of meaning (Chandler 2017); it is also a recognition of story and the potential for dramatics that might capture attention. The stories I had the privilege to see play out over time in riparian places were the inspiration for the below-described Riparian ReAnimation project. I’ve chosen the term “drama” as a nod to tropical agroforestry. In Trinidad I perceived and was introduced to many plants as dramatic, whether in size (leaves, spines, height), colour, potency, or, when it came to cacao, diva status. The prefix “mini” is a nod to the minute gesture that each of Mini-drama is alone, and to the potential for small things brought together to become more than the sum of their parts. Mini-drama 1: February 4, 2021 Caption: Beaver slide! Alt-text: River bank through which a divot has been worn in the soil that leads directly into the green-blue water. 15 Every Mini-drama created as part of this research was posted on Instagram23 between November 2020 and November 2023, with the first year (November 2020 to November 2021) located also in an Open Science Framework (OSF)24 project.25 While compiling them as a catalogue, I assigned them tags of words and phrases, names and contexts, linkages between riparian places and across the three years of the project. A selection of these tags link out to an OSF wiki page, which will compile and display the collection of every Mini-dramas that was assigned that tag, creating a Mini-drama Catalogue Excerpt (MCE). These words and phrases are indicated in this text by the letters “MCE” in brackets.26 If you are reading digitally, clicking on these letters will open a web browser tab to show the Mini-drama Catalogue Excerpt for that tag. Mini-drama 1 (page 14), for example, is tagged with Similkameen27 (MCE), beaver, roots, and soil. These selected excerpts are organized chronologically and included to demonstrate to you, the reader, the corrugating effect of repetition. Each encounter with a particular entity educated my attention a little more as I moved further into relation with the riparian. As a collection, these Mini-dramas chronicle three years of my research process and provide a series of tiny windows into the life and times of the riparian places I learned with, from the front yard of the apartment building I live in, which sits immediately adjacent to Mill Creek (MCE), one of the primary waterways flowing through Kelowna, to the town of Penryn, in Cornwall (MCE), United Kingdom, where I stayed in January and February of 2023 as a visiting scholar/artist and exhibited a portion of the Mini-drama Catalogue.28 Mini-dramas pepper this document.29 The full catalogue is stored in an OSF project30 and is creative commons licensed (CC BY 4.0 Deed).31 This output is a result of presearch activities (Part 2), and both created the theory of corrugation and was created by its practice (Part 4). As such, it enfolds multiple media: text and photographs, 23 Instagram is a photo and video sharing social media platform. My handle is @alsdeeend. 24 The Open Science Framework is an open source research workflow management tool. 25 The original project has been closed and replaced to accommodate the subsequent two years. Note, the full catalogue takes time to load. 26 All Mini-dramas Catalogue Excerpts, organized by subject tag, can be found here: https://deniledam.github.io/Educating-Riparian-Attention/. 27 The Similkameen Valley and River are to the southeast of the Okanagan Valley and River. The rivers meet just south of the Canada-USA border. All of this happens in syilx homelands. 28 A heartfelt thanks to Caitlin DeSilvey and the Environment and Sustainability Institute for hosting me. And to Geoff and Amy for the housing and good company, and, of course, all the fish. 29 A list of all Mini-dramas included in this document is compiled in Appendix A (page 171). 30 “Educating Riparian Attention”: https://osf.io/hnjvz/ 31 This license allows anyone to copy and redistribute, remix and transform the content, provided I am attributed original authorship and not indicated as endorsing any remixed content (Creative Commons n.d.). 16 as well as the weathers, travel, embodied experiences, and affective happenings over three years of research. This is one outcome of prioritizing multimodal research praxis. 1.3.4 giant riparian character puppets Riparian ReAnimation was a giant puppet making community art project and process (see Figure 1, page 4, and Figure 2, page 9). The puppets produced during Riparian ReAnimation exist and will circulate locally as long as they have people caring for their maintenance, storage, and transport. Advocating for this project and creating the space that allowed for these puppets to be made was a practical ethic for place-based inquiry. These puppets now exist in the world as agents of story to help those who engage with them learn a bit about the multi-being communities that create life-world-possibilities in this place. Preceding the puppets themselves, we created Workshop, an ephemeral yet reliable weekly meeting space for creation in community and creation of community. The creation and performance of Workshop as a social space was, in my opinion, the most important outcome of Riparian ReAnimation (as detailed in Part 8.2, page 144). Though the irreproducible nature of this happening makes it difficult to identify as an output, precedent has been set by performance-as-research practitioners for the analysis of performance to further develop, support, and travel, in lieu of the performance itself (Lewis and Tulk 2016). Both Workshop and the puppets, like other research creation projects and products, push on the boundaries of what is scholarly (Chapman and Sawchuk 2012). Their becoming is one of the implications of prioritizing varied modalities of research practice and communication. 1.3.5 gratitude This place, and particularly the constituent riparian fringes, made this research possible. The people living here and those who are a part of this place, made it possible for me to learn what I’ve learned and experience all of the things I’ve experienced. To illustrate the relationships and encounters that shape my relationship to this place and its beings, I present the following three vignettes. These vignettes gesture at the stories that lie behind my footnotes, which are gestures of gratitude to all those whom I have learned from and with. They are presenting anonymously because they are personal and examples of type. The people for whom they are more than examples know who they are. We were together planting roses. I knew they had a tattooing practice, budding and unestablished. I had an idea, a piece I wanted but only if the making process 17 was one rooted somewhere other than in commerce. I’m not sure if I was thinking about the possibility of them creating, in my living room, me on the couch. Three sessions of fourteen hours in total. But that happened. And then, in between and afterwards, we continued to plant (and mulch and water) roses. And when the roses were done, I sent a text: “If we were going to make a giant riparian snake puppet which kind of snake would we make?” “A rubber boa,” came the answer. and “No! I can’t deliver firewood to your mother, there’s Covid everywhere!” “So you would prefer she freezes?” “Well, no. Good point. Okay, I will wear a mask and be quick about it.” “Who will she talk to then?” “Good point. Okay. Good point.” It was in the conversations around deliveries of firewood that I learned about the many types of siya, the overwhelming amount of heritage handmade baskets for which there are no room, and the pain of losing one’s children. and It was the end of a long week. Everyone was tired, even the puppets. When though, when would either of us ever again be so close to that behemoth of reclamation, the Grand Coulee Dam?32 My grandfather had been, my mother had told me. When it was built it created upset and turmoil for the salmon and the salmon people, I learned while coding interviews with Elders some years prior. This was a riparian place. We were so close, I was reminded. We would take a picture with one of the puppets, to add to the collection. And if all went well, we would still cross the border in time to buy cherries. We had to go. And we did, on all accounts. The time and space afforded by graduate education has allowed me to forge and nurture the relationships mentioned above and so many others, while also creating a framework of possibility for intentionally non-directed, ambulatory, and physically demanding methods. In my five years in the Okanagan I have been well fed, housed, clothed, socialized, and exercised. I am thankful for all of the entangled multi-being relationships that made this possible. Moving through and engaging with 32 “Dams act as symbolic boundaries, as cuts (agential as in Barad, or trans* as in Hayward) [see Part6]—concealing and unconcealing, natural and artificial, destructive and restorative—that both interrupt and innovate flows and movements, and modify landscapes and bodies” (Hayward and Weinstein 2015, 205). 18 place is a privilege, one I engage in order to live in Kelowna and do my research, though not one that would necessarily be extended to me by others if asked. While thinking of gratitude as an output feels a bit out of place, I list it here as something I have learned—from syilx priorities, Indigenous methodologies, and Indigenous methodologists—to foreground as part of my ethic for place-based inquiry as a visitor-scholar in this settler colonial context. The parts I can write down I have, in acknowledgements and footnotes throughout this document. These portions of text express this ethic, extending nuance, expressing recognition, and naming names.33 The parts I can’t write down don’t belong here, but the writing could never have become without them. 1.4 thesis structure & theoretical framework 1.4.1 organization This thesis is separated into 11 Parts; these Parts are of three types: Episode, Chapter, and Thread. The two stories I tell are articulated in the differentiation of these three Part-types. The Episodes tell a socio-ecological story of a particular place—Brandt’s Creek (MCE) and the Northend Marsh—they assimilate complexity and anchor theory in a location, somewhere you could visit if you wanted to, “entangling [your]self within the stitches of [its] ongoing processes” (Hayward 2008b, 65). My own repeated visiting of this place is an approach to research that “insist[s] on immediacy and involvement” (Denzin 2003, 8). My faith in this approach has the same origin as the theory that comes out (described by the Chapters): I try things out and see if and how they fit together. I commit to projects that excite me, without knowing exactly what the outcome will be. Figuring out how things fit together, and what the outcomes of a particular project are, is work I think of as “threading.” 34 Though nominally contained here in the Threads, threading is integral to all the work I do and share. It makes the difference between “singularities that don't add up but are always threatening to” (Stewart 2008, 72) and a collection of activities woven together into one experience. This always-already-everywhere threading—the kind that shows fabric itself to be a bunch of threads, woven together—that lives in the footnotes, which make this thesis bottom-heavy with fibrous roots. Finally, the creation of this unusual document structure is itself an act of threading, 33 All human people named here have consented to their inclusion. Thank you humans! 34 Threading is important, just like making explicit the things you take for granted is important, because “knowledge itself is held in the relationships and connections formed with the environment that surrounds us” (Shawn Wilson 2008, 87) and “it matters what ideas one uses to think other ideas” (Strathern 1992, 10). 19 fitting together many things I did in many years with many collaborators, all with and for riparian places. The Episodes (Part 3: habits of the Okanagan, Part 5: inhabiting the Northend Marsh, and Part 7: Brandt’s Creek’s habituation, becoming riparian) integrate archival materials, conversations, and observation to tell a socioecological story of Brandt’s Creek and the Northend Marsh. The even numbered Parts are the Chapters (Part 2: presearch, Part 4: corrugation, Part 6: fringe natures, and Part 8: Riparian ReAnimation), which build on each other to detail adjacent projects I conducted and the theory emergent from this research. These are spaces of theoretical play and innovation that develop their titular key concepts and connect those concepts, through theory, into the story told in the Episodes. The Threads—acknowledgements, introduction, more room, and the glossary—splay out and tie together the various strands of this research and cite, acknowledge, and give thanks to relationships and concepts that anchor this work.35 35 "This concept of relationality instantiates an ethical imperative to acknowledge and honour the significance of the relationships we have with others, how our histories and experiences position us in relation to each other, and how our futures as people in the world are tied together. It is also an ethical imperative to see that despite our varied place-based cultures and knowledge systems, we live in the world together with others and must constantly think and act with reference to these relationships. Any knowledge we gain about the world interweaves us more complexly with these relationships and gives us life" (D. Donald 2012, 536). Mini-drama 2: October 11, 2022 Caption: Industrial byproduct in tule camo. Alt-text: Long, cylindrical, ash white metal rods collect together in a somewhat parallel clump in grass. 20 1.4.2 the Episodes 1.4.2.1 methods and theory The Episodes integrate archival materials, conversations, and observations to tell a socioecological story of Okanagan valley-bottom riparian ecology and the history, present day happenings, and potential of the creek currently known as Brandt’s and the Northend Marsh, from which it is collected. In compiling this story I spoke informally with many people about Brandt’s Creek. Every conversation taught me something.36 I learned about the beavers who moved into Rotary Marsh,37 the high density of Siberian Elm trees (MCE) alongside the creek, and the presence of discarded packaging and industrial materials along its banks (see MCE and/or Mini-drama 2, page 19). I learned these things also/again by walking, sometimes alone, sometimes with others, alongside the creek, in its margins. Walking with others, like heavy processing (see Part 2: presearch) is “a technology of information gathering … of big data where every single datum is understood to come from somewhere worth learning from” (Rault and Cowan 2020a). Some of my most important learning came through absences. People live and work alongside Brandt’s Creek for years without knowing it is there or anything about it. ”I thought it was just a ditch,” was a common refrain. Yes, it is a ditch; it’s also so much more than a ditch (MCE). There is one dynamic community in particular located alongside Brandt’s Creek that I did not interact with. The City of Kelowna has established this site, between Ethel and Richter Streets and alongside the Okanagan Rail Trail, as the current designated place for outdoor sheltering (City of Kelowna 2021).38 Many people shelter there year-round, and a number of organizations are involved in supporting residents and monitoring activities in the small human-riparian community.39 The City 36 “Any information or observation shared by anyone is of value, as there is a reason why it is shared” (Stubington 2013, 24). 37 The Rotary Marsh is a riparian place at the mouth of Brandt’s Creek. This confluence of the creek with Okanagan Lake was revitalized in the late 1990s after decades of treatment as the outflow of a drainage ditch. 38 In 2015 The Supreme Court of British Columbia ruled in Abbotsford (City) v. Shantz that the prohibition of people sleeping or being in a city park overnight or erecting a temporary shelter is unconstitutional. Such bylaws were said to be in violation of section 7 of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, which reads, “[e]veryone has the right to life, liberty and security of the person and the right not to be deprived thereof except in accordance with the principles of fundamental justice” (‘Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms’ 1982). 39 In a local news article from the outlet Castanet News, community safety director Darren Caul is quoted explaining, “[t]he advantage to a designating space; not withstanding that it meets our legal obligation (to make public space available for outdoor sheltering), is that it enables finite resources from our not-for-profit partners, health and social service partners, as well as police and bylaw to focus on that site and on the 21 has not spoken to the location of this sheltering site in relation to Brandt’s Creek, though the choice of this particular site likely had to do with the sparse vegetation and a general over-looking by most locals of this riparian corridor nestled between aging industrial buildings. These factors would have been considered favourable for the sake of long sightlines and minimizing complaints from neighbours respectively.40 I do not have the skills and experience to incorporate the circumstances of the encampment and experiences of people residing there in my research, though I do include a few observations made in the course of walking through the area and comment on the history of sheltering in Brandt’s Creek’s riparian corridor (Part 7.1.5: Section 5, page 124). Trying to read about Brandt’s Creek on the internet echoes these conversational absences. Online, there are a few mentions of a pub in the upstream neighbourhood of Glenmore and the linear park along which the pub sits. Once the creek hits valley-bottom though, a casual, English-language web search will yield no information. Mentions of the creek as a whole do exist, in City of Kelowna and Okanagan Basin Water Board documentation, though this information is technical and difficult to find. There seems to be a discursive dissolution of the creek at the point where it flows out of the upstream neighbourhood of Glenmore and encounters the Northend Marsh. As the only creek whose watershed is contained entirely within the municipal bounds of the City of Kelowna (see Figure 3, page 26), and with the keen local interest in all things water,41 it is surprising that a creek occurring between two city neighbourhoods—Downtown and the Northend—flows broadly unnoticed. Attempting to compile all of the recorded sources I could about the area, I visited the Kelowna Public Archives and the UBC Okanagan Special Collections and Archives.42 Additional materials came from City of Kelowna staff and reports,43 as mentioned above. There were two other archives I was suggested to visit, the Glenmore Ellison Irrigation District, whose director told me they did not nearly 100 people who shelter overnight at that site, in our bid to maintain health, safety and security” (White 2023). 40 Despite the strategically selected location, complaints abound in local public discourse. 41 This interest is apparent from siwɬkʷ (water) rights discussions (M. G. Sam 2013; Dulic 2021), to scholarly research (Wagner 2013), to community gathering and performance (Cathy Stubington 2015; Sotelo 2023). 42 In the former my search for Brandt’s Creek-related materials was supported by archivist Tara Hurley, who shared all of the photos of the area that would provide a view of the Northend Marsh in the past, as well as a report about Brandt’s Creek from 1974, the origin and authors of which are unknown. Paige Hohmann at UBC Okanagan Special Collections directed me to the Simpson Family Fonds, a fonds collected by and about the family who initiated and ran a lumber mill at the lake-edge of the Northend Marsh (see Simpson 2003). 43 The recent documentation created by City of Kelowna staff and contractors in support of the upcoming Northend Neighbourhood Plan was particular helpful. 22 know anything about Brandt’s Creek when I inquired, and the archive held by the Kelowna Golf and Country Club—under which the creek flows—which could not welcome researchers at this time due to the recent flooding of their facilities. Golf courses and floodplains are, it seems, a matter of seasonal (in)compatibility. Often the most important part of a visit to any official place of record keeping, was the recommendations I would receive for people to talk to. Alongside these empirics, this work of transdisciplinary scholarship collects and assembles an array of theoretical tools. The story I tell sits in a nexus of ideas and seeks to answer how have people in the past, do people in the present, and might people in the future interact with and relate to the various ecologies of Brandt’s Creek and the Northend Marsh. At the center of this nexus is the settler colonial and capitalist project of separating “land” and “water” into distinct entities to service the ideology of place-as-property and unhinge Indigenous ways of being. This priority of separating land and water in the Okanagan manifests as a disinterest in places that fit poorly into either category, such as marshes and riparian habitats. Land’s fixity and water’s mobility was deemed inevitable; once determined to be necessary for rail and urban expansion, the Northend Marsh was seen to be land and reinforced as such through laboured process of undoing the marsh. Records of both this labour of what I will refer to here as “deswampification” and the soggy, squelchy, marsh itself are sparse. Either these records were not though of as worth archiving, or they were never collected in the first place. From this dynamic emerges an ecological manifestation of the anarchive, that which has not been archived. The anarchive is a concept and practice of reading archival absences that is most often employed to think through the human voices unaccounted for in dominant tellings of histories. Here I explore this ecological anarchive to piece together this story of Brandt’s Creek’s riparian becoming (Part 7). To detail these ideas, I draw on literature from geography, design, and urban planning in settler colonial cities; geometrical concepts such as the surface and line; and the aporia, “a line that, in the process of being drawn, simultaneous constitutes entities, categories, or concepts as mutually incompatible and jointly necessary” (Derrida 1993). From the environmental humanities and science and technology studies I borrow figuration, assemblage, and spectral ecologies, as ways of positioning these concepts in relation to the places of which they are a part. 1.4.2.2 three Parts This story of floodplain dwelling moves through layers of relating with this riparian place. These three Parts (3, 5, and 7) are intended to stand alone as a piece to be shared locally. I’ve selected the 23 empirics that, I think, best tell the story that archival photos, anarchival reading, technical documents, many walks, inquiring conversations, and a biodiversity survey44 shared with me. It is a story of habits, inhabitation, and habituation: the socio-ecological habits of the Okanagan Valley, the settler colonial inhabitation of the Northend Marsh as a place for year-round industrial operations and domestic dwelling, and the habituation of Brandt’s Creek—created as a ditch from the Marsh—to its emerging riparian habits. Part 3: habits of the Okanagan, introduces the Okanagan as a place, then details Mathur and Da Cunha’s conceptualization of wetness, the surface, and the line, in relation to settler colonial and anthropocentric infrastructure (MCE). This introduction situates the Northend Marsh and Brandt’s Creek within the socioecological context of the city of Kelowna (Figure 3, page 26), the Okanagan’s largest municipality (Figure 6, page 50). Part 5: inhabiting the Northend Marsh, I describe the trajectory of the Northend Marsh from a wet and squelchy place, fluctuating in degree of firmness throughout the year(s), to an industrial center and neighbourhood (Kelowna’s Northend) bordered to the south by a ditch through which water flows (Brandt’s Creek). While this place’s marshy mode of being was excavated and buried, over the course of about 50 years in the first half of the 20th century, it remains haunted by the spongy wetness that defines it. I outline the specific unruly heritage of settler colonial valley-bottom settlement in Kelowna’s Northend, one version of Brandt’s Creek’s marshy past. Finally, in Part 7: Brandt’s Creek’s habituation, becoming riparian, I explore Brandt’s Creek’s valley-bottom flow and relatively recent riparian becoming. Despite the challenges associated with hosting anthropocentric infrastructure, the Northend Marsh, with its wetness collected as a flowing creek, is animating riparian habits to the best of its current ability. This is a tale of that ditch-becoming-creek, how it scraped together a riparian existence, and what we might learn from its practices of habituation. The Episode closes with a proposition for embracing a seasonally contingent swampy aesthetic as a tool for living well with this place. 1.4.3 the Chapters My first research Question—What is an ethic for ecologically specific place-based inquiry as a visitor-scholar in this settler colonial context?—is given two answers. First, in Part 2, I introduce 44 The compiled results of this biodiversity survey, which I conducted with riparian ecologist Kasey Moran in 2022, as well as previous and subsequent observations, can be found in Appendix B (page 176). 24 “presearch” as an praxis for inquiry as a visitor-researcher. Presearch is an ethic as much as it is a practice, can take many different forms, and can help researchers develop relational accountability with their research assemblage.45 Next, in Part 4, I explain “corrugation” as an experience of affective and relational thickening that results from intentional, sustained, and attentive engagement with place. It is a multimodal layering process that strengthens relations and the ability to connect. Corrugation as a theory emerged from a presearch project, Educating Riparian Attention (ERA), so these Chapters are linked closely together. The theory I use to help me think through presearch, corrugation, and ERA comes from critical disability studies (accessibility and alt-text), digital humanities (multimodality, mediation, and heavy processing), feminist environmental humanities (weathering), anthropology and cultural geography (weak theory, thick description, and multi-being ethnography), and ecological psychology (the education of attention). In weaving together these lines of thought, I also begin, particularly in Part 4: corrugation, to address my second Question: What does it look like to prioritize multimodality, mediation, and remediation in place-based research and what implications have that commitment had for this research? Corrugation as a concept plays out in the thesis itself through an “expression of the ambivalent, powerful, and elusive ways that ecology is composed through histories of interaction, relationality, interconnection, and materiality” (Hayward 2012, 185). Part 6 creates a fold with a different approach, distinct theoretical vocabulary, and a non-Okanagan location, all the while maintaining a critical lens toward the discursively unyielding separation of land from water and the effects of their attempted containment. Part 6 shifts west and introduces the figuration of “fringe natures,” a term Astrida Neimanis and I apply theoretically in the case study of Semá:th X_ó:tsa, a water body of great seasonal variation, in the Fraser Valley of British Columbia, Canada. We wrote this chapter together for the Routledge “Handbook on Gender and Water Governance” edited by Tatiana Acevedo-Guerrero, Lisa Bossenbroek, Irene Leonardelli, Margreet Zwarteveen, and Seema Kulkarni 45 In 2021—as one of two comprehensive exam creations I made during my PhD—I created a presearch methodology course curriculum as an Open Educational Resource (a publicly available educational tool) (see M. Donald 2021). The curriculum introduces photography, audio recording and listening, video recording and watching, and drawing as four different methods for anchoring and cataloguing presearch processes and the education of attention. It also addresses questions of accessibility, temporality, and humility, which are all important aspects of doing and learning through presearch. These topics are not exhaustive of the possibilities for presearch in academic research settings, though they would serve as a launching-off point for anyone interested in pursuing the idea further in a pedagogical setting. 25 (in press).46 The theory we used departs from that which I have employed elsewhere in this document though brings us to similar conclusions about non-binary futures of living with wetness, at the bottoms of valleys, amongst the unruly heritage of settler colonial, capitalist, and anthropocentric infrastructures. The fold this chapter creates is one of strengthening, of splaying out and bringing back together. The fringe (MCE) is both a real environmental phenomenon that refers to the uppermost section of a littoral zone, where terrestrial and aquatic habitats meet (see for example Mini-dramas 1, 16, and 20 on pages 14, 103, and 124 respectively), and the marginalized discourse space occupied by an ecotone that can be at any time both land and water and therefore evades simple categorization. Sumas is another place, like the Okanagan, where settler colonial, capitalist, and agricultural priorities contributed to a project of deswampification. We came to engage with this particular story because of a series of atmospheric rivers that rained down in November of 2021, causing the long-suppressed seasonal lake to reassert itself and temporarily upend commercial agricultural lifeways. We write in conversation with the work of trans studies scholars—who challenge ideas of fixity and teach us to think with contingencies and context—and explore the idea of the riparian as a thickening of the line on a map that denotes a waterway, separating it from land. We push on the edges of that conceptual margin to expanded the littoral zone—the place where land and water meet—stretching the concept “littoral” multi-dimensionally, into its atmospheric and hyporheic expressions. This conversation between the trans and the riparian helps us to articulate the potential for trans ways of being, perceiving, and relating in the Sumas Valley and other fringe natures. This Chapter builds on Part 3: habits of the Okanagan, thickening the concept of a swampy aesthetic by introducing a different place, case, and theoretical framework, with which to story year-round living at valley-bottom. The last Chapter, Part 8: Riparian ReAnimation, is about story and storying; about thinking the product was the point and realizing it was the process that made the difference. Here I discuss the research-creation project “Riparian ReAnimation” and explore the potential for animating habits and habitats that emerged in and during the free, open, community art gathering space that we created. Riparian ReAnimation was a community puppet making and maneuvering endeavour that I 46 I have made only small changes to the original text for inclusion in this thesis. Its title in the Handbook—due to be published in late 2024—will be “Semá:th X_ó:tsa: Fringe Natures as Decolonial Feminist-Queer-Trans Water Imaginaries.” 26 Figure 3: Kelowna's Northend Marsh and surroundings. Watercolour by Moos van Caspel, 2024. The Northend Marsh presently exists as two entities, The Northend neighbourhood and Brandt’s Creek’s valley-bottom flow. Brandt’s Creek is one of the many bodies of water that pulses through the city of Kelowna. The valley -bottom portion of its flow, once pooling as a marshy floodplain is currently a plucky drainage ditch, making the most of a situation with many constraints. The creek reaches valley-bottom at the southern opening of the Glenmore Valley, moving west from there to Okanagan Lake. Its present day trajectory is depicted in Part 7 . 27 facilitated with the support of an extraordinary team of knowledge holders, artists, scholars, administrators, performers, teens, and generally curious people. In the spring and summer of 2023, we gathered once a week to create giant riparian character puppets. Initially I thought it would be the finished products—puppets as agents of ecological story and their reanimation as characters in dramatized tales from the riparian—that would be the research focus. I was, however, mostly wrong about that. The space we opened to create these puppets, which we came to refer to as simply “Workshop,” was more generative than I could have imagined. During Workshop, we crafted, and crafted in, a community. This was the act of performance, not the puppet animation that would follow, that ended up being the central focus of Riparian ReAnimation as a research creation project. This chapter explores that process through the lens of accessibility and is informed by research creation and critical disability studies scholarship, as well as the study of performance and community gathering.47 Riparian ReAnimation demonstrated that prioritizing multimodality, mediation, and remediation creates thickness in, and enhances the communicability of, ecological research by opening up various avenues through which to engage with both the physical material of puppet crafting and the conceptual material of the riparian. Managing this project taught me the importance of multimodal accessibility as a mechanism for community gathering. 1.4.4 the Threads This thesis began with Part 0: acknowledgements, which are written in the form of a letter to my father. He always asked how things were going; usually I said they were hard, or busy, or overwhelming. I wish I would have told him, instead, about all of the support I have received throughout this process. So many individual humans, communities, organizations, situations, habitats, technologies, and materials have made this research and these outputs possible; many of these specific entities are mentioned by name throughout the text, in places that anchor their relations with the work being presented. In the matter of splaying out and tying together this work, these are the most crucial relationships to mention. At the document’s other end is Part 10: glossary, the place where I make explicit what it is I am inclined to take for granted. This communication is particularly crucial in transdisciplinary scholarship. Defining terms in a glossary highlights both implicit and explicit relationships between concepts and discourses. In this way, the 47 In writing this Chapter, I have included many quotes from Cathy Stubington’s Master’s of Fine Arts thesis, written in 2013 for the program out of UBC Okanagan. Cathy was one of the core Riparian ReAnimation team members at the project’s outset 28 glossary situates and describes the way words are being used. I would urge you, the reader, to visit the glossary while reading; it is an important articulation of my relational accountability as a transdisciplinary scholar. The introduction, you are reading now. This Thread introduces the research assemblage, some important vocabulary, the ideas in play, and the nature of the outputs. Part 9: more room, collects the thoughts, theory, and analysis introduced throughout the text. While avoiding the notion of a conclusion in the sense of being conclusive, my aim is to conclude my work here and make it possible and practical for others to pick up where I’ve left off, or somewhere close by.48 1.4.5 formatting In this document headings are not capitalized unless they include proper nouns, such as place names. Note, I have made certain nouns proper for the specific time and place of this thesis (e.g. Thread, Mini-drama, Workshop, Section). Other decisions were made to increase multimodal accessibility—such as ensuring all images include alt-text. Finally, this text contains links to webpages outside of the text and to the catalogue of 1405 Mini-dramas produced and collected as part of my Educating Riparian Attention project (detailed in Part 4: corrugation). I was born in 1992, a scant nine years before Wikipedia launched (‘Wikipedia’ 2023). The first thing I learned about citation, in elementary school, was that citing Wikipedia was prohibited. Today the website’s review mechanisms and the intensity of use by people around the world make it a go-to source for many things wondered-about. The central role that hyperlinks play in the browsing of Wikipedia has made normal this non-hierarchical, lateral form of organizing text. From Wikipedia to the rest of the internet as we know it today, hyperlinks are everywhere. As a digital native, it was only while reading Laura Cameron’s book “Openings: a meditation on history, method, and Sumas Lake” while doing research for the chapter “Semá:th X_ó:tsa: Fringe Natures as Decolonial Feminist-Queer-Trans Water Imaginaries” (included here as Part 6), that I realized this interwoven, non-linear design and associative access and retrieval method—so ordinary from my perspective as 48 Figure 4 (p. 31) depicts the trajectory of the thesis graphically. 29 to be entirely unremarkable—has not only a name, but also a body of theory behind its becoming. It’s called hypertext.4950 Hypertext gives the reader “the opportunity to branch off to other materials. … [T]he ability to link to other materials formalizes multiple connections and allows complexity” (Cameron 1997, 8). Once intentional and written in code as well as text (Hayles 2004), the labour facilitating this type of media production is invisible to me as I write in the user interface of Microsoft Word, in which embedding links is a simple click-through process. The development of hypertext “revealed new possibilities for artistic [and scholarly] production and reception” (Swift 2014, 9) and the spirit of the “hypertextual experience” has permeated my time as a student and researcher. I make note of this here to recognize the work that made this work possible and position myself in relation to the media I’m using. Recognizing the work that made this work possible will be an always incomplete project. It was Max Liboiron who wrote most clearly (in a footnote) that footnotes are “part of doing good relations within a text, through a text” (2021b, 1). Many of my footnotes are what Robin Metcalf (a close friend and fabulous member of my support network) would call “love notes.” They are thank yous and by-the ways: they remind us that every sentence contains a multitude of “yes, and.” Footnotes have the potential to be a place of place of nuance and politics, where the protocols of gratitude and recognition play out (sometimes also called citation), where warnings and care work are carried out (including calling certain readers aside for a chat or a joke), and where [work is] contextualize[d], expand[ed], and emplace[d]. (Liboiron 2021b, 1) I have embraced that potential here. There is a lot of work done in these footnotes. 49 That is to say, the version I know is called hypertext. Angela Haas points out that there have been versions of interlinking memory and retrieval methods, particularly among primarily verbal communicators, since long before the theory of hypertext came around (2007). 50 A Google n-gram search for the string “hypertext” displays a general emergence in 1980, with steady incline to a sharp peak in 1996 and nearly steady decline to 2019, the last year for which data is available. The 1996 to 2019 decline represents an order-of-magnitude decrease in frequency of mentions in English language print media. 30 Figure 4: Thesis structure. Drawing by Moos van Caspel, 2024. This image depicts the themes of each of the 11 Parts of this thesis. First, the acknowledgements, written in the form of a letter to my father, drawn here as an envelope. The other Threads, “introduction” and “more room” show the bringing together and spreading apart of a waterway. The Episodes—3, 5, and 7—are written simply as text on the landscape . The Chapters—2, 4, 6, and 8—respectively show someone taking a photo of a tree; a stack of books and a paper crane; a lake, connected to the waterway, surrounded by grass; and a giant puppet parade. 31 2 presearch Consumer-capitalist priorities endanger many of the systems, beings, and relationships that make possible human lives and those of our other-than-human kin. All university research conducted today operates within this reality. The research I do is anchored by my belief that “crafting better possibilities for shared life” (Van Dooren, Kirksey, and Münster 2016, 17) requires deep, committed, and responsible thought in response to and in relation with this reality. Before conducting research in this context—particularly as visitor-scholars not indigenous to the places with which we51 work— “learning to learn” (Sundberg 2014) with place as a practice of “participatory reciprocity” (Kuokkanen 2007, 118)52 is imperative to the conduct of respectful, relationally accountable research. I refer to this work as presearch and the mechanism for doing presearch as the education of attention (Gibson 1979). Presearch is all of the things that happen before relationally accountable research can start, such as building and tending to relationships, immersion in a particular ecosystem or community (Hayward 2012), reading (McLauchlan 2018; Hinchliffe et al. 2005), watching (Atleo 2008), waiting (Manning 2016), drinking tea (Castleden, Morgan, and Lamb 2012), telling stories (Archibald 2008b), being with (Wiseman 2016), and listening (Castleden, Morgan, and Lamb 2012).53 Though they often overlap in time and activity, presearch here is distinguished as a process separate from research to highlight the ethic embedded in the chronology of pre (as in prerequisite). 51 While there is no such thing as an undifferentiated “we” (Liboiron 2020), I am writing here about classification of human that applies to me, and is likely to apply to a significant portion of people reading this text. Currently my livelihood is facilitated by doing research in a university-institutional setting, in a place with recent and ongoing experience of settler colonial occupation, and it is through the patterns and practices of settler colonialism that I have come to be here doing this research, as a visitor here. By visitor I mean someone who is not Indigenous to the place where they are. If you too are in that position, you are part of the “we” I am referring to here. 52 As described by Kuokkanen (2007), learning as participatory reciprocity acknowledges the sociality of knowledge. Speaking to this point, Anna Tsing—in a chapter entitled More-than-human sociality: a call for critical description—states, “[i]f we want to know something about social life, our first step is to immerse ourselves in its ways” (2013, 28). 53 Here I am interpreting an expanded version of ‘pre-search,’ a term already in use in library and information sciences (Harada 1997), defined by Virginia Rankin as “the process that helps students to relate research to their prior knowledge of a topic first, and then develop questions about the topic to organize their search” (1992, 168). 32 Doing presearch is a praxis of “weak theory,”54 which accounts only for small and close phenomena (Mini-drama 3). Weak theory “requires acting as a beginner, refusing to know too much, allowing success to inspire and failure to educate, refusing to extend diagnoses too widely or deeply” (Gibson-Graham 2006, 8). This is how I’m defining the difference between presearch and research, by a commitment to practicing presearch as a beginner, for “[t]he mind of the beginner is empty, free of the habits of the expert, ready to accept, to doubt, and open to all the possibilities” (Suzuki 2020, n.p.).55 Presearch questions56 help us determine what research questions are relevant and respectful for a given research assemblage, thereby building capacity for researchers to conduct relationally accountable research. The beginner (presearcher) is “not trying to make something skillful or beautiful, but simply [acting] with full attention as if you were discovering [the action] for the first time” (Suzuki 54 This concept is detailed in Part 4.2: Mini-dramas. 55 Relating with the humility of the beginner is something I have often heard from syilx people learning n̓syilxčn̓, who sometimes refer to themselves as “babies” in reference to their language skills, a recognition of just how much they have to learn. 56 Some examples of presearch questions are: What is happening in this place? Why am I here? How can my inquiry be useful? Mini-drama 3: April 7, 2021 Caption: Ethnobotanical mystery number 2. Alt-text: Branches tied together into what seems to have once been a ladder though is now no longer in use and is seen here propped against a tree trunk with leafless dogwood and willow branches in the background. 33 2020, n.p.). This praxis of weak theory “does not elaborate and confirm what we already know; it observes, interprets, and yields to emerging knowledge” (Gibson-Graham 2014, 3). In this chapter, I describe my two presearch activities for research with riparian communities in the Okanagan Valley as a visitor-researcher: 1) a catalogued walking practice I called Educating Riparian Attention (ERA) and 2) my participation as a volunteer labourer at k’əmcnitkw, a syilx lead floodplain reengagement project. Relatedly, in Part 4: corrugation, I unpack the product of this process and its implications, both for research relationships with place and the richness of multimodal communication. 