Creative and Critical Studies, Faculty of (Okanagan)
DSpace
UBCO
Mathur, Chhavi
Master of Arts - MA
University of British Columbia
Okanagan Valley of British Columbia is often depicted in Canadian settler culture as an oasis in a desert, or a Garden of Eden, thanks to its exceptional climate and semi-arid shrub steppe biome. With its fruit, tourism, and wine industries, it is best known today as place of leisure and plenty. This idyllic and utopic image of the place is, however, complicated by the complex history of its cultural and material landscape. The Okanagan idealized by Canadians is, in fact, the traditional unceded territory of, primarily, the Syilx people. Since the late 19th century, through successive phases of settler colonialism in the Okanagan, the material and cultural landscape of the area has been written over, reshaped, transformed, and remains contested in many ways. This thesis contributes to a discussion on the making of environmental cultures through an ecocritical reading of the role of the Beautiful British Columbia magazine – with a focus on the years 1959-1983 when it was funded by the provincial government – in shaping the idealized narrative and landscape aesthetic of the Okanagan Valley that persist to this day. The visual and textual analysis of the magazine is framed by the socio-political, economic, and material history of the region from the mid to late decades of the 20th century. While international tourists were presumably the primary audience of the magazine, this thesis argues that the magazine also served the province’s campaign to attract Anglophone migrants and to ‘sell’ British Columbia and more specifically the Okanagan as an idyllic home for white settler populations. It traces and uncovers some of the recurring aesthetic tropes that have constructed and framed both the British Columbian landscape generally and within that, the Okanagan Valley, as an idyllic place to live. It contrasts the white settler colonial landscape aesthetic of the Okanagan with Indigenous imaginations of the place. It brings out the fault lines and contradictions between the imposed settler aesthetic and the material affordances of the environment.
PARADISE FOUND: THE SETTLER COLONIAL LEGACY OF BEAUTIFUL BRITISH COLUMBIA MAGAZINE by Chhavi Mathur B.A. (Hons), Ashoka University, 2019 PGDip, Ashoka University, 2020 A THESIS SUBMITTED IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF MASTER OF ARTS in THE COLLEGE OF GRADUATE STUDIES (Interdisciplinary Studies) (Sustainability) THE UNIVERSITY OF BRITISH COLUMBIA (Okanagan) May 2024 © Chhavi Mathur, 2024 ii The following individuals certify that they have read, and recommend to the College of Graduate Studies for acceptance, a thesis entitled: Paradise Found: The Settler Colonial Legacy of Beautiful British Columbia Magazine submitted by Chhavi Mathur in partial fulfillment of the requirements of the degree of Master of Arts. Dr. Greg Garrard, Faculty of Creative and Critical Studies Supervisor Dr. David Geary, Irving K. Barber Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences Supervisory Committee Member Dr. Erin James, University of Idaho Supervisory Committee Member Dr. Laura Moss, The University of British Columbia (Vancouver) University Examiner Additional Committee Members include: Lisa Grekul, Faculty of Creative and Critical Studies Supervisory Committee Member iii Abstract The Okanagan Valley of British Columbia is often depicted in Canadian settler culture as an oasis in a desert, or a Garden of Eden, thanks to its exceptional climate and semi-arid shrub steppe biome. With its fruit, tourism, and wine industries, it is best known today as place of leisure and plenty. This idyllic and utopic image of the place is, however, complicated by the complex history of its cultural and material landscape. The Okanagan idealized by Canadians is, in fact, the traditional unceded territory of, primarily, the Syilx people. Since the late 19th century, through successive phases of settler colonialism in the Okanagan, the material and cultural landscape of the area has been written over, reshaped, transformed, and remains contested in many ways. This thesis contributes to a discussion on the making of environmental cultures through an ecocritical reading of the role of the Beautiful British Columbia magazine – with a focus on the years 1959-1983 when it was funded by the provincial government – in shaping the idealized narrative and landscape aesthetic of the Okanagan Valley that persist to this day. The visual and textual analysis of the magazine is framed by the socio-political, economic, and material history of the region from the mid to late decades of the 20th century. While international tourists were presumably the primary audience of the