2.1 the ethic Relational accountability—a term I learned first in Shawn Wilson’s (2008) book “Research is Ceremony”—is widely used and referenced by researcher-practitioners working with Indigenous research methodologies. Alex Wilson explains relational accountability as meaning that “we are accountable to each other for everything that we do” (2008, 194), we are accountable to the collective and the collection of beings that make up our research assemblage. Similarly, grounding their understanding of relational accountability in Indigenous ontologies, with support from psychology and deep ecology, Stan and Peggy Wilson describe the term as “a way of expressing one’s place in the universe” (1998, 157). I have learned a lot from Indigenous methodologies and those who take the time and energy to do the community and ontological braiding/weaving that makes Indigenous methodologies possible (Sarris 1994; Dion 2009). Through the work of these scholars,57 I have come to understand Indigenous methodologies as respectful methodologies; no matter how they are explained or what places/languages/traditions they come from, they all center respect. And while I do not use Indigenous methodologies per se, my aim, with these influences, is to conduct research with respect. To carve presearch out of research is a making-explicit of the work that goes into crafting respectful research questions; it is not something new, but an acknowledgement and championing of relevant praxes already methodologically established elsewhere. Max Liboiron, for example, has written and spoken extensively on establishing and maintaining relational accountability in their marine plastics research lab (Liboiron 2021b; Hutton and Hess 2019; Yanchapaxi et al. 2022) and Chelsey Jones 57 Manulani Aluli-Meyer, Max Liboiron, Margaret Kovach, Dolleen Tisawii’ashii Manning, Daniel Heath Justice, Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, and Dylan Robinson, to name some of the people who have been most influential in my becoming as a researcher. 34 (2019) shared an experience of relationship building through storytelling in the essay “That time I punched a boy in the forehead: sibling stories ahead of research.” In a similar vein, Jas Rault and T.L. Cowan, in their series of “heavy processing” essays, are inspired by the trope of “lesbian processing,” described as “a sexy, sometimes agonized but always committed, method, an orientation towards unruly information” (2020a). While more specifically focused on human-human relationships than I am here, these essays describe many of the components of presearch. Before you can identify your protocols, your ethics or your method, you need some heavy processing. You need listening and talking and asking for more information. Method might be understood as the procedures by which you go about your research, or which tools you’re using and how … heavy processing, allows us to come to understand which archives or data we want to collect in the first place and why … Process is checking-in multiple times during each stage of research or creation to reassess commitments, to find out if everyone still consents to participation, if the tools are good or just actually too evil, and if there is new information that we need to think about. We admit, process is not great at deadlines. … this not as a practice of unproductive time-wasting, but as the rigorous practice of experiments, making mistakes (fucking up), dealing with miscommunication, and being able to do this by building relationships based on respect and trust. (Rault and Cowan 2020a) Heavy processing could be one ethic for place-based inquiry as a visitor-scholar. Presearch is another. Presearch acknowledges heavy processing and its conceptual kin, holding tightly onto the multi-being nature of research assemblages. In the context of this work “visitor-scholar” is who I am and why I’m here asking Q/questions. I am also a body in the world, amplifying my question with one asked by Dolleen Tisawii’ashii Manning, “what does it mean to be in this body in the world, and how do I encounter other bodies, and what is the knowledge that comes from that" (2018)? In the context of a graduate studies program with course requirements, timelines, and funding constraints, my insistence on making time and space for presearch is an act of “oblique activism.”58 To hold this space is non-trivial. As “a technology of information gathering, rather than 58 “Oblique activism” is a phrase I first heard from Cathy Stubington of Runaway Moon Theater (Grindrod, BC, Canada). Cathy appears again in Part 8: Riparian ReAnimation, as an advisor and crucial support person for our giant riparian character puppet project. 35 management, of big data where every single datum is understood to come from somewhere worth learning from” (Rault and Cowan 2020a), presearch seems a square peg puzzling over a round hole. The oblique used here is leaning on its definition of “not straightforward” or perhaps even “devious.” It is a sideways activism, one that does not yell but whispers. Cathy Stubington describes it as a form of persistent presence, standing with a cause, being present in that place with what you have to share and trusting that what you share will seep slowly into the consciousness of others. Making the time and space for my presearch was, in my case, a matter of approaching the round hole with conviction and only a little deviousness.59 Today, I make a point of telling even-earlier-career researchers that they can probably make their wonky idea happen if they perceive the generosity present in the relationships that hold apparently rigid institutional structures together.60 2.2 educating riparian attention 2.2.1 the education of attention The physical self is one part of the whole self that depends entirely on the parts of us that exist beyond the skin. We survive within our skin and inside the rest of our vast “external” selves. We survive by the continuous interaction between our bodies and everything around us. We are only partly aware of that interaction in our intellect, through our senses. (J. Armstrong 2000) One way of attuning is to “learn from the parts of the story you focus on” (Gadsby 2018). This recognition is especially important in transdisciplinary scholarship.61 Our research practices and findings are shaped by the ways in which we have been educated, throughout our lives, to receive and integrate sensory information. One cannot perceive that which they have not been attuned to perceiving: “to engage in daily life an individual must grasp what is going on” (Zukow-Goldring, 59 I emphatically appreciate the flexibility I was allowed—both by the UBCO IGS program and by my supervisory committee—to do this work, even though I wasn’t sure what would come of it in the end. I am grateful to have been trusted. It is important to me to share the success of this trusting relationship. I meet many student-researchers who perceive strict limitations on what is possible to do in their positions. And while some of these limitations may in fact be enforced some of the time, in my experience, if you have an idea that seems out of the box, it is always worth asking questions to investigate how that idea might become part of your research, for “[h]ow we live in the world is contingent upon how we imagine that world to be” (Neimanis and Walker 2014, 563). 60 Tess Lea’s (2020) book “Wild Policy” speaks to this generosity in both its positive and negative valences. 61 As described by the “Charter of Transdisciplinarity,” “[t]he recognition of the existence of different levels of reality governed by different types of logic is inherent in the transdisciplinary attitude (de Freitas, Morin, and Nicolescu 1994). 36 2012, p.570). Diversified perception and inquiry can open us up to parts of the story we would otherwise not have recognized. In order to focus on and learn from those parts, we first have to learn the “arts of noticing” (Tsing 2015, 17), through which they can be perceived and prepare ourselves for reception. The phrase, the “education of attention,” sometimes referred to as “perceptual attunement” (Araújo and Davids 2011) was initially outlined by James Gibson (1986/1979) under the disciplinary label of “ecological psychology.” Tim Ingold (2000) influentially employed Gibson’s theories in his anthropological work, some of which have since been taken up by scholars of many proclivities (Chambers 2008; Pitt 2015; A. Harris and Flynn 2017; Zukow-Goldring and Arbib 2007; Dokumaci 2023).62 This transdisciplinary conceptual weaving attempts to articulate how we humans come to be in relation with the beings and ecologies with whom we share this world. A novice’s attention is educated by engaging with mentors who guide and 62 Other elaborations on similar concepts include, though are by no means limited to, skilled vision (Grasseni 2007), a curriculum of place (Chambers 2008), sensory ethnography (Pink 2009), atmospheric attunement (Stewart 2011), arts of attentiveness (Van Dooren, Kirksey, and Münster 2016), learning to learn (Sundberg 2014), and engaged witnessing (Bell, Instone, and Mee 2018), which draws from the Indigenous Australian concept of Dadirri. My relatively comfortable and routine cottonwalks, or walks in the cottonwood riparian habitats of the Okanagan and Similkameen watershed, have been, much to my surprise, uncomfortably jostled by the seemingly sudden blanketing of the world in the colour green. Don't get me wrong, there are flowers too, and remnants of winter's plants remain, mostly though, there is green. It was exciting at first, so very exciting. I thought had spent the winter waiting for leaves, first seeking remnants of the green fall and finally waiting in nail-biting anticipating for the cottonwoods to unfurl their fragrant buds and the nettles to poke up along the pathways. Once it came though, it came so fast, so haltingly fast. There is so much of it, it is overwhelming. It seems to stick up its middle finger to my months-long efforts in getting to know the non-leery world of late fall and winter. Now it's all green all the time and I feel I'm starting from scratch. It's difficult to take photographs. It's difficult to choose to walk as opposed to cycle or to dismount through the riparian section of my commute. Where would I start? It's all just so, so green. Figure 5: An entry I wrote on the May 2021 OFS wiki page for ERA, titled “An interlude and commentary on the colour green.” 37 focus their attention on salient aspects, patterns, and processes occurring in place. The mentor, in a mentor-novice relationship, need not be human, it could be, for instance, a habitat, plant, or collection of rocks. This attending requires skills and sensory literacies learned with, in, and from place (Tuck and McKenzie 2014). We are in an educative process through the action of attending: listening, watching, smelling, tasting, and/or touching as different actors in our surrounding environment solicit our attention. The education of ecologically specific attention is a personal pedagogy and a step on the path towards relational accountability (Mini-Drama 4). It is also a deliberate intervention in the “systemic insensitivity” to plants and plant-ways common in modern urban ways of being and engaging with the world (Sandilands 2021). Our sensual and sensory organs are culturally configured, “[w]hat this entails for your research is that you will need to slow down what it means to see something, hear something, or experience something” (Aluli-Meyer 2008, 6). Grasping what is going on doesn’t always come easily. When you are paying acute attention to something, noticing its small changes, if the rate of change increases it can be difficult to process. It can be an astoundingly quick transition from believing you have a decent grasp, to fumbling and barely maintaining contact. Maybe someone shares a piece of information that makes sense of a whole suite of previously disconnected or precariously assembled observations. Maybe the seasons change, and your skills no longer jive with the environment (Figure 5, page 36). Our sense making is necessarily exclusionary. Every attempt at making sense “simultaneously acknowledges the Mini-drama 4: April 11, 2021 Caption: I wish I had taken a moment to feel this texture. Alt-text: Grey and white fungus with the appearance of carpet-like softness, growing on a tree. 38 impossibility of such a project through the excess of ‘insensible subjects’ that always await description, nomination, or apprehension” (Yusoff 2013, 209). The simultaneously gradual and punctuated education of my riparian attention has made clear this precarity. The education of attention is a strong yet slippery process. Location in place—as demonstrated by the differences between Part 6: fringe natures and the rest of the Chapters and Episodes—is critical for its applicability. This holds both ecologically, in relation to habitat expression, and socially, in regards to the ways one can reasonably expect to converse with and learn from other people in a place. Riparian habitats in the Sumas Valley, for example, are not a whole lot more wet than non-riparian habitats; they do not stand out as they do in the Okanagan. My increasingly educated (Okanagan) riparian attention served me in only limited ways in Sumas, most of which had less to do with recent research and more to do with my having lived nearby for a number a years during high school, in a similar climate that attracts and produces similar beings and relationships. We could not pursue a place study in the Sumas Valley because we did not have the relationships to facilitate that kind of work. There, my co-author and I were not only visitor-scholars in relation to our ancestral and immigrant lineages, but visiting visitor-scholars, in that we also lacked the immediacy of proximity to home as well as the kind of visceral accountability that comes with relationships developed slowly over time. 2.2.2 the practice There was so much to learn. I needed a process through which I would educate my attention within this context. Also, it was 2020, COVID-19 was the primary organizing force in the life and times of many humans in most places, and walking alone was all the rage for those who had the ability to do so. So, with the ability, I chose to walk. Walking in and with riparian places, attending to the practice, would surely teach me things, even if I wasn’t sure at the time what those things would be. This orientation to process, not results, has been echoed recently by many scholars challenging methodological and institutional norms that value productivity first (CLEAR 2021; Rault and Cowan 2020c; Meyerhoff and Noterman 2017; Kanngieser and Todd 2021; Black 2018; Aluli-Meyer 2006; Stubington 2013). Of particular influence for my understanding of presearch have been those theorizing “crip time” (Hamraie and Fritsch 2019; Clare 1999; Piepzna-Samarasinha 2022; Samuels 2017; Dokumaci 2023), a term from disability culture that references “a flexible approach to normative time frames” (Price 2011, 62). The figuration of crip time condenses the varied ways things often take more time and require 39 additional thought and care when disability is an operational factor. The work that disabled folks and disability studies scholars have done to assert and defend crip time as legitimate has opened space to proceed with time-flexible methods.63 I myself live with a disability that causes absolute shutdown of my person-system in the event of overloading or excessive hurrying. These ways of being in the world are not possible for me in any part of my life, scholarship included. My disability, however, is not the aspect I want to put forward as why I prioritized this slow method of coming to know—nor the social and institutional disabling caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. Reading or working alongside (and six feet away from) a local expert would have been faster and more pointed. I could have been guided as a child is guided, to the beings and categories already deemed salient by the informed source (Zukow-Goldring and Ferko 1994; Ahmed 2006; Marin and Bang 2018). What resulted instead, from my choice to walk, sniff, listen, and look around—mostly without invited human company—was thickness.64 The decision to walk was also convenient. Every time I leave my apartment, I cross Mill Creek and its attendant riparian habitat. When I go to the gym or cycle to campus I pass through or travel along riparian fringes. If I take a dip in Okanagan Lake (MCE), the littoral nature of the foreshore is itself riparian, and I am a semi-aquatic participant in that moment, not minding, as a cottonwood (MCE) doesn’t mind, occasional wet feet. By assigning time in my day to attend to these places, I was giving myself opportunities to encounter and participate in the ongoing dramatics of the riparian, learning to perceive stories told by the multi-being characters composing and being composed by these habitats (Mini-drama 5, page 40). 63 Other, perhaps less theorized, frameworks for normalizing time-flexibility that I have heard are “island time” and “Indian [as in Indigenous] time,” both of which are often proudly claimed or, if not, at least widely accepted in their respective home contexts. 64 While there is a significant literature on walking as method (Chandler et al. 2019; Ingold and Vergunst 2008; Marin and Bang 2018; Springgay and Truman 2017b), I am interested here primarily in the thickness that resulted from the particular practice of walking and attending that I describe below—a folding of experience, on top of ideas, on top of encounters that increases capacity for relating multimodally across difference. See Part 4: corrugation. 40 Cottonwoods—trees that grow fast and tall in riparian margins, absorbing water in times of plenty and releasing moisture in times of scarcity, creating an overstory at their peak height and becoming a rich source of nutrients for soil and streams when leaves, branches, and trunks fall—had been highlighted by the Enhancing Ecosystem Sustainability project as a being of primary importance.65 So, I named these walks “cottonwalks,”66 to distinguish them from regular walks, and activate my attention. I was a participant-observing, over, and over, and over, conducting a multi-being ethnography with no clear goal in mind other than to educate my riparian attention by creating meaningful experiences with these ecologies. 65 As a result of this priority—a focus on the cottonwood-salmon-riparian nexus of relationships—cottonwoods were my entry point into the riparian and the focus of my initial study. Drawing from previous work in cacao agroforestry, where altitudinal levels of ecological function are particularly important, I came to see the cottonwoods, the tallest trees around, for their many riparian functions. Cottonwoods grow quickly; absorb and release water like sponges; humidify their surroundings; create an overstory that gives shelter and shade to beings underneath; drop leaf litter in streams that contributes to the nutrification of waterways and the health of aquatic critters; tumble branches and trunks regularly, which decompose and add bulk and nutrients to the soil; and host animal and fungal life, from owls to bracket fungi. These trees need concentrations of wetness only found alongside flowing bodies of water and cannot grow well in the less-wet hills. The living infrastructure facilitated by large deciduous trees like cottonwoods (and their smaller neighbours such as willows (MCE), aspen, and alder) make possible riparian lifeways, and are the reason for the uniqueness of the riparian habitat in the Okanagan valley. See the recent work of Kasey Moran (2023) for specifics of cottonwood life in the Okanagan. 66 This was a labeling used only in the context of, “I think I’ll go for a cottonwalk this afternoon,” and similar such sentences. Labeling them made the process feel intentional and legitimate; it was a good reminder for me that this labour of love I was insisting on was (probably) worthwhile. Mini-drama 5: June 4, 2021 Caption: Curious. Alt-text: Shadows casting over an area of long grass that is laying flat on the ground, radially, from a center in which there is a hole that reveals a small patch of soil. A pair of sand aled human feet stand at the bottom of the frame. 41 Originally, the plan was to cottonwalk regularly (one to multiple times per week), in and with this habitat, for one year. I would encounter riparian beings and be open to their solicitations of my attention. As documentation of this process, and to build in a bit of accountability for myself, I kept a photojournal, cataloguing the being and collectives by which my attention had been solicited. One year felt like a long time and a big commitment. Little did I know one would become three and a presearch project would coalesce into research, answering one question and defining another. This commitment to repeated, intentional, attentive encounter with the riparian also lead to my participation in the k’əmcnitkw floodplain re-engagement project (described below), which became a place of learning in more ways than I could have dreamed. 2.3 k’əmcnitkw What I want future generations to know is that knowledge is not just from books or in the four walls of a classroom. Knowledge is taste, touch, see, and smell. And that ability to be there when it happens. (Armstrong, 2021) I spent two years traveling once a week (weather permitting) to the city of Penticton (from November 2020 to October 2022), a 50-minute drive south of where I live, to volunteer as a labourer at and for k’əmcnitkw (MCE), a floodplain re-engagement project run by the En’owkin Center’s Ecommunity team.67 The En’owkin Center is a syilx cultural, educational, ecological, and creative arts organization located a few kilometers away from the floodplain re-engagement site. k’əmcnitkw is a 10-year collaboration between the En’owkin Centre, the Okanagan Nation Alliance, and the Department of Fisheries and Oceans, that was initiated to remediate some of the ecological damage that was done unto the Okanagan River (MCE) when the flow between Okanagan Lake and Skaha Lake was channelized in the 1950s. The site is part of the current Penticton Indian Band reserve located in the historic floodplain of the Okanagan River and alongside the current channel. It is flanked by a golf course that separates k’əmcnitkw from Ecommunity Place, a teaching space encompassing the region’s healthiest stand of black cottonwood trees. Much of the funding for the project came via the need to provide shaded, slow-moving waters to salmon fry on their way to the ocean. 67 Many thanks to Aleksandra Dulic and Miles Thoroughgood for introducing us, and on a harvest festival weekend nonetheless. 42 I arrived 5 years into the project, after the funding had been procured, location secured, elders consulted, plantlings cultivated, invading foliage removed, topography re-arranged, and a hole punched in the dike to allow backflow into the soon-to-be reengaged floodplain. On my first visit, it looked like the makings of a construction site (Mini-drama 6).68 There I worked alongside Taylor Lezard (advisor and successor of the project lead), Michael Bezener (project lead), youth from the Penticton Indian Band community, and other enthusiastic volunteers. We followed the priorities, practices, and protocols laid out for the project by a group of syilx elders who had met for years in advance of planting to determine which plants would be best suited to re-populate the floodplain. 68 With its location directly adjacent to a popular walking path along the river channel in Penticton, engagement with passers by was a common occurrence. Before we started planting, many people thought the site had been slotted for a new riverside housing development. Mini-drama 6: March 25, 2021 Caption: Removal of white poplar. That's a very long root you're seeing there. Alt-text: One bright red digger machine tilts precariously on a grey-brown slope while grasping a very long tree root. The soil around the digger is peppered with florescent flags indicating the presence of young plants. 43 Working at k’əmcnitkw taught me many things. I learned about politics of representation,69 the importance of showing up,70 and the humility necessary to accept a ‘no’ when its offered.71 I learned to plant trees as if they are octopuses, that efficiency (plants planted per hour) and effectiveness (plants surviving their first winter) might as well be negatively correlated in Okanagan floodplain rehabilitation work (Moran 2023), and the relationship-building power of labouring together.72 This was not, in fact, a casual way to spend some time in a riparian habitat;73 it was so much more. The principles of presearch played out in this place, in the cold, heat, and smoke; with the plants and the spectral presence (traces) of various critters; and in the friends I made. In October of 2023 Michael Bezener, Kasey Moran (a local riparian ecologist), Moos (my partner), and I took a walk to see how things had grown at k’əmcnitkw since we had all been there last. The intimacy I feel with that place surprised me; there are thick memories inscribed in the multi-being community I helped bring to life. Though, as a visitor, I will not always be welcome in this place, k’əmcnitkw is one of the most important teachers I had throughout this research journey. 69 One day early on in my visits an elder told me it was good for the youth to see me there labouring with them. She went on to explain that it was the fact that I was coming from the university, having been in school for a very long time, and was still able to be out doing the work; it was a display of mutual compatibility and an example of how it is possible to go to school and not give up the important work we were doing there. 70 I was asked many times, “you came all the way from Kelowna to be here?” It has proven true, in other contexts as well, that people appreciate being met where they are. 71 This research about riparian relating in syilx territory had two previous iterations. The first was abandoned as a result of the international border closures or and uncertainty around the COVID-19 pandemic and the second, which would have taken place at and been produced as part of the k’əmcnitkw floodplain re-engagement project, did not go forward because one “no” rang louder that many yesses. 72 I am grateful for my ability to participate in this kind of physical labour at this time in my life and recognize the role that that physical ability has played in my research endeavours to date. 73 Though I did take pictures while there, most days I would be too busy or my hands too dirty or cold to bother. 44 3 habits of the Okanagan This is the first of three Episodes in the socio-ecological story of Brandt’s Creek and the Northend marsh, a place abutting Okanagan Lake in the present day city of Kelowna, British Columbia. This Episode, “habits of the Okanagan,” introduces the Okanagan as a place. First, I present an idea of the Okanagan through: its settler colonial relations and history; its geography and ecology as a river and watershed, defining a semi-arid, snow-melt driven hydro-ecological system; and the varied imaginaries of this place that bring each other into relief. Next, I introduce Mathur and Da Cunha’s conceptualization of wetness, the surface, and the line to highlight the importance of the settler colonial and capitalist projects of invasion and acquisition that create place-as-property, an ideology that today organizes many of the ways humans relate to place in much of the world. I close with a window into Okanagan riparian life and an introduction of Kelowna’s Northend Marsh and Brandt’s Creek. 3.1 an overview The word “Okanagan” names a people, a region, a valley, a river, a lake, and a fantasy. It is also, a place of wetness, where snow and melt define possibilities for interaction. These, as we will see, are incommensurate vocabularies, both of which I weave together here to help story this place, for incommensurability is not impossibility. In conversation with Dilip Da Cunha, whose work with Anuradha Mathur I lean heavily on below, he shared his understanding that “we don’t see things differently, we see different things” (pers. comm., 2023).74 There is dissent embedded in this incommensurability—clashing modes of sensing, inhabiting, and engaging in the world (Manuel Tironi 2018; M Tironi and Sannazzaro 2017)—and in this dissent, illustrative friction. Exploring these two different Okanagans—an Okanagan defined by settler colonial map- and pattern-making and the separation of land from water; and an always-already wet Okanagan, for which we must think in gradients and density as opposed to punctuated difference—can contribute to an anticolonial imaginary of living well with this place. This imaginary would necessarily include the dissolution of the land/water binary, an aporetic boundary if there ever was one, and move away from the lines and surfaces that create place-as-property in the Okanagan and beyond. 74 Thank you Chhavi for your gracious introduction to this scholar who also happens to be your uncle. 45 The Okanagan people are the Indigenous people of this place, the people indigenous to this place.75 Okanagan is not the only name that is used by and for these people. Often, and more commonly these days, syilx or Syilx is used, or S/syilx Okanagan.76 Sometimes syilx will be italicized to indicate—when written in and among English—that it is a word from another language, n̓ syilxc ̌n̓ or Nsyilxcen, the language of this place.77 Though preferences vary, the majority of people indigenous to this place who I have been in conversation with choose to identify as syilx. I have also met people indigenous to this place who prefer to think of, and refer to themselves as sqilxʷ, “which in translation means person or people” (J. C. Armstrong 2009, 230). While decisions are made in documents to use one or another naming convention—I have chosen to use both “syilx” and “Syilx Okanagan” here to refer to the people who have lived in, with, and as a part of this place since the glaciers receded78—it is important to remember that these designations are not static. In English, proper nouns are “specific to one place, time, and culture” (Liboiron 2021b, 7) and different choices are likely to be made in the future as they have been made in the past. Though the Syilx Okanagan people never ceded title to their home, neither by their or anybody else’s laws, the Okanagan—the place—has been intensively occupied, cultivated, and settled in the last 160 years and counting. This colonial settlement was initiated by people of European origin and descent (B. Cohen and Chambers 2021). More recently, people have arrived from, and via, many other places around the world (Joy 1982; Elise Hjalmarson et al. 2015; Kyle 2019; Aguiar, 75 Pre-colonization the boundaries of syilx territory were defined by story and language; the map in use today by the Okanagan Nation Alliance and communicated by the oft-cited website native-land.ca was developed in the 1980s as a tool to counter the imposition of other maps onto syilx peoples and their homes (Dixon Terbasket, pers. comm., 2020). The Native Land mapping project also shows neighbouring cultures with history and presence shared with, sometimes contested by, the syilx. 76 Elder and scholar Marlowe Sam defines “Syilx” as “original people who learned to live together on the land in peace; dreaming ones; bound together; of the land” (2008, vii). 77 The convention to not capitalize the “s” in syilx is derived from nsyilxcən, in which no words are capitalized. “In an egalitarian society, capitalization insinuates there is something that holds more importance over another, and that does not fall in line with syilx ethics” (Kilawna 2021b; J. Armstrong 1998). The way I understand it, capitalizing Syilx in English follows anglophone conventions of respect and grammar, so recognizing Syilx as a word adopted into English it can be respectfully capitalized and written without italics. 78 I made this choice for consistency with the terminology currently in use by both the Okanagan Nation Alliance (Okanagan Nation Alliance, n.d.) and the University of British Columbia Okanagan (‘Declaration of Truth and Reconciliation Commitments: The University of British Columbia Okanagan 2022 Annual Report’ 2022), Syilx Okanagan, and to honour the preference I have most often heard in conversation, for the word syilx to be pronounced in the language, nsyilxcən, and stay true to its single-case conventions. Respectful language use is situational and relational, and therefore, inevitably imperfect in a fixed written format. There will never be one way that will be right for everyone effected by these labels and I welcome any feedback from the community to improve on the choices I have made here. 46 McKinnon, and Sookraj 2010).79 This is the Okanagan I have come to know throughout this research, an Okanagan in which settler colonial settlement patterns and capitalist/industrial priorities overwhelm ecologies. In this Okanagan, place names often commemorate wealthy/powerful European settlers; obscure anarchival histories of people othered by whiteness; name hauntings of ecological assemblages sidelined by anthropocentric infrastructure;80 or are anglicised variations of nsyilxcən words (B. Cohen et al. 2021). The word “Okanagan” itself is one such word. Nsyilxcen language speaker Marlene Squakin (yaxma) explains that the word is anglicized from sukanaqin, “ones who carry messages for the people” (Kilawna 2021a), while Bill Cohen and Natalie Chambers cite “Okanagan” as coming from the Nsyilxcen word “Swknaqínx,” a “place and people descriptor [that] connotes looking into the future responsibly” (B. Cohen and Chambers 2021, 35). Both of these derivations center communication and responsibility.81 79 Demographically, the region today is overwhelmingly white, meaning of Western European descent. In 2021, according to Statistics Canada, the five most frequently reported ethnic or cultural origins in the Regional District of the Central Okanagan in 2021 were English, Scottish, German, Irish, and Canadian (Statistics Canada 2022). People come to the Okanagan from within Canada as well. The valley is marketed to monied Canadians and widely recognized as one of the most desirable places to live, work, and play, for reasons of climate and urban comforts (Aguiar, Tomic, and Trumper 2005; an infinite number of monkeys, n.d.). 80 For example: various uses of the name “Predator Ridge” in Vernon, a golf course for instance; the neighbourhood of “Trout Creek” in Summerland; or a nod to a more recently overtaken ecological assemblage, Kelowna’s “Orchard Park Mall” (see Rhenisch 2017). 81 I have a commitment to holding my research here accountable to this place. It is for this reason that the themes of communication and responsibility anchor this work. Mini-drama 7: April 11, 2021 Caption: Map making at its best . Alt-text: Lichen growing on tree trunk . 47 Geographically, the Okanagan valley is located in western North America and central Cascadia (see McCloskey n.d.), folded between the Cascade Mountain range to the west and the Columbia range to the east.82 Steep slopes carved by receding glaciers hug the Okanagan River, itself so wide in parts that it manifests as a series of lakes (Figure 6, page 50). Moving north to south, as does the river, the region extends from the town of Armstrong, British Columbia, and weaves its way through the municipalities of Vernon, Lake Country, Kelowna and West Kelowna, Peachland, Summerland, Penticton, Oliver, and Osoyoos, down to the 49th parallel border with the USA, where the place switches names, becoming the Okanogan.83 Of the six main lakes—Okanagan, Kalamalka, Wood, Skaha, Vaseux, and Osoyoos—Okanagan Lake, at 135km long, is by far the region’s largest and featured in most promotional imagery of the area. Wetness has always defined this place (Okanagan Nation Alliance Natural Resources Council 2014; R. Armstrong 2016; J. Armstrong 2006). For syilx people, “water rights are viewed as an ethical responsibility as water is recognized as central to the existence of all living things” (M. Sam 2008, 77). In both abundance and scarcity, wetness is everywhere. This wetness, a key concept for this story of the Northend Marsh, is described by the theoretical and design work of Anuradha Mathur and Dilip Da Cunha:84 There is no such thing as dry land. Wetness is everywhere to some degree. It is in the seas, clouds, rains, dew, air, soils, minerals, plants, animals. The sea is very wet; the desert less so. So, when we experience ‘water’ on the other side of a line that allegedly separates it from ‘land’, we know it to be by design, design that articulates a surface for habitation. This surface has served as a ground for experience, understanding and knowledge. Today, however, with rising seas, warming temperatures, and the increasing frequency of floods, this surface along with the edifice of civilization and certainty built upon it is threatened, calling into question the act of separation that brought it into being. (n.d.) 82 Note, the Okanagan and Similkameen rivers are closely linked both culturally and ecologically, hosting similar valley climates and becoming one just south of the Canada-USA border. 83 The sociopolitical and ecological complexities of this border crossing are beyond the scope of this discussion. See (Lozar 2018; Jack 2010; Rhenisch, n.d.) See also Daisy Pullman, Janatul Ferdous, and Greg Garrard’s forthcoming publication on this topic. 84 I refer to a number of Mathur and Da Cunha’s publications throughout this thesis. While some associated citations hold only Da Cunha’s name, given Mathur’s recent passing, in a conversation with Dilip Da Cunha in late 2023, he referred to this body of work as shared by the two of them, so, borrowing a convention from J.K. Gibson-Graham, I have credited them both accordingly. 48 The fact of wetness cannot be represented by maps as I have come to know them—two dimensional representations to scale (by distance measured on the surface of ‘the ground’) of the four85 dimensional world in which we live, used for navigation and delineation. These maps, we’ll call them “conventional maps,” are inadequate tools to communicate and depict the fact of wetness, which exists in gradients and potencies. “[B]oth water and land”, Harold Rhenisch points out, “are contained by story” (2019). Maps are one mode of storying. In the same post on his blog “Okanagan Okanogan,” Rhenisch details the primacy of land in conventional mapping practices and asks the question, “[w]hat would a water-based map look like” (2019)? It would, he concludes, look very similar to a land-based map. Whether water contains land or land contains water, it is the fact of containment (MCE) that wetness, as a concept, makes impossible.86 Conventional maps, therefore, interface poorly with wetness. Context and specificity create the relevance for containment and, its inevitable accompaniment, permeability (see Part 6). The stories I tell in this thesis variously reject and rely on containment, 85 In this count I include time as a dimension. 86 “Even when they contain water, well, the word says it: they “contain” water” (Rhenisch 2019). Mini-drama 8: June 4, 2021 Caption: Now, chats, I realize you don't typically come this far north, but I'm here to tell you that Kelowna has a lot to offer you. Alt-text: Levels of riparian vegetation, mostly brilliant green and illuminated by the sun under a blue sky. Grasses and showy milkweed feature prominently in the foreground, supported by roses, currants, and tall mature trees in the back. One fledgling tree stands out in the grass. 49 depending on context and specificity. The map here (Figure 6, page 50)—produced in watercolour, a medium that dabbles in un-contain-ability—echoes this duplicity (see also Mini-drama 7, page 46). Situated at the northern tip of a dry climatic system, in a rain shadow created by the Coast and Cascade Mountains, it is warmer and less wet here, relative to the rest of Canada.87 The Okanagan hills host semi-arid steppe vegetation and receive the majority of their annual precipitation as snow in the higher elevations. Snow falls through the winter and begins to melt in the spring, engorging waterways in a process called freshet, and moving water through dryer lower-lying land to the valley-bottom and the Okanagan River. Here all beings in need of wetness in significant concentration throughout the year must locate near, or with easy access to, flowing bodies—rivers, creeks, streams, ditches, hyporheic flows. Living in the margin of wetness created by a flowing body of water is the condition of being riparian. Riparian habitats are “spatial and temporal environmental mosaic[s] with few parallels” (Naiman and Décamps 1997, 262). Particularly in places with little rainfall—such as the Okanagan—riparia both concentrate and distribute wetness, spatially and temporally, resulting in a diverse and unique assemblage of beings (Mini-drama 8, page 48) and a clear distinction between riparian and non-riparian habits and habitats (Mini-drama 11, page 68). 3.2 vocabularies I’ve defined this research as an investigation into human thought about, and interaction with, Okanagan riparian habitats. The concepts that create the riparian however—water, land, margin, interface, flow, thickening—are troubled by both Mathur and Da Cunha’s work, as well as the rhythms of traditional syilx life. For a fringe to exist there must be a blanket; for a boundary to be possible, there must be something that is bounded. Wetness does not allow for a body or flow of water, or a fringe thereof; wetness is always already everywhere and can be attended to only in gradients (Da Cunha, pers. comm., 2023). It requires the perception of different things and the use of a vocabulary entirely unfamiliar to either ecology or the ecological humanities. Attending to the thickness of the riparian margin/interface between water and land necessitates first that place is perceived as a surface, and 87 Crucially for the agricultural prowess of the region, crops like stone fruit and grapes can grow here but very few other places in the country. 50 Figure 6: The Okanagan Valley. Watercolour by Moos van Caspel, 2024. 51 that distinct places be defined in relation to that surface.88 It then requires the line that creates water and land as separable entities and is made possible by the surface, one dimension drawn through two. Relying on a surface and separation, this riparian negates the possibility of the sponginess of place, even when that sponginess is described as characteristic of some of its constituent beings (moss or mud, for example). It is incommensurable with a continuum or gradient of wetness, from what gets called the atmosphere, where weather occurs, to holdings designated as aquifers, below the ground: “Wetness is everywhere to some degree. It is in the seas, clouds, rains, dew, air, soils, minerals, plants, animals. The sea is very wet; the desert less so” (Mathur and Cunha n.d.). While I find Mathur and Da Cunha’s work exciting and illustrative, my ability to communicate the work I’m presenting here through the central concept of wetness, and associated vocabulary that would remain consistent to the theory is limited. It is important also to speak through and to the vocabularies currently in use amongst ecological researchers and practitioners, words that often have origins grounded in delineation and separation, for reasons of both practicality and origin,89 and some that have been created to resist rigidity.90 So, instead of choosing one approach or the other, I play with the friction created by this incommensurability between wetness, which has no margin, and the riparian, which both is a margin, and is made marginal. 3.3 place-as-property Before European capitalists’ settlement of this place,91 syilx people moved with wetness throughout the year, traveling with the melt, staying in place while temperatures kept wetness mostly frozen and 88 As an anglophone, I have come to know this surface as “the ground” (MCE). 89 If it is important to your way of life to be able to apply for funding, for example, for a defined project in a defined place, with specific goals and key performance indicators, language that delineates these things is necessary. Such ways of life developed among the complex entanglements of settler colonial capitalism, which, in western Canada, has been primarily conducted in English, imported here from particular places and times. 90 Such as “ecotone” (see Krall 1994). 91 Capitalism is important here. The settler colony of Canada was founded first and foremost on fashion and prized minerals (Trufelman 2023; Mikkelsen 1950). The people arriving and making their home and work in the Okanagan valley in the later half of the 19th century were capitalists by culture, not by genetics. Place was not always property in Europe, nor in Britain specifically, whence the majority of the Okanagan’s first European settlers arrived (Barman 1996). In English common law “[t]he doctrine of estates meant that land was not ‘owned’ in the absolute way in which, for example, an object, classified as property, was owned. … [W]ith the transition from feudalism to capitalism, the long separated legal categories of land law and property law gradually merged so that land was increasingly regarded as an object of property. … The alienation of peoples from places and the reduction of land to a set of commercially valued commodities were inconsistent with traditional English land laws” (Graham 2020, 2; McDonagh 2013). Enclosure of common land was 52 relatively still.92 The ability to move cyclically in this way was hindered by settlers’ assertion of place as property—as something fungible and possessable—one of the primary mechanisms of settler colonial violence (Bhandar 2016; 2018; Culhane 1998; Graham 2020). Due to these pressures, and the legislated confinement of syilx people to reserves (C. Harris 2002), year-round single-location living became increasingly common for Okanagan residents, syilx and settler alike (D. Thompson 1990; Casorso 1983).93 European-dominated settlements were built at the valley’s bottom. The wetness present in these places was treated as a problem to be solved through discourse and engineering that would turn wetness into water and separate water from land. In the Okanagan happening though, and was a key factor in, the increase in agricultural production that sustained the enormous population growth, which in turn made colonialism possible (De Angelis 2004). The very idea that a place can be owned sits at the core of capitalist and settler colonial logics. 92 The details of syilx lifeways are not for me to share. Many skilled and knowledgeable storytellers throughout the territory have gifted stories to me in my time here and some of those people make it their work to share with others. To those interested in learning more, I recommend visiting the Sncewips Heritage Museum in West Kelowna, or attending an event hosted by/with syilx knowledge holders. 93 Of the shift to dwelling in a single location year-round, Duane Thompson writes: “The permanent villages centered around the church and the regime imposed by the village bell re-oriented Indian life from the seasonal rhythms of nature to a rhythm based on industrial time. The new religion [Catholicism] did not reflect either traditional values or, apparently, the values of white society, and it left the Indians ill-prepared to deal with aggressive, acquisitive white neighbours. Virtues of piety and submissiveness, and isolation from white society did not prepare Indians well for the real world. The authoritarian structures imposed by the Oblates, combined with other political, judicial, and social structures, made the Indian people dependent. They lost the independence to which they had been accustomed and the control of their own future” (1990, 140). Mini-drama 9: January 6, 2021 Caption: This, is a cottonwood tree, who is laying down to rest, and producing sap. Alt-text: Brown, grey, black, bark glistening with water and sap, filling the frame. 53 today, as in so many places around the world, urban centers have largely been situated in floodplains, or places where melt is held.94 In the introduction to the “Feral Atlas” its editors describe infrastructures—"human-built landscape modification projects that emerge within social and political programs”—as creatures of history, explaining the importance of historical conjectures for shaping what can come after (Tsing et al. 2020a). They go on to identify the emergence of capitalism as a founding conjecture of the anthropocene and the origin of “infrastructural design for the deployment and amassment of investment capital” (Tsing et al. 2020a). The investment capital created, deployed, and wielded most powerfully in the Okanagan has been property. The infrastructures that subjugate riparian ecologies are a result of this capitalist priority. In their book “The Invention of Rivers” Mathur and Da Cunha (2019) explain that the idea of a river, as a coherent flowing body of water, began with Alexander the Great’s depiction of wetness as a line, a flow, a separation.95 These lines were drawn first on the ground—here is water, here is land; this bit is wet, this bit is dry—and then on a map.96 These lines, one dimensional in their mapped form, were made possible by the perception of “the ground” as a surface of two dimensions, where land meets sky. Rivers were invented as water, rather than wetness, as flowing rather than seeping, soaking, spreading, and muddying. In so doing, land too is invented, and it is supposed to be dry. Mathur and Da Cunha call this a first colonialism, the beginning of a geometric understanding of place that created the conditions for both geography and place-as-property. For geography, and colonialism to be possible, they argue, there first had to be the concomitant ideas of the surface and the line. Summarizing in an interview for the podcast “Cultures of Energy” Da Cunha explains: we’ve taken a wetness that is everywhere, and we acknowledge it everywhere—I mean it’s in the humidity, it’s in us, it’s in plants—you know, there’s no such thing 94 Many examples of colonial floodplain development and obstinate dwelling insistent on a separation between land and water can be found in present day India (Acharya 2015; Ge 2019; Mathur and Da Cunha 2009; Karim 2020). Iftekhar Iqbal writes a story of the Bengal Delta, for example, where “the age of the Anthropocene began with the arrival of the railways” (2020), a statement that might also be made of the Okanagan. In both places, the Bengal Delta and the Okanagan Valley (as well as the Sumas Valley, a story of which is told in Part 6), (settler) colonial observers noted, the regions as “admirably adapted to, and capable of, producing every kind of crop” (Gastrell 1868, 6). 95 I cite this as a specific storied example, not necessarily as fact, because, who really knows? The separation and its repercussions are what is important here, not the specifics of who and when. 96 See also one of Harold Rhenish’s many blog posts on the topic (e.g. 2019). 54 as dryness, there’s only less wet and more wet. We have now turned this wetness into dry and wet, so it is wet water and dry land, or unchanging land and changing water, so now you have a binary, but a binary with the power given to land, so water is now contained, or wetness is contained, by making it into water and making it a binarism. This tool gives you a land to colonize. (2022) Land and water, therefore, are dependent on the vocabularies and technologies we use to describe them. Or, as Harold Rhenisch puts it, “both water and land are contained by a story” (2019). The line created by their separation is an aporia. “Rather than being oppositional or binary, the relevant terms, [water and land], are co-produced in the act of determining the line that separates them” (Tedesco 2021, 256). That is to say, the matter that gets called “water” is wet, though needs the concept water and its distinction from land to act and be reacted to as a place where walking would never be a possible mode of transport, as opposed to a pooling of wetness, where the need for canoe transport could more easily be taken as circumstantially contingent. Mathur and Da Cunha described an earlier edited volume, “Design in the Terrain of Water,” as a “dialogue between two waters—water that is somewhere, framed, held in place, and distinguished from land; and waters that are everywhere, challenging conventional representation and demanding invention” (2014, xi).97 Also dependent on the ideas of fixed land and flowing water, is the place in between: the riparian. Manifest from the impossibility of the separation of these entities is a thickness that allows for ecological possibilities otherwise unrealizable in this not-very-wet place. 3.4 the riparian Many being types grow alongside, make their homes in, and transition through the Okanagan’s riparian places, the majority of who could not live well or for long periods of time elsewhere in the valley. The relative moistness of these places self-perpetuates to maintain the biodiversity hosted there. Trees, cottonwoods for example, grow tall, draw creek water vertically up (soaking), releasing it slowly throughout the year (seeping) (Mini-drama 9, page 52). In so doing, cottonwoods and other riparian trees help to create the microclimatic infrastructure necessary for their kin and fellows to 97 Highlighting the story of one Okanagan place—a marsh, ditched to facilitate year-round human and industrial occupation—this place study, one of wet, multi-being lifeways in the Okanagan, is an incident of this dialogue. This is a story of living with wetness in this semi-arid, snow-melt system within unceded and occupied syilx territory. 55 thrive. Adapted to grow in saturated soils with low oxygen levels for much of the year, other plant families, such as willows, dogwoods, rushes, and water-loving birches, live exclusively in these moist places (Mini-dramas 8, page 48, and 10). On the fringe of the fringe—as riparia transition from more wet into less wet—roses (MCE), snowberries (MCE), showy milkweeds (MCE), hawthorns (MCE), choke cherries (MCE), and many other plant beings make their homes. Invertebrates, amphibians, and reptiles use riparian areas for breeding, developing young, feeding, and shelter (Olson et al. 2007). Birds use riparian areas for foraging and nesting habitat (Forrester et al. 2020; Heltzel and Earnst 2006; McKibbin and Bishop 2010). Fish seek creeks with riparian vegetation for food, nutrients, and the cooler water temperatures ensured by the shade provided (Pusey and Arthington 2003). Mammals use these areas as travel corridors (Stanley et al. 1991); foraging sites for harvesting foods98 (Xiang, Zhang, and Richardson 2017), medicines (Turner, Bouchard, and Kennedy 1980), and materials (Poe et al., 2013); shelter (Wölfle-Erskine 2019); cruising (Hazard, 2022); recreation (Braatne, Rood, and Heilman 1996); and learning and teaching (Stevenson 2018). 98 Many edible fruits (MCE), for example, grow in the riparian. Mini-drama 10: June 4, 2021 Caption: Here we see mostly dogwood and co., though this until-recently unknown to me region of riparia incorporated so many riparian characters it felt almost like a caricature. Alt-text: An entire frame filled with late-spring green leaves. 56 Habits characteristic of these places—such as seasonality, making and taking shelter (MCE), and collaboration between levels (MCE)—inspire questions about which voices are not-yet audible in the mainstream and what perspectives require more attention such that they might world99 different kinds of human-wetness relations (Chao 2022; Gómez-Barris 2021; Wölfle Hazard 2022). In this Episode I introduced the Okanagan, a general overview of its geography and ecology, a selection of place-based-imaginaries, and the settler colonial relations that organize my understanding of what it means to live and work as a visitor-researcher here. We then explored Mathur and Da Cunha’s world of surfaces, lines, and wetness in order to describe the settler colonial assertion of place-as-property and the concurrent need to establish firm land and flowing water from an inherently inseparable condition of wetness. In the next Episode, inhabiting the Northend Marsh, I introduce a place study of spectral ecologies, Kelowna’s Northend Marsh and its rearticulation as a ditch that goes by the name of Brandt’s Creek. This is the most locally applicable aspect of the research compiled here.100 People who live in Kelowna have reason to interact with and care about this place, even if they don’t currently. I weave textual and photographic archival materials together with municipal documentation and conversations had with community members to assemble a telling of how the valley-bottom portion of Brandt’s Creek came to be—through digging and draining—and how it came to be disappeared—though an insistence that the wetness of which it is created was not of much consequence in the first place. 99 Here the term “world” is a verb: world, worlded, worlding. This is a term possibly starting with, though almost always connected to, Donna Haraway, who, in her 2013 chapter “Sowing Worlds,” describes the multi-being interactions that make going on possible: “[t]he slight curve of the shell that holds just a little water, just a few seeds to give away and to receive, stories of becoming-with, of reciprocal induction, of companion species whose job in living and dying is not to end the storying, the worlding” (Haraway 2013, 139). 100 There have been three central stories around which this research was to be wound. Neither of the first two came to fruition, for individual research projects falling through is a fact of graduate research. I was made aware, particularly of Brandt’s Creek, by my supervisor Greg Garard, in a moment when there was a need for a new focus. Through the three different project ideas, never did my efforts stray from the riparian—and all the while I continued educating my riparian attention—what they did do was become ever more local. The Northend Marsh is somewhere close friends and colleagues live and Brandt’s Creek is just a few kilometres from my own home. 57 4 corrugation This chapter builds on Part 2: presearch to explain how the project Educating Riparian Attention (ERA)—organized around the presearch method of attentively walking in and with riparian places—became a multi-media and multimodal experience, chronicling three years of coming to know, and resulting in a collection of 1405 riparian Mini-dramas (Part 4.2, page 73). I introduce “corrugation” as a theory of affective and relational thickening that results from intentional, sustained, and attentive engagement with place. Like synesthetic cognition, which creates additional sensorial hooks into which synesthetes can attach memory and associations—colours and numbers coinciding for instance—corrugation folds experience, on top of ideas, on top of experience, creating an effect of thickness (Geertz 1973; Neimanis and Walker 2014) or “heavy processing” (Rault and Cowan 2020a; 2020b; 2020c), becoming more and other (Hayward and Weinstein 2015). It is a way of coming to know, a dance between attention, memory, and the passage of time. Here I engage concepts such as multimodality, mediation, remediation, and weathering, in addition to the practices of writing alt-text, creating thick description, and conducting muti-being ethnography, to answer the Question: What does it look like to prioritize multimodality, mediation, and remediation in place-based research practice and communication, and what implications have this commitment had for this research? Part 4.1 educating riparian attention cont. (page 57) opens with a description of my process and protocols for ERA. Two digital platforms helped shape the project: Instagram and the Open Science Framework (OSF). I discuss these platforms and their contributions and shortcomings, as well as my orientation to the use of these tools. Thanks to OSF, learning about and writing alt-text became an important part of educating my riparian attention. I write specifically about that dimension of the project before describing the current state of the catalogue and the ways in which the catalogue has been used to date. 4.1 educating riparian attention cont. 4.1.1 process, protocols, and platforms This is a story I have told many times, in graduate studies classes, workshops, to an attentive group of Grade 3s,101 in a Grade 12 classroom (see Figure 10, page 72),102 and at least once a day for two 101 Thank you Aunt Regina for inviting me two years in a row to talk to your class. 102 And thank you Kelly for welcoming me into your learning community. 58 months in a gallery space (Figure 11, page 75). Though it started as a tolerated side project, ERA became, amongst the tumult of graduate studies and research in the era of COVID-19, the one thing I was consistently doing and could rely on as a project through which to communicate my research agenda. I will try to tell the story of ERA here in the same way I would if we were sitting together in a coffee shop.103 It is not overtly theoretical and need not be overtheorized. As described, this is a practice accessible to many, and if amended slightly, to include a wider array of media and modalities of engagement, more accessible still. I intend for the story of my experience with this practice to be told accessibly as well. We left off in Part 2: presearch with my intention to educate my riparian attention. This I planned to do by walking regularly and attentively with and among riparian places/communities. One year, I promised myself; I would do this for one year. Once I started, the need for a mechanism of accountability, for and to myself, was immediately clear. Even if it were a trivial thing, it seemed important to track this practice. Photos made sense. I would take photos with my phone, which I almost always have with me when I leave the house. No special equipment would be required; that felt crucial. If I was going to make a year-long commitment at that moment it had to be so easy as to be nearly incidental to the ways I was already moving around. As this is a marshy place, living in Kelowna, particularly at valley-bottom, where wetness has been confined and collected into channels and coherent flows, means living with riparian places. I would simply move slower than usual, on foot as opposed to on a bike, through these places. The education of attention requires repetition and duration. Two to three times a week felt right, as a frequency that would require commitment but not overwhelm me. In November of 2020, having never acquired an interest in photography nor participated regularly in social media life-tracking, I did not particularly enjoy taking pictures. With the photography feeling like an annoyance, I assigned myself the task of taking three to five photos on every walk, a modest goal for a modest endeavour. These photos would be of anything that caught my eye, anything that solicited my attention, so long as I was in a riparian place while photographing. Not wanting these photos to simply collect on my phone, feeling like that would not create sufficient accountability, I decided to make an account on Instagram, which I had heard of but never used. Participating in the platformized world managed by the mega tech company Meta created unease for me, downloading the app to my phone all the more. Despite that unease, the user-friendly interface and aesthetically 103 I have even come to a coffee shop to do this writing, setting the mood. 59 pleasing (to my eyes) output created a feeling of worth-it-ness.104 Suddenly I had a vision of being able to scroll through a year’s worth of photo-tiles that would put on display the colour changes of the riparian as it went from brown (MCE) in November (MCE) to white and shining with ice (MCE) and snow (MCE), to speckled with green (MCE), to popping with multi-coloured flowers (MCE), and finally closing with the rainbows (MCE) of fall.105 It was Instagram that created that vision, and I was committed to making it happen. While posting my first photo I was asked by the platform to add a caption to my image. Not realizing this step was optional I thought, “hmm, well, in the spirit of keeping things easy, I'll just write the first thing that comes to mind at this moment of posting.” That too became part of the protocol. To recap, so far, the parameters of the project were as follows: • Walk with the riparian two to three times a week. • Take three to five photos on each walk (Figure 7, page 60). • Post photos on Instagram, captioning them with whatever comes to mind at the time of posting, usually later on the same day the photo was taken (Figure 8, 60). • Do this for one year to complete the riparian rainbow, from brown to brown. There was a “determined indeterminacy” (Hinchliffe et al. 2005, 656) here, composed of a vague plan and limited photographic skills. At its outset, ERA was a “commitment to a process that cannot be fully known beforehand” (Hinchliffe et al. 2005, 656). This presearch design existed only in its enactment; I had no idea what would come of it. A week or so into the project, in an attempt to make it known to the people in my life that this was a thing I was doing—which for me serves as another layer of accountability building—I tried to share my Instagram feed, only to learn that one cannot view a feed in its entirety without being logged in on an Instagram account. In my case that meant that my closest friend, partner, parents, 104 Also, as it turned out, lots of scholars and academically oriented collectives communicate about their research and activities through Instagram, so this acquiescence opened a portal for me that I did not previously know existed. And though no scholarly collaborations resulted from my time spent on Instagram, the friends and colleagues who were already interacting in and with the platform did indeed follow along with this project, and the @alsdeend feed where I posted the photos became a quick and easy way to share something of my research with those who had access. 105 This was a naive vision, for I now know that “[f]all isn’t brown and gold; it is dotted with berries: the bright white of the snowberry, the dusty blue of Oregon grape, the scarlet of the rose hips, the black of the elderberry. Winter isn’t just white: the Red Osier Dogwood is dark reddish purple; the dry grasses are pale golden yellow and the Pacific Willows by the creek glow orangey-gold. The pines are evergreen” (Stubington 2013, 29)! 60 Figure 7: Photograph anything that solicits your attention. Figure 8: Caption the photo with whatever comes to mind. In this photo, for example, I saw an elephant in the fuzz. 61 grandmother, and supervisor would all not have access to this catalogue I was creating. That didn't feel good, and it definitely didn't feel accessible. I did not, however, have another tool with which to easily create and share the riparian rainbow aesthetic to which I had become conceptually attached. So, instead of abandoning the platform, I decided to instigate a parallel version of the catalogue, an additional place to store these photos, a place where they would be accessible to anyone with access to an internet connection and viewing device. Having just learned about the Open Science Framework (OSF) and the integration of UBC as an OSF Institution,106 an OSF project wiki page seemed a good option for this purpose. Like Instagram, OSF also asked something of me when I began uploading photos to my newly created project wiki page: “enter image description here.” Though I didn’t know it at the time, these image descriptions are alt-text, short for alternative text, a textual substitute for non-text digital content that is embedded in an item’s metadata and accessed by and via screen readers, which are most often used by people who are B/blind or have low-vision. 4.1.2 alt-text The purpose of using OSF to begin with was to increase the accessibility of the content I was compiling. That the digital infrastructure was putting me face to face with another way in which my original plan was inaccessible, felt like an opportunity to learn about this style of writing and reassert my commitment to multimodal accessibility. It also felt intimidating. I had just added another layer of work to a project that was intended to be nearly incidental to my daily meanderings.107 A commitment was a commitment though, so I did my best to “enter [an] image description here.” Having seen an elephant in some plant matter (Figure 8, page 60), the caption of that photo became “Baby elephant. Medium: fuzz.” I thought I was pretty funny writing that caption, just like a placard at a museum; how could I be more descriptive without having more information myself though? Usually, especially in the beginning, I had no names for the beings I was photographing, 106 UBC Library has a comprehensive guide to using OSF for research purposes (Vis-Dunbar, n.d.). The librarians and other staff members championing and supporting the use of OSF at UBC Okanagan have been helpful from this project’s inception to the final stages of integration into this thesis. Thank you! 107 At the beginning writing alt-text was hard! I’d never written anything like that before. I do not have a background in ekphrastic poetry, nor was I trained in botany, which surely has its own descriptive conventions for plants. Instead, I was a transdisciplinary mutt, bumbling through the beginning of a commitment that just kept growing every time I gave it any room to do so. Much to my surprise and delight, this project opened a door to conversations in multimodal digital accessibility and critical disability studies, and now I know how important it is to build accessibility in from the beginning of a project, not as an afterthought. 62 neither local nor taxonomic. How could I decide what information was relevant to share about a given image without having a goal for communicating something specific by sharing said image? And why on earth did I have such a limited vocabulary of words to describe texture!? The amount of information contained in an image varies with the knowledge brought to its interpretation. In asking me to “enter [an] image description here” OSF was asking for both my interpretation and my inference about the viewers’ interests and interpretative capacities. My first attempts were clunky108 and only resulted in more questions. What do I do about colours? I don’t even agree with my partner most of the time, who grew up speaking a different language than I did, whether something is green or blue. What does colour mean to a person who does not see as I see, or does not see at all? What about relative size and perspective? Would it be useful to compare the size of the entities in the photos to something like a/my human body? Or the weather? The intensity of sunlight is visible in a photo, while the temperature is not. Both would have contributed to my experience of encounter. Does it make sense to report one and not the other if the intention is to describe the encounter that caused the photo? Etcetera. These questions lead me on a stroll around the internet to find resources that could improve my alt-text writing. With a few key exceptions,109 many of the guides that exist speak principally to alt-text describing photos of humans or technical diagrams.110, 111 Descriptions of online photographs of 108 The alt-text I wrote for “Baby elephant; Medium: fuzz,” for example, was “Cluster of white-brown plant fuzz branching out from center in focus in foreground, green grass and brown branches in background.” 109 For example the collaboration between artists Bojana Coklyat and Shannon Finnegan that resulted in the Alt Text as Poetry website, workbook, and ongoing work (2022), and the multiple guides written by Veronica with Four Eyes (n.d.). This fact has also changed in the years since I was starting with ERA and many more comprehensive guides now exist. 110 Examples of such descriptions can be found in lots of places, from the Disability Visibility Project website, to Instagram. Instagram does have an alt-text function. It is not, however, foregrounded in the process of posting a photo and users have to know it is there and click through a series of steps to add alt-text to their visual content. It would be simple to make such processes more prominent (‘Dark Patterns in Accessibility Tech: Databite 121’ 2019). As recently as March 2023 it was the case that alt-text would appear as hover-text when a user rested their cursor over an image displayed on Instagram for a period of time. Alt-text as hover text increases the visibility of alt-text for sighted audiences. At the time of writing, December 2023, this function, unfortunately no longer exists. Some Instagram users (@justnalln for example) create a more explicit display of image description on Instagram, using the caption field for their alt-text as well as adding it to the purpose-built alt-text function. 111 See John Lee Clark’s (2021) article Against Access for an example of the need to humanize human description. 63 other-than-humans have been paid relatively little attention.112 Unsatisfied with my internet search, I set a meeting with Laura Bulk, a researcher and assistant professor of teaching at UBC Vancouver.113 My most important take away from our conversation was that people who are B/blind or have low vision all have different preferences for alt-text. That alt-text is there is critically important, but there will never be one best way to write it (Stangl, Morris, and Gurari 2020). “Nothing about us without us,” is a powerful and widely used concept and phrase in disability and accessibility activism (Hamraie and Fritsch 2019). When it comes to legislation, infrastructure, and software development and testing, people of all kinds of abilities need to be involved or in charge at every stage (Jones, Collins, and Zbitnew 2021). Similarly, the voices of people who consume alt-text, whether for reasons of low vision or low bandwidth can, and should, be those that guide the writing process.114 As more disabled scholars, activists, and practitioners create more content to support alt-text authors, I hope people can joyously embrace this multimodal method of engaging with research media and communication. While differing opinions among alt-text users as to what constitutes good alt-text in a particular context makes writing alt-text that will satisfy a broad audience an unreasonable expectation, it’s still worth a try.115 My use of alt-text began as an access-oriented priority and became an important practice for the education of my own attention. At the outset, I barely comprehended enough context to improve on the auto generated “may be a close up of nature,”116 but as my ability to attend to the riparian places developed, the alt-text I wrote improved and became easier to write.117 Writing alt-text 112 The processes of and practices for describing all kinds of visual media do, however, receive beautiful support from people working to make visual art displayed in museums increasingly accessible. See, for example, the 2013 special double issue on Museum Experience and Blindness in the journal “Disability Studies Quarterly.” 113 Dr. Bulk has low vision herself though does not tend to use a screen reader. 114 Kelly Mack and colleagues (2021), for example, explored an exciting option for authoring high-quality alt-text, creating a feedback interface between screen reader users and alt-text authors that allowed users to give direct feedback to authors. 115 As someone putting visual imagery out into the world, you are responsible for the (in)accessibility of the media we produce (Humber College 2021). There are layers of interpretation involved in the creation and reception of both visual imagery and alt-text (Edwards 2023). Taking and sharing photos that you have written the alt-text for makes you, in the words of Edwards et al. (2023), an “artist-writer,” and creates an opportunity to reflect on and communicate your intention in sharing that image. Making time do this work is about priorities. 116 Quoted from the alt-text auto-generated by Instagram on March 25, 2023 for a photo I posted on February 4, 2023. 117 Actually, perhaps it is not possible for me, a sighted person to make the claim that it improved. My perception of improvement here is due to the text, over time, betraying less of me nervous energy. 64 became a way to reflect on the encounter captured in time by the photograph, of asking myself what I really see there and what appears to me to be relevant.118 That fourth pass—1) attention solicited, 2) photo taken, 3) photo captioned, 4) image described—made clear the effect that re-encountering was having on my memories of these encounters. These memories are thick, their thickness “a material duration that is both broad and deep” (Neimanis and Walker 2014, 570). For many, perhaps fully half, of the 1405 photos that make up the ERA catalogue, I have access to the exact location, weather, how I was feeling, where I was going, and what else happened that day. This remembering is a result of careful attunement and a “connectivity of phenomena at different scales” (Barad 2007, 246), which echoes Astrida Neimanis and Rachel Lowen Walker’s (2014) concept of “weathering.” Following Neimanis and Walker, weathering is a climate change imaginary of that thickens relationships between humans and climate, “stretching between present, future, and past” (2014, 561). [W]e are made by the time makers all around us: the earth’s soil that heats our bare feet in summer and freezes hard in the winter, telling us to wear boots to protect our skin; the old concrete building that decays as it collaborates with the wind and rain, retaining a/our memory of past splendor in its peeling paint. (Neimanis and Walker 2014, 569) Our human bodies contract past memories to make sense of present experience. I may not have known the names of the plants I was photographing, but I was coming to know them in my own way, through corrugation, a dance between attention, memory, and the passage and contraction of time.119 There are conversations happening right now in disability communities that speak to the work alt-text has done in this project. At the outset there was a need, a need in be inclusive, to make accessible this content I was producing, curating, and putting out into the world. And while alt-text serves purposes beyond descriptions for screen reader users, that character, who hears a webpage instead of seeing it, was top of mind. Reading John Lee Clark, however, introduced more questions of and into this practice. 118 This layer of reflection happened at the end of each month when I uploaded all of that month’s photos to OSF. 119 Plus, “[n]ames are fine, … but if you know what something’s called, it’s hard to keep wondering [as a beginner wonders] what it is” (Rothfus 2023, 132). 65 Programs created in the name of access make it possible for me [Clark is DeafBlind] to write this essay. Ramps, elevators, wide doorways, flashing lights, railings, benches, assistants, care workers, and myriad technologies make all the difference in the world. But the way those things are lobbied for, funded, designed, implemented, and used revolves around the assumption that there’s only one world and ignores realms of possibility nestled within those same modes. (2021) “Such a frenzy around access,” Clark points out, “is suffocating. I want to tell them [well-meaning able-bodied folks], Listen, I don’t care about your whatever. … Why is it about their including or not including us? Why is it never about us and whether or not we include them” (2021, emphasis in original)? Who was/am I, I had to ask myself, to assume anyone who cannot see these photos would be interested in their descriptions. And then, was their interest even the point? Maybe creating layers of multimodal content around and about the same topic-item—in this case a photograph of and taken in a riparian place—was a thing to do in and of itself, keeping accessibility in mind while valuing the practice for what is was, a corrugating act. In a recent webinar entitled “The Messy Work of Making a Visual Medium Accessible: Tactics and Techniques for Audio Describing Unflattening,” panel members discussed the project of audio-describing120 “Unflattening” (2015) the monographic created by Nick Sousanis from his dissertation, originally crafted in the same format. Joshua Miele, one member of the panel, spoke to this really interesting continuum of accessibility and alternative formats and alternative materials […] they're not really the same thing. When I talk about accessibility what I'm really talking about is creating a way for people with disabilities to participate equitably and with a very similar experience to the way that non-disabled participant would. So that includes the factor of sort of how much time it takes, how you get at it, how you approach it, what impact it has on you emotionally and physically. So that's what an accessible experience [is]. But it's also possible to create alternative experiences that try to sort of convey maybe the same information but are quite different from what the experience of the primary material might be. (Kleege et al. 2024) 120 Audio description is a practice akin to writing alt-text, for alt-text when used be folks who cannot see or cannot see well is typically received in audio format. 66 It is this “continuum of accessibility and alternative formats and alternative materials" that the process of writing alt-text for each of these 1405 photos eventually helped my sink in to. Where is started though, was with a nervous energy created from the desire to “get it right” for my imagined Blind or Low Vision interlocutor. These nerves energized my first alt-text questions, beginning with: what does colour mean to a person who does not see as I see, or does not see at all? Some guidelines, such as “How To Write Alt Text And Image Descriptions” by Veronica With Four Eyes, offer the advice to nuance colour descriptions: When describing colors, use shade names such as cobalt blue, periwinkle, burgundy, lime green, metallic gold, or similar names- there’s no need to describe what the color red looks like, but shade names are helpful for providing more in-depth information. (2018) Colourblind comic artist M. Sabine Rear (2023) demonstrates one possibility nestled in that realm (Figure 9, page 67), delighting in the world of colour on their own terms. When I think about all the alt-text I have written with hyphenated “yellow-green” (MCE) or “red-brown-grey” descriptors, I imagine this task of improvisation, of doing the best with what I had (an obvious lack of fine arts training), as both contributing to and communicating my evolving perception of the encounters captured by each photograph. To try to describe what you see helps you perceive it better, both in hindsight and for the next time you are in that place or interacting with similar beings; description “extends and disciplines curiosity about life” (Tsing 2013, 28). To fully take on the advice of Four Eyes and Rear might look something like Mini-drama 11 (page 68) or Mini-drama 12 (page 71), their alt-text respectively reading: “Dalmatian decay on what is left of a milkweed seed pod.” and “Two rainbow sherbet dogwood leaves, splotchy and in transition.” Both of these phrases ask a lot of the reader and offer something in return. It is a different kind of conversation, a conversation that creates both accessibility and thickness through corrugation. Making media accessible mustn’t be mistaken for creating true replicas of one medium in another. Words will never mean exactly the same thing to different people (my partner and I imagine different colour spectra from the words “blue” or “green”), and text will never be the same as an image. The experience of reading braille will never replicate the experience of reading words on a page or listening to those same words read aloud (Kleege et al. 2024). Replication is not the point of making media accessible, creating possibilities for participation is. In the words of Audre Lorde, “community must not mean a shedding of our differences, nor the pathetic pretense that these differences do 67 not exist” (2007). Let us prioritize multimodality and diverse media as avenues for shared meaning-making and prioritization of the relationships that facilitate life (human and otherwise) on this planet. Creating layers and embracing the varied experiences folded into an offering is about expanding options and embracing difference. That is the goal of mulit-modal accessibility. 4.1.3 repetition We get to know our environment by moving around in it (by walking around in it, for example), not by simply looking at it. As we move around and curiously explore our environment, whether that environment be external or our internal psychic environment, the patterns that we notice undergo continual modulation. (Malloch 2019, 6) The fact of my walking, repeatedly, and often in the same places, created a situation in which my attention to, in, and with the riparian was undergoing continual modulation. There was always more Figure 9: A screenshot from M. Sabine Rear ’s (2023) comic “A Vision In Monochrome: Colorblindness in a Color-Coded World.” Used with permission from the artist. 68 to notice and always more to learn. It is nearly inevitable that a researcher working with multi-being social ecologies will have a feeling similar to Henning De Klerk, who, after claiming it is “imperative to engage in a sustained and extended period of perceptual enskillment in the field” (2007, 38) laments the shortcoming of not doing so: Given the complexity of the case history which came into full focus near the end of the research cycle, it is now apparent to me that successive cycles of research similar to the one from which this account is produced, is needed to render a nuanced understanding sensitive to complexities and apparent contradictions. (2007, 39) “Those of us who have tried fieldwork”, writes Anna Tsing, “know how important it is to bumble our way into the sociality of others, at least until we find our feet” (Tsing 2013, 30–31). We come to know social forms through unfamiliar encounters. “Fieldwork ‘immersion’ works because we are forced to enter other ways of life—that is, to become social—before we have any idea what we are learning” (Tsing 2013, 31). In the context in which my research was conducted however, and perhaps this is increasingly the case for many researchers, requesting participation from the human constituents of my research assemblage while I was still bumbling would not have been appropriate. My research emerges from an orientation that prioritizes continued thriving for the beings of this place, human (syilx) and more-than-human. At this time, in the Canadian academic context, this is not an unusual orientation, and concessions can be made to institutional timelines Mini-drama 11: April 18, 2021 Caption: Always showy, no matter the season. Alt-text: Dalmatian decay on what is left of a milkweed seed pod. 69 and processes in order to accommodate requisite consultation and/or collaboration. That said, intentions to be engaged as a visitor-researcher in anti-colonial work are not always able to be accommodated by syilx community members. Members of the community who are willing and able to collaborate with researchers on various projects are often, in my experience,121 overwhelmed with requests. It is a privilege to consult or collaborate with syilx people, not a right. In alignment with the logic and ethic of “nothing about us without us” (Charlton 1998), collaboration with Indigenous community members in research conducted in settler-colonized places is important, and important to begin from the beginning (Smith 2012; Liboiron 2021b; Kuokkanen 2007; paperson 2017). This creates an impasse for the visitor-researcher with anti-colonial priorities and associated good intentions.122 I take seriously the fact of Canadian occupation in the homes of people who lived here for a really long time and did not consent to the establishment and operations of the Canadian nation state. From this anti-colonial perspective, it follows that, what it means to do research in an Indigenous community goes beyond the settler state’s delineations of bands and reserves and an anthropocentric understanding of community and sociality (Tsing 2013; Starblanket 2018). Doing research here, or anywhere in Canada, with the institutional support of settler colonial universities, means doing research in a multi-being Indigenous community (Leanne Betasamosake Simpson 2017; paperson 2017). In lieu of saying “no” to the endeavour all together, we can choose to devise ways of working that can support the multi-being communities that make life, and research, possible in the places we work (Aveling 2013; Styres and Zinga 2013; Shawn Wilson 2008). Presearch is a tool for this purpose. 121 Elder Pamela Barnes and her daughter, knowledge holder Jasmine Peone, who we worked with for the Riparian ReAnimation project (Part 8), often spoke to how busy they have become. Other friends and colleagues in both the West Bank and Penticton syilx communities have echoed this sentiment. 122 In current funding and organizational environments of Canadian universities, at the beginning of a thing, there may not be funding to pay people for their time. At the beginning of a thing, you may not know enough to ask relevant questions or engage people’s time well. This could change, it may change, it may even change here—in Canada, thanks to the work and dedication of many Indigenous and visitor scholars, from Dolleen Tisawii'ashii Manning, to Max Liboiron, to Neha Gupta, and many more—before it changes in other nation states’ university contexts. Research agendas could be set by Indigenous communities (as, to some extent, this one was), but short of the system overhaul that would make that a norm and that norm a reality, this impasse will likely continue to puzzle and frustrate anti-colonially minded visitor-researchers. I will not speak to that which is felt by Indigenous people on the receiving end of requests, though would be interested in conversations about how to move into a respectful, enthusiastic, and adaptable norm of relation in collaboration and consultation. 70 While I make no claim that small acts of presearch—protocols and practices that integrate attentive repetition to help derive, define, and refine research agendas and questions—can replace engaged collaboration or more time fieldworking, the attunement of a researcher’s perception in presearch can minimize the need for lamentation over complexities unrecognized as a project’s outset. While there will always be more we could have done or things that could have been done better, beginning a research project with personal insight into the complexity of your research assemblage, built through several different modes of encounter, is a good start. By investing your energy in multi-being relationships and attunement you, as a researcher, can design more respectful and relevant research and extend requests for collaboration or consultation with sufficient context, so as to make it worth the while of the people you are asking to devote time and energy to the project you are creating. For me, this took shape in my work at k’əmcnitkw—planting, weeding, watering, and listening, labouring in place with people—as well as in our Riparian ReAnimation puppet making workshops (see Part 8.2, page 144), during which I mostly served as project manager and supplies fetcher for workshop participants, trying to make sure everyone was comfortable and had what they needed to participate. These activities do not sound scholarly, and they often didn’t feel that way either. What they did do was add up, creating thickness, making possible rigour, and enhancing my ability to relate and strengthen relations. Educating attention, attuning, learning to learn, these are slow processes that require the acknowledgement and embracing of a particular kind of lumpy time. In a paper-length proposition of “an analytic attention to the charged atmospheres of everyday life” (2011, 445) Kathleen Stewart writes, “[t]he intensities of living through things accumulate and pool up in worldings and forms of attending to what's happening” (2011, 452). Like wetness, attention pools and seeps; it soaks into us through repeated encountering, particularly when we give it space to do so, though not on a predictable, linear schedule. The riparian was a “little world” I immersed myself in (Stewart 2011, 452); I wasn’t aware how much I was absorbing until it pooled, and then I was. Presearch helps develop the skill of critical description, asking urgent questions and extending and disciplining curiosities (Tsing 2013). There is much that can be learned from storytellers about the benefits of curious exploration. Jo-ann Archibald, in her book “Indigenous Storywork,” quotes Elder and storyteller Ellen White, who, reflecting on the importance of repetition for emerging storytellers, explains, “[i]f they just read it, they’re just going to read it from page one to page two ... without any input from them ... They [should] start to read it, read a page at a time and [come to know] the story and [visualize] it, look between the lines, and go into the story themselves” (2008a, 134). 