magazine, this thesis argues that the magazine also served the province’s campaign to attract Anglophone migrants and to ‘sell’ British Columbia and more specifically the Okanagan as an idyllic home for white settler populations. It traces and uncovers some of the recurring aesthetic tropes that have constructed and framed both the British Columbian landscape generally and within that, the Okanagan Valley, as an idyllic place to live. It contrasts the white settler colonial landscape aesthetic of the Okanagan with Indigenous imaginations of the place. It brings out the fault lines and contradictions between the imposed settler aesthetic and the material affordances of the environment. iv Lay Summary This thesis contributes to studies on the relationship between culture and nature by examining the cultural impact of the Beautiful British Columbia magazine in constructing and shaping the popular imagery and narrative of Okanagan as an idyllic land of abundance and leisure in white settler colonial imagination. It situates this ‘making of place’ in the Okanagan within the context of the making of British Columbia as a unified geographical, political, and cultural entity. Through close and critical reading of the magazine, it traces the construction and emergence of some of the core characterizing imagery of the Okanagan as an oasis, “Garden of Eden” and “Four Season Playground”. It also aims to underline the contradictions between these images and the material affordances of the Okanagan ecology and landscape, even as it points towards alternative Indigenous imaginations and relations to the place. v Table of Contents Abstract ..................................................................................................................................... iii Lay Summary ............................................................................................................................. iv Table of Contents ......................................................................................................................... v List of Figures............................................................................................................................ vii Acknowledgements .................................................................................................................... xii Dedication ................................................................................................................................ xiv Chapter 1: Introduction ............................................................................................................... 1 Literature Review ................................................................................................................11 Summary of Chapters ...........................................................................................................14 Chapter 2: British Columbia as a “Road-scape” ......................................................................... 16 Road Culture in North America .............................................................................................18 Train vs. Road Tourism in Two Cultures ................................................................................22 Post-1950s: Roadways Displace Railways ..............................................................................32 Road Vistas: Road-scape Reconstitutes Landscape ..................................................................39 Roads to Okanagan ..............................................................................................................47 Chapter 3: Landscape Aesthetic of the Okanagan ....................................................................... 53 The Oasis/Desert Paradigm ...................................................................................................56 Marginalization of the Syilx People .......................................................................................63 Okanagan as a “Four Season Playground”...............................................................................79 Contradictions in the ‘Oasis Aesthetic’ ...................................................................................84 Chapter 4: Evolution of the Magazine through the Privatized Era (1984-2001) ............................ 90 A New Face of the Magazine ................................................................................................91 Representation of Okanagan: Continuities and Divergences ......................................................93 ‘Ours to Cherish’: An Environmental Turn .............................................................................99 Representations of Indigenous Communities ......................................................................... 