71 I walked in the same places, again, and again, and again. For one year, and then two, and then three. It was three years in the end, between the Novembers of 2020 and 2023. There came to be a predictability to the patterns, of walking, of greening in the spring, and of the call and response of social media. When repetition led to predictability, I was able to perceive more difference. If you think you know what you’re going to find, and are paying attention anyway, you notice when your expectation isn’t met. “Sensitivity to minor differences,” write Steve Hinchliffe and colleagues, “may or may not prove fruitful. But … this openness to difference, which is borne out of a looser kind of sense, a knowing around rather than a knowledge of … is a vital means to allow for nonhuman knowledgeabilities” (2005, 653, emphasis added). Following Stengers (1997) and Paulson (2001), they conclude, “this ability to listen attentively is a way or means of putting knowledge at risk and of allowing others, of all shapes and sizes, to make a difference to the process of knowing” (Hinchliffe et al. 2005, 653). Putting what you think you know at risk is one of the fundamental tenants of doing research. Repetition and multimodality help us do that. Multiple encounters in the same place, encountering the same being-type in various places, experiencing the passage of time, a textual reflection on a pictorial recording of a tactile encounter, these things all contribute to the thickness of relationships within a research assemblage. The mater-realities of encounter are “tangled webs of different Mini-drama 12: October 30, 2022 Caption: The rainbows are everywhere, but they're not all like this. Alt-text: Two rainbow sherbet dogwood leaves, splotchy and in transition. 72 length, density and duration, and whose consequences are experienced differently in different places” (Braun 2006, 644). Encounters “affect us, provoke us to think and feel, attach us to the world and detach us from it, force us into action, demand from us, prompt us to care, concern us, [and] bring us into question” (Pacini-Ketchabaw, Kind, and Kocher 2016, 1). A story does not need to have meaning right away. Hearing stories over time—folding in new associations, relationships, and experience each time, perhaps encountering the same story through a different medium—embeds them in memory (Archibald 2008a). “[O]ur memories are activated when we locate, and through location we re-member, reconnect, and recover our very identity” (Absolon and Willett 2005, 117). These are multimodal pathways of collaborative, multi-being sense making. In an interview some months before her death, scholar Deborah Bird Rose spoke to the stories that had been influential in her life. “When I go back to my notebooks, or to stories that I’ve told in one context that I want to return to in another context, they just keep unfolding. It hasn’t reached bottom; it never would reach bottom—there just isn’t a bottom” (van Dooren 2020, 1). Corrugation is folding so things can unfold, adding and differentiating context through multimedia and multimodal engagement. To this day, when I see goldenrod (MCE) in any season I think, “Baby elephant; medium: fuzz,” for that is the name I came to know it by. I also, through that name, have access to memories and concomitant relationships in, and with, many riparian places, where, at some point in the past, I have thought, “Baby elephant; medium: fuzz!”123 123 Others have recorded such experiences. Matthew Gandy, for instance, writes of his transportation through decades by a multi-being sensibility toward embodied memories: “I have only to touch or smell the mugwort plant […] to be instantly transported back to memories of my study site from the mid-2000s” (2022, 1125). Once I took “Baby elephant; medium: fuzz” to a grade 12 class. One student was moved by the idea of being able to give your own name to something that you don’t yet have a name for, even if it only has meaning for you. This helped them reflect on their own assertion of their own identity, outside of normative categories, and the liberatory potential of such practices. I had never thought of it that way. Figure 10: A reflection on sharing. 73 4.2 Mini-dramas Educating Riparian Attention (ERA) was rooted in a slow ethics of encounter, which builds and is built from events, participated in and shared. Encounter creates story, and “[s]tories themselves have the potential to promote understandings of embodied, relational, contingent ethics” (Rose 2013, 9). While building relations with the Okanagan’s riparian communities, I was partaking in and observing the stories that played out there, supporting the education of my riparian attention. By taking photos in the moment, captioning, and then describing them after some time had passed, I participated in making and sharing new stories, each photo, caption, and alt-textual description a miniature drama unto itself. Once I found my rhythm with walking, encountering, photographing, Instagramming, and using OSF, the parameters of the project were as follows: • Walk with the riparian two to three times a week. • Take photos on each walk, as many as pleases you. • Post some of those photos on Instagram (not more than 10 a day though, that’s just obnoxious),124 captioning them with whatever comes to mind at the time of posting, usually later on the same day the photo was taken. • At the end of each month, upload to OSF the photos and captions that you posted to Instagram that month.125 Add alt-text. • Do this all year to chronicle the riparian rainbow, from brown to brown. Mini-dramas are embedded throughout this thesis, surrounded by purple text boxes, and labeled with the date the photo was taken.126 These Mini-dramas are a product of my process; their presentation here is the result of many helping hands.127 What was supposed to be one year 124 Once a friend, poet, and master of the craft, Xiao Xuan Huang, lovingly brought it to my attention that I was using Instagram “wrong.” That was okay with me. The principle of “social” in social media was enough of an incentive; there was no need for intense engagement or outreach through the platform to other users. Toward the end of the project my Instagram account, @alsdeeend, had just over 200 followers, approximately half of which I know personally. 125 This was not a trivial task. The software was not perfect, code would jump all over the place, and writing alt-text in bulk takes serious time. 126 See Appendices Appendix A: list of Mini-dramas (page 171). 127 Here I owe particular thanks to my partner Moos van Caspel, who helped me withstand the drudgery of poorly functioning user interfaces; a fabulous friend Karis Dimas-Lehndorf, who swooped in to help in a time of need when I was in need of more time; and Donna Langille and Mathew Vis-Dunbar, two stupendous librarians who bookended the techy sides of this project over its years of life. 74 became three. I stopped because it was time to write, compile, and reflect. I took breaks at times—after the first year for example128—feeling tired from pressure I had put on myself to keep going and keep up. Taken together, the collection of 1405 Mini-dramas (photos, captions, and alt-textual descriptions) is one output of this research. The full catalogue is stored on OSF and can be called on for reference and cited like a research publication.129 In the iterative production and analysis of these data I employed what J.K Gibson-Graham (2006; 2014), following Eve Sedgwick (2003) and Sylvan Tomkins (1962), have called “weak theory.” Though “little better than a description of the phenomena which it purports to explain” (Tomkins 1963, 433), “[t]he revolutionary contribution of thick description and weak theory is to help make these otherwise hidden pathways apparent” (Gibson-Graham 2014, s151). Weak theory can only account for small and close phenomena, which is a feature, not an impairment. My iterative engagement with the layers of each Mini-drama is an act of repetition: “[a]s it orders more and more remote phenomena to a single formulation, its power grows” (Tomkins 1963, 433). As a researcher having conducted presearch, you have a choice—like Gibson-Graham explains of weak theory— as to what threads of interpretation to pull on in the making of a story about “large issues.” This involves a political choice to enact a revolution of sorts, one that makes faint glimmers of hope into prefigurative elements of a becoming. (2014, s151) Multiple becomings emerged through ERA: a foundation from which to do research about the way people in the Okanagan interact with riparian habitats, an appreciation of elapsed time and the value of acting on curiosity through multiple modalities, and an attunement to which threads were appropriate and useful to pull. I started Part 4.1 (page 57) by stating that I have told the story of the education of my riparian attention many times. Since the spring of 2021, a few months into the project, I have been returning to my growing catalogue of riparian Mini-dramas each time I’m asked to contribute or present something (see Figure 11, page 75) for an example of their travels. The folder on my computer where I store the photos has been backed-up fastidiously and scrolled-through dozens of times. I’ve 128 December (MCE) became the month with the least photos over all. It is also the only month not represented here by a Mini-drama. 129 Link: https://deniledam.github.io/Educating-Riparian-Attention/by_date/complete-mini-drama-catalogue.html. DOI: DOI 10.17605/OSF.IO/HNJVZ 75 tested out different photo management software and worked with friends and colleagues to determine which would be best for my purposes.130 All of this time spent with these Mini-dramas matters; this too is corrugation, the revisiting of an archive recently created and still in the making. New folds are created with each visit, each time I select a photo to include in a presentation, or print out, or incorporate into a thesis. These are folds inward as well as outwards.131 These Mini-dramas are thick and thickening. 130 Finally, we landed on a photo management software called Darktable to organize, tag, and embed metadata into the image files so they could travel as Mini-dramas instead of photos, for I do not believe the photos are worth orders of magnitude more than the words. They are multimodal entities and I would like them to be engaged with as such. 131 By folds inwards I mean an enrichment of my own relationship with the place a photo was taken, the beings photographed, and my encounter(s) therewith; folding outwards refers to the sharing that happens when I select a Mini-drama to bring to a new conversation or elucidate a concept in a new place. Figure 11: A collection of Mini-dramas sat on display in an exhibition space at the University of Exeter ’s Environment and Sustainability Institute in January and February 2023. The original ERA captions were tacked on the wall alongside each photo; visitors to the space were invited to add their own reflections, responding to the prompt “What do these photos bring to mind for you?” In the selection of 12 photos pictured above, all except the top and bottom images on the left-hand side—which are archival images from July 1970, provided BC Air Photos—were taken as ERA photos. 76 5 inhabiting the Northend Marsh This Episode describes the trajectory of the northern extent of the marshy Kelowna floodplain—the Northend Marsh—from a wet place, fluctuating in degree of wetness throughout the year(s), to a fixed and firm industrial center and neighbourhood (Kelowna’s Northend) bordered to the south by a ditch through which water flows (Brandt’s Creek). While this place’s marshy mode of being was excavated and buried, over the course of about 50 years in the first half of the 20th century, it remains haunted by the spongy wetness that defines it. In the essay collection, “Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet,”132 the editors explore the idea of haunting to ask the question, “[h]ow can we get back to the pasts we need to see the present more clearly” (Gan et al. 2017, G2)? Here I lay out one version of Brandt’s Creek’s marshy past by outlining the specific unruly heritage of settler colonial valley-bottom settlement in Kelowna’s north end. This is a story told with the hope that it can help the creek’s (potential) collaborators envision possible paths toward living better with wetness in this place by more clearly perceiving how humans have interacted with and related to the various ecologies of Brandt’s Creek and the Northend Marsh in the time since year-round dwelling in the Kelowna floodplain began. Though this story is chronologically assembled—from the arrival and expansion of European settlement and cultivation to the urban present—it is important to remember that this place carries its pasts, presents, and futures. The form of the story I tell here is inspired by these spectral ecologies, including, and learning from ways of being marsh, ditch, creek, neighbourhood, site of industrial production, and nexus of commerce and transportation. It is these spectral ecologies, always layered with stories, that I aim to draw out through the integration of archival materials, conversations, and observations in and about this marshy place. Kelowna’s Northend marsh has been all but written out of textual records, replaced by the Northend neighbourhood and a ditch that is called a creek and often overlooked. Inspired by scholars of the anarchive, in this Episode, “demands are made of the slivers of evidence in colonial archives to yield more than they contain, to provide material from which counter-colonial narratives may be 132 Ghosts (those who haunt) here are defined as “the traces of more than human histories through which ecologies are made and unmade” (Gan et al. 2017, G1). This is a two-sided collection, with one side entitled “Ghosts on a Damaged Planet.” The other side of the collection, organized under the heading of “Monsters and the Arts of Living,” represents “the wonders of symbiosis and the threats of ecological disruption” (Swanson et al. 2017, M2). Together these sections “tell intertwined stories … monsters and ghosts cannot be segregated” (Gan et al. 2017, G3). 77 fashioned” (Zaayman 2019, 9). How we interpret and engage with these and other stories will determine the ways it is possible to be here. In compiling this story, I’ve looked to archives for imprints of absences. I do not have all the facts, and I have heard stories that are not mine to tell; what I can share, and surmise, is collected here as a record of a spectral ecology, a past we need in order to see the present more clearly. 5.1 the Northend Marsh The Northend Marsh, as I’m imagining it,133 begins in the topological crease between the hills that lead into the Glenmore and Bankhead neighbourhoods to the north and south respectively. The Marsh currently coalesces into a body of water called Brandt’s Creek,134 which flows through the 133 Note, so far as I know, nobody else uses this moniker. 134 The upstream portion of this creek was named for/after/by Frederick Whendt and his family. Whendt was turned to “Brent” at immigration to the USA between his birth in Prussia (1827) and his enlistment in the US army (1854) and Brandt some time later, after his arrival in the Okanagan (Central Okanagan Heritage Society n.d.). The upstream flow was likely named before the creek flowed all the way to Okanagan Lake (Glenmore Centennial Committee 1958), once the marsh it met at valley-bottom was separated into land and Figure 12: KPA#1634, the Northend Marsh, used with permission from Kelowna Public Archives. The image here has been cropped to show, to the close -looker, a flat marshy place with a serpentine divot where wetness collects. Along its bottom margin the photo reads “A.B. Knox estate, Kelowna B.C., Kelowna in the distance.” Though dated circa 1910 by Wadds Bros. Vancouver (in operation from 1892 to 1912), the KPA archivists contest this date in their records, stating that it “[m]ost likely dates from 1897 (Knox Presbyter ian Church) to 1904 (Board school).” Though a few small farm buildings can be seen in the marsh, no ditches are clear in this image and the wetness of the marsh seems to be (if not entirely) unconstrained. 78 city of Kelowna and into Okanagan Lake. One of many tributary streams flowing into the Okanagan River, Brandt’s Creek is the only of these flows whose watershed is completely encompassed by the City of Kelowna’s municipal boundary. Its headwaters gather in the agricultural and suburban hills of the Glenmore neighbourhood (formerly municipality), run off and coalesce in irrigation canals to reach a channel at valley-bottom through a series of storm drains and culverts (MCE). Noted as an “insignificant” body of water (unknown 1974, 2), the creek receives but one mention in a 57-page compilation of Glenmore’s history published by the Glenmore Centennial Committee: “[a] small watercourse called Brent’s Creek ran down to Kelowna” (Glenmore Centennial Committee 1958, 7).135 As currently channelized, there is a 2.3km stretch of the valley-bottom portion of Brandt’s Creek that runs through the city’s industrial area (formerly railway yards). This body of water is the wetness of a marsh collected into a flow (MCE) and amplified by its upstream self. The creek meets Okanagan Lake via the well-loved and heavily landscaped Rotary Marsh (MCE). It is these less glamorous penultimate 2.3km on which I have focused this place study;136 it is a story of wetness, an aporia, and a thickening.137 5.2 the marsh in/and the (an)archive Part 3: habits of the Okanagan, showed that the settler colonial, capitalist impulse to claim place-as-property relies on an (aporetic) separation of water from land, of change from fixity. The separation of always-everywhere wetness into water and land is, in this place, a colonial approach to floodplain management and, in the words of Saidiya Hartman, a “founding violence” of settler colonial occupation. This violence, Hartman continues, “determines, regulates and organizes the kinds of statements that can be made … create[ing] subjects and objects of power” (2008, 10).138 water with the need to convey the water off the land to make firm space for the railroad, this valley-bottom ditch inherited the name from its upstream waters. The full extent of the creek has been referred to variously as Brent or Brant Creek (Department of Lands 1911; unknown 1974) and more recently Brandt’s Creek. 135 This text cites Kelowna as beginning, at the low-elevation terminus of the Glenmore Valley, which is the eastern most point of the Northend Marsh. 136 See Capon et al. (2013) for an overview of the importance and potential of riparian habitats and their revitalization in the anthropocene. 137 As Anuradha Mathur and Dilip Da Cunha describe, “[w]hen ecologists speak of a watershed, they see lines gathering from multiple sources like branches of a tree and dispersing like roots into the sea, and when they speak of a riparian zone, they thicken these lines to be an interface between land and river [flowing body of water]” (Mathur and Da Cunha 2014, 4). 138 In her influential essay “Venus in Two Acts,” Hartman is writing about the archive of slavery, “at the limit of the unspeakable and the unknown” (2008, 1), “straining against the limits of the archive to write a cultural 79 Decisions are made about what to record and how to store records, decisions that affect future possibilities for storying. When (settler) colonial and capitalist priorities and prejudices create the conditions that determine archival appearances and silences, that which did not serve the project of invasion and settlement goes missing from official records (Hartman 2008; Zaayman 2019). In Kelowna’s archives, which catalogue the arc of settler colonial occupation from settlement to municipality, Kelowna’s Northend marsh has been depicted almost exclusively as land, always land, its soggy, squelchy, marshy habits unacknowledged, though perceivable in a few photographs (e.g. Figure 12, page 77). Either these records were not deemed worthy of archiving or never collected in the first place. This is an ecological manifestation of the anarchive,139 where wetness is, at best, an inconvenience. This non-acknowledgement of marshy habits is, I propose, a material manifestation of the preference for the categories of flowing water and salable land over the ambiguity and seasonal contingency of a marsh. As such, marshy places are silenced by settler colonial authorities for their incompatibility with the project of turning place into property. To address an ecological anarchive we first have to think with the ecologies of a place. The Okanagan, as described in Part 3: habits of the Okanagan, is a place where wetness collects at valley-bottom in the spring, moistening and making-squishy places once easily perceived—perhaps weeks prior—as firm and unyielding. In the summer, the topography of wetness inverts. In the valley’s warm summers, wetness concentrates primarily in the high places, closest to the most recent remnants of snow, moistening forests and foods of many kinds. It is in these high places where syilx people have primarily lived, traveled, and harvested. In an account of her grandmother and father discussing European settlement in the Okanagan valley, syilx Elder and scholar Jeannete Armstrong describes the settlers’ decisions as unusual and ill informed. For the effect of the history of the captive, and, at the same time, enacting the impossibility of representing the lives of the captives precisely through the process of narration” (2008, 11). I worry that citing this work here will be read as a conflation of direct corporeal violence done unto humans by humans with violence done unto place by humans of other places. I do not mean for this to be a direct comparison. It is the logics I want to fold on top of one another, to show their similarities. The logics that govern enslavement and place-as-property come from the same stock. See Nicholas Blomley’s (2003) article “Law, property, and the geography of violence: The frontier, the survey, and the grid” for a discussion on the relationship between regimes of place-as-property and violence. 139 The anarchive is that which has not been archived, all those things, experiences, images, sounds, textures, relationships, and opinions that are not recorded in a material medium and/or not deemed worth keeping by those with decision-making power about such things. It is a concept most often employed to think through the human voices unaccounted for in dominant tellings of histories and is here deployed to facilitate the telling of a story of a place of a squelchy and ambiguous nature. 80 summertime contrast, between more wet higher elevations and the less wet valley-bottom, the description is worth quoting in full. I once sat on a hillside on the reservation with my father and his mother as they looked down into the town on the valley floor. It was blackcap berry season, and the sun was very warm, but there in the high country, a cool breeze moved through the overshading pines. Bluebirds and wild canaries darted and chirped in nearby bushes, while a meadowlark sang for rain from the hillside above. Sage and wild roses sent their messages out to the humming bees and pale yellow butterflies. Down in the valley, the heat waves danced, and dry dust rose in clouds from the dirt roads near town. Shafts of searing glitter reflected off hundreds of windows, while smoke and grayish haze hung over the town itself. The angry sounds of cars honking in a slow crawl along the black highway and the grind of large machinery from the sawmill next to the town rose in a steady buzzing overtone to the quiet of our hillside. Looking down to the valley, my grandmother said (translated from Okanagan), “The people down there are dangerous, they are all insane." My father agreed, commenting, "It's because they are wild and scatter anywhere.” (2000) Why build a permanent and heavy structure in a place where wetness fluctuates so drastically? Why was this choice made over and over again in many places around the world? The only answer I can think of follows directly from Mathur and Da Cuhna’s work (2019): many humans today, influenced by empire and capital (Tsing et al. 2020a), desire to live on land and be close to water, as opposed to living in relation with wetness, moving as its concentrations move and/or designing for its fluctuations.140 This assertion of settler, capitalist, and imported agricultural priorities is expressed through anthropocentric infrastructures both today and in the past. It is no small task to maintain a fiction of dry land in and among wetness. Public works of eco- and hydro-logical management must be put in place and maintained, in both matter and mind; infrastructures of land/water division beget assertions of land/water division and vice versa. Like the division itself, the instable, aporetic nature of this line, once drawn, creates the necessity of constant maintenance work. 140 Both moving with wetness and designing for its fluctuations have global historical precedent. 81 The massive feats of engineering necessary for industrial construction in a marshy place alone are a good indication of the inherent instability of a land/water divide.141 One of the first industries to be built on the Northend Marsh was a sawmill. In her book detailing the history of the mill, which changed locations and owners a few times before living out its life in the Northend,142 Sharon Simpson includes a section titled “Building on the bog.” Simpson writes of the construction of the new mill on a parcel of land situated “approximately 1 km north of Kelowna’s downtown” (2003, 38): the land sat empty until Stan [Stanley M. Simpson] decided it was the best location for the new sawmill he wanted to build. … Even the waterlogged land wasn’t a deterrent—Stan had dealt with the same conditions before. (2003, 38) This refusal to be deterred by the waterlogging of land and the inevitable maintenance work that would be necessary to uphold the land/water fiction relies on a deep-set cognitive dissonance that eschews ambiguity and reifies the possibility of this separation. That “Stan had dealt with the same conditions before” (emphasis added), demonstrates that the separation of land and water was part of the normal course of things—never framed as the end of a process for which there had been a beginning. Instead, it was simply work to make the land they already perceived act more like the land they needed to achieve their goals. The first obstacle they had to contend with was the waterlogged and swampy Manhattan Beach property, which was difficult to build on at the best of times and almost impossible during heavy rain-storms or when Okanagan Lake flooded. The land had been filled with slabs, wood, bark, and whatever waste was available and then covered with dirt, rocks, and shale, but logging trucks and other heavy machinery still got so stuck in the bog that only D9 cats could pull them out. (Simpson 2003, 99) Despite the necessity of such labour for the assertion and maintenance of land as separate from water in this marshy place, this is one of few accessible documented examples of labour undergone to contest its squelchy nature. Though largely anarchival, the maintenance necessary to uphold the 141 As if located in an attempt to make this as clear as possible, Brandt’s Creek neighbours a cement factory, a business that works hard to be able to continue releasing fine particulate matter out into the open. See Mini-drama 13. 142 The mill, then in operation by Tolko Industries, closed for good in 2020 and is now in the middle of a planning process for redevelopment as a “sustainable, walkable, and year round community connected to the natural heritage of the Okanagan” (Holar Developments 2023, 3). 82 aporetic boundary between land and water—digging ditches to separate moving water from staying-in-place land, laying pipes and culverts to conduct and hide water, lining channels to conduct water through land, and adding material to make land more land-like (as in the above example of building a mill on a bog)—was, and continues to be, essential to the (re)making of Kelowna’s floodplain urbanism.143 When the disaggregation of this marsh place is mentioned144 it is presented not as a result of a decision or articulation of priorities, but as necessity in an inevitable trajectory, and typically framed in the context its success or failure to maintain the separation.145 The focus, on maintaining an existing separation—overcoming an “obstacle” of “waterlogged and swampy” property—as opposed to creation of that separation itself, is indicative of the perceived inevitability of a land/water dichotomy. This dichotomy was, and remains, crucial to the settler imaginary of place that anchored itself in Kelowna, and throughout southern British Columbia (see Part 6: fringe natures), in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. 143 This aporetic land/water boundary requires constant maintenance. “Aporetic boundaries are not entities that exist as such, but practices made apparent through their patterns of effects. Similarly, the entities, concepts, and experiences they produce do not exist as such, but as unstable effects that may be fixed in space and time, but only temporarily” (Tedesco 2016, 17). “[B]oundary work is a continual chore for those tasked with “protecting” species and structures of significance, and in the messy realm of everyday practice, boundaries and borders are usually “less self-evident, more unstable, and more multifaceted” than would be suggested by reading of management plans and policy guidance alone” (DeSilvey 2017, 152). 144 For a description of these reference materials and my process see Part 1.2.4.1 methods and theory. 145 For example: “In the spring of 1910 the Central Okanagan Lands and the Kelowna Irrigation co. … laid out an irrigation system in Dry Valley which with concrete lined ditches, steel flumes and wood pressure pipelines, was considered to be the ultimate as to permanency” (Glenmore Centennial Committee 1958, 23). Only the aforementioned steel flumes held up well, some were still being used in 1958 (ibid.). Mini-drama 13: October 1, 2022 Caption: Levels zijn belangrijk . Alt-text: A series of silos rise from a building under a bright blue sky. 83 The separation between land and water is created, manifest, and maintained by relationships between surface and lines drawn on maps and the people who act in accordance with the imaginary of one, or the other, bringing into being the world they perceive. 146 Lines on a surface make waterways and flow out of concentrations of wetness, and fixed firm land (turned property) out of places less wet. Enacting a water/land imaginary is not the only way to perceive and live with this place, but it is an ideology that has been forcefully dominating for the last century. This ideological domination discourages curiosity; it becomes difficult to imagine making possible an alternative, especially “one that acknowledges the responsibility that human beings have in relation to worlding the world” (Bolt 2018, 97 citing; Zylinska 2014).147 The dependence on a land/water ideology—around which record keeping, modes of speech, and relationships with place develop148—results in an inability to recognize the ambiguity of the marsh, ever fluctuating in its degree of wetness. In 1925 the Canadian National Railway laid tracks into Kelowna for which the valley-bottom portion of Brandt’s Creek was first channelized in its entirety (Policy and Planning Department 2021).149 Chronicling the challenges and contestations of this branch of rail service, Ian Pooley writes of the railway in Kelowna as “the final penetration of a modern transportation network, in spite of the obstacles placed by the quirks of Okanagan geography” (2012, 92).150 In the nearly 40-page paper about building the rail line into Kelowna, the marshiness of place, as “a quirk of Okanagan geography” was not mentioned once. There exists one aerial image of the marsh clearly presenting as a marsh, taken from a plane in 1938 (Figure 13, page 84), thirteen years after the railroad was officially open for business. At the time this photo was taken the mill was up and running, holiday homes for Kelowna’s wealthy lined up along Manhattan Point—which juts out into the lake, creating an apparent 45 degree angle of shoreline—and the horse racing track is accessible by gravel road that crosses through the marsh. 146 The photograph in Mini-drama 13 (page 82) shows the silos of a concrete plant located immediately next to Brandt’s Creek, as if placed there to point out the need for constant maintenance of these boundaries. 147 “[W]e might think of our very existence as a hub where multiple overlapping relationships of time and place intersect and regenerate. Past and present relationships between human bodies and bodies of land and water are layered one upon another, alongside relationships between both our ancestral ways of knowing and being and the future possibilities that they might offer. It is when the breadth and significance of these relationships is selectively invoked that the possibilities for ethical and accountable relationships narrow” (Starblanket 2018, 8). 148 This I surmise in part due to the paucity of textual and photographic records of the decisions, labour, and labourers that enacted the line as a ditch, which became Brandt’s Creek. 149 This assertion is based on informed speculation, as nowhere does it say, ‘now the creek is complete!’ 150 Railways were a primary aspect of making-be a settler colonial imaginary in North America. For more on this see LaDow (2001) and Dearinger (2009). 84 A ditch, the ditch that is Brandt’s Creek, can be seen as a faint straight line skirting the northern edge of the racetrack, along what is now Recreation Avenue. The racing track was established in 1909, when it was introduced by the city as part of a formal civic recreation area (Policy and Figure 13: Bird’s eye view of the Northend marsh circa 1938 , the single aerial image of this area known to exist from this decade and the next . Image and permission for use shared by a staff member at the City of Kelowna. This image has not yet been made accessible through the BC Historical Air Photo Index Map Viewer nor through the Kelowna Public Archives. In addition to the ditch, racetrack, mill, and vacation homes, what can be seen most prominently in this image are collections of wetness gathering, pooling, and wiggling. Likely taken in the spring, this captured moment in 1938 displays the wet nature of the Northend Marsh, at that point already in transition to Brandt’s Creek and the Northend neighbourhood. 85 Planning Department 2021).151 This section was perhaps the first to be channelized,152 to allow the horses to run and the people to be entertained, while the cattails watched quietly.153 Downstream 151 Though formalized in 1909, the Northend Marsh had been used for some time prior by settlers for recreation purposes—polo, rugby, horse racing, and ice skating in their seasons (Zysblat and Cook 2021). 152 I found no record claiming this first section of ditch, though given that the racetrack preceded both the railway and the mill, this is a best guess. 153 Though I was never able to find record of which ditch was dug when and where, in order to bring those infrastructure projects to the public and keep them dry enough to use, ditches would have had to have been dug and wetness collected in those ditches. Its also likely that smaller drainage channels were excavated for agricultural purposes earlier than 1909, for A. B. Knox—who claimed and tended to a 4000 acre swath of this place that included the Northend Marsh until 1903, when he sold his ranch to the Okanagan Land and Fruit Company (Koroscil 2003, 177)—“had one of the finest orchards and kitchen gardens in the district” (Lowther and Laing 1968, 10). Figure 14: A clipping from an article in The Kelowna Courier and Okanagan Orchardist from September 10, 1925. The article is titled "C.N.R. Rails Enter City Limits Today” and describes the situation of “the track sagg[ing] in a marshy spot under the great weight of the engine.” This is an example if the incommensurability of the surface imaginary with the reality of life. The marsh, over which this train attempted to role, is a place of dimension, into which it is possible to descend. 86 from the track, the ditch runs west to empty into the lake, and upstream through two sharp turns, one south, one east. These sharp turns were realigned in 1948 when a new loop of the rail line was introduced and industrial busniess exapnded in the area (The Kelowna Courier 1948b) (see Part 7.1.5: Section 5, page 124). This ditch, however, had not yet deswampified the marsh. 5.2.1 when the boundary dissolves, an example Occasionally, the incommensurability of the line-and-surface narrative of place-as-property with the squelchy reality of life in a marsh becomes impossible to ignore, even for those most invested in the separation. On September 10, 1925, upon near-completion of the rail line into Kelowna, the marsh asserted its squelchy self by toppling the train rolling in celebration toward town (Figure 14, page 85). Just because there is a will to drain, fill, and build, and the infrastructural means to do so, doesn’t make the marsh go away. Instead, the marsh assumes a spectral quality and a tendency to reassert itself, given the chance. Nearly a full century later, the marsh remains present in the place that performs the duties of a neighbourhood today. Multi-being lifeways that seek concentrations of wetness have found ways to exist in the thin riparian margin that Brandt’s Creek now creates (more on this in Part 7). Marsh plants such as tule (MCE), red osier dogwood (MCE), cattails (MCE), and grasses (MCE) continue to grow well, despite the limited space they have to work with. 5.3 a waste place by unruly heritage With the railroad came fruit picking “transients,” a character that remains a crucial part of the valley’s continued agricultural identity.154 Described here by Sharon Simpson: “[t]ransients arrived in Kelowna for the 1930 picking and packing season and then stayed on,” the number of people of this designation trippling in the coming years of the Great Depression (2011, 138). “Most of those arriving in Kelowna had jumped off the transcontinental trains at Kamloops and hitched a ride on the 154 There has been extensive research and activism around this topic, particularly by researchers Amy Cohen, a former committee member for this dissertation project, Elise Hjalmarson, and Red de Apolyo para Migrantes Agricolas/Radical Action with Migrants in Agriculture (RAMA), the support network they run with many helping hands (see for example A. Cohen 2019; A. Cohen and Caxaj 2018; Hjalmarson 2022; Elise Hjalmarson et al. 2015). 87 CNR [Canadian National Railways] southward. It wasn’t long before a “hobo jungle” appeared north of the tracks” (2011, 138):155 It was called “Honolulu City” by its inhabitants, … Unlike many other “jungles,” Kelowna’s was an orderly place with rules and regulations, and was organized enough to send delegations to city council to lobby for better conditions. Council was dismissive, as the men were not Kelowna residents and they had no right to petition on any matter, and sent them to the provincial government office. When council asked why they shouldn't call out the Rocky Mountain Rangers to run the squatters out of town, they were told that such action would result in the men scattering and likely sleeping in people’s cellars, camping in their barns and perhaps even stealing whatever they could lay their hands on. It would be wiser if council let the orderly Honolulu remain as it was. (Simpson 2011, 138–39) In 1948 Brandt’s Creek was rerouted to follow the new Canadian Northern Railway line from Kelowna to Kamloops (The Kelowna Courier 1948b). During the construction, new ditches were dug to drain wetness, land dry enough to run trains over was created through “fill,” and railway tracks laid (The Kelowna Courier 1948a). It was this process that created Section 5 (see page 124) and new industrial investment along Brandt’s Creek (Zysblat and Cook 2021) (Figure 15, page 88). By the mid 1950s a neighbourhood of affordable single-family dwellings had moved into the Marsh (Figure 16, page 89). Many of these houses were built as victory housing for soldiers returning from World War II and their families (Amaneta 2010). The intention was that this new neighbourhood would provide financially accessible housing and proximity to the industrial labour jobs many of the returning veterans would be working (T. Hurley, pers. comm., 2023).156 The concetration of industry along this new creek resulted in pollution of the waterway, principally with the effluent expelled by SunRype (formerly the B.C. Fruit Growers Cooperative) and Calona Wines’ processing infrastructure. By the early 1970s the situation had become so severe that the 155 Of interest, though beyond the scope of this Episode, is the conversation between settler colonial deswampification, labour, migration, and gender. “In the early years, Kelowna developed a number of water and sewer projects to employ the transients, but those opportunities soon vanished and the single men either left town or went to the federally run relief camps. There was no point in allowing women to register for relief as no suitable employment was available for them” (Simpson 2011, 139). 156 An active community of Kelowna residents, present and former, communicate on a Facebook page called “Old Kelowna,” where posts regularly express nostalgia for this period, when “life was just about perfect” (Stuart 2021). 88 city constructed the original Brandt’s Creek Tradewaste Treatment Plant to deal with the discharge, which “was at that time, and remains, much too strong for the City’s main Sewage Treatment Plant to treat” (Director, Design & Constriction Services 2009, n.p.; The Kelowna Daily Courier 1977). The new facility was to treat tradewaste effluent, reducing its polluting capacity “to a level that met the Provincial standards for discharge to the adjacent Brandt’s Creek” (Director, Design & Constriction Services 2009, n.p.). Great pride was taken in this municipal achievement, and though the condition does seem to have improved,157 Brandt’s Creek continues to be treated as both a victim and perpetrator of pollution (see Hoppe 2023).158 157 “For years certain industries in Kelowna were dumping their untreated waste into nothing more than a slimy open sewer which emptied into Okanagan Lake. […] we now have an industrial waste treatment plant and I am proud to say once again, ‘There are fish in Brandt’s Creek.’”(The Kelowna Daily Courier 1974). 158 “There are many active polluters of Okanagan Lake, such as the city’s outfalls (Brandt’s Creek), storm sewers pouring into the creeks, the dense array of septic tanks on a flood-plain fringing Okanagan Lake” (Lamont 1975, 4). Figure 15: An article from the front page of the Kelowna Courier newspaper (1948a) announcing the new industrial section of town. The photo looks over the Northend Marsh from the north-west, showing the oval horseracing track to the south of a small agricultural plot. To the east sits the SunRype building, alongside the rail right of way, which runs diagonal to the city ’s primary urban grid. 89 Figure 16: KPA #10290, the western extent of the Northend Marsh in 1969. While the arc of the horseracing track is still visible, it appears to no longer be in use, superseded by industrial development and a baseball diamond. To the north of the diamond runs a ditch, from there to its unceremonious outflow into Okanagan Lake (Figure 17, page 92). The mill’s log booms have increased in size from the 1938 image (Figure 13, page 86), a neighbourhood has been constructed to the east of the mill, and the vacation homes at Manhattan Point remain prominent. 90 In 1974 there was a study done of Brandt’s Creek (refered to in the report as Brant Creek).159 Seperating the creek into three sections, the report’s first section, “The Industrial Area - from the creek mouth to where the creek crosses High Road,” covers and exceeds all of the seven Sections described in Part 7 (Figure 20, page 115). Much of the text contained in this report could have been written yesterday, from the erosion (Mini-drama 20, page 124), to the “various swamp vegetation,” to the watercress (MCE and Mini-drama 14, page 93) that dominates the channel. One attribute stands out as a relic of the past, on-brand for settler culture’s160 relations with this body of water: 159 The paper copy of this report is housed at the Kelowna Public Archives without any contextual information. The author, commisioner, and origin of the document are all unknown. 160 This is a difficult phrase. It implies homogeneity in all that is not “Indigenous culture,” which itself both implies homogeneity and establishes a dichotomy. This dichotomy, between Indigenous culture and settler culture, is true and false at the same time and not particularly useful in this context. I use the phrase settler culture however, because I am sympathetic to Harold Rhenisch’s statement that “[i]t’s a crazy thing, this idea that there’s a thing called settler culture, this notion that the foundation of a culture was set in colonial times and that’s that, but it’s really like that” (2022b). He writes this in a post on his blog entitled “Water? No, Watering,” which details the everywhereness of water (or wetness as Mathur and da Cunha would put it) and Figure 17: Brandt ’s Creek’s unceremonious connection with Okanagan Lake, July 19, 1977. These images, taken in the heat of summer, when the lines separating ditch from land and land from lake appear firm. This is a matter of seasonal contingency. BC Air Photos Bcc159/023 and Bcc159/041, used with permission from the Province of British Columbia Ministry of Citizens' Services, Intellectual Property Program (File Number: 7200003974). 91 At the end of Brant Avenue it leaves the streets and flows along the bottom of a hill, though an area of fields and horse pasture. The horses have direct access to the creek. There is one place where the creek flows through a feedlot. There is no vegetation here so that soil and manure can be easily washed away, adding to the nutrient load of the creek. (unknown 1974, 3) Raising horses is no longer practiced in this part of the city, but treating the creek as a conveyor by which the unwanted can be washed away is. The report’s analysis of this first “Industrial Area” concludes with a series of recommendations. These recommendations begin: Brant Creek is badly polluted in this section. This in itself is not important as this creek in not very significant, but the pollutants are carried from here into Okanagan Lake and contribute to pollution there. Obviously this pollution should be reduced as much as possible. There have been other, more comprehensive studies done of pollution in Brant Creek and recommendations for a cleanup of this creek have been made before. … We can only point out the problem again. (1974, 3) Exasperation oozes from this statement, likely written by people tasked with identifying a situation and its problems, though without much hope of contributing to change, as if pollution and refuse are the inevitable habits of this place. They go on to suggest that “where erosion is a problem, the banks should be reinforced in some way”161 (unknown 1974, 3) and if and when most pollution sources along Brant Creek are arrested, it would be very beneficial to give this section of creek a “cleaning” … the creek channel has a thick layer of muck and ooze on the bottom. … the channel should be dredged and gravelled through most of this section. (unknown 1974, 4) This last recommendation communicates repugnance in the face of “muck and ooze,” marshy habits that defy a water/land binary. Dredging and graveling are proposed as solutions to this ambiguity, solutions that will confirm the separation that is necessary for aesthetic satisfaction in this concludes with an assertion: “The very idea! That water flows. Pshaw” (2022b). It was Harold who made it possible for me to take in Mathur and da Cunha’s ideas. I started reading Harold’s books and blog early on in this research process, thanks to a tip from Nancy Holmes. Eventually he became a friend and supportive critic of my approach to doing research here as a visitor-scholar. Thank you, Harold, for being an expert pen-pal. All of those conversations shaped this work and will remain important to me in future endeavours. 161 Reinforcement of the banks has been established today to a large extent by Siberian elm trees (see Section 3 and/or Mini-drama 22). 92 imaginary of place. This is the unruly heritage of Brandt’s Creek and the Northend Marsh, forced into an imaginary it cannot satisfy, never quite meeting the expectations of a place separated into the knowable categories of flowing water and fixed and firm land. The treatment by the City of Kelowna and citizens of this place as a wasteland, somewhere vagabonds collect and refuse can be disposed of without significant complaint, has, I suspect—in addition to this series of local happenings—origins in its swampy nature. It is not just the unruly heritage of this place that creates the settler colonial conflation of wetland with wasteland.162, 163 This is a pattern repeated, over and over, nearby and farther away (Giblett 2019; Carlson 2010; Callicott 2003; Dillon 2022; Gandy 2013; O’Gorman 2021).164 Okanagan valley-bottom places are in constant flux, inundated in the spring with melt waters and parched in the summer, while wetness, becomes trees,165 is soaked into the warm air, and collects in the iconic lake. The Northend Marsh in particular changes its concentration of wetness with both the seasons and annual fluctuations in the water table (T. Hurley, pers. comm., 2023). Given these 162 Marshy places and their squelchy habits have the ability to disrupt expectations. An account of the E. R. Bailey Family in the Okanagan Historical Society Annual Reports speaks to such an incident in the Northend Marsh: "Grandfather's many interests included sports, and along with others (including my parents), played golf on a makeshift course at the north end of town on the flats there. In those days there was no artificial ice, so they curled on Whitup's Pond which was part of the swampy area in the present C.N.R. yards. He would tell the story about leaving the curling stones, which were home-made, on the ice one night only to have a chinook blow up during the night. In the morning all the rocks were at the bottom of the pond never to be seen again” (Schoenfeld and Sismey 1972, 160–61). 163 This conflation of wetland with wasteland is something people thinking with these places have contested over and over. “Wetlands are a commonly misunderstood resource. Terms such as swamp or wasteland are frequently used – belying a common failure to understand and value wetland environments. Yet wetlands are among the richest of environments, often providing a wide range of benefits to society. Simply put, an environment without wetlands is incomplete and may be unable to support the functions upon which we depend for livelihood, lifestyle and life support” (Bond et al. 1992, iii). See Lindsay Dillon’s (2022) essay “Civilizing Swamps in California” for an example of how this conversation plays out in relation to the settler colonial necessity of a water/land divide. In this and a surprising number of other ways, the histories of the Okanagan and present-day California overlap, with scale as the obvious factor separating these stories of deswampification (Sze et al. 2009). 164 Brandt’s Creek is far from the only watercourse to have received such treatment. It shares a similar story with the LA River for example, though the later is orders of magnitude larger and has received waves of attention unknown to Kelowna’s marsh-become-ditch. In Los Angeles: “[t]he creation of a ‘tent city’ on the river’s banks in an effort to hide the homeless during the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics reinforces the perception of the river as a marginalized landscape to be eradicated from the public imagination, but it is also an ironic recognition of the river’s long-standing role as a refuge for marginal or displaced peoples including gypsies, South American transvestites and other outsiders” (Gandy 2006, 141–42). 165 Discussing this phenomenon in a blog post, underneath a photo of some pines on a dry slope, Harold Rhenisch writes, “[t]hose pines are clouds, that never leave, or, rather, that carry the earth up with them and aren’t entirely lost (and hold some of the sun on the earth in the process.) They ebb and flow with rising and falling water levels, in companionship with fire. That is quite the trick” (2018). 93 fluctuations, year-round Okanagan valley-bottom dwelling, in and with wetness-eschewing infrastructures—intensified by increased urban density166—does not make sense. It can be made conceptually logical through an ideological reliance on the separation between land and water but will not be able to be eco-logical if the ways we think about and build with this place do not change. This northern portion of the Kelowna floodplain moves through different forms: marsh, conversion into a drainage ditch, and assertion of itself as a creek within a settler colonial urban context. Wetness—the dance of snow and melt—makes life possible here, soaking and seeping, creating shelter and passage, and accommodating for inevitable fluctuation. Living with and in wetness necessitates flexibility. The next Episode will detail Brandt’s Creek’s recent and potential transition from drainage ditch to bumptious riparian place. 166 This densification is, by many measures necessary, and suburban sprawl is doing no ecological favours at either a local or a global level. This necessity stands at loggerheads in a city built in a floodplain; more, heavier, impermeable stuff in ever more constrained marshy and riparian places is not, cannot be, the answer. Mini-drama 14: July 28, 2023 Caption: There's a creek in there somewhere. Alt-text: A thickness of green. Bushy watercress blooms white flowers. A few stalks of thin, round, tule stalks poke through. 94 6 fringe natures This Chapter is a slight adaptation167 of a chapter I wrote in collaboration with Astrida Neimanis168 in 2022 for the Routledge Handbook on Gender and Water Governance (in press)169 in response to a weather event from November 2021. It presents the concept of fringe natures as an alternative to settler colonial land/water imaginaries. It is anchored in and a case study of Semá:th X_ó:tsa, the Sto:lo170 name for a water body of great seasonal variation, in the Fraser Valley of British Columbia, Canada. This story, while situated at the bottom of a different valley than the rest of the stories collected in this thesis, speaks similarly to lifeways of settler colonial occupation and capitalist cultivation. It also speaks to anti-swamp infrastructure and the ideologies that prioritize and uphold its construction. Whereas I refer to the story of Brandt’s Creek as a “place study,” a study of particularity, proximity, and visceral accountability, this Chapter shares a “case study,” a story of a place, yes, though one to which neither Astrida nor I have immediate proximity or the kind of visceral accountability that comes with relationships developed slowly over time and/or located where one lives. Though the distancing, from place to case, may appear as contradictory to the ethic detailed throughout this research as a whole, its inclusion is, I think, valuable. The inclusion of this chapter introduces a fold, an alternate geography and socioecology as well as theoretical reasoning and vocabulary that are 167 I have made small changes throughout the text to link this writing to the rest of the thesis and harmonize formatting. Personal identity markers, which I have not included elsewhere in this document, are preserved here as they were originally written in this chapter to honour the decision Astrida and I made as co-authors. 168 Thank you Astrida for the mentorship and for the time we spent thinking and working together, both for the sake of and alongside the FEELed Lab. It was an exciting time for me intellectually; I never stopped learning from you. 169 When we wrote this, we did so as equal partners in the project; I am the first author on the chapter in press. Astrida was invited by the book editors to make a contribution and extended the offer to me for us to write it as a team. Collaborating in this way brought us—a theorist and someone interested in riparian places—together to investigate a case of eco-spectacle. I did most of the local context research and carried my work with the riparian into the collaboration, we had been working on “fringe natures” as a figuration together for months prior to commencing this writing, and Astrida incorporated trans theory. We traveled together to the Sumas Valley in June of 2022 to learn on the ground about the place we had read about in books and heard narrated through the climate-sensational media of the moment. Astrida has given me permission to include this co-authored piece here. 170 We write in this chapter about Sto:lo language and relations with place from a distance, both geographically—though we did visit the Sumas valley once, in June of 2022—and socially. We do this because we believe it is important to put Indigenous peoples first in conversations about being with places that have experienced and continue to endure settler colonial occupation. This was a different experience for me than writing with syilx presence, for I have relationships with syilx people and have, at times, been welcomed into syilx spaces, which helps me navigate that writing with more context than we had here. 95 not invoked elsewhere in the thesis. The similarities that emerge—in socioecological story and theoretical expression of a desire to embrace ambiguity—provide a way of reading this chapter alongside the past, present, and future imaginaries of living with Brandt’s Creek and the Northend Marsh. The settler colonial, capitalist, and agriculturally motivated separation of land and water in the Sumas Valley is diffracted through trans theories, which speak to boundary transgression, dissolution, and transformation and echo the formulation of wetness. Adding the thickness of this case study to the place study of Brandt’s Creek, here we ask, how have people in the past, do people in the present, and might people in the future interact with and relate to the various ecologies of Semá:th X_ó:tsa? While a century of colonial rule transformed it into an ostensibly controlled agricultural prairie, catastrophic flooding in November 2021 brought the return of Semá:th X_ó:tsa in its lake form. This transformation, which drew our attention to this story, is a matter of mediation and remediation, and addresses the first part the Question: What does it look like to prioritize multimodality, mediation, and remediation? The opening of this Chapter describes these transformations and argues for an understanding of settler colonialism itself as a mode of water governance, mediating relations between human and place, demanding a separation between land and water. The second portion outlines an anticolonial, feminist-queer-trans theoretical framework that can offer an alternative land/water imaginary. This begins with a hydrofeminist understanding of bodies of water as porous and changeable, then augments this with queer trans ecological theories that propose water bodies as curious about boundaries, rather than rigidly opposed to them.171 Through this feminist-queer-trans imaginary, the chapter proposes an understanding of water bodies like Semá:th X_ó:tsa as fringe natures. In a time of increasing climate instability, fringe natures are figured as part of an expanded littoral zone, where anticolonial, feminist, and queer-trans modes of watery being might flourish. 6.1 introduction In November 2021, a series of atmospheric rivers caused devastating flooding in Lower Mainland (MCE) British Columbia, and of the Sumas Valley (MCE) specifically. Characterized as a major disaster, this 2021 event also brought the return of Semá:th X_ó:tsa (the Sto:lo name for a large 171 Adding this analysis here introduces new language and reasoning. This additional language, like that of the riparian, is also incommensurate with always-already everywhere wetness as the primary organizing concept for relations in place (Da Cunha 2019). As I read them though, Mathur and Da Cunha’s theory of wetness and a hydrofeminist take on bodies of water move toward similar goals and think with compatible priorities. 96 body water in the Fraser Valley) in its lake form. This seasonal iteration of Semá:th X_ó:tsa had been mostly repressed for a century by major colonial drainage engineering that turned this place into farmland. An extreme form of the lake was reactivated in 2021 by the river in the sky. How might we understand such dramatic climate change events not as errant catastrophes, but rather in relation to colonial histories and land/water imaginaries that attempt to fix bodies of water like Semá:th X_ó:tsa into categories they refuse (Figure 18, page 97)? In this Chapter, we argue that how we imagine bodies of water—what they are and how we think they should act in relation to other bodies of water, including humans—is a key part of water policy and governance. More liveable futures in the Sumas Valley thus demand perforating the settler colonial land/water imaginary. This Chapter proceeds first, by rehearsing the settler colonial transformation of Semá:th X_ó:tsa from a fecund body of water of great seasonal variation in depth, size and temperature, into an ostensibly controlled agricultural prairie. The colonial environmental imaginaries that buttress these actions provide the necessary context for current or future governance actions, but also reminds us that settler colonialism is itself also a mode of water governance, often with undesirable consequences for lands, waters, and existing communities. Following this, we outline an anticolonial, feminist-queer-trans theoretical framework that helps us to imagine Semá:th X_ó:tsa otherwise. This begins with a hydrofeminist understanding of bodies of water (Neimanis 2017) that highlights the porous, shifting and interconnected being of water bodies. While maintaining that all water needs a body, that is to say, some semi-permeable membrane of containment, we aver that rigid categories of containment can lead to harmful paradigms of water governance with devastating results. Instead of inflexible divides between land and water, the alternative imaginary requires attention to marginality and aporetic bordering. The next segment therefore turns to queer and trans ecological theory developed by Cleo Wölfle Hazard, Eva Hayward, and others, which inspires an imaginary of water bodies that are curious about boundaries, rather than rigidly opposed to them. Attuned to this motile ambivalence, we then return to Semá:th X_ó:tsa and read it through the figuration of “fringe natures” as our key conceptual intervention. To conclude, we suggest that in a time of increasing climate instability, fringe natures such as Semá:th X_ó:tsa should be imagined as part of an expanded littoral zone, where forcible maintenance of fixed binary categories can no longer hold. In this expanded littoral zone, we might articulate modes of water governance in which 97 not only Semá:th X_ó:tsa might flourish, but so too might other anticolonial, feminist, and queer-trans modes of being. Before continuing, though, we stress that we do not seek to import theories about gender and sexuality from a gender studies context into a water governance one as mere metaphor or conceptual analogy. Following the diverse work of scholars such as Kim TallBear (2015; 2019), Michelle Murphy (2018; 2015), Catriona Sandilands (2005; 2017), and Farhana Sultana (2011; 2022), as well as Wölfle Hazard (2022; Klein et al. 2022), we argue that gendered embodiment (and how we understand/control/claim it); good, life-sustaining ecological relationships between humans and other ecological bodies; and anticolonial support to Indigenous ways of knowing and LANDBACK movements are all materially and imaginatively connected. Settler violences done unto land are always gendered processes that distort and disappear Indigenous understandings and enactments of gender (e.g. Whetung 2019) while often reimposing binaristic, “Master Model” (Plumwood 1993) understandings on both human bodies and places. As Michi Saagiig Nishnaabeg scholar Leanne Betasamoskae Simpson (2017) notes, drawing on the work of Kanien’keha:ka Figure 18: Overflowing in the Sumas Valley, June 12, 2022. 98 scholar Audra Simpson, the sovereignty of Indigenous women’s, queer, and trans peoples bodies under their own various political systems was a major threat to settler states’ imposition of colonial systems, and these bodies were therefore targeted for death and disappearance. In Simpson’s words, “you simply cannot ignore the fact that performance of settler governmentality in Canada and the United States is strategically gendered” (2017, 118). To this, we add Wölfle Hazard’s understanding of settler control of waterways “as a central force of heteropatriarchy” (2022, 130). As Wölfle Hazard further asserts, concepts of trans(gender/species) embodiment bring “attention to how the vicissitudes of settler legacy and present human need shape the water body and transform the water body” (2022, 104). This attention, “together with the various species and elementals in the watershed,” can help “shape the possible presents and futures of that water body” towards renewed ecological possibility (2022, 104–5). Using feminist-queer-trans frameworks to rethink watershed governance thus serves as a reminder, first, that governance is always gendered even if in non-obvious ways, and second, that what we do to watersheds (e.g. through policy and governance) is informed by our always gendered understandings of embodiment and power. Feminist-queer-trans-theory is thus materially relevant to imaginaries of water governance.172 6.2 Semá:th X_ó:tsa: from Semá:th to settler colonial water governance Sumas valley, unceded and occupied Stó:lō territory,173 lies between two mountains, Sumas to the northwest and Vedder to the south east, and within the Fraser River watershed.174 The Semá:th are the Stó:lō group most closely enmeshed with this valley (Bolton and Daly 2013), a valley whose 172 These theoretical frames also insist that human queer and trans bodies directly belong in and make valuable contributions to these ecologically oriented debates. As trans geographer Loren March confirms, “utilizing queer (usually trans) subjects as abstracted, deconstructive conceptual tools or as a metaphor for liminality” (2021, 461) is problematic, when their lived experiences are not taken into account in the production of this scholarship (see also Seymour 2020). Cleo Wölfle Hazard (2022, 80–102) also notes that having queer trans scientists on a river restoration project, for example, brings new perspectives and knowledges. Our research for this chapter did not directly involve transgender or queer watershed researchers of Semá:th X_ó:tsa, but it took place in the context of our research lab, The FEELed Lab (www.thefeeledlab.ca), that advocates for and practices the inclusion of queer and trans people and their lived knowledges in environmental humanities research. 173 “Stó:lō traditional territory extends from Yale to Langley, BC” (Stó:lō Service Agency n.d.). Halq’eméylem (alternate spellings include Hul’q’umi’num’, Halq'eméylem, and hən̓q ̓əmin̓əm ̓) is the language of this Land (Silver, n.d.; ‘First Peoples Map of BC’, n.d.). 174 These are their present day anglicized colonial names. 99 mountains seem to end abruptly when they meet its floor, as if a massive body spent a long time flattening the land in between them. Today the valley’s prairie bottom hosts a meaningful proportion of the commercial agricultural production in the province (British Columbia Ministry of Agriculture 2017). Eggs are laid in long metal buildings by large numbers of chickens; cows graze on the grasses nourished by the valley’s soil; blueberries grow obediently in rows; and potatoes ready themselves for dinner tables province-wide. Before the chickens, cows, valley-bottom blueberries, and potatoes, there was a lake. This lake-place Semá:th X_ó:tsa, varied in size throughout the year, and at high water in late spring stretched the expanse of the valley, from the base of one mountain to the other (Reimer 2018).175 Water would stop in Semá:th X_ó:tsa on its way to the Fraser River, gathering and pooling, welcoming and nourishing a diverse array of fish, birds, insects, soil, humans, and more (Cameron 1997). The Sumas Valley has nourished humans since long-ago glaciers receded, leaving a valley in their wake (Reimer 2018). Stó:lō communities fished, hunted, frequented berry patches, and root digging grounds, and procured materials for shelter, tools, adornment, and trade from up and down the valley (Bolton and Daly 2013). The lake’s annual variation in extent, depth, and temperature played 175 We refer to this ‘lake’ as such only tentatively, because as we detail below, this name, like the river described by Mathur and Da Cunha (2019), is directly related to settler colonial imaginaries of water governance. Mini-drama 15: July 2, 2022 Caption: How's this for a riparian fringe? Alt-text: Long grass leans and glistens green in the sun light. 100 a major part in the ebb and flow of Stó:lō livelihood activities and served as a regional gathering place in both summer and winter (Silver, n.d.). When European settlers moved into the valley—first in small numbers for travel-though, and then in masculine droves to hunt the exuberant communities of waterfowl who would stop at the lake mid-migration to rest and dine—they quickly noticed the rate and extravagance with which the grasses grew in the littoral zone when the freshet receded in mid summer (Cameron 1997; Reimer 2018) (see Mini-drama 15, page 99). Cows, a staple in European food and agri-cultures, would eat well on such grasses. In a manner familiar to modes and methods of colonial land relations, this thought was taken to the extreme. If this grass is good, surely more would be better, and the grass appeared when the lake receded (Cameron 1997). With aspirations to establish settlements and feed livestock, human kin, and customers elsewhere, European farmers moved into Semá:th territory. The needs, knowledge, and opinions of the Semá:th were overridden by these settlers and their desire to farm productively and profitably. Laura Cameron quotes an exchange176 between Chief Ned, the male chief of the Sumas band, and “the commission”:177 Q (commission): Could there be any land reclaimed here by dyking? A (Chief Ned): I could not say. I am against the dyking because that will mean more starvation for us. Q: Why do you think that you would be starved out if this land were dyked? A: Because the lake is one of the greatest spawning grounds there is and this dyking would cut it off and that way would cut off our fish supply. This disregard for the needs and knowledge of the Semá:th people has echoed throughout history. In 2008 James Murton explained that “[w]ith the approval of the landowners and of nearly everybody else who mattered in the province, the Land Settlement Board was planning to drain Sumas Lake” (Murton 2008, 92, emphasis added). A multi-year campaign to empty the valley-bottom of the lake began. 176 These interviews have been described by historian Paul Thompson (1988, 105) as “a peculiarly intimidating form of interview, in which the lone informant is confronted by the whole committee” (cited in Cameron 1997, 26). 177 Royal Commission on Indian Affairs for the Province of B.C. 1913-1915. 101 When the settlers had reached an agreement amongst themselves that the lake would be drained, dikes, canals, and pumps were put in place to divert the shallow, widespread lake waters to the Sumas River, which would flow neatly into the Fraser at the north end of Sumas Mountain (Cameron 1997). In 1924 a lake was manipulated, shifted from the valley-bottom towards a riverine flow—a flow along which now runs the Trans Canada highway, flanked by industrial outpost buildings and strip-mall-style shopping opportunities. To the south, approaching the would-be lake bottom, lie farms. As currently practiced, agricultural life in Semá:th X_ó:tsa is rife with paradox. Rich soils created by centuries of seasonal sediment deposition resulting from ebbing lake and river waters attracted early-arrival agriculturalists (Reimer 2018). Now, for over 100 years—a very short story in the long life of Semá:th X_ó:tsa—generations have cultivated livelihoods in this prairie-between-mountains. Despite efforts towards governance and control, the lake maintains its prominence in the valley. Pumps run constantly to move water out of the valley-bottom and into the river, flood risk is high in most parts of the prairie, and anthropocentric infrastructure periodically fails to match water’s determination (‘Sumas Prairie: Failed Dikes, Flooded Farmland: Semá:Th X_ó:Tsa’ 2022). Or, as explained by Tyler Olson of the Abbotsford News (2016), “the work of keeping Sumas Prairie dry will never be finished.” Since Semá:th X_ó:tsa was re-placed, many floods have threatened agricultural lifeways in the valley. In addition to increasingly erratic climatological phenomenon, clear cut logging (MCE), and high-intensity forest fires create hillsides off of which precipitation can flow ferociously, overwhelming human abilities to maintain the valley’s prairie bottom. One such flood occurred in November of 2021 with the arrival of a series of tropical atmospheric rivers that dumped themselves as rain while unseasonably warm temperatures melted early-season snow off recently scorched mountainsides. Despite paradox and intermittent devastation, the ongoing maintenance of a farmable valley-bottom has become an obvious necessity to many, unimaginable otherwise: "It's our entire livelihood. We'll come back stronger” (Sandhu, in McSheffrey 2021). Catastrophic climate change events may belie this conviction. Can we reimagine Semá:th X_ó:tsa in a way that both looks back at its fluctuating liveliness but also looks forward to climate events that must be lived with? In this chapter we are thinking with Semá:th X_ó:tsa—a glacier turned lake, turned prairie and, for several weeks in November 2021, back to lake again—to ask what alternative decolonial and 102 feminist-queer-trans conceptual understandings of places/ecologies might better accommodate more livable futures. 6.3 imagining Semá:th X_ó:tsa otherwise 6.3.1 bodies of water Human bodies as bodies of water are akin to geophysical bodies of water – rivers, lakes, clouds, aquifers: we are all comprised mostly of water. This is a material fact, and a shared ontology. This watery constitution is what enables such bodies to move, grow, change, and gestate other bodies which, too, are mostly watery. When we start to pay attention to the wateriness of bodies, we begin to deduce their watery “onto-logics”—that is, not only that we are watery, but also that we share modes (or logics) of being and relating as bodies of water (Neimanis 2017, 95). Onto-logics of watery bodies thus pertain to what they are, how they act in the world, and what is needed to allow them to fulfill their ecological responsibilities. Two key watery onto-logics that Neimanis (2017) elaborates are interpermeation—that is exchange across and between bodies—and differentiation, whereby through these exchanges water is continually becoming different (Mini-drama 16, page 103). Alerted to these onto-logics, we understand that bodies of water inherently and ontologically expand, shrink, shift, and transform. As a human, for example, you may be approximately sixteen times bigger than you were fifty years ago, but you are still the same person; a “lake” on a floodplain, similarly, is still that lake, even as the precise location of its edge shifts with the seasons and the weather. Geological time may eventually render the category of “lake” non-sensical (as glacial icesheets form, or continents separate and join), but bodies of water have a metastable flexibility—remaining what they are even as they push and pull at their borders—until they are annihilated entirely (Deleuze and Guattari 1987). Until then, in order for these transformations to happen, bodies borrow from and bequeath their waters to other bodies, in a wondrous, complex, cascading and nesting series of multibeing hydrological cycles (Neimanis 2017, 65–67). Paying attention to these onto-logics means appreciating the subtle ambivalence of watery bodiedness: although continuously changing, a body of water can still hold coherence as a body. Put otherwise, these watery onto-logics reveal bodies of water as porous and permeable, but this does not mean they are all just one big amorphous flow. A recognition that bodies of water shift and morph as a fundamental aspect of their being, is not a submission to total dissolution. The bodies-of-water concept also recognizes the imperative of what physicist and feminist theorist Karen Barad has called “agential separability” (Barad 2007, 140). According to Barad, material bodies appear as 103 distinct only when we “cut” them into separate bodies for pragmatic purposes. Barad calls this “agential cutting” because this separation is an active and changeable process. Sometimes these cuts are made by human language—"this is the lake but this here is the river that flows into it”—sometimes these cuts are made by non-human material processes178 and they are often a matter of scale.179 The key point here is that relata do not pre-exist relations; material bodies come into meaningful existence through the intra-action of materiality and the discourses or processes in which they are made intelligible. Again, while the borders of water within an entire river basin system and those of a single farm’s irrigation system are both permeable and contingent, from each perspective different borders would be salient. To make such cuts is to affirm agential separability; this separability is a necessary part of responsive and relational meaning making in the world. Barad further underscores that responsivity to changing environments—circumstantially, cyclically, and over longer durations—can also be a matter of a body’s survival. As Barad notes, 178 A slow, centuries-long pooling of a river, for instance, can create a concentration of wetness that would carry the name ‘lake.’ 179 A river and a lake can become one body if we understand both as part of a watershed, for instance. Or, in the case of the Okanagan Lake and the Okanagan River, its designation depends the context in which it is being addressed. For a rich discussion on scale as a matter of what relationships matter, see Liboiron (2021b). Mini-drama 16: June 12, 2022 Caption: Becoming so many things. Alt-text: Short herbaceous plants of many kinds, foliage and flowers, collect and descend down a low-angled streambank and extending themselves into grey-brown water that is moving slowly by. 104 “intelligibility and materiality are not fixed aspects of the world but rather intertwined agential performance” (2007, 376). In other words, this agential separability—or discernments that distinguish between bodies of water—are practical and necessary, both for the body itself and for those who are in relation to it. We need to know if a body of water can be traversed with a canoe, for example, or whether it is shallow or dispersed enough to ride a bike across. “It matters which cuts are enacted,” Barad reminds us, because “different cuts enact different materialized becomings” (2007, 361). As Neimanis puts it, all bodies need water, but concomitantly, all water needs a body, or some semi-permeable membrane of containment such that it can persist as a being or entity (such as a human body, a lake). All water needs a body in order to be meaningful in the world, even if that container (whether discursive, or material, or likely both) is temporary or contingent. This containment generates difference, and differentiation is what allows the proliferation or multiplication of bodies of water. These onto-logics exist in in both complementarity and tension; interpermeation allow bodies to retain a metastability, but this exchange is also what enables bodies to become something new. Living well with other bodies of water requires neither fixity nor total dissolution of borders, but rather curiosity about shifting embodiment in response to time, space, and other bodies. Attuning to these onto-logics helps us understand what enables bodies to flourish and fulfill the roles they have in relation to other bodies of water. While these onto-logics are articulated by Neimanis within a Western feminist context, they can also be anticolonial in their dismantling of dominating180 white colonial and heteropatriarchal ontologies of bodies. As we detail below, understanding water’s onto-logics can be directly relevant for water governance seeking to counter the effects of colonial imaginaries. Before turning back to Semá:th X_ó:tsa, though, we augment these hydrofeminist onto-logics with explicitly queer and trans ecological insights. 6.3.2 transing water bodies Water’s hydrofeminist onto-logics suggest that sustaining relationships with other bodies of water requires neither a rigid fixity of boundaries, nor their total refusal (Figure 19, page 108). This imaginary can be helpfully supplemented by queer and trans ecological theories that offer more nuanced understandings of boundary transgression, dissolution, transformation, and a rejection of binaristic thinking and being. Here, trans theory is not an alternative to feminist hydro-logics, but an 180 We use the gerund ‘dominating’ here as opposed to the more often used adjective ‘dominant’ to highlight the ongoing practice and perpetuation of settler colonial ontologies. 105 amplification and specific attunement to some of its tenets. Queer trans feminist STS scholar Cleo Wölfle Hazard (2022) invites us to “consider how trans bodies are like bodies of water.” He continues: “Bodies of water are not containable. They overflow their banks in floods, or they seep away and go dry: the boundary is always a matter of contingency” (Wölfle Hazard 2022, 103) (Mini-drama 16, page 103). This element brings closer attention to that boundary work, and the movements, places and affects it elicits. Acknowledging the great diversity and even disagreement that is internal to trans theory (March 2021), many of its insights can usefully inform an analysis of environmental questions and water governance specifically. These concepts appear in the emerging subfield of trans ecologies, but their roots reach back across several decades of trans scholarship. In the first place, trans theory draws our attention to bodies and places of and as movement. Trans is to ‘move across.’ As Eve Hayward explains, trans is “a prefix weighted with across, beyond, through (into another state or place—elsewhere)” (2008a, 68). Susan Stryker similarly points out that “trans” means “the movement across a socially imposed boundary away from an unchosen starting place—rather than any particular destination or mode of transition” (2008, 1). In other words, trans theories invite us to perceive movement, or transitioning, as ontologically significant. The relationship of trans movement to borders is neither to categorically affirm or denounce them, but to be curious about them, including how they might be useful, what work they might do, as well as how they can be violently enforced. Trans ecological theories, specifically, remind us that non-human worlds are and have always been home to transitioning—moving, changing, shifting. This work underscores that transitioning, or transing—not simply as a means or a temporary phase on the way to a more important or more stable state, but as a way of being in itself—is not pathological, but entirely common, and “natural” (see also Freyne 2020; Seymour 2020). The desire to perceive stable states (land or water, for example) may be related to Western ontologies of binary thinking that are linked to (and even anchored in) how these systems of thought understand gendered bodies (Plumwood 2003). For Wölfle Hazard, “the watershed body” (which comprises the extended and connected embodiment of multiple watery bodies) is always “a kind of body-in-transition” (2022, 110).181 181 In this transing, a movement between modes and expressions, we can read also the Northend Marsh's spectrality and Brandt’s Creek flourishing. It is the ghost of a marsh, has the bones of a ditch, and holds the potential for riparian thriving—all of these things, both at once and expressed separately in space and time, are held in story by its being a body in transition. 106 Trans ecological thinking reminds us that trans places are also contact zones (Bedford 2020). As Wölfle Hazard’s (2022) “watershed body” also reveals, transing bodies are always transing in relation to other bodies; from a queer trans ecological standpoint, transition is not a journey to individual fulfilment as much as an incitement to “trans community cocreation.” He continues: “Becoming a member of a transfigured watershed body requires that “one act in ways that foster good relations” (2022, 128). Transing always happens in relation to other bodies, and in ways that reconfigure how those bodies fit together, in place. In these lively contact zones of transing, binaries are blurred, and the in-between is enlivened. Sometimes known as ecotones, such spaces are often ecologically and evolutionarily significant (see Krall 1994). Culturally speaking, these lively zones can also be where sedimented modes of thinking are loosened, and new imaginaries can take hold (Mini-drama 17, page 106). Here, trans ecologies emphasize what eco- and hydrofeminist thought has similarly suggested about in-between zones (see also Mortimer-Sandilands 2004; Neimanis 2012), but reminds us that these insights are also related to, verified by, and deepened through lived experiences of trans people. Littoral zones, where land and water meet, are one such ecotone, and are particularly salient for water governance. This liveliness of transitional spaces is also affectively significant. For example, as Taylor Coyne, drawing on research about eels and urban waterways, notes: “The margins are, for queer eels and for queer folk, safe places—places of liberation and pleasure” (2022, n.p.). Of course, this is not Mini-drama 17: September 23, 2021 Caption: Trees pretending to be clouds. Alt-text: A shadow cast upon a filed of green and yellow grasses, in the background of which lies a lake ringed with rolling mountains. 107 universally true; as trans geographer Loren March underscores, unstable borders and encounters that cross them can also be “disorienting” and “potentially deadly” (2021, 466). But Coyne’s point can nonetheless remind us that transitioning, and transitional spaces, can be life-affirming and joyful. Bedford reminds that “‘contact zones’ and ‘borderlands’ […] have the potential to be reclaimed as sites of belonging for those cast as ‘impure’ within the social body” (2020, 2)—and the ecological one, we argue. Even when located in urban and suburban zones, such margins are still uncontainable in their evasion of normative strictures (in this case, of sociality and sexuality). These are place-times at or on the fringe. These sentiments are echoed in the marginal queer trans multispecies watershed body that Wölfle Hazard (2022) describes, that brings “river lovers of all genders” (2022, 110) together in a “yearning against settler colonial affects” (2022, 116). The location of affirmation in fringey transition might shift attention to what is still possible and cocreated in such “yearning against,” rather than reinforcing violent and pathological associations with certain bodies or lifeways.182 In other words, transing is natural, and can also be joyful and affirmative; ecological transition zones can be similarly abundant and life-affirming, just as anticolonial marginalized worlds that counter heteropatriarchal settler colonial imaginaries and affirm Indigenous life and land relations are full of joy and affirmation. While the dangers and violences of marginality or liminality are real, this is not inherent to these bodies-spaces themselves, but rather linked to how they are imagined and treated from dominating colonial or heteropatriarchal positions. To find affirmation in these fringey margins does not mark a return to an Edenic or pure state. As bodies of water that enact a logic of continual differentiation, transing is border play across bodies (e.g. land and water; Figure 19, page 108). As Wölfle Hazard, citing the work of Hayward, asserts, there is a “vertiginous joy at being unable either to turn back or to continue as before; new ways, transways, transselves are required of us here” (2022, 105). In Hayward’s (2008) words, “to be trans- is to be transcending or surpassing particular 182 This can relate to Eve Tuck’s (2009) warning to scholars writing about Indigenous communities to resist telling damage stories and to focus instead on the life-affirming ways of being that persist in those communities, in spite of settler colonialism. 108 impositions, whether empirical, rhetorical, or aesthetic” (2008a, 68, italics in original). Trans ecologies can draw our attention to transitioning environments not as pathological ones in need of correction or stabilization, but as teachers for different ways of living in relation. Aswim in hydrofeminist onto-logics and queer and trans understandings of the possibilities afforded by bodies in transition, we offer a reading of Semá:th X_ó:tsa following what Cleo Wölfle Hazard calls a “trans theory of watershed embodiment” (2022, 134). We support Wölfle Hazard’s claim that such a theory can “sharpen and focus these narratives of unsettling projects” (2022, 134) to act in solidarity with Indigenous nations (in this case, the Stol:lo) working towards LANDBACK. We also propose that this can suggest a way to understand what Semá:th X_ó:tsa actually is—neither Sumas Lake nor Sumas Prairie—and open to different governance perspectives and approaches better fit for the climate instability we must learn to live with. 6.3.3 Semá:th X_ó:tsa as fringe nature Semá:th X_ó:tsa does not exist in the settler water governance imaginary. While this Sto:lo name already holds within it a necessary contingency of terrestrial-aquatic categories, in languages such Figure 19: Boundary (di)solutions; June 12, 2022. 109 as English, neither lake nor prairie will do, loaded as these words are with fixed separability. Indeed, as Reimer suggests, settler imaginaries of this place were guided by discourses of nature according to “two fixed elements: water and land” (2018, 152). Reimer elaborates what this perspective would have supported: “Water that was silted up with land, or land that had too much water on it, was faulty and had to be fixed. This is what was wrong with the aging, shallow Sumas Lake and its surrounding wetlands” (2018, 152). According to such a view, this shapeshifting body could not fulfill its “proper purpose” as “fertile agricultural lands” (Reimer 2018, 152). Reclaiming the land takes on the literal language of redemption in the settler imaginary, emphasized in the 1894 words of Presbyterian minister John Locke: “If this fertile land […] ever comes to what God or nature intended, there must be a strong and united effort made to reclaim it from its watery grave” (cited in Reimer 2018, 152). Yet, as Reimer bewilderedly inquires: “how can you reclaim something that was never there” (2018, 151)?183 Evoking Hayward’s reminder that “trans […] does the now familiar work of suggesting the unclassifiable” (2008a, 68), we propose that bringing queer and trans ecologies to the question of Semá:th X_ó:tsa might enact a necessary curiosity around these settler classification and containment paradigms that have proved devastating in so many ways. What if, countering the idea that this place “needed to be redeemed” (Reimer 2018, 151), we become curious about such ambivalent or fringey spaces as sites of pleasure and possibility? What if fringey ecotones were instead places of ecological and social significance, as Coyne above suggests, where a watershed body, as Wölfle Hazard muses, could be “most joyous, bountiful and most vibrantly itself” (2022, 129)? Guided by these questions, we propose fringe natures as an operational concept for telling an alternative story of Semá:th X_ó:tsa. We suggest that marginality, transition, movement, and alternative sociality can be held by the image of the fringe, in a way that might encourage different approaches to governance and policy making. Fringe natures is thus a figuration, following the development of figurations offered by feminist theorists Rosi Braidotti (2011) and Donna Haraway (1997). A figuration is a real, material phenomenon, which holds explanatory and propositional agency for inaugurating different kinds of relationships (Neimanis 2017, 5–6). In this sense, even as they have conceptual, associative, and 183 “Reclamation” works the other way too. “What,” I asked the person at the information counter in the Great Coulee Dam visitors’ centre, where the word was written on nearly every plaque, “is being ‘reclaimed’ here?” “Land of course,” I was told as if I should have been able to see this for myself, “land is being reclaimed from the desert, for agriculture.” 