107 vi Chapter 5: Conclusion ............................................................................................................. 112 Works Cited ............................................................................................................................ 121 vii List of Figures Figure 1. Utility boxes in Kelowna with Beautiful British Columbia covers (Photos by Chhavi Mathur) ........................................................................................................................................... 1 Figure 2. “Okanagan Valley”, Hello BC, www.hellobc.com/places-to-go/okanagan-valley/. ....... 7 Figure 3. “Kelowna”, Hello BC, www.hellobc.com/places-to-go/kelowna/. ................................. 7 Figure 4. Cover image of a road through mountains. Beautiful British Columbia: The Land of New Horizons, vol. 2, no.3, 1960, pp.1. UBC Rare Books and Special Collections. ................... 16 Figure 5. Poster of My American Cousin (1985). IMDB, www.imdb.com/title/tt0089647. ........ 21 Figure 6. Kajol and Shah Rukh Khan (names of actors) in the DDLJ train chase climax. “DDLJ and CHENNAI EXPRESS Train Scenes”, www.youtube.com/watch?v=qPVijZzUOaI&ab_channel=VishwaVenkule. ............................... 24 Figure 7. Deepika Padukone and Shah Rukh Khan in Chennai Express in a scene that references the DDLJ train scene. “DDLJ and CHENNAI EXPRESS Train Scenes”, www.youtube.com/watch?v=qPVijZzUOaI&ab_channel=VishwaVenkule. ............................... 24 Figure 8. Shahid Kapoor and Kareena Kapoor in train chase scene from Jab We Me. “Jab We Met”, Shemaroo, www.youtube.com/watch?v=jf2gOSORoqU&ab_channel=Shemaroo. .......... 25 Figure 9. Surya and Sameera Reddy meet on the train in Vaaranam Aayiram. “Vaaranam Aayiram - Train Scene”, www.youtube.com/watch?v=sCvLOTLPivE&t=250s&ab_channel=UnitedIndiaExporters. ...... 25 Figure 10. Single orange car on Trans-Canada Highway. Beautiful British Columbia: Land of New Horizons, vol. 2, no. 4, 1961, pp. 44-45. UBC Rare Books and Special Collections........... 27 Figure 11. Car on Highway through Kootenay Park. Beautiful British Columbia: Land of New Horizons, vol. 3, no. 1, 1962, pp. 44-45. UBC Rare Books and Special Collections. .................. 27 viii Figure 12. Car on Rogers Pass near Revelstoke. Beautiful British Columbia: Land of New Horizons, vol. 4, no. 1, 1963, pp. 44. UBC Rare Books and Special Collections. ....................... 28 Figure 13. The caption to this image of a train says “In the face of increased highway traffic many are now turning to rail transportation for a more relaxed holiday. Shown in this photograph is a Canadian National Railway passenger train following the canyon of the mighty Fraser River into Vancouver”. Beautiful British Columbia: Land of New Horizons, vol. 2, no. 3, 1960, pp. 34. UBC Rare Books and Special Collections. ................................................................................... 30 Figure 14. Photograph of train silhouette in “Railroadin’”. Beautiful British Columbia: Land of New Horizons, vol. 11, no. 3, 1969, pp. 30-31. UBC Rare Books and Special Collections. ........ 31 Figure 15. “Once upon a train…”, Beautiful British Columbia: Land of New Horizons, vol. 16, no. 4, 1975, pp. 32-33. UBC Rare Books and Special Collections. ............................................. 31 Figure 16. “Museum Train”. Beautiful British Columbia: Land of New Horizons, vol. 17, no. 4, 1976, pp. 30-31. UBC Rare Books and Special Collections. ....................................................... 32 Figure 17. “A Message from the Premier of British Columbia”. Beautiful British Columbia Land of New Horizons, vol. 1. no. 1, 1959, pp. 3. UBC Rare Books and Special Collections. ............. 36 Figure 18. Comparative maps of BC Interior Road networks in 1925 (left) and 1970 (right). Ben Bradley, British Columbia by the Road: Car Culture and Making of a Modern Landscape, UBC Press, 2017. ................................................................................................................................... 38 Figure 19. “Alaska Highway: Road to Adventure”. Beautiful British Columbia: Land of New Horizons, vol. 2, no. 4, 1961, pp. 27. UBC Rare Books and Special Collections. ....................... 40 Figure 20. “Highway 16”. Beautiful British Columbia: Land of New Horizons, vol. 3, no. 2, 1961, pp. 34. UBC Rare Books and Special Collections. ............................................................. 41 ix Figure 21. “Highway 5 and the Yellowhead Route”. Beautiful British Columbia: Land of New Horizons, vol. 10, no. 4, 1969, pp. 18. UBC Rare Books and Special Collections. ..................... 