110 suggestive power, figurations are always more-than-metaphorical. In our case, the fringe is a real environmental phenomenon that refers to uppermost section of a littoral zone, i.e. where terrestrial and aquatic habitats meet. We thus use the term fringe nature to refer to the ambiguous and contingent land/water space of Semá:th X_ó:tsa with a degree of ecological soundness. This lake-made prairie-become lake again is an actual place where land and water come together. Rejecting the fixity of either/or, Semá:th X_ó:tsa transcends land/water, surface water/ground water, and atmospheric/terrestrial with a full-bodied yes and, an affirmation and addition that holds multiple and trans-capable possibilities for relating to the flows that facilitate our lives. Contextualized by seasons, inter-species relations, and stories, Semá:th X_ó:tsa and uncountable generations of Stol:lo thriving as participants of this place show that it is possible to live well with such vicissitude, within these literal fringe natures. Semá:th X_ó:tsa is a transing place-body, always in movement, consistently becoming anew in a dance of seasons, weather, climate, and community relations. “A river or lake is not contained by its shoreline,” nor are shorelines containable in their defining two dimensions, “but seep around underground, hidden or revealed through relations to other entities” (Wölfle-Erskine and Cole 2015, 304). This inherent border curiosity of watery bodies is repressed by the insistence that these bodies must be governed according to settler imaginaries that treat a drained and fallibly engineered floodplain as though this is the only way it could ever be (Mini-drama 18, page 110). On Mini-drama 18: July 24, 2022 Caption: So many fringes weaving themselves. Alt-text: A harsh streambank. A chainmail and barbed wire fence separates a parking lot full of stacked construction materials from a near-vertical streambank growing small green plants and flanking murky brown-tinged water. 111 increasingly frequent occasions, infrastructural restrictions on waterways cease to perform the function for which they were engineered: dykes and levees seep and break, containment mechanisms fail to contain. Even though “all water needs a body” and these bodies are constantly subject to agential cutting in Barad’s terms, in the context of climate change rubbing up against the anthropogenic insistence on the fixity of these separations, the usefulness of this particular agential cut overflows and seeps out, flooding the territory in ways that exacerbate relations with other bodies of water. As humans living as visitors in this unceded place in the context of increasingly erratic climate, we are—as pronounced by B.C. Public Safety Minister Mike Farnworth in November of 2021—"in uncharted territory when it comes to these storms” (‘B.C. Public Safety Minister Mike Farnworth Provides Update on Flooding Situation’ 2021). Perhaps it is the ideal of charting that needs to be reconsidered, for to shift between wetter and drier states is in alignment with water’s onto-logics. As noted, figurations also draw attention to epistemological positioning, and hold symbolic, imaginative power that connects a real phenomenon to broader social, ecological, and political questions. We thus invoke the concept of fringe natures moreover to point to the ways in which ecological spaces such as littoral zones—where land and water meet, mingle, and transition—are marginalized within apparatuses of knowing and imagining. They exist at the frayed edges of what is securely knowable and categorizable (i.e. land or water) and often at the margins of our policy and governance imaginations too. In their characteristic “submerged, floating, or emergent vegetation” (Environmental Encyclopedia 2018), fringe natures inspire us to ask about which voices are not-yet audible.184 While Semá:th X_ó:tsa comprises fringe natures in the ecological sense, it is also a fringe nature in the submergence of Sto:lo knowledges within water governance decision-making in this place. To say that these knowledges are “fringe,” however, is not to relegate them to a minority status as an essential or fixed position. Note that in the definition above, fringe natures are also “emergent.” In this, they hold possibility—a possibility whose realisation depends on shifting the imaginary of Semá:th X_ó:tsa to respond to what is. In other words, marginal or fringe may not index minority in the quantitative sense; the marginal refers to what is submerged and emergent in response to the given context.185 184 See Macarena Gómez-Barris’s “Submerged Perspectives” in The Extractive Zone (2017). See Sophie Chao on emergence within ecological spaces (2022). 185 Fringe natures are therefore kin to spectral ecologies and their ways of making themselves known. 112 6.4 water governance for an expanded littoral zone In the context of colonial climate catastrophe, we need to shift what knowledges and figures are relegated to the margins. Returning to Karen Barad’s (2007) concept of agential separability, we note that what a body is, and what it becomes as it transitions, depends on how our discourses cut it. If the discourse demands land or water as the only “proper” categories, then Semá:th X_ó:tsa is either lake or prairie. We are led to imagine that most everything must be land or water. In this dominating discourse, there is no way to explain a tulip field below two feet of water other than aberrant, catastrophic, and spectacular. As we move more deeply into the wilds of climate change, however, aberration becomes increasingly familiar. Each fire season is worse than most have ever seen, and we continually confront above-average temperatures, or rivers, upon rivers, upon rivers falling from the sky. When the aberrant increases in frequency, shifting towards the quotidian, perhaps the fringe becomes the norm; the world of atmospheric rivers and devastating floods are part of an expanding fringe that is not to be romanticized or aestheticized through academic conceptual wordsmithing, but responded to through governance and policy that meet this transition aptly. Living with these exigencies is not just imaginative work (although it is this as well, see Mini-drama 17, page 106); it can also be enacted through governance and policy changes both small and large.186 This is an expanded littoral zone, encompassing far more than the river’s edge as a fixed line on a map, and instead extends across entire valleys, and vertically too, up into a riverine sky and down into the hyporheic zone (Mini-drama 19, page 113).187 In this expanded littoral zone—one among many possible swampy aesthetics—where water and land are always comingling, reconfiguring the 186 For example, Sarah Whatmore’s (2013, 43) research on flooding in the UK reveals how such exigencies can be addressed with small policy changes related to building, as reflected by a research collaborator who notes, “in the past, people had houses with solid floors and if it flooded you swept it out, but now of course we have got your electrics and carpets, and you put your wooden floors in. Why do you do it when you know you are going to be flooded? (MP, 11/09/2007)” 187 The hyporheic zone—"from the Greek hypo, under, and rheos, flow" (Wölfle Hazard 2022, 8)—includes concepts such as undercurrents, sub-surface flows, groundwater, and aquifers. See Wölfle Hazard (2022) for elaboration on this dimension. 113 watershed body anew, water governance must learn from, with, and within these fringe natures. For humans to live well with Semá:th X_ó:tsa’s amphibious ecology requires situated attention to the changing conditions of climate and weather variability. “[F]ocusing on the shifting affordances of wet, dry, and in-between environments,” which the Semá:th have extensive in-place experience with, will allow future governance to recognize the “spectrum of possibilities and oppositions that emerge in relation to particular human activities and projects” (Krause 2017, 405–6). This is the stochastic world we need to learn to live in with compassion, because warm temperatures will melt snow that has fallen on scorched hillsides and water will insist that it “belongs to itself” (Maracle 2017, 37, italics in original), that it governs itself, despite the efforts of settler colonialism to fix it within impermeable containers and either/or categories. Wölfle Hazard claims that “once they are deployed to orderly ends, queer and trans are no longer themselves and they are no longer ours” (2022, 105) (that is to say, of and belonging to queer and trans people). But perhaps in a feminist queer transing imaginary, the watershed body is never simply ours, to be controlled. This is the water, the wetness, that governance must reckon with. Mini-drama 19: May 25, 2021 Caption: Today it rained. Alt-text: Dark clouds, obviously raining, over a riparian pond. 114 7 Brandt’s Creek’s habituation, becoming riparian The previous Episode (Part 5: inhabiting the Northend Marsh) walked through a story of the seasonal marshland that was ditched and drained—to make a railway line, a racetrack, a neighbourhood, and Brandt’s Creek—to separate seasonally fluctuating wetness into land and water. Despite the challenges associated with hosting anthropocentric infrastructure, this marshy place, with its wetness collected as a flowing creek, is animating riparian habits to the best of its current ability and with some help along the way. This Episode tells a tale of that ditch-becoming-creek and how it scraped together a riparian existence. I close by proposing we acknowledge the riparian as experienced pedagogue and embrace a swampy aesthetic as an effective tool for living sustainably in and among wetness.188 For ease of description, I have allocated names to seven sections of Brandt’s Creek, separated from each other by works of anthropocentric infrastructure and human-creek relations: The Triangle, Bankhead Elementary, Shade Station, Brandt Ave, Weddel Place, Recreation Ave, and Manhattan Drive. Following the trajectory of flow, the first of the sections described, Section 1: The Triangle, is a bookend, that marks a shift in both topology and land use; this is where the creek flows to valley-bottom and the adjacent architecture shifts from residential to industrial, collecting as what I’ve referred to as the Northend Marsh. The Marsh, as I’m imagining it, begins here, in the topological crease between the hills that lead into the Glenmore and Bankhead neighbourhoods to the north and south respectively, where presently the creek intersects Clement Avenue. In this Episode I detail these sections as I have come to know them—though observation, modern and archival documentation, walking and talking with others, and a biodiversity survey conducted with Kasey Moran in 2022 (see Appendix B: Brandt’s Creek biodiversity survey, page 176)—in relation to Brandt’s Creek’s riparian becoming to date.189 188 Embracing a swampy aesthetic is an active seeking-out of fringe natures—like the riparian alongside and created by a ditch—learning from and applying the principles and habits found in these places elsewhere. 189 This data has been collected and presented to provide specific detail to the story of Brandt’s Creek’s relatively recent riparian becoming. 115 7.1 the Sections This aerial image (above) of The Marsh, Kelowna’s Downtown and North End neighbourhoods, shows the seven sections of the present-day flow of Brandt’s Creek that were the focus of this place study.190 Beginning with Section 1, just before the creek hits the valley-bottom, and flowing downstream to Section 7, a short stretch that was a part of the riparian revitalization efforts directed to the place where the creek meets the lake in the early 2000s. These seven sections were defined 190 At the time of writing, an ArcGIS web map of these sections with photo-illustrated points of interest is also available. See the web map for specific data parameters. https://www.arcgis.com/home/item.html?id=0265036224fa40b987a1cba6eccad74e Figure 20: Recent aerial view of study area. Sections labeled 1 through 7 on the flow course of Brandt's Creek describe the area where the Northend Marsh is currently forming riparian habits (outlined in bright green). This, and all of the Section images below, were created by Brittany Adams, specifically for this purpose, using data compiled by the City of Kelowna. 116 by infrastructural separation—channels and culverts—and logistical convenience.191 Sections 1, 2, and 7 have histories of recent ecologically-focused riparian revitalization efforts, while Sections 3 through 6 do not. All seven Sections are described below. 7.1.1 Section 1 Section 1: The Triangle, with seasonal above ground flow marked with a dashed blue line and red circles with crosses show the locations of each culvert. This, and the rest of the Section images are ortho photos oriented to the north; the creek flows west. Municipal zoning is depicted in grey text with a light-yellow background, primary street names shown in capital letters. The Okanagan Rail Trail is a dashed orange line. 191 Note, Kelowna-based Ecoscape Environmental consultants conducted a thorough ecological survey of Brandt’s Creek in 2006 (‘Sensitive Habitat Inventory and Mapping (SHIM): Inventory Summary Report (Project No. 06-054)’ 2007). Their report numbers sections of the creek differently than I have done here and covers the entire flow of the creek as a coherent body of water. Though I reached out at the beginning of this research we never formed a relationship, and Ecoscape has not been involved with this project. Different still, creek sections were also determined by the unlabeled 1974 “Report on Brant Creek.” 117 This is Section 1 (MCE), a triangular place hemmed in on all sides by concrete (MCE), wetness collects here in a last moment before encountering the Northend Marsh. As recently as the early 2000s, this parcel was growing a monocrop of short grass (Figure 21). After a revitalization effort, Figure 21: Section 1 as depicted in a screenshot from train watcher Jeremy Spurway’s March 1st, 1999 video (2016). Spurway’s YouTube channel hosts a few videos of the same spot, from as late as 2002, that show similar foliage less clearly. Figure 22: Revitalization plans for Section 1 , drawn by Kelowna-based engineering firm Urban Systems in 2009. 118 detailed in 2009 by the local engineering firm Urban Systems to support the expansion of Clement Avenue (Jim Hager, email to author, 2023; Figure 22, page 117), and the passing of some time, this riparian place is now host to myriad beings. 7.1.2 Section 2 Section 2: Bankhead Elementary Section 2 (MCE) runs between the concrete path, the Okanagan Rail Trail192, and a fence line separating the creek from Bankhead Elementary’s playfield. This is where the Northend marsh begins, at valley-bottom, and likely where, on September 10, 1925, upon completion of the main 192 The Rail Trail (MCE), as it is locally known, is a major active transportation corridor of the area and one of the few car-free paths that traverses much of the city of Kelowna. Its southern terminus reaches Okanagan Lake between Kelowna’s Downtown and Northend neighbourhoods. The path follows the once-railway from Kelowna to Vernon, and while currently not continuous and unpaved north of the Kelowna International Airport, is championed by many in the community (‘Okanagan Rail Trail - Where Will It Take You?’, n.d.). I have also heard complaints about this trail, which runs primarily through riparian places, that it has ‘caused’ people to sleep rough along the creeks, an activity perceived to be associated with crime. 119 train line into Kelowna, the train tracks sagged under the weight of the engine (Figure 14, page 85). Flowing through four culverts, wetness collects seasonally in a ditch preceding the primary channel in flow. A healthy stand of tule (MCE) reeds is maintained by the seasonal moisture in this area. Downstream from the tule there is a community of spitcin (MCE) plants, which grow and are weed whacked annually by the city’s park maintenance team. The creek often is obscured from view by thick mats of watercress (Mini-drama 14, page 93). 7.1.3 Section 3 Section 3: Shade Station The creek is directed, via culvert, back under Clement Avenue, re-emerging in Section 3 (MCE), where it flows between a field and a steep slope, and then immediately alongside a parking lot used primarily for industrial materials storage (Mini-drama 18, page 110). The field is maintained to accommodate more-than-usual wetness in times of high water and until recently housed an autoshop building. The box culvert in the middle of the stretch of creek pictured above is a place 120 that makes possible skateboarding, sleeping atop, moving across, as well as the retention of wetness. The steep slope is held in place by one of the most detested vegetal beings that thrives in today’s Okanagan riparian habitats, the Siberian elm. While in other places they are vigorously fought against, these Siberian elm trees are so important to the stability of the slope that they have been protected from beaver predation (Mini-drama 22, page 132). 7.1.4 Section 4 Section 4: Brandt Ave. Underground flow is shown in grey between blue, which depicts overground flow. Brant Avenue is a block-long street running north of and parallel to the space allowed for the creek. The south side of this stretch of creek is entirely occupied by the same industrial parking lot mentioned in the description of Section 3 above. During a recent visit to the newly established office on the adjacent property we learned that the parking lot used to store construction materials—which could not be built today, given the bylaw mandating a 15-meter riparian buffer be allowed 121 between any creek (at bank-full width) and new infrastructural development—will continue to be used for the purposes of storing building materials for the foreseeable future. This stretch of creek hosts many Siberian elm trees, a number of different grasses, and some shorter woody plants, such as rose and dogwood. Streambanks are very steep and access to the water would be challenging, though not impossible, if sought after. With its steep banks, minimal room, and dense foliage between the public sidewalk and the creek, this Section is probably the least attended to of the seven. Section 4 (MCE) is also where the present day Northend Neighbourhood Plan boundary begins (in relation to the flow of the creek), with Section 3 forming a portion of the southeastern boundary (Policy and Planning Department 2021; Figure 23). Figure 23: Northend Neighbourhood Plan project boundary. Image dated 2021, sourced from the City of Kelowna website , accessed 2024.05.07. A diagonal line, in relation to the north-up orientation of the map, traces the course of Brandt ’s Creek on the boundary’s eastern edge. 122 Here let us pause in the description of the Sections to highlight the extent to which Brandt’s Creek is made unknown, not only in the (an)archival sense of historical record keeping, but also in the present-day ways in which residents of this place learn about daily trajectories and move through the city. This example comes from Google Maps.193 Below are two screenshots showing the way Google Maps represents the creek’s transition between Section 4: Brandt Ave and Section 5: Weddel Place. One image is from the satellite view, a photo taken from above, the other is of the street map, assuming a surface and drawn with lines (see Part 3.1, page 44). Both screenshots were taken from the same browser on the same day, within moments of each other. One image, Figure 24: satellite view (page 123), clearly shows the creek (unlabelled), on the south side of Brant Avenue, dipping through a culvert and channel under Gordon Drive, and reemerging to the south of Weddell Place. The water is grey-brown and lined with a small margin of foliage. The scale of the images is identical, showing a distance of 20 metres in the legend, individual cars and addresses are visible at this resolution. In the next image, Figure 25: street view (page 123), Brant Avenue, leads into Gordon Drive, which leads into Weddell Place, all without any indication that there is a creek nearby. The wetness that collects, in a ditch, as a creek, has been drawn out of existence—not even water and land, just land alone—by this tool that not only has the power and reach to communicate information assumed to be factual, but also, in so doing, to create the world it is depicting. These technologies make possible and are made possible by “techniques and systems of valuation and devaluation that allow some things to flourish by discarding, erasing, and dispossessing others” (Liboiron 2021a). Often, these technologies are used as aids for practicing discernment, “figuring out what we want to manifest as an intentional choice” (Vaughan 2007, 331). If I want to go for a walk by a creek in town, and I look for a creek on Google Maps street view, I will not find this one. In this way, these technologies, collaborative projects between some humans and a few algorithms, organize the ways in which it is possible to attune to place. When I talk about the importance of coming to know the riparian habitats in this place, and how coming to know, building relationships, is key to living well with place, to what and whom can I speak when these habitats and their waterways are mapped out of existence? In this example, Brandt’s Creek has been made 193 As described by Wikipedia, Google Maps “is a web mapping platform and consumer application offered by Google. It offers satellite imagery, aerial photography, street maps, 360° interactive panoramic views of streets (Street View), real-time traffic conditions, and route planning for traveling by foot, car, bike, air (in beta) and public transportation” (‘Google Maps’ 2024). 123 Figure 24: satellite view Figure 25: street view 124 spectral, not by its having changed form, but by having been denied representation in its current form. 7.1.5 Section 5 The creek was re-routed in 1948 to follow the new Canadian Northern Railway line from Kelowna to Kamloops (The Kelowna Courier 1948b). The creek now flows directly underneath powerlines, the active maintenance of which prevents trees from growing tall in the riparian fringe. The southern riparian fringe is an over 7-acre parcel of land zoned as “P3, Parks/Open Space” (City of Kelowna, n.d.), through with the railroad tracks ran until decommissioned in 2013 and the Okanagan Rail Trail (MCE) runs today.194 Though the Northend Neighbourhood Plan Background Study’s Historical Context Statement claims that “[t]oday, Brandt's Creek is part of the city's Linear Park Master Plan” (Zysblat and Cook 2021, 66), the most recent Linear Park Master Plan, makes no mention of either Brandt’s Creek or the Northend (Catherine Berris Associates Inc. 2009). And while Brandt’s Creek is mentioned in the 2015 revision of the Official Community Plan as a place intended for linear park development, the sections mentioned are Drake Road to Summit Drive, in the upstream Glenmore neighbourhood (MCE), and Ellis Street to Okanagan Lake (from Section 7: Manhattan Drive to the lake), the portion of the creek 194 Address: 890 Bailie Ave., VGW 8FG, Kelowna, British Columbia. Mini-drama 20: October 1, 2022 Caption: Water and Road have a plan. Alt-text: A dry, undulating, and old-school, industrial place. Seemingly still water in a creek, the bank of which is steep, crumbling, and directly below a road for cars. One street sign perches on the precipice. 125 supported to foster riparian habitat in the 1990s and 2000s.195 The portion of flow that goes un-archived and broadly un-noticed in today’s imaginary of an urban Kelowna, the portion described by these seven Sections, is the bit in between. Section 5: Weddell Place The soil in Section 5 (MCE) is highly compacted and, at its current water levels and flow, remains hemmed into its channel established in the 1940s. The northern bank is nearly non-existent, as the creek abruptly becomes Weddell Place, a street in decay (Mini-drama 20, page 124). Large industrial operations, such as the long-running SunRype (formerly the BC Fruit Growers 195 The Historical Context Statement also details that, given the Northend’s low elevation and marshy nature “prior to the construction of a drainage channel … in the springtime, residents sometimes had to rely on canoes to paddle out of the [Manhattan Point] neighbourhood [along the lake-edge of the Northend]” (Zysblat and Cook 2021, 65). The fact of canoeing, though uncited in the Statement, makes sense (see Figure 12, page 79, and Figure 13, page 86). What remains unclear is which drainage channel is being referred to here and whether or not it differs from the flow presently referred to as Brandt’s Creek. 126 Cooperative) factory and Calona Wines, sit adjacent to this stretch of creek. Both of these operations have histories using the ditch that is Brandt’s Creek as an efficient way to move waste away from their properties, practices that created a need for the City to build a wastewater treatment facility in the 1970s (Director, Design & Constriction Services 2009).196 This park space, which until recently was a place large transport trucks parked to service the neighbourhoods industry (as seen in Figure 24, page 123), is the stretch of creek along which Tent City, or the Encampment—the City of Kelowna designated location for overnight outdoor sheltering—is located.197 Tent City is the City’s stop-gap solution to supporting people to safely shelter outdoors and part of a longer program to end homelessness in Kelowna,198 This is a marginalized community creating shelter and community in a marginalized place.199200 7.1.6 Section 6 A pipe runs under Recreation Avenue conveying much of the creeks flow underground. Above ground a seasonally dry ditch is home to willows, roses, tule, and an impressively large walnut tree, in addition to a concrete manufacturer and building supplies outlet (MCE; Mini-drama 13, page 82). 196 Rumour has it the creek ran red with wine (byproduct) at times, though the manager of Calona Wines in 1975, Bob Claremont, claimed, in regard to taking responsibility for the effluent they release into Brandt’s Creek, “there is nothing in the world this company could have done better” … “we should be commended for what we have done” (Brayne 1975). 197 “When there is insufficient housing and shelter space for people experiencing homelessness, the law in British Columbia prevents the City from prohibiting temporary overnight sheltering from all its parks and public spaces. The City can, however, identify which parks or public spaces the prohibition against overnight sheltering will not be applied” (City of Kelowna 2021). Provisions vary per jurisdiction and people are advocating for rights to shelter in parks throughout the province. 198 Kelowna’s program to end homelessness in the city is called the Journey Home Strategy, which brings together diverse actors from around the city to work together toward the goals of 1) ending chronic and episodic homelessness, 2) introduce measures to prevent homelessness in the first place, and 3) implementing a coordinated systems approach to homelessness (Turne et al. 2018). Any work done to invigorate the riparian habitat athwart Brandt’s Creek in this section while people are still sheltering here risks harming the people living at Tent City through mechanisms of ecological gentrification. 199 As described by Sarah Dooling, “marginal space has no current political value or symbolic value, and little or no economic or exchange value to entrepreneurs. From the standpoint of politicians, entrepreneurs and housed residents, marginal space is essentially valueless; it appears as abandoned space. Consequently, this space is allowed (either intentionally or unwittingly) to be used and occupied by poor and homeless people” (2009, 632). 200 As was detailed in Part 5.3, the precedent for informal housing alongside Brandt’s Creek’s valley-bottom flow was set during the Great Depression by the eventual inhabitants of Honolulu City, which would have been located nearby, if not in exactly the same place as Tent City is today. There is a harsh irony in this being the place the City of Kelowna chose for legal overnight sheltering. Creating and providing opportunities for shelter is something that thriving riparian habitats do well. This riparian place having not been given the chance to thrive is exactly what makes it appealing—long sight lines and dominant cultural invisibility. 127 The baseball diamond and curling club immediately south of Recreation Ave. are part of the civic recreation area introduced by the City in 1909 (see Figure 13, page 84). Section 6: Recreation Ave 7.1.7 Section 7 This last bookend to the Sections of Brandt’s Creek included in the study area, Section 7 (MCE) was part of habitat rehabilitation efforts that were undertaken from the early 1990s and mid 2000s through the combined efforts of the Rotary Club of Kelowna (Rotary Club of Kelowna, n.d.), Friends of Brandt’s Creek (‘Regular Meeting’ 2006),201 the Central Okanagan Land Trust (‘Rotary Marshes at Brandt Creek’ 2018), and the Canada Lands Co. (‘Brandt’s Creek’ 2007). It is from this section 201 The Friends of Brandt's Creek was an environmental organization established in 1994 to protect Brandt's Creek from further deterioration and to try and rehabilitate it to become a healthy environment. The late Kevin Ade was the primary mover and shaker of the group, which appears to have dissolved since his passing. I was unable to locate any other former group members for consultation. 128 onwards, west of Ellis Street (pictured above), that Brandt’s Creek re-enters communal consciousness as a place and body of water.202 Today the section hosts a surprising diversity and density of beings, despite being hemmed in by concrete on all sides. Section 7: Manhattan Drive 7.2 a swampy aesthetic Kelowna is a floodplain city organized by development practices that exemplify an ecosystem-disconnected hubris of lakeside fantasies and industrial and agricultural priorities. The wetness where Kelowna now lies is a marsh, separated and defined as 1) creeks that flow into Okanagan Lake and 2) saleable land. These definitions are established and reasserted through acts of 202 The creek’s flow also increases drastically west of Ellis Street, where water piped underground meets the channel and flows as Brandt’s Creek to Okanagan Lake. 129 conventional mapping.203 Defining this marshy place as creeks, commoditizing the land, and prioritizing irrigation for agriculture enabled the marketing of place with “lush, oasis-like qualities of orchards and lakes set among a dramatic, arid and mountainous backdrop” (Wagner 2008, 23).204 This image, which John Wagner calls an “oasis aesthetic,” has contributed to ecosystem degradation in the Okanagan Valley for over a century.205 As the orchards are replaced by vineyards, golf courses, and autocentric infrastructure, this insistence on the line and its concordant separation “reproduces colonization as an iterative cultural practice” (Wagner 2008, 22). When the water crosses the line drawn on the map and through the land it is called a flood. That line creates the divide, “you create the [creek] and you create flood at the same time” (Da Cunha in Howe and Boyer 2022), for “without a line to cross water can never flood” (Karim 2020, 8). In this place, increased wetness at valley-bottom is most often associated with freshet, the seeping of snow in the mountains, moving with gravity in the late spring, collecting as melt. The phenomena of freshet mixed with the insistence on a division between static land and dynamic water creates flood—the perceived threat imposed by water exceeding and complicating its bounds. The rate of change from less wet to more wet in the high-water season increases with warming weather (Merritt et al. 2006), lack of tree cover and decreasing forest complexity due to deforestation and destructive wildfire (Winkler, Spittlehouse, and Boon 2017; Kachanoski and De Jong 1982), soils with compromised capabilities for soaking (Tollan 2002; Pomeroy, Fang, and Ellis 2012), and the presence of functionally impermeable anthropocentric infrastructure (Ekman 2023). These dynamics exacerbate one another. That’s enough of that! Enough ecosystem degradation, enough flooding, enough. We are pretty far down a long and dangerous road of climate change and ecological calamity at many scales, but we 203 The ambivalence of the march is resisted by a settler culture, which needs place to be property in order to assert its legitimacy. This practice began with European settlers in the 19th century surveying for “pre-emption” of land and has been reproduced uncountable times in attempts to reaffirm this impossible division. As Lars Horn writes, of the act of writing, “[t]he administering of a tattoo or stamp upon water—of fixed entity upon mobile element—creates a startling juxtaposition between [supposed] permanence and [assumed] mutability, between written word and water” (2022, 161). There is always, Horn continues, “such instability there, [in the materials of writing and] their dependence on bodies to bring them into being” (2022, 161). 204 In the construction of this city-atop-floodplain watercourses were siphoned into channels with the hope of guiding both year-round flows and floodwaters. 205 Since 1800 approximately 92% of riparian ecosystems in the area the city of Kelowna now occupies have been compromised (Iverson and Uunila 2008). 130 don’t have to stay on the road, or wait for it to flood and canoe off; we can look to the margins and see what there is to learn. Land or water is a fantasy; here, as every-here on earth, there is wetness (Rhenisch 2022a). Here this wetness exists as snow and melt, collecting, seeping, and soaking. Riparian places hold distinctive capacity to collect, seep, and soak. And though tuning to the riparian as a place is a reassertion of the line that separates, it is the thickening of this line—both in the directions of the sky and earth’s center, and in the directions “toward water” and “toward land”—that holds the potential for a shift in perspective, away from colonizing surfaces and lines and towards an understanding of the sponginess of place, in which wetness is everywhere, from the atmosphere, to the aquifers, to the leaves of the arid shrubs. There, in that spongy ambiguity of the margin, which surpasses categorical impositions, is a swampy aesthetic.206 If the line becomes thick enough to step inside, it ceases to be a margin and becomes the center.207 Such as, for instance, the people victimized by European aggression, despoliation, and diasporic 206 One purpose of the Mini-dramas peppered throughout this thesis is to introduce, through the mode of textually enhanced photography, how this aesthetic manifests in this place. 207 I once heard Kim TallBear speak of this as the reason she does not consider herself, or tend to use the word, “queer.” Etymologically, queer is other than, or odd in relation to, some non-queer hegemonic condition. Having now come to refer most often to sexuality and gender, queerness presents as other than or Mini-drama 21: August 12, 2022 Caption: Totally by accident. Alt-text: A bumble bee alights on a purple chicory flower in the sun. The flower, with its serrated petals circling around the bee emerges from a stem that appears ready to bloom many others. 131 exile, who made their homes in the Great Dismal Swamp (in present day North Carolina, USA), a place perceived as “naturally recalcitrant and forbidding to the general colonialist compulsion to expand and intensify the use of privately and governmentally owned land” (Sayers, Burke, and Henry 2007, 69). Worlding with a swampy aesthetic would mean centering the muck so it is no longer marginal and not just allowing for, but embracing and designing with seasonal fluctuations and contingencies. Figuring a swampy aesthetic refers to and relies on the materiality of this ambiguous208 habitat of wetness, while also holding poetic, symbolic, and imaginative power such that ecological phenomena can be connected to broader social, ecological, and political questions. Categories made and (re)enforced through structures of power (e.g. water/land, male/female, educated/uneducated) must compromise and entertain contingencies to be of any use at all. It is not the policing and maintenance of boundaries that perpetuates the usefulness and acceptance of a category; instead it is ongoing compromise and the work of maneuvering contingencies that dampen the threat of inconsistency (Rescher 2009).209 These connections point to the ways in which riparian and marshy habitats are both marginal and marginalized. Non-binary places, people, and circumstances exist at the frayed edges of what is securely knowable and categorizable and often at the margins of policy imaginations.210 For the marshy riparian place, being outside of the water/land binary means the systems in place to engage with land and water do not apply, which, though not necessarily a negative situation, makes these places less legible to many of the existing structures through which they might be supported, prioritized, and cared for. outside of a cisgendered and heterosexual norm. If, however, the central ontological condition is one in which people relate with varying levels of intimacy to whomever they (mutually) please, then that which is currently commonly referred to as “queer” becomes central and that which would be categorized as cisgendered and heterosexual need not occupy its own category, for those ways of being also fit within the larger relational ontology I’ve just described. 208 Ambiguous, that is, in relation to the here-and-now hegemonic water/land binary that has been normalized by and in service of the assertion of place-as-property. See Gramsci (1971) for an influential articulation of hegemony, the co-creation of ideas and materiality through a dominant faction rationalizing their authority by gaining passive consent to their ideology from other groups. 209 In the case of the wetness, this work is performed through projects of, for example, flood mitigation, which as a concept and family of actions—engineering projects, insurance provision, campaign talking points, etc.—reaffirms the notion of water as separate from land as the default, taken for granted, truth and any outlying experiences as aberrant and in need of fixing. 210 Even though riparian buffer policy is in place to support land/water fringes in Kelowna, infrastructures, especially along Brandt’s Creek have been grandfathered in and will be allowed to remain at creek-edge for the foreseeable future. 132 As the climate becomes increasingly erratic, if we wish to stay, those of us who live here must learn to live in this swampy reality. This resistance to fixity is not a submission to total dissolve, but rather a recognition that wetness shifts and morphs, seeps and pools, dissolving some boundaries and creating possibilities for others in a continuous process of negotiation and transformation. Respect for these processes and the relationships they sustain requires attention to communication, seasonality, and the quality of relations. The riparian can be a pedagogue on the subject of swampy aesthetic (as described in Part 4: corrugation). 7.3 becoming more riparian What if Brandt’s Creek could thrive as a riparian place? What if residents of Kelowna were to recognize the industriousness of this marsh that was collected into a ditch and is now emerging as a creek? For these things to happen would mean, I think, that we were in the midst of an inhabiting: inhabiting the Northend Marsh in its current form, creating the conditions for riparian thriving in the midst of a spectral marsh, and allowing a ditch to assume the character of creek and associate a riparian fringe accordingly. Such a process would create the conditions for complex, biodiverse riparian and wetland habitats to do what they do so well: accommodate spring freshet and curtail excessive flooding that concrete and pipe engineering can’t handle, and, retain wetness in their multibeing communities that can be Mini-drama 22: July 7, 2022 Caption: A surprising recognition of value and an inactive foe. Alt-text: A tree trunk wrapped in wire netting and soaked in dappled shade among bright sun. Behind the trunk is a knee-high wall of stacked black sandbags. 133 slowly released and redistributed throughout the periods of the year during which wetness is in high demand and low supply (i.e. the Okanagan’s hot and dry summers). This inhabiting could not just accommodate but welcome floodwaters, improve soil and water quality, create pocket parks, support recreation and active transportation, and revitalize fish and wildlife corridors. As a thriving and necessarily urban riparian community, Brandt’s Creek could also be a place for humans to learn about and enjoy the wetness that brings us life, particularly this life we live here, at the bottom of a valley, thanks to a river that is also a lake, the wetness that make it possible, and the people who have cared, in this place, for a very long time.211 So, what does Brandt’s Creek need in order to foster a bountiful and vibrant riparian place? It needs some more room, both on the ground and in the thoughts and priorities of humans in this place making more-than-human community in and of wetness.212 Looking toward a future of living well with this place in the tumultuous ecological present, we can learn from the flexibility demonstrated by Brandt’s Creek’s current riparian margin and lean into it. When life gives you seeds (MCE), grow the trees you need for shade and bank stabilization (Mini-drama 22, page 132). Maybe that means not focusing efforts 211 This is the point at which, if I were standing in front of you giving a presentation, I would now show you a series of photos of Brandt’s Creek riparian habits, glistening in the sun. Instead, there’s Mini-drama 21, a moment of encounter with a bumbling bee, a culvert, and some flowers. See also, the Brandt’s Creek Mini-drama Catalogue Excerpt (MCE). 212 As Kasey Moran was recently quoted saying in relation to the riparian rehabilitation work ongoing in Penticton, "[w]hat's at the crux of their controversial nature is the fact that cottonwood [riparian] ecosystems need space to exist" (Richardson 2024). Mini-drama 23: April 28, 2021 Caption: How could this tree not make you smile? Alt-text: One big old tree, as wide as it is tall, leafing out with the brightest of green. 134 and resources on fighting the proliferation of species labeled invasive—Siberian elm (Mini-drama 23, page 133), for instance, which is currently stabilizing most of Brandt’s Creek’s banks—and maybe that’s okay in this place at this time (see Sandilands 2022). When life gives you inherited settler colonial settlement patterns and space-devouring industrial infrastructure, acknowledge that unruly heritage, learn from it, and figure out how to do better. Making room to recognize, attend to, and be affected by riparian places—their habits and contingencies, and the eco-social fabric of which they are a part—makes it possible to think with them in special and infrastructural decision making about how to live with and among these ecologies. Figure 26: Moos, riding fire, through a park where there once was a creek that flows no longer. Photo by Michael Hintringer, September 2023. 135 8 Riparian ReAnimation This chapter is about Riparian ReAnimation, a research creation project that was supposed to be one thing and turned out to be another. Working in collaboration with colleagues from UBC Okanagan, syilx teachers Elder Pamela Barnes and her daughter Jasmine Peone, and Kelowna’s Rotary Center for the Arts (RCA), we set out to create a community of giant riparian character puppets to be used as agents of story from, and in service of, this marshy place. The puppets were to flood the floodplain, taking up space in and proceeding in conversation with the hard materials of the city, meandering without regard for the grid (if we could get away with it). As the project progressed, the research creation output changed, from product (puppets) to process (collective making-community). We crafted, and crafted in, a community. This chapter explores that process through the lens of accessibility and is informed by research creation and critical disability studies scholarship, as well as the study of community gathering. I describe three layers of the project—its origin, Workshop, and the puppets—which weave and can be woven Mini-drama 24: June 12, 2023 Caption: One cottonwood trunk in a floodplain. #riparianreanimation Alt-text: A tall person stands smiling inside the trunk of a cottonwood puppet. In addition to the puppet the person is wearing shorts and sandals, standing on a covered and industrial -looking concrete porch. 136 together to make each stronger through reimagination and reiteration.213 Accessibility plays a major role in the success of this project, as such, my analysis describes multimodal accessibility as the principle creative output of Riparian ReAnimation and an effective mechanism for community gathering. Advocating for this project and creating the space that allowed for these puppets to be made was an ethical act and an answer to my first Question: What is an ethic for ecologically specific place-based inquiry as a visitor-scholar in this settler colonial context? These puppets now exist in the world as agents of story to help those who engage with them learn a bit about the multi-being communities that create life-world-possibilities in this place. Creating via the medium of (giant) puppetry pushes on the boundaries of scholarly outputs. Creating community on the path to the puppets’ becoming is one important result of taking that medium seriously, a last answer to my third Question: What does it look like to prioritize multimodality, mediation, and remediation in place-based research and what implications has this commitment had for this research? 8.1 plotting and planning The idea of making riparian character puppets began in early 2020, preceding and leading in to Educating Riparian Attention (see Sections 2.1 and 4.1), when I was learning to attend to Okanagan riparian habitats (Mini-drama 23, page 133).214 My partner, Moos, and I were spending a lot of time together, isolating in each other’s company while we did our best to stay apart from others during first year of the COVID-19 pandemic. When I started ERA and was visiting particular riparian places and beings often enough to see small changes in their habits, learning to perceive the drama—rainbows fading to grey, recently frost-bitten burs, berries retaining their plumpness despite the low temperatures—I came to look forward to what I would see next time, what would have changed. We talked about my cottonwalks or went on them together, while I learned about 213 The context in and relationships through which the project developed were made possible by previous practices and priorities such as those detailed in the preceding chapters of this thesis. Imagining puppets as a product and research output was in the realm of possibility thanks to the program (Interdisciplinary Graduate Studies) and faculty (Faculty of Creative and Critical Studies) in which this research was located; surrounded by writers, fine artists, and performers, Riparian ReAnimation felt like a project worth defending. The practice of creating and recreating a weekly workshop would not have been possible without either the existing relationships and support systems through which Riparian ReAnimation got started nor the final product of giant riparian character puppets to work towards together. This coupling of context, practice, and product is corrugated. 214 Mini-drama 23 shows one of my favourite trees, which I came to see go through an entire season before learning it too was a member of the dreaded “Siberian Elm” clan. It still makes me smile. 137 Okanagan riparian characters, cottonwoods in particular (see footnote 65), through reading, conversation, and observation. Over the course of that peak-COVID year, one verse per season,215 we wrote a jingle (Figure 27, page 138). The writing was fun—silly at a time very little else was, or could be, silly—and I found myself wondering: What else might be a fun and accessible way to communicate the drama of the riparian in conversation with folks who might be interested? How can we imagine the reanimation of vital riparian habitats in this place where waters run to and through? And how can we make it joyful to do so? A jingle, and perhaps … puppets? Puppets! Maybe we should make some puppets. 8.1.1 Round 1, 2020 Puppetry is a radical theatre art form that has a unique capacity to work across borders; to connect the unusual, the offbeat, the quirky and the mainstream; to enable discussion about […] almost any field you can imagine. It is a particular fusion of the material and immaterial; of physical presence haunted by ghosts of past and future; of vivid existence in an immediate world and of multiple, communal voices singing collective songs of shared culture and memory. Puppetry straddles worlds, concepts and stages of ‘liveness’. It is both obscene and sedate; bounded by form and free from form; vulnerable and eminently powerful. Puppetry is vehemently interdisciplinary, multivocal and intracultural. It gives us great scope to dream, to imagine and to create. (Astles 2016, 70) I, at the time, knew nothing about puppets. Perhaps the intuition that created the thought, “Maybe we should make some puppets?” came from a vague feeling that, as Astles details above, puppetry has powers of boundary dissolution, “both obscene and sedate” (2016, 70). Having never trained in the fine arts, nor been particularly inclined to tinker or craft, it was immediately clear that if I was going to do anything with puppets, I would be needing some help. Originally, I had hoped the puppets would be made using collected riparian plant materials, and that 215 That is, one verse each for the summer, fall, winter, and spring. While I acknowledge and agree with Cathy Stubington that “our knowledge that there are four seasons leads to generalizations that prevent us from noticing what is really taking place” (Stubington 2013, 25), I also think that creating bridges between knowledges based on the four-season solar calendar I was raised with and the phenological engagement of seasonal indicators and traditional ecological knowledges, which Cathy describes in her thesis, is an important project. 138 was the idea I started to talk about in casual conversation. It was amazing to hear from the people who entertained my whimsy, just how many happened to have puppetry experience of one kind or another. Stories from the puppet-filled pasts of friends and colleagues both intrigued and encouraged me; with that much interest and experience floating around, it couldn’t be too wild an idea. Right? It was through these conversations that I ended up beginning two new relationships, one with a fellow PhD student, Megumi (Meg) Yamamoto—who does practice fine art and could actually imagine creating these reanimated riparian characters—and another with puppeteer and community crafter Cathy Stubington. Both of these relationships were forged in pandemic-infused fire. One resulted in some delightful and foundational brainstorming and a trial run of workshopping over Zoom, the other in one conversation that created a thread I would pull on years later, in Round 2 (below). Meg was my first official collaborator for Riparian ReAnimation.216 Leaning on her background in and ongoing practice of creating with found organic materials,217 we devised a plan for collecting and working with plant materials from riparian places with which puppets would be created in a workshop setting. The workshop could not, however, be in person, so, we turned to Zoom.218 To our six-or-so participants, who were assembled as part of a team for a different project and volunteering to help us test-run our workshop set up, we delivered boxes full of plant matter collected in late November 2020219 and some feathers and dried berries 216 Thank you, Meg, for enthusiastically taking me up on this proposition. 217 Meg’s portfolio can be viewed on her website: https://www.megumivegso.com/assemblage. 218 Zoom is a videotelephony and online chat platform that became a critical communication tool for many people in my social circles during the COVID-19 pandemic. 219 I remember taking photos the day we went collecting. It was that day I learned about cottonwood roots and how tangled and thin they can be at the streambank. Cottonwood leaves Cottonwood leaves Fall in the water They came from the trees, Brown and yellow No longer green Bringing the nutrients back to the stream; Cottonwood wood Cottonwood wood Growing as only a cottonwood could, Loved by beavers Birds and bugs Perfectly content With occasional floods; Cottonwood bud Cottonwood bud Covered in resin The trees' lifeblood, Oh, so sticky What can you do? Make an ointment for cuts Or a powerful glue; Cottonwood fuzz Cottonwood fuzz Cottonwoods doing what a cottonwood does, Making fuzz All day long Even while we are Singing this song. Figure 27: the cottonwood jingle 139 from Meg’s stores (Figure 28). Assembled as they were, with materials in hand, I spoke for a while about our intentions for the project and, in the meantime, the participants created. In that hour we learned many things about convening a puppet making workshop. We learned that people don’t tend to read emails word-for-word, and that puppet could be interpreted loosely. In our post-workshop discussion we talked about the fragility of the puppets that were created and our desire to not shy away from decay (MCE), an important and everywhere-present ecological phenomenon that is often overlooked or negatively valanced, though needn’t be (DeSilvey 2006). In December of 2020 it was far from clear when we might be able to gather in person again, so we didn’t dare plan for that. Our future-thinking for the project was Zoom-centric and physically distanced, a version of Riparian ReAnimation that today—given how Round 2 played out—is nearly impossible for me to imagine. Making puppets together in person is the bread and butter of Cathy Stubington, co-founder of Runaway Moon Theater, “a small, but mighty theatre company based in Enderby BC, a tiny city in Secwepmec traditional territory” (n.d.).220 In the fall of 2020, Cathy, gracious and unsure, welcomed 220 As Cathy describes it, “[c]ommunity is the material, form, process and result: we are working with people in the creation of work that is by, about, and for them” (Stubington 2013, 16). That is not to say that community cannot exist and be created via Zoom and similar technologies (disability justice activists such as Figure 28: Materials collected and shared for the Riparian ReAnimation pilot workshop, December 2020. Photo by Megumi Yamamoto. 140 Moos and I into her home for a chat during a time when it was unclear whether or not that was okay. We drank tea, took notes, discussed previous projects of hers I had read about and many I had not, and were given a tour of the puppet museum she keeps in a barn alongside braids of garlic and crates of squashes. For a suite of reasons, Round 1 was short lived and did not continue further than that pilot workshop. We did not make a puppet show, but we had begun to try.221 For the time being, that was enough. I remember being satisfied that a sufficient number of people had taken my idea seriously enough to make a start. In my personal notes for a blog post I was asked to write about the project (posted by Oddleifson 2021) I drafted: What was initially conceptualized as a pre-research or “presearch” project, creating a puppet show to bring together and dramatize a handful of riparian stories, has been delayed. Delay, in this case, has led to accretion. Sometimes when I carry an idea in my carrier bag [(Le Guin 1988)], bringing it out to weave in and through conversations, it grows and shrinks, ebbs and flows. Often, I don’t even notice this happening; I’ll take the idea out for a spin and it’ll be a different shape, colour, weight, and texture than I remember it being. Like Educating Riparian Attention, Riparian ReAnimation began as a side-project, an act of presearch, a way of coming into relation with the riparian habitats of this place. When it did not come to fruition I nestled it comfortably on the proverbial shelf, where it sat until the fall of 2022. 8.1.2 Round 2, 2022-2023 In August of 2022 the upheaval of COVID had settled and I was well in to researching Brandt’s Creek, the third iteration my would-be thesis project. It was at that point that Greg Garrard, one of my co-supervisors, mentioned an incoming Masters of Fine Arts student, who would need a research assistant position but for whom he personally had no obvious work to assign. “Are you offering me an MFA student!?” I remember saying. Without Greg actually saying “yes,” it was made Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha (2018) speak to video conferencing as a critical tool for community making and sustaining), just that it is not Cathy’s style, and as it turned out, it also wasn’t a modality that felt like it worked for the Riparian ReAnimation project either. 221 I am grateful for the initial votes of confidence we received from both UBC Okanagan’s Public Humanities Hub, who in late 2020 awarded a proposal for Riparian ReAnimation their Public Humanities Hub Impact Award in the amount of $3000, and the Institute for Community Engaged research, who awarded us their $1000 ICER Community Engaged Research Scholarship in early 2021. 141 clear to me that if I still wanted to make a puppet show, Annie Furman, the incoming student, could be employed to help. So, Riparian ReAnimation came down from the shelf, and Annie and I met to discuss my dusty ideas some hours after she arrived in the Okanagan. Annie was my second official collaborator for Riparian ReAnimation, and the best right-hand person I could have imagined. I met Andrew Stauffer by happenstance, while attempting to learn a choreography for the Inner Fish Theatre Society’s TrailArt exhibition in the fall of 2022.222 At the time he was working as a programing coordinator at Kelowna’s Rotary Centre for the Arts (RCA),223 where he too, as it happened, had been wanting to make puppets. Andrew though, imagined them giant (Figure 29). “Sure, I don’t see why they can’t be giant,” I likely responded. 222 My participation was incidental at best and the result of a casual conversation with a professor from UBC Okanagan’s Faculty of Creative and Critical Studies. Studying in this place and being associated with this faculty had me roaming in and among the fine arts and their makers more often than I’d ever expected. Nobody ever seemed to take me seriously when I said I had no training or skills, and not because I exhibited any. It has often felt like artistic creativity and enthusiasm is a taken for granted baseline in this faculty, with or without skill. Since I’ve been here, it’s simply been normal to want to make a puppet show; or spend many afternoons learning a choreography to be part of a make-do dance crew for one event that would last four minutes in total, all the while working with the choreographer to align the performance with the riparian place where we danced; or take photographs, many photographs, and assert the time spent doing so as important to my research trajectory. All of these things have been part of this journey, all of these modes of engagement responsible for the relationships I have been party to in the last four and a half years. 223 The RCA is a multidisciplinary visual and performing arts and cultural center in downtown Kelowna, located in a marshy place some 500 metres from Okanagan Lake. Figure 29: Western Painted Turtle and Rubber Boa perform at Woodhaven Regional Park. Photos by Ari Pielecki. 142 An incidental conversation led to an intentional conversation, soon after which we were co-writing grant applications, all of which, to our delight, were accepted.224 With the resources we received were able to host our puppet-making gatherings free to the public, hire as a project consultant master puppeteer Cathy Stubington, whom I hadn’t spoken with since our aforementioned visit in 2020, and buy puppet-making supplies. Priorities for the project, including which riparian beings we would make puppets of, and to what ends, were established in conversation with Elder Pamela Barnes and her daughter Jasmine Peone, both of whom are syilx knowledge holders and educators who gracefully facilitate inter-community communications. From the moment I mentioned the idea of making riparian character puppets to Pamela, at the 2022 kikanee festival in Mission Creek Park,225 she was keen to help provide vision for the project.226 With additional guidance from Cathy,227 it was determined that we had the capacity to make our riparian puppets of a scale large enough—both in dimension and quantity—to flood the streets and parks of Kelowna with their presence, as per Pamela’s vision. 228 224 After teaming up, we received grants from the City of Kelowna, the Telus Foundation (the philanthropic arm of a Canadian telecommunications company), and the Faculty of Creative and Critical Studies, as well as support from the SSHRC-funded “Kelownafornia” project grant, through which my research was being supported. Thank yous to everyone who supported and believed in this project, from the smaller grants I was offered early on, to the larger funds that made it possible to make all of the magic described below. This could never have happened without the financial support we received. 225 A festival hosted by the Regional District of the Central Okanagan to welcome the kikanee salmon back to Mission Creek (MCE) to spawn in the late summer/early fall. The valley-bottom flow of Mission Creek is a place of great important to many syilx families and the return of the salmon for spawning an important event in the phenological calendar that serves in this case as a celebration and sharing of eco-cultural priorities between syilx and non-syilx people. This festival marks one beginning and one end of the Riparian ReAnimation project. By the time the 2023 festival came around there was a giant riparian character puppet dance party participating. 226 Pamela, Jasmine, and a number of their family members work in communication and relationship building between syilx people and visitors to syilx territory. I had crossed paths with them many times since arriving in the Okanagan in 2019 and feel deep gratitude to them for the enthusiasm they brought to this project and the time they have both put in. 227 Guidance from Cathy became a strong theme throughout this project. While we were only able to employ her for a few sessions towards the start of round two, the experience and grace she shared with us—and with me in particular, both over the phone and over coffee—was indispensable. It is for this reason that this Chapter includes so many quotes from her MFA thesis, which I read only after the completion of Riparian ReAnimation and in which I found much of my own experience described. 228 This scoping work was inspired by the way Henri Décamps writes about the need “to re-insert our ecological knowledge in the context of landscape experiences, expectations and pleasure … to become aware of sensory approaches” (2001, 174). Quoting Bernard Lassus, Décamps asserts, “[a] sensory approach that involves making visible both nature and our own nature is an indispensable way of reconciling science and the sensory world” (1998, n.p.). 143 8.1.3 a shift First, I thought making puppets was about making a puppet show, reanimating the characters of the riparian to highlight and share the dramas of this important and dynamic habitat. It was to be a project about performance, learning from the Mini-dramas I was observing and rearticulating them in this new medium. This, as I understood it, is the outcome Pamela was looking forward to, the potential which is captured by the quote that opened Part 8.1.1 (page 136). We had, however, created a long road for ourselves to get to that outcome. We planned five months-worth of weekly workshops, the project growing in scale enough to occupy most of my time. Focusing on the end product no longer felt motivating, as the hugeness of the puppets and complexity of project management made the end feel very far away indeed. We (or perhaps just I) needed an interim focus. Conveniently, when we started hosting workshops in Round 2, something new and exciting happened: people were building relationships with riparian beings right there in the room; the education of riparian attention lay in the process of puppet making. It was an attention in a different mode and through a different medium than I was used to—separated from the squelchy ways of the riparian and marshy habitats by the very infrastructure making it possible—but riparian attention nonetheless. While we, as the core project team,229 usually started puppets ourselves or described an idea to a participant or two eager to get started on a new character, workshop participants consulted with one another and used photographic and descriptive materials (provided by us or searched for on the internet) to create characters that represented their beings as closely as the materials available would allow.230 Sometimes people would bring reference materials from home, or bit of puppets they worked on in their leisure time. At least once, someone met a plant they had heard talked about, a Saskatoon bush (MCE) in this case, for the first time, through the creation of its character puppet (Figure 30, page 149). Someone else replicated beaver hands that were just as uncanny as the hands of any living-breathing beaver. The wings of a damselfly were designed and re-designed, to 229 The core project team varied over the months we were in action. Contracts, parental leave, family affairs, enthusiastic late-adopters, and travel plans meant that exactly who this “we” refers to changes throughout. 230 The materials we used varied from newspaper and cardboard boxes to bamboo blinds and papier mâché paste. Thanks to Cathy Stubington’s constant insistence that weight adds up quickly, and even if a puppet is giant, it still needs to be light enough to carry around, we took every opportunity to make each being as portable as possible given the materials we had on hand. In the end we were able to make most of our riparian character puppets able to be manipulated or carried by most people. 144 best approximate the shape and texture we could see in photos. There was no need to wait until the puppets were finished, the engagement was happening right there, every Monday evening. “[R]iparian landscapes, as other landscapes[,] evolve from a series of events over time[,] which are influenced by our feelings of responsibility to them and our interest in them” (Décamps 2001, 174). This was a project intended to use the mode of puppet making and animating to support interest in and enthusiastic responsibility for reanimating Okanagan riparian habitats. Currently, for most people, living in and moving through Kelowna means participating in the expulsion of riparian and swampy lifeways in this place. Creating the workshop space allowed for the possibility of intimacy with the riparian without the proximity of being there in and amongst the riparian beings, not "virtual" presence, but "real" presence "in loopy materialities” (Haraway 2017, M39).231 Loopier still, given the location where the Giant Puppets workshops were being held, in the RCA building, built atop the very marshy floodplain to which the Episodes above speak. Making giant puppets of beings displaced by our ways of being was always going to be an exercise in “staying with the trouble” (Haraway 2016).232 Working to create riparian character puppets that would take up space was one step away from working toward the riparian beings themselves taking up space. Or, that was my intention anyway, to center the riparian, build giant puppets as agents of story that would be used to animate riparian dramas, and, in so doing, have participants—both puppeteers and audience members—take interest in and build relationships with the riparian beings they were helping to create. These things did happen, and they happened beautifully. Something else though, also happened. Workshop happened, and then it happened again, and then again. This repetition created a community of practice that far surpassed my expectations for the project. 8.2 making in workshop, making Workshop In the spring and summer of 2023 (March through August), we gathered once a week for 22 consecutive weeks to create giant riparian character puppets in collaboration with whoever showed up. The call for eager participants had gone out via the RCA’s social media channels, word of mouth, and some eye-catching posters made by RCA staff and hung in strategic locations around 231 We could also think of this as a spectral intimacy. 232 In addition to being conveniently located in the marsh and near public transport, the RCA building has physically accessible facilities and we knew we would be able to welcome people with diverse mobility modalities. 145 town.233 As Cathy Stubington said of her 1998 Enderby District Community Play Project, “we continued to invite, invite, invite people in to the creation of something, from a place of high ideals, which required many hands” (2013, 2).234 “Maybe we should make some puppets?” turned to “Hey, we’re making some giant puppets every Monday evening for 5 months straight; you should come! Bring a friend!” The workshops were advertised with the alluring title of “Giant Puppet Workshop” and tag line, “Do you want to see a 10-foot bear?” The original handbill also read “Regular attendance at these working sessions is not required, and participants can attend one or all of the workshops as they please. Pre-registration is not required and drop-ins are welcome.” High ideals notwithstanding, it is nerve-racking to stand in a room full of gifted, thrifted, and salvaged materials, wondering if anyone will show up. Only later did I realize this was part of what made the workshop, something we were hosting with the goal of having puppets made, in to Workshop, a community of practice, or what I came to think of as a habitat. The power of performance Virginie Magant writes, “resides in experiential cognitive processes anchored in the materiality of the body” (2016, 142). We (me and at least one other person) were there, no matter what, every Monday. As Cathy clarifies, it is most important to hold drop-in workshops that risk having low attendance, and to find ways to continue inviting, inviting, inviting. You never know who will show up and why they chose to; you also cannot predict when someone will become engaged for a longer term! Drop-ins are also likely to be attended by a more diverse cross-section of people. (2013, 39) Though the nerves dimmed as the weeks went by, the uncertainty remained. We never knew how many people would come to Workshop. We never knew what they would bring. What we did begin 233 This promotional material and some strategic word of mouth worked wonders; by their internal measures, Riparian ReAnimation turned out to be one of the most successful programs the RCA has ever hosted. 234 As Cathy tells it, the Enderby District Community Play—"an attempt to discover a way to bring town residents and members of the Splatsin Band together under one roof” (2013, 1)—was something people said could not be done, the gulf between the Indigenous and settler communities was too wide, it would never work. In the case of Riparian ReAnimation, while nobody at the university was telling me “no,” making puppets and a puppet show as part of my PhD felt like it should have been impossible. But I decided it wasn’t, never suggested that there might be a problem with doing this as a research activity, and just kept inviting people, first to collaborate with me, then to our workshops. People kept not saying “no,” and then eventually they said “yes!” 146 to learn was what participants told us brought them to the room and what kept them coming back.235 My partner and I take each other out on surprise dates. We saw this on a post on Reddit236 and I thought it would make a fun outing. and Hello, you might not remember me, we spoke some weeks ago in the lobby. I brought you these wire hangers to use for your project. and I look forward to Mondays every week. When you’re stuck on something, it helps being able to work together to get un-stuck. Plus, it’s really nice to make a mess somewhere other than my own home for once. and My mom makes me and my sibling come. I guess it’s a good way to get teenagers out of the house. and We’re part of the Kelownafornia research group. We’ve all been working together for months; making puppets together has helped us turn colleagues into friends. For the most part, nobody was really there for the riparian, they were usually there for the puppets. If I was a little disappointed about that in the beginning, I got over it quickly; there was so much to do! I was project managing and hosting in a space that was completely new to me. While having to make all of the decisions felt like a lot of pressure—even with the guidance of Pamela, Jasmine, and Cathy, and with the support of Annie, Andrew, and other RCA staff—I also was able to make all of the decisions. So, every week I would open Workshop with a Land Acknowledgement and News from the Riparian, which went something like this: Welcome everyone, thank you for coming this evening! We are gathered here in the home of the syilx people, in a building, on concrete, in a marsh. We are here to 235 What follows are not quite quotes but amalgamations of my notes from many Workshops. 236 Thank you Moos, for making a post on Reddit. 147 make riparian character puppets. This week the chicory flowers are in full bloom, and the bees are loving it [Mini-drama 21, page 130]. Or, today I noticed that Weddell place is crumbling into Brandt’s Creek [Mini-drama 20, page 124]. Or, the saskatoons are in bloom [Figure 30, page 149]! News from the Riparian was an extension of my Land Acknowledgement practice. I came to this practice with an understanding that meaningfully articulating the settler colonial relations that organize my presence in this place means doing so through attentive engagement with what is going on here right now;237 “[t]he toad that sings by the back door is not a toad but the toad that sings by the back door. These beings are our community” (Stubington 2013, 22). It was also the first conscious practice I developed for creating Workshop and the spoken word was one of many media we engaged to keep Workshop together and relatively consistent. As the weeks went on, I came to know people and why they were there with us, at the RCA, making giant puppets on their Monday evening.238 While some specific reasons are listed above, the following parameters stood out as consistently important for creating an accessible and welcoming space for people. • free of charge • not involving food or alcohol • after standard work hours • long-term goal without the need for a long-term commitment • all ages welcome • no artistic or specific physical skills required • levels of participation and engagement could vary in both puppet making and socializing • reliably happened every week In addition to having physically accessible facilities and an activity that didn’t require participants to see or hear if they didn’t happen to see or hear, these factors were the things that made it possible 237 “[A] territorial acknowledgement is more than just a way of identifying oneself as an ally in the struggle for self-determination among Indigenous Peoples. By insisting on acknowledging place, and the peoples of our place, territorial acknowledgements also provide an opportunity for us to learn about histories, current politics, teachings, and relationships that can contribute to rebuilding ecological, social, and economic sustainability in our communities” (L. Wilson and Menzies 2019, 2). 238 You see, during Workshop I spent the majority of my time trying to making sure everyone was comfortable and well supplied with making-materials. In the moments I could, I would work on a puppet here and there, mostly though, I chatted. 148 for so many people to attend. By making space for people to come as they were, with the organizing factor being at least a passing interest in what we were up to and minimal requirement of respecting both the people and puppets present in the room, many different needs were met or accommodated for.239 This was multimodal accessibility. We began this project by looking at the riparian communities in the Okanagan, thinking with the medium of puppetry to help make those communities stand out for more people as interesting, relevant, and worth attending to. We thought making a puppet show might draw attention to red-winged blackbirds nesting in cattails, or a non-native Siberian elm protected from beavers by city planners because its roots hold up a stream bank (Mini-drama 22, page 132); how water disappears from view and reappears unexpectedly, having traveled unseen through culverts and storm drains. Without forgetting this origin story that (for me) was the reason to come together in community, with each passing Workshop it become increasingly clear that in opening accessible space and inviting people to build these giant puppets with us, we were not only supporting but creating a habitat.240 8.3 puppets, created and animated Creating giant puppets and a giant puppet-making habitat as a research output pushes on the boundaries of what is scholarly. In their widely cited paper that groups families of research creation praxes, Chapman and Sawchuck conclude, research-creation operates in contrast to the dominant academic paradigm. but paradigms are mutable and have the potential to grow, shift, or even be overturned […] Initial acceptance of the academic value of research-creation having already 239 An irony hovers over me as I type these words, for my own disability made the time of day at which Workshop happened particularly difficult for me. Especially at the end of the night; I knew I would need help each week to close up shop and make sure people left safely and supplies were put away. Had I been a potential participant instead of the person in charge, I would likely never have attended. That is to say, by no means am I claiming that Riparian ReAnimation achieved complete accessibility for all potentially interested people. What I do think we did was a darn good job with the resources we had available to us. 240 Kathleen Stewart has referred to this kind of happenstance as a “little world”: “The intensities of living through things accumulate and pool up in worldings and forms of attending to what's happening—trauma cultures, redemption cultures, recreational worlds, public feelings fueled by humor, sarcasm or rage, forms of critique or cocooning, worlds of volunteering or self help or activism or art or exercise. All of these are little worlds that some people immerse themselves in, or dip in and out of, or make fun of, or build a light and temporary link to before they move on to something else” (Stewart 2011, 452). 149 been achieved, we must now turn to the task of elaborating new academic paradigms of knowledge production and dissemination. (2012, 24) Research creation, or arts-based research, “is more a conversation than a collecting of information” (Stubington 2013, 33). A conversation, in the case of Riparian ReAnimation, that was happening in the creation and maintenance of Workshop as a community of practice and puppets as a re-mediation and re-animation of riparian lifeforms. Given the unruly heritage of this place—the settler colonial violence, valley-bottom settlement, and habitat degradation—reanimating healthy riparian habitats will not happen without conscious community care to make it so. This project invites and challenges people to think about the beings of the riparian, to create and create-with them, to notice that which may often go unnoticed: we invite them to care. The process of making and the puppets that emerged functioned as intermediaries between the creators and the riparian. Participants showed up to play, to socialize, and to contribute to a project bigger than any one of us individually. In so doing, they/we created a spectral riparian ecology. As described by Katherine Yusoff, “[b]y bringing these creatures into existence through representation we acquire responsibility for and to their spectral beings, yet they are not present in this encounter as themselves, as full sovereign beings, but as a kind of haunting configured around a profoundly human sensibility” (2012, 585). Figure 30: Saskatoons, in flower, remediated. The image on the left is part of the ERA catalogue. The image on the right was taken by Joanne Gervais of our Saskatoon puppet—a backpack style contraption that represents both the time of bloom and the time of berry—at the 2023 Siya Celebration hosted by West Bank First Natio n. 150 The puppets we made are agents of story, ready to participate and be re-animated anew. They have already attended festivals,241 celebrations, conference presentations,242 an anthropology class,243 and a storytelling event in Woodhaven Regional Park (Figure 31, page 152).244 They will circulate in the local community as long as there are people caring for their maintenance, storage, and transport.245 These giant (mostly)246 riparian character puppets are also the material manifestations of the education of many attentions. Every Workshop participant contributed to and cared for these beings. Managing a community art project like Riparian ReAnimation means being vulnerable to receiving praise, accepting derision, and dealing with the weather, all of which are fielded more graciously when supported by the relationships that hold the project (and puppets) together. As a workshop participant it can be hard to take pride in work when you don’t know what it will look like at the end and how it will be received; it takes courage to engage in a thing with so many unknowns. “I helped make a very small part of a very small part of that!” said Greg Garrard when he first saw the Rubber Boa in action (Figure 29, page 141). Others commented on the shadows cast by our puppets, a type of puppetry we had not even realize we were engaging. By showing up in public with the puppets we learned things about how this work operates and what it means to be proud of, and present with, the unknowns inherent in this practice. 241 The first puppet event organized almost entirely by people other than me was the 2023 kikanee festival in Mission Creek Park (see footnote 226). This was an exciting moment, both because it felt like the project had come full circle, having first talked to Pamela about Riparian ReAnimation at the self-same festival the year prior, and because my non-involvement was an indication that the puppets would continue to have a life beyond this research. 242 In the summer of 2023 the Saskatoon, River, Freshet, Ladybug, and Mx. Mason Bee traveled to Portland, Oregon to present and be presented at the annual conference of the Association for Literature and the Environment. 243 Thank you John, for inviting the Saskatoon to your outdoor classroom. 244 This particular event was the only one created just for them. We worked with the Regional Parks department at the Regional District of the Central Okanagan (thanks James and Rose!), the Friends of Woodhaven neighbourhood park organization (thanks Leah and Nancy!) and Pamela and Jasmine, who brought yet more costumes to the middle of a small forest at the south end of town so Pamela could tell a fantastically animated story about living in this place (Figures 31, page 154, and 32, page 160). 245 Here a huge thanks to Angela Ray, who we had just enough grant money left over at the end to pay to care for the transition of Riparian ReAnimation into whatever it will become in the future. Angela, I don’t know what I would have done without you. Thank you. 246 Due to a special request from Elder Pamela Barnes, to have a bitterroot puppet, we did make one distinctly non-riparian being puppet. The bitterroot is one of the four food chiefs from an important captikʷɬ, a particular type of syilx story that, in the words of Ender Jeannette Armstrong, when spoken/told “in the Nsyilxcen language mimics the dynamic aspects of nature‘s required regenerative principles [and] when communicated to each succeeding generation, acts as a feed-back loop reconstructing the social paradigm as an environmental ethic” (2009, 2). 151 In addition to the performances we put out into the world, at the end of this project we are left with memories and lessons from Workshop. For the most part, it was Workshop we were performing, not a puppet show, though as Cathy points out, “[i]n this practice, the ‘doing’ is inseparable from the final result. Each rehearsal, or workshop session, is in itself eventful, as people gather to do something meaningful together that is outside of, though related to, their regular lives” (Stubington 2013, 17). During Workshop, we crafted, and crafted in, a community. This Chapter has explored that process, which I have come to think of as the making-possible of a community arts habitat. This possibility was made with a set of circumstances that opened the space to as many people as possible, thanks both to a rigorous practice of “everyone is welcome” (Stubington 2013) and to the funds that were made available to us through grants and the location for hosting at the RCA. People were welcome, regardless of age, physical or artistic ability, or level of interest. If you were interested enough to come through the door we were happy to have you there. Riparian ReAnimation demonstrated that prioritizing multimodality, mediation, and re-mediation contributes to the thickness and communicability of ecological research. We were able to welcome many people into this project’s folds, thanks to its (sometimes incidental) accessibility. Managing this project taught me the importance of multimodal accessibility as a mechanism for community gathering and facilitating unlikely conversation. My ability to create and undertake the pockets of research described above—walking with the riparian, labouring together as relationship building, taking and working with photos—often hinged on specific capacities, whether for movement, tolerance of weather, sensory acuity, or scheduling flexibly. I was able to go-to, to visit people and places where they were. Riparian ReAnimation, in many respects, was a different sort of thing. Through Workshop, we were bringing the riparian out of place (though not very far out), creating a niche for riparian place-based curiosity while availing ourselves of the accessibility of the Rotary Center for the Arts building as well as the relational infrastructure established to make Workshop happen every week. In this case, prioritizing multimodality looked like the creation of an accessible community of practice and valuing that accessibility for what it was, a sign that everybody’s welcome. If you’re in the Okanagan, the riparian places have bearing on your life, whether you recognize it or not; please, come hang out with us and think about that, either actively or passively, while we make things together. Saying “yes” to that recognition by showing up in Workshop created intimacy without proximity, which came to be through the re-mediation of these riparian beings, and relating to and with each other in the habitat of Workshop. 152 Figure 31: A forest in a forest. One moment among many from our event in Woodhaven Regional Park. Photo by Michael Hintringer, September 2023. 153 9 more room 9.1 What is an ethic for place-based inquiry as a visitor-scholar in this settler-colonial context? This is, I think, a question many visitor-scholars, people not indigenous to the places in which they live and do research, are asking at this moment in time. Over the course of four and a half years of residence and research in the Okanagan, I have continuously (re)iterated an answer to this question for myself, which is the only answer I can share. The concept and practice of presearch came to be through my insistence on reserving time and energy for navigating the unruly circumstances created by settler colonial occupation of the home of syilx people. This was, in fact, one of the reasons we returned to North America for my PhD; I wanted to think amongst the unruly heritages into which I was born and raised.247 In the pursuit of this, I came into relation with and was educated by all kinds of beings, humans included. I was welcomed into a floodplain reengagement community of practice at k’əmcnitkw. There I learned how to plant trees properly and also how to take “no” for an answer, conducted biodiversity surveys with one of the Penticton Indian Band’s Natural Resources crews, and had the privilege to help without needing to be paid for my time. It is common to hear that Indigenous engagement is of the utmost importance when doing research as a visitor-scholar, particularly in the territory claimed by Canada at this moment in time. I wholeheartedly agree, in so far as the engagement can be ethical, respectful, relational, and mutually beneficial, that is to say, relationally accountable. Institutional timelines, researchers’ lack of community connections, and ill-aligned research agendas often prevent the realization of a full-fledged engagement that many people imagine and that aspirational institutional messaging presents as the thing to strive for. Much like the bike paths in Kelowna, which often seem to have been designed by people who have read many books about riding bikes, but do not, themselves, ride bikes, institutional messaging around Indigenous engagement often reads as unconnected from the realities of working with syilx people.248 syilx people are people, with their own priorities and 247 I was born and lived until the age of 11 on Coast Miwok territory in present day California, USA, a place I refer to in my acknowledgements as having a lot in common with the Okanagan. 248 Building inter-community relationships can be particularly challenging for early career scholars, those who have very recently arrived here, over-worked faculty, those with young children or close to retirement, people 154 goals, and the imagined syilx community is composed of all sorts of different people with all sorts of different goals (see Starblanket 2018). Even if you, as a researcher, are conducting research directly requested by a syilx person or group thereof, and that person or people are meaningfully involved at every step of the process, there will never be an outcome that satisfies all perspectives on what it means to do that research well. These circumstances create an impasse. In my time here I’ve tried to work in the muck of that impasse—acknowledging the unlikelihood of full and complete engagement with syilx collaborators without foreclosing on the possibility of relationally accountable research as a visitor-scholar in this place—working toward a way of doing research that is ethical and achievable. In order to do this I engaged with the more-than-human communities of the riparian habitats in this place, asking them to help me determine what questions would be appropriate and useful to ask at this time. In the Chapter I co-wrote with Astrida Neimanis (Part 6: fringe natures) we took a different approach, an approach that is difficult to reconcile with an ethic of critical place inquiry. When the storm that brought a series of lake-inducing atmospheric rivers to the Sumas Valley occurred, I was at home in Kelowna, in a Zoom meeting. My father called from the Pacific coast, some 80km west of Sumas, to ask how we were faring, assuming the storm would have made it this far east. I missed his call and received the message that followed later, while staring out a window in my home, watching what was left of that storm skirt around the city. The water—the concentration of wetness—that moved through rivers in the sky that day, descending to what we call the ground, upset more than the firmness of the Sumas Valley’s bottom. Highways that connect the “Lower Mainland” to the rest of the mainland crumbled. In the city of Merrit, the Coldwater River changed course and claimed a city street as its new path. We flew to the coast for the holidays that winter, as the roads took months to reroute and reopen. My father died a few months later. The opportunity to write something together, for a particular volume about gender and water governance came soon thereafter. The spectacle of this storm had stuck with me. It was those connections—to the storm, to my father, to the feeling of climate and weather immediacy—that brought us into conversation about Semá:th X_ó:tsa. Throughout most of this thesis I have demonstrated what anti-colonial priorities can look like in place-study; Part 6, a case study, holds that priority differently, theoretically, more removed. Astrida living with a disability, graduate students who have limited social facility or confidence in English, and folks who rely on the Okanagan’s limited public transit system to travel from place to place. 155 and I decided to write with this remove, to embrace an opportunity, examine and specify ideas long-discussed, and learn about a place we would otherwise not have built relationships with. The result of our collaboration on that piece became, while I was in the process of organizing myself to compile a thesis, a corrugating fold. The theory we call on and articulate—ecologies of the littoral zone, bodies of water, transing, fringe natures—these ideas fold on top of riparian habits, poolings of wetness, and aporetic ditches in a not-quite convergence that strengthens both stories. These things happen, they are patterns of capitalist settler coloniality in this part of the world, here are some different ways to read them. On some days I think our decision, to study a case instead of in place, is difficult to reconcile with the ethical framework I detail; on others I can extend grace to, and perceive the utility of, learning from and speaking to somewhere slightly farther away. When I really try to answer the Question—What is an ethic for doing place-based research as a visitor-scholar in this settler colonial context?—I find myself at priorities and multimodality, prioritizing relationship building with and within your research assemblage and engaging multimodally in and towards those relationships. We can create more room for these things in both institutional processes and personal approaches to research planning. Given that “[h]ow we live in the world is contingent upon how we imagine that world to be” (Neimanis and Walker 2014, 563), the personal and the institutional are inextricably connected. The university is run and managed by people who are scholars, were once scholars, or have spent a lot of time hanging out with scholars. Priorities, I think, when asserted consistently and coherently, have the ability to trickle up. I conducted this research imagining that making room to work toward relational accountability was acceptable and possible, and it was. Presearch249 was my way of prioritizing these relationships and corrugation taught me about thickening response-ability to and within relationships through iterative and multimodal engagement, a “constant enfolding of matterings” (Hayward 2015). When it became time to do Riparian ReAnimation in earnest, I was able to call on the thickened relationships I had been tending to for years—my educated riparian attention, connections in the community, and faith in the importance of the subject matter. 249 I have one recommendation for any researcher taking me up on my proposition to prioritize presearch: document the process! It doesn’t have to be with photos. It could be drawings, or sound recordings, or the classic, fieldnotes. Even though presearch doesn’t feel like the thing that requires documentation, having a record—even if only for yourself—of the education of your attention is invaluable. The Mini-dramas I collected/created throughout ERA were a documentation of both process and product, and ended up being incredibly important to how I understand my experience of living in this place. 156 9.2 How have people in the past, do people in the present, and might people in the future interact with and relate to the various ecologies of Brandt’s Creek and the Northend Marsh? Wetness—the dance of snow and melt—makes life possible here, soaking and seeping, creating shelter and passage, and accommodating for inevitable fluctuation. Before valley-bottom settlement, before drainage and channelization, before impermeable surfaces, this water—that now performs as a coherent flow in the purpose-designed channel—moistened and meandered over a much larger area of the Kelowna floodplain, sustaining a low-lying marshy habitat, and providing an important source for plants of sustenance and traditional syilx construction materials. It was a wetness that was everywhere before it was water somewhere. In the preceding Episodes I told a story of Kelowna’s Northend Marsh, a now spectral ecology, and its offspring, the oft-overlooked Brandt’s Creek, itself an ecological manifestation of a settler colonial and capitalist anarchive. Lines drawn through this place give the illusion of fixity through the separation of land and water. This settler colonial delineation—the line deployed and then given power—makes possible functionally impermeable anthropocentric infrastructure, the habitual marginalization of the in-between, and the normalization of place-as-property. Working towards a different imaginary, given the unruly heritage of this place, is what this research is about. So, how might people living in this place relate to these ecologies in the future? To maintain life in the city as the climate changes, we must respect and live well with the wetness that makes life in this place possible. In the case of the Northend Marsh, that wetness has been buried, collected into a ditch, and recognized as a creek. Most creeks in the Okanagan host riparian habitats that create multidimensional possibilities for multi-being life that requires a certain amount of, and proximity to, wetness to thrive. With a little help, Brandt’s Creek has shown that it too has the potential to host a riparian community. What it needs now is some room to make that happen. Riparian restoration (MCE) is an important theme in the Okanagan today, and once room is made for it, Brandt’s Creek could use some specific help from knowledgeable community members to vegetate its banks (MCE) and assist in creating the conditions for the riparian to do its thing. Restoration in the Okanagan, however, is a social and legislative conundrum before an ecological one. It shouldn't be on the shoulders of particular landowners to "give up" their land along 157 waterways to restoration efforts,250 but, as it stands, there is a part to be played at all levels of decision making—that includes those with power to disassemble anthropocentric infrastructure, whether municipal, industrial, or commercial251—to manifest sustainable lifeways in this place. While ecological gentrification remains a significant concern in any recommendation made towards Brandt’s Creek’s roomier future, I think there is room for the history of sheltering in this place to become a future of stewardship, drawing attention to and care for this waterway and its margins. Allowing the riparian to inhabit Brandt’s Creeks’ margins, and thickening those margins—both in the material sense that would have Brandt’s Creek’s riparian self take up more space, and in the place imaginaries of people living in and traveling through Kelowna—does not have to mean that humans cannot continue to be or become active participants in that place. Ecological inhabitation can be assisted by human labour (i.e. restoration or rehabilitation) and has the potential to contribute to human health and well-being (Aronson, Blatt, and Aronson 2016), place-based pedagogies (Anderson and Woelfle-Erskine 2021) and an invigoration of public life (Usher 2023). Making more room for Brandt’s Creek and its riparian becoming, and, in so doing, embracing a swampy aesthetic, could make room for these possibilities as well. 9.3 What does it look like to prioritize multimodality, mediation, and remediation, and what implications has this commitment had for this research? On the one hand, it looks like this (Figure 32, page 158). “Sometimes,” Stewart writes, “a worlding snaps into form like a force of nature, providing comic relief or a horrifying preview” (2011, 451). This photo, to my eyes, does both. In September of 2023, this is what my life had become. I was dressed as a mountain, taking things very seriously. On the other hand, this event was attended by many small children and “evacuated” by our Fire puppet (Figure 26, page 134) and James Chester, who acted as fire marshal in his official Regional Parks uniform. This evacuation happened just weeks after a very real and very scary evacuation of much of the cities of Kelowna and West Kelowna and Westbank First Nation. Just before the event someone suggested it might be too soon 250 In many cases, those individuals are just following in the footsteps of the giants of settler colonial deswampification and place-as-property. 251 On disassembling anthropocentric infrastructure and embracing decay see Koslov (2016), Cairn and Jacobs (2014), and DeSilvey (2017). 158 to be making light of such an experience. Pamela set us straight. We were not making light of anything. Nothing we were talking about that day was anything other than as serious as it gets. The modes and materials of engagement that have been available throughout this (p)research process made possible the compilation of stories, analyses, and outputs collected here. Diversified perception and inquiry open us up to parts of the story we would otherwise not have recognized.252 This research has been conducted based on the theme, “relating with riparian lifeways in the Okanagan,” rather than the issue of the degradation of those lifeways as a result of settler-capitalist priorities. This allowed me to create a context in which people, myself included, were able to perceive things in a new way and converse with others they would not otherwise encounter and in ways they may not have expected. As Cathy Stubington explains of her own work “[w]e don’t focus on problems but instead look beyond them. This allows everyone in” (2013, 19). 252 “The senses sharpen on the surfaces of things taking form. They pick up texture and density as they move in and through bodies and spaces, rhythms and tempi, possibilities likely or not. They establish trajectories that shroud and punctuate the significance of sounds, textures, and movements” (Stewart 2011, 448). Figure 32: Me, taking things seriously. Photo by Michael Hintringer, September 2023. 159 10 glossary alt-text: Alternative text, or alt-text, is text that describes an image. In a digital landscape, this text is read out by screen readers to people who are blind or low vision and who use that technology to engage with screen-delivered content. Often, if a user is only seeing a screen displaying a user interface with their eyes, they will not see the alt-text. In its most inclusive form, alt-text describes the relevant content and information shown by an image. Ensuring all photos published digitally include alt-text enhances the content from the outset, creating an additional layer of engagement for the content creator as well as making the content itself more accessible. anarchive: that which is in excess to the archive; events and materials unrecorded or unrecordable, uncatalogued or uncatalougable; the imprints of absences in archival record keeping [W]hat has been collected only exists because of the regulatory “law” of an archive. To correct for this bias, one must either find the omitted information elsewhere or invent it. However, no matter how much one looks, one can never recover the fullness of a life or a moment in time. And no invention can be sufficiently dislodged from its own time to fill the space of the past. Finding more information, or conjuring it up, can only flesh out the archive to a limited extent. Ultimately, the question remains—unless we recognise the absence, how will we know what the loss is? What is more, how can these absences be figured so that we recognise them as absence? (Zaayman 2019, 16) Engaging with an archive anarchivally requires “a thinking with twofold attention that seeks to encompass at once the positive objects and methods of history and social science and the matters absent, entangled and unavailable by its methods” (Lowe 2006, 208). anthropocentric infrastructure: Infrastructure created by humans primarily for use by humans. Used here as in the “Feral Atlas,” where infrastructures are described as “human-built landscape modification projects that emerge within social and political programs” (Tsing et al. 2020a). Thinking about human-place relations via anthropocentric infrastructure is a “way of getting at the structural features of anthropogenic landscape transformation; structure is produced as that transformation emerges from large-scale human social projects” (Tsing et al. 2020a). aporia: As described by Delacey Tedesco in her PhD thesis, an aporia is “a line that, in the process of being drawn, simultaneous constitutes entities, categories, or concepts as mutually incompatible 160 and jointly necessary (Derrida 1993).” These lines are overdetermined and inherently unstable. They undo themselves as they are being done (Hartman 2008). archive: A collection of stuff, often interpreted as information, given what Jane Bennet has called thing power: “a material body always resides within some assemblage or other, and its thing-power is a function of that grouping. A thing has power by virtue of its operating in conjunction with other things” (Bennett 2004, 353–54). Gathered and assigned power, never a complete representation of anything, yet holding titular authority, archives both empower (e.g. Rawson 2022) and withhold power (e.g. Hartman 2008). assemblage: “everything from material objects to doings and sayings that congeal in space and social life” (Marston, Jones III, and Woodward 2005, 423); “socionatures whose intricate geographies form tangled webs of different length, density and duration, and whose consequences are experienced differently in different places” (Braun 2006, 644) atmospheric river: massive conglomerations of wetness that travel in the sky, sometimes across the globe, to become enormous rain events upon their arrival attention: a focused convergence of our senses, intellect, and feeling capitalist: an ideology of getting ahead of one’s peers vis a vis the intentional accumulation of surplus community of practice: “a unit of analysis that cuts across formal organizations, institutions like family and church, and other forms of association such as social movements. […] a set of relations among people doing things together” (Bowker and Star 1999, 294 citing; Strauss 1978; Lave and Wenger 1991; Becker 1986) corrugation: an experience of affective and relational thickening that results from intentional, sustained, and attentive engagement with place; the gathering of intensity and nuance created through regular (re-turns) to encounters and experiences of relating in a more-than-human world; creating and strengthening multimodal access to relationship building across difference deswampification: the project of erasing the ambiguity of wetness, often involving “the making of artificial smooth surfaces; the coordinated acceleration of one process after another” (Tsing et al. 2020b) 161 ecological gentrification: “the implementation of an environmental planning agenda related to public green spaces that leads to the displacement or exclusion of the most economically vulnerable human population homeless people — while espousing an environmental ethic” (Dooling 2009, 621). ecological anarchive: an ecological manifestation of the anarchive, a habit of place that has been written into silence in official record keeping, the record keeping that is revisited by people in/with power to inform future decision making ecotone: a place of interaction between difference; “edges where differences come together” (Krall 1994, 4); spaces between edges (Butler 2022; Neimanis 2017); “a combination or meeting of at least two distinct ecological zones … liminal, indeterminate, and hard to map” (King 2019, 3) education of attention: Perception is improved with practice. “The more practised we become in walking the paths of observation, according to Gibson [1979], the better able we are to notice and to respond fluently to environmental variations and to the parametric invariants that underwrite them” (Ingold 2017, 31). figuration: A figuration is a real, material phenomenon, which holds explanatory and propositional agency for inaugurating different kinds of relationships (Neimanis 2017, 5–6). Figurations are always more-than-metaphorical. freshet: Water falls to the land primarily as snow in the cold months, collecting in the mountains’ forests to rest. When the weathers warm the snow melts, slowly at first, then quicker, filling the streams, creeks, rivers, and ditches. This quickening we call freshet. fringe natures: ambiguous, contingent, and marginalized ecological assemblages habitat: a place with distinctive ecological characteristics formed by particular habits of being in relation habits: the processes and forms that are undergone and created by an entity, repeatedly and over time, always already in conversation with all that they are made of and in relation with habituation: a method of being and becoming that is characterized by the creation and strengthening of habits, adaptivity, and the ability to tend to be creative in circumstances of unpredictability, as well as the willingness to keep at it; embracing and making-do 162 heavy processing: listening and talking and asking questions, pausing to think, then repeating the process hyporheic: where surface water and ground water interface inhabitation: habituation in place Land: Land with a capital L is used—by a number of scholars whose work I’ve read closely and been heavily influenced by—to mean that which allows all beings to be and do. Some of these scholars differentiate typographically between “land,” which can indicate a “colonial worldview whereby landscapes are common, universal, and everywhere, even with great variation” (Liboiron 2021b, 7), and Land, which Styres and Zinga capitalize when “referring to it as a proper name indicating a primary relationship” (Styres and Zinga 2013, 313) and Liboiron employs to refer “to the unique entity that is the combined living spirit of plants, animals, air, water, humans, histories, and events recognized by many Indigenous communities” (2021b, 7), or, “all the stuff that makes a place a place and not another place, from spirits down to dirt” (Liboiron in Harp and Callison 2021, pt. 5:05-5:10). In Manulani Aluli-Meyer’s words, Land is more than a physical place. It is an idea that engages knowledge and contextualizes knowing. It is the key that turns the doors inward to reflect on how space shapes us. Space as fullness, as interaction, as thoughts planted. It is not about emptiness but about consciousness. It is an epistemological idea because it conceptualizes those things of value to embed them in a context. (2008, 4) The syilx concept for Land, as described above, is referenced by the word “tmxʷulaxʷ, which “translates better as a life-force-place, rather than of land as location or ecology type” (J. C. Armstrong 2009, 2–3). The similar term Country is also of note as used in English to describe a similar Indigenous concept, though primarily in Australia (Country et al. 2016; Poelina et al. 2020; Noonuccal and Noonuccal 1988; M. Donald and Bruineberg 2022). land: a place with a concentration of wetness perceived to be low enough so as not to be considered “water” and defined by its separation therefrom line: a technology of differentiation littoral: where land and water meet, mingle, and transition 163 mediation: to intentionally represent something using media different from that of which the thing being represented is composed Mini-drama: Mini-drama is a term used in this thesis to describe the tableaus created through the photos I took during my project Education Riparian Attention and the corrugated layers of story that came to thicken each encounter represented by a photo. modality: Modality refers to the manner in which something is done or takes place. When referring to modes of communication, this can be broken down into representational modes—the media used to communicate (e.g. text, audio, visual)—and communicative modes—the method of communication, or genre (e.g. storytelling, guiding, sharing data) (Wozniak, Lück, and Wessler 2015). I forgo using this technical language in favour of discussing media (puppets, images, text) and method (community art making, photography, describing). multi-being: The effective use of nouns in English necessitates bounding persons, places, and thing as discrete entities and reasonable agreement between those party to a given conversation as to where those boundaries are being drawn (Asmuth and Gentner 2005; Zukow-Goldring and Ferko 1994). Throughout this thesis I use the term multi-being to refer to the multitude of entities that compose and are composed by a specified context (e.g. habitat, city, research assemblage): plants, rocks, humans, birds, bulldozers, etc. I have chosen to use the term multi-being in lieu of the more common multi-species,253 for two reasons. First, some of the beings I refer to, such as rocks, are not categorized in terms of species. Second, how species are categorized is in constant flux among taxonomists (Hejnol 2017), and the ways I have come to know some beings in this place, such as the black cottonwood tree, or mulx, have either less or more included in the boundary implied by their name than would be allocated by a taxonomist due to hybridization and language differences (Moran 2023). See Ogden, Hall, & Tanitka (2013, 14–15) for further discussion of the ontological multiplicity allowed by this expansion of the term. multimodality: encoded and flexible possibilities for varied modalities of engagement (see modality) 253 Multi-species, often used in the context of multi-species ethnography, is a phrase around which much of the research that has influenced my work collects. By choosing to use “multi-being” instead, I mean no disrespect or criticism toward those who have used and continue to use and rely on “multi-species,” particularly given the conversational capacity of scholars across place and discipline that collecting under one term can create. 164 multimodal accessibility: the condition of many options being available for engagement through varied modes and methods place: Defining the meaning of place (and its relationship to space) has been the goal of so much scholarship I can’t even begin to wrap my head around it (for a selection see Tuck and McKenzie 2014; Massey 2005; Taylor and Giugni 2012; Country et al. 2016; Coulthard and Simpson 2016; Heise 2008; Watts 2013). It is one of those words that you think you know what it means until you try to write it down. I have used the word place here in a way I might otherwise have chosen to employ Land given the extent to which this analysis rests on a discussion of a water/land binary and the fact that screen readers do not distinguish between capitalized and non-capitalized words. I could have written “capital L Land,” each time I wanted to reference the concept, but that seemed silly, and using the Australian Indigenous term Country does not fit the context. Perhaps there was another possibility, but I landed on place primarily for the characteristic I mentioned above, that most English speakers have an understanding of what the word means.254 Place is stuff you can touch and stuff you cannot. It is ideas and ecologies, relationships and infrastructures, memories and minerals, everything that makes “here” here and not over there. place-as-property: the idea that an entity can “own” a place, often related as possession that is both enduring and meritocratic presearch: all of the things that happen before relationally accountable research can start, and because relational accountability is not established just once, presearch activities are likely to happen through the duration of a research project relational accountability: Relational accountability is widely used and referenced by researcher-practitioners working with Indigenous research methodologies, and—thanks in large part to Shawn Wilson’s (2008) widely cited book “Research is Ceremony”—beyond. Earlier, Wilson described the place for relational accountability in research: As a researcher you are answering to all your relations when doing research. You are not answering questions of validity or reliability or making judgements of better or worse. Instead you should be fulfilling your relationships with the world around 254 “Although it comes to us with a complex baggage, the term retains within it the potential for redefinition and reorientation, as well as critical reflection on the choices that we make in its name” (DeSilvey 2017, 8 speaking to ‘heritage’). 165 you. So your methodology has to ask different questions: rather than asking about validity or reliability, you are asking, "Am I fulfilling my role in this relationship? What are my obligations in this relationship?" The axiology or morals need to be an integral part of the methodology so that when I am gaining knowledge, I am not just gaining in some abstract pursuit; I am gaining knowledge in order to fulfil my end of the research relationship. (2001, 177) He goes on to express in “Research is Ceremony,” that “knowledge itself is held in the relationships and connections formed with the environment that surrounds us” (2008, 87). Alex Wilson (no relation I’m aware of) echoes this sentiment of breadth: “we are accountable to each other for everything that we do” (2008, 194), a statement I read through a multi-being lens. Informed by these and other Indigenous scholars and methodologies (see footnote 57), I understand relational accountability in research to mean designing and executing research with accountability for our actions, big and small, and how they impact others, human and more-than-human. In this I also hold a need for account-ability, an ability to account for the whys and why-nots of a research practice in conversation with the collection of beings that make up a research assemblage, even if the answers to those questions are not those expected by an institutional structure or specific discourse. remediation: This term I use uncritically, recognizing the extensive conversation happening in media studies though not engaging with it for reasons of scope. As described by Michelle Lee Brown, Marshal McLuhan’s (1964) definition of remediation is “a process in which one medium becomes the content for another” (2017, 24). There is a chronology encoded here, suggesting that one medium must come first.255 That is okay with me. Thinking with “loopy materialities” (Haraway 2017, M39) allows the organization of chronology in a line that doesn’t have to be straight and can curl around to engage that which came before or is to come. research assemblage: “[T]he bodies, things and abstractions that get caught up in social inquiry, including the events that are studied, the tools, models and precepts of research, and the researchers” (Fox and Alldred 2015, 400). Use of the word assemblage stresses “the making of socionatures whose intricate geographies form tangled webs of different length, density and duration, and whose consequences are experienced differently in different places” (Braun 2006, 255 Brown chooses to bracket the “re” to work with “(re)mediation” as a way of integrating varied concepts of time, particularly through various Indigenous ontologies in the context of Indigenous digital media. 166 644). This is a verb-become-noun (to assemble), implying happening, movement, and change, while holding form: “a complex and dynamic process whereupon the collective’s properties exceed their constitutive elements” (Ogden et al., 2013). When a research project is defined it will have boundaries, likely both permeable and malleable, though boundaries, nonetheless. These boundaries will define a research assemblage in a variety and combination of geographic, temporal, hydro- and geo-logical, demographic terms in order to define a socioecological setting for inquiry. This verb in noun’s clothing allows for particularity, the particularity that allow for the phrase “outside the scope of this research,” while holding space for inevitable movement and emergence. research-creation: “An approach to research that combines creative and academic research practices, and supports the development of knowledge and innovation through artistic expression, scholarly investigation, and experimentation. The creation process is situated within the research activity and produces critically informed work in a variety of media (art forms). Research-creation cannot be limited to the interpretation or analysis of a creator’s work, conventional works of technological development, or work that focuses on the creation of curricula” (SSHRC 2012). riparian: An ecological community that forms at the interface between land and a flowing body of water. seasonality: the drastic changes to habits of being played out by multi-being communities in relation to temperature, daylight, and concentrations of wetness settler colonialism: a logic of invade and stay; expansionist domination made possible by colonial geographic mapping’s “epistemologies of segmentation” (Sundberg 2014) and the imaginary of place-as-property (Da Cunha 2019; Manuel and Derrickson 2015; Burow, Brock, and Dove 2018) settler colonial: socioecological contexts formed through processes of settler colonialism spectral ecologies: “the very conjuration and unsettling of presence, place, the present, and the past” (Wylie 2007, 172) as manifest by ecological assemblages256 surface: the ground I learned I stand on; a medium for habitation; a place where water and land meet sky; a place that does not fit into a world of wetness, nor an expanded littoral zone, nor an experience in which trees become air and enter lungs (M. Y. Chen 2020); “with rising seas, warming temperatures, and the increasing frequency of floods, this surface along with the edifice of 256 Note, all assemblages are ecological (see Barua and Sinha 2022). 167 civilization and certainty built upon it is threatened, calling into question the act of separation that brought it into being” (Mathur and Cunha n.d.) swampy aesthetic: a recognition and embracing of wetness, which shifts and morphs, dissolving some boundaries and creating possibilities for others, in a continuous processes of negotiation and transformation thick description: This term was coined by Clifford Geerts (1973), though my preferred definition comes from J.K. Gibson-Graham: “a method that directs interpretive attention not only to material practices but to the nuances, affects, multiple codes of meaning, silences, jokes, parodies, and so on, that accompany them” (2014, s148). threading: Figuring out how things fit together, and what the outcomes of a particular project are, is work I think of as threading. Cathy Stubington also employs this metaphor to discuss her role in the puppet theatre company she founded: "I am the needle that threads things together. From my point of interest, the series of projects are linked and are a learning, through artistic practice, about what it is to live where I live” (2013, 27). transing: Transing, as I understand it—thanks in large part to the published work of Eve Hayward (2015; 2012; 2008b; 2008a), Cleo Wölfle Hazard (2015; 2022), and Mel Y. Chen (2012; 1992; Hayward 2015)—is moving, changing, and shifting as a way of being, a disassembling and disruption of taxonomies that confounds the notion of a coherent whole (see also Springgay and Truman 2017a). unruly heritage: all of the things those of us living here now (wherever here and now happens to be) have inherited and are now causing trouble, from city centres in floodplains, to autocentric urban planning, to the social conditions that create oppression for many; “masses of neglected and unwanted matters passed on and lived with” (B. Olsen and Pétursdóttir 2016, 39) visitor-scholar: Currently my livelihood is facilitated by doing research in a university-institutional setting, in a place with recent and ongoing experience of settler colonial occupation, and it is through the patterns and practices of settler colonialism that I have come to be here doing this research, as a visitor here. I use this composite term to refer specifically to people like myself, who live and conduct research in settler colonized places as non-Indigenous visitors. By visitor I mean someone who is not Indigenous to the place where they are. Often the phrase “uninvited guest” is used to refer to non-Indigenous people in these contexts. 168 water: a collection of wetness, defined by its separation from land weak theory: “Weak theory does not elaborate and confirm what we already know; it observes, interprets, and yields to emerging knowledge” (Gibson-Graham 2014, s149). weathering: a climate change imaginary of “transcorporeal temporality” that thickens relationships between humans and climate, “stretching between present, future, and past,” … “foreground[ing] a nonchronological durationality” (Neimanis and Walker 2014, 561); our human bodies contract past memories to make sense of present experience. wetness: “Wetness is everywhere to some degree. It is in the seas, clouds, rains, dew, air, soils, minerals, plants, animals. The sea is very wet; the desert less so” (Mathur and Cunha n.d.). 169 Appendices Appendix A: list of Mini-dramas image & date caption alt-text tags p. Mini-drama 1 2021.02.04 Beaver slide! River bank through which a divot has been worn in the soil that leads directly into the green-blue water. February, Similkameen, beaver, fringe, roots, soil, traces and tracks, water 14 Mini-drama 2 2022.10.11 Industrial byproduct in tule camo. Long, cylindrical, ash white metal rods collect together in a somewhat parallel clump in grass. Brandt's Creek, October, Section 6, discarded, Okanagan 19 Mini-drama 3 2021.04.07 Ethnobotanical mystery number 2. Branches tied together into what seems to have once been a ladder though is now no longer in use and is seen here propped against a tree trunk with leafless dogwood and willow branches in the background. April, branches, ethnobotany, levels, Okanagan 32 170 Mini-drama 4 2021.04.11 I wish I had taken a moment to feel this texture. Grey and white fungus with the appearance of carpet-like softness, growing on a tree. April, bark, lichen, texture, Okanagan 37 Mini-drama 5 2021.06.04 Curious. Shadows casting over an area of long grass that is laying flat on the ground, radially, from a center in which there is a hole that reveals a small patch of soil. A pair of sandeled human feet stand at the bottom of the frame. June, feet, grass, green, shadow, sun, Okanagan 40 Mini-drama 6 2021.03.25 Removal of white poplar. That's a very long root you're seeing there. One bright red digger machine tilts precariously on a grey-brown slope while grasping a very long tree root. The soil around the digger is peppered with florescent flags indicating the presence of young plants. March, European white poplar, k’əmcnitkw, soil, restoration, Okanagan 42 Mini-drama 7 Map making at its best. Lichen growing on tree trunk. April, bark, lichen, Okanagan 46 171 2021.04.11 Mini-drama 8 2021.06.04 Now, chats, I realize you don't typically come this far north, but I'm here to tell you that Kelowna has a lot to offer you. Levels of riparian vegetation, mostly brilliant green and illuminated by the sun under a blue sky. Grasses and showy milkweed feature prominently in the foreground, supported by roses, currants, and tall mature trees in the back. One fledgling tree stands out in the grass. June, Mill Creek, blue sky, grass, levels, rose, showy milkweed, Okanagan 48 Mini-drama 9 2021.01.06 This, is a cottonwood tree, who is laying down to rest, and producing sap. Brown, grey, black, bark glistening with water and sap, filling the frame. January, Munson Pond, cottonwood, sap, Okanagan 52 Mini-drama 10 2021.06.04 Here we see mostly dogwood and co., though this until-recently unknown to me region of riparia incorporated so many riparian characters it felt almost like a caricature. An entire frame filled with late-spring green leaves. June, dogwood, levels, green, Okanagan 55 172 Mini-drama 11 2021.04.18 Always showy, no matter the season. Dalmatian decay on what is left of a milkweed seed pod. April, Munson Pond, showy milkweed, seed pod, decay, Okanagan 68 Mini-drama 12 2022.10.30 The rainbows are everywhere, but they're not all like this. Two rainbow sherbet dogwood leaves, splotchy and in transition. October, Okanagan, dogwood, rainbow, leaves 71 Mini-drama 13 2022.10.01 Levels zijn belangrijk. A series of silos rise from a building under a bright blue sky. Brandt's Creek, October, Section 6, infrastructure, Okanagan 82 Mini-drama 14 2023.07.28 There's a creek in there somewhere. A thickness of green. Bushy watercress blooms white flowers. A few stalks of thin, round, tule stalks poke through. Brandt's Creek, July, Section 2, green, tule, watercress, Okanagan 93 173 Mini-drama 15 2022.07.02 How's this for a riparian fringe? Long grass leans and glistens green in the sun light. July, grass, green, k’əmcnitkw, Okanagan 99 Mini-drama 16 2022.06.12 Becoming so many things. Short herbaceous plants of many kinds, foliage and flowers, collect and descend down a low-angled streambank and extending themselves into grey-brown water that is moving slowly by. June, Sumas, fringe, margin 103 Mini-drama 17 2021.09.23 Trees pretending to be clouds. A shadow cast upon a filed of green and yellow grasses, in the background of which lies a lake ringed with rolling mountains. September, Skaha Lake, grass, hills, shadow, Okanagan 106 Mini-drama 18 So many fringes weaving themselves. A harsh streambank. A chainmail and barbed wire fence separates a parking lot full of stacked construction materials from a near-vertical streambank growing small green plants Brandt's Creek, July, Section 3, bank, containment, fence, sign, Okanagan 110 174 2022.07.24 and flanking murky brown-tinged water. Mini-drama 19 2021.05.25 Today it rained. Dark clouds, obviously raining, over a riparian pond. May, Munson Pond, clouds, grass, levels, mustard, weather, Okanagan 113 Mini-drama 20 2022.10.01 Water and Road have a plan. A dry, undulating, and old-school, industrial place. Seemingly still water in a creek, the bank of which is steep, crumbling, and directly below a road for cars. One street sign perches on the precipice. Brandt's Creek, October, Section 5, bank, fringe, Okanagan 124 Mini-drama 21 2022.08.12 Totally by accident. A bumble bee alights on a purple chicory flower in the sun. The flower, with its serrated petals circling around the bee emerges from a stem that appears ready to bloom many others. August, Brandt's Creek, Section 1, chicory, bee, Okanagan 130 175 Mini-drama 22 2022.07.07 A surprising recognition of value and an inactive foe. A tree trunk wrapped in wire netting and soaked in dappled shade among bright sun. Behind the trunk is a knee-high wall of stacked black sandbags. Brandt's Creek, July, Section 3, bank, beaver, mediation, Okanagan 132 Mini-drama 23 2021.04.28 How could this tree not make you smile? One big, old tree, as wide as it is tall, leafing out with the brightest of green. April, Siberian elm, Mill Creek, Okanagan 133 Mini-drama 24 2023.06.12 One cottonwood trunk in a floodplain. #riparianre-animation A tall person stands smiling inside the trunk of a cottonwood puppet. In addition to the puppet the person is wearing shorts and sandals, standing on a covered and industrial-looking concrete porch. June, Cottonwood, Moos, Rotary Centre for the Arts, Riparian ReAnimation, Okanagan 135 176 Appendix B: Brandt’s Creek biodiversity survey Note: Names provided for beings are those through which I met these beings. For beings represented by at least one of the 1405 images in the Mini -drama catalogue, links to sample images with alt-text in their metadata are embedded in the being name text. being Section 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 algae No id. No id. No id. No id. Identified No id. No id. American goldfinch Identified No id. No id. No id. Identified No id. No id. asparagus No id. No id. Identified No id. No id. No id. No id. bindweed Identified No id. No id. Identified Identified No id. Identified box elder maple No id. No id. Identified No id. No id. No id. No id. bumblebee No id. No id. No id. No id. Identified No id. No id. burdock No id. No id. Identified No id. No id. No id. No id. cabbage white butterfly Identified No id. Identified No id. Identified No id. No id. carp Identified No id. No id. No id. Identified No id. No id. catmint Identified Identified Identified No id. Identified No id. No id. cattail Identified Identified Identified Identified Identified Identified Identified cedar waxwing No id. No id. No id. No id. Identified No id. No id. cheatgrass No id. No id. No id. No id. Identified No id. No id. chicory Identified No id. No id. No id. Identified No id. No id. clover Identified No id. No id. No id. Identified Identified No id. cottonwood No id. No id. Identified No id. No id. Identified No id. 177 curlycup gumweed No id. No id. No id. No id. Identified No id. No id. dalmatian toadflax No id. No id. No id. No id. Identified Identified No id. damselfly Identified No id. No id. No id. Identified No id. No id. dandelion Identified No id. Identified No id. Identified Identified No id. deer Identified No id. No id. No id. No id. Signs of Identified dock Identified Identified Identified No id. Identified No id. Identified red osier dogwood No id. No id. No id. Identified Identified Identified No id. elder Identified No id. No id. No id. No id. No id. No id. European nightshade Identified Identified No id. No id. Identified Identified No id. European white poplar No id. No id. Identified No id. No id. No id. No id. goldenrod No id. No id. No id. No id. Identified Identified No id. grape No id. No id. No id. No id. Identified No id. No id. grass Identified No id. Identified No id. No id. No id. No id. green sweat bee Identified No id. No id. No id. No id. No id. No id. gull No id. No id. No id. No id. Identified No id. No id. hawthorn No id. Identified No id. No id. Identified No id. Identified spitcin (a.k.a. hemp dogbane) Identified Identified No id. No id. No id. No id. No id. heron No id. No id. No id. No id. Identified No id. No id. honey locust No id. No id. No id. Identified Identified No id. No id. horsetail No id. No id. No id. Identified Identified No id. No id. 178 house finch No id. No id. No id. No id. Identified No id. No id. house sparrow Identified No id. No id. No id. Identified No id. No id. human Identified Identified Identified Identified Identified Identified Identified knapweed Identified No id. No id. Identified Identified Identified No id. lady bug/beetle Identified No id. No id. No id. No id. No id. No id. lamb's quarters Identified No id. No id. No id. Identified No id. No id. lodgepole pine No id. No id. No id. No id. No id. Identified No id. mallard duck No id. No id. Identified No id. Identified No id. No id. mallow Identified No id. No id. No id. No id. No id. No id. maple No id. No id. Identified No id. No id. No id. No id. mullein No id. No id. Identified No id. Identified No id. No id. muskrat No id. No id. Identified No id. Identified No id. No id. mustard Identified Identified No id. Identified Identified No id. No id. night-flowering catchfly Identified No id. No id. No id. Identified No id. No id. nipplewort No id. No id. No id. No id. Identified No id. No id. Oregon grape No id. No id. Identified Identified Identified Identified No id. pigeon Identified No id. No id. No id. No id. No id. No id. pineapple weed Identified No id. No id. No id. No id. No id. No id. plane tree No id. No id. Identified No id. No id. No id. No id. plantain Identified No id. No id. No id. Identified No id. No id. 179 ponderosa pine Identified No id. Identified No id. Identified No id. No id. poppy Identified No id. No id. No id. No id. No id. No id. quail Identified No id. No id. No id. No id. No id. No id. rabbitbrush No id. No id. Identified No id. No id. No id. No id. raccoon No id. No id. Signs of No id. No id. Signs of No id. raspberry Identified No id. No id. No id. No id. No id. No id. rat Signs of No id. No id. No id. Signs of No id. No id. reed canary grass Identified No id. No id. No id. Identified No id. Identified red-winged blackbird Identified Identified No id. No id. Identified No id. No id. rose Identified Identified Identified Identified Identified Identified Identified Russian olive No id. No id. No id. No id. Identified No id. No id. salsify Identified No id. No id. No id. Identified No id. No id. Saskatoon No id. No id. No id. No id. Identified Identified No id. Siberian elm Identified Identified Identified Identified Identified Identified No id. Sitka alder No id. No id. No id. No id. No id. Identified No id. smartweed No id. No id. No id. No id. Identified Identified Identified snowberry No id. No id. Identified No id. Identified No id. Identified solitary bee No id. No id. No id. No id. Identified No id. No id. song sparrow Identified No id. No id. No id. No id. No id. No id. spider No id. No id. No id. No id. Identified No id. No id. 180 St. John's wort No id. No id. Identified No id. No id. No id. No id. starling No id. No id. No id. No id. Identified Identified No id. sumac No id. No id. No id. No id. No id. Identified No id. tansy ragwort No id. No id. No id. Identified No id. No id. No id. tarragon Identified Identified No id. No id. Identified No id. No id. thistle Identified No id. Identified Identified Identified Identified No id. tree of heaven No id. No id. No id. No id. No id. Identified No id. tule Identified Identified No id. No id. Identified Identified No id. Virginia creeper No id. No id. Identified No id. Identified Identified No id. walnut No id. No id. No id. No id. No id. Identified No id. watercress Identified Identified No id. No id. Identified No id. No id. willow Identified Identified Identified No id. Identified Identified No id. 181 Works cited Absolon, Kathy, and Cam Willett. 2005. ‘Putting Ourselves Forward: Location in Aboriginal Research’. In Research as Resistance: Critical, Indigenous, and Anti-Oppressive Approaches, 97–126. Canadian Scholars’ Press. Acharya, Amitangshu. 2015. ‘The Cultural Politics of Waterscapes’. In The International Handbook of Political Ecology, 373–86. Edward Elgar Publishing. https://www.elgaronline.com/display/edcoll/9780857936165/9780857936165.00036.xml. Aguiar, Luis LM, Ann McKinnon, and Dixon Sookraj. 2010. ‘Repertoires of Racism: Reactions to Jamaicans in the Okanagan Valley’. 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Thesis/Dissertation
eng
Interdisciplinary Studies
Vancouver : University of British Columbia Library
Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International
Graduate
Garrard, Greg
Forssman, Natalie
Human-riparian relating at valley-bottom : modes, methods, and marshes
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