41 Figure 22. Full spread photograph of road intersection. Beautiful British Columbia: Land of New Horizons, vol. 3, no. 3, 1961, pp. 28-29. UBC Rare Books and Special Collections. .................. 43 Figure 23. Picture of a “Highway Vista” in BC. Beautiful British Columbia: Land of New Horizons, vol.1 no. 1, 1959, pp. 42. UBC Rare Books and Special Collections. ......................... 44 Figure 24. Photograph showing “some of the rugged grandeur to be seen on the Canyon route between Hope and Lytton”. Beautiful British Columbia: Land of New Horizons, vol. 2 no. 1, 1960, pp. 28-29. UBC Rare Books and Special Collections. ....................................................... 46 Figure 25. “Lazy Days Ahead!”, Beautiful British Columbia: Land of New Horizons, vol. 2, no. 1, 1960, pp. 38. UBC Rare Books and Special Collections. ......................................................... 48 Figure 26. “Hidden Highway”, Beautiful British Columbia Magazine, vol. 22, no. 2, 1980, pp. 28-29. UBC Rare Books and Special Collections. ....................................................................... 49 Figure 27. “Okanagan Oasis”. Beautiful British Columbia Magazine, vol. 21, no. 1, 1979, pp. 34-35. UBC Rare Books and Special Collections. ............................................................................. 51 Figure 28. Photo of Vaseux Lake, Beautiful British Columbia: Land of New Horizons, vol. 8, no. 4, 1967, pp. 4-5. UBC Rare Books and Special Collections. ....................................................... 58 Figure 29. “Plant of the Pocket Desert”, Beautiful British Columbia: Land of New Horizons, vol. 17, no. 4, 1976, pp. 36-37. UBC Rare Books and Special Collections. ....................................... 59 Figure 30. “Africa in Canada”, Beautiful British Columbia: Land of New Horizons, vol. 13, no. 2, 1971, pp. 33. UBC Rare Books and Special Collections. UBC Rare Books and Special Collections. ................................................................................................................................... 61 x Figure 31. Advertisement for gift subscription for magazine – “Still time for BRITAIN and EUROPE mailing”. Beautiful British Columbia: Land of New Horizons, vol. 3, no. 3, 1961, pp. 45. UBC Rare Books and Special Collections. ............................................................................. 69 Figure 32. White woman in dress gazing over the view of Vaseux Lake near Osoyoos. Beautiful British Columbia: Land of New Horizons, vol. 3, no. 1, 1961, pp. 34-35. UBC Rare Books and Special Collections........................................................................................................................ 70 Figure 33. Beautiful British Columbia: Land of New Horizons, vol. 2, no. 1, Spring 1960, pp. 1. UBC Rare Books and Special Collections. ................................................................................... 71 Figure 34. Beautiful British Columbia: Land of New Horizons, vol. 2, no. 1, Spring 1960, pp. 18. UBC Rare Books and Special Collections. ................................................................................... 71 Figure 35. Beautiful British Columbia: Land of New Horizons, vol. 7, no. 1, Summer 1965, pp.1. UBC Rare Books and Special Collections. ................................................................................... 72 Figure 36. Beautiful British Columbia: Land of New Horizons, vol. 4, no. 1, Spring 1962, pp. 1. UBC Rare Books and Special Collections. ................................................................................... 72 Figure 37. Face of woman framed by apple blossoms, Beautiful British Columbia: Land of New Horizons, vol. 12, no. 2, 1970, pp. 2-3. UBC Rare Books and Special Collections. .................... 73 Figure 38. “Okanagan Grapes”, Beautiful British Columbia: Land of New Horizons, vol. 6. no. 2, 1964, pp. 22-23. UBC Rare Books and Special Collections. ....................................................... 76 Figure 39. Photograph from “Fruit of the Vine”. Beautiful British Columbia: Land of New Horizons, vol. 17, no. 2, 1975, pp. 36-37. UBC Rare Books and Special Collections. ................ 78 Figure 40. Photo of skiers. Beautiful British Columbia: Land of New Horizons, vol. 6, no. 3, 1964, pp. 2-3. UBC Rare Books and Special Collections. ........................................................... 81 xi Figure 41. “Boat Launching Sites”, Beautiful British Columbia: Land of New Horizons, vol. 1, no. 1, 1959, pp. 8-9. UBC Rare Books and Special Collections. ................................................. 82 Figure 42. “Summer Games”, Beautiful British Columbia: Land of New Horizons, vol. 20, no. 1, 1978, pp. 30-31. UBC Rare Books and Special Collections. ....................................................... 83 Figure 43. “Okanagan Oasis”, Beautiful British Columbia Magazine, vol. 21, no. 1, 1979, pp. 34-35. UBC Rare Books and Special Collections. ............................................................................. 84 Figure 44. Photo of golf course. Beautiful British Columbia Magazine, vol. 21, no. 1, 1979, pp. 42-43. UBC Rare Books and Special Collections. ....................................................................... 84 Figure 45. Changed design of magazine in Spring 1984 issue with Editor’s Notes and index of contents. Beautiful British Columbia Magazine, vol. 25, no. 4, 1984, pp. 2-3. UBC Rare Books and Special Collections. ................................................................................................................ 92 Figure 46. “Lakeside Vision”, Beautiful British Columbia Magazine, vol. 31, no. 4, 1989, pp. 36-37. UBC Rare Books and Special Collections. ............................................................................. 95 Figure 47. Contents page. Beautiful British Columbia Magazine, vol. 35, no.2, 1993, pp. 2-3. UBC Rare Books and Special Collections. ................................................................................. 104 Figure 48. Contents page. Beautiful British Columbia Magazine, vol. 35, no. 3, 1993, pp. 2-3. UBC Rare Books and Special Collections. ................................................................................. 104 Figure 49. Cover page with “Ours to Cherish” subtitle. Beautiful British Columbia: Ours to Cherish, vol. 37, no.1, 1995, pp. 1. UBC Rare Books and Special Collections. ........................ 106 Figure 50. Back cover with “Glimpses” frame. Beautiful British Columbia: Ours to Cherish, vol. 37, no. 1, 1995, pp. 48. UBC Rare Books and Special Collections. ........................................... 106 xii Acknowledgements There are so many people who I am grateful to for having been part of the journey of writing this thesis. I would like to first thank my supervisor Greg Garrard, who led me to an investigation of the Beautiful British Columbia magazines and has been a constant source of encouragement and guidance in my research and writing from day one. Many thanks also to all my committee members, David Geary, Erin James, and Lisa Grekul, who took the time to give me critical and valuable feedback and edits on my drafts. I am also grateful for the SSHRC CGS-M grant I received that allowed me to comfortably devote my focus to this research. I am grateful to all the friends who have been there with me through all the ups and downs of this process. Thanks to Morgan and Daniela, my friends, roommates, and fellows in my Masters journey for sharing in all the joys, stress, confusions, and struggles of this experience. Thanks to Disha for her warmth, generosity, and graceful presence in my life – she has been like an older sister to me. Thanks to Yazdan for reminding me of “whimsy and frolic” during the tougher parts of this thesis and being a great bestie. Thanks to Donya for being my study buddy and another lifeline through my last year in Canada. Thanks to Tom and Brian for their friendship and for cheering me on. I am grateful that Rina was my first friend and a constant support throughout my graduate student experience in Canada. I am also grateful to my first landlady in Kelowna, Balwinder, who helped me settle into the place smoothly and feel so at home in the first year. My friend, Pourvaja, from my undergraduate university, has seen me through two theses and graduations over multiple zoom support and work sessions and I so am grateful for her continued support and friendship. Harshitha has been a constant friend of mine ever since we were little more than babies, and I am so fortunate to have had her around at the last stage of this journey to help me through defense preparation. Lastly, I could not have gotten through this project without the solid backing of my family. My xiii parents, Chandrika and Alok, made the time even through a very busy phase of their lives to read my drafts, encourage me in my writing, and listen to me practice my presentation. My sister, Ruchi, has been the best moral and emotional support throughout my master’s and through life. xiv Dedication I dedicate this thesis to the Indigenous Syilx people of the Okanagan and all those who are engaged in reimagining better ways of feeling, living, and relating with this world. 1 Chapter 1: Introduction When walking the streets of Kelowna, a town in the Okanagan region of interior British Columbia in western Canada, you are sure to see images of the cover pages of vintage volumes of the Beautiful British Columbia magazine on several colourfully decorated utility boxes. These images are usually placed against various backgrounds of bountiful fruit image prints showcasing apples, grapes, peaches, and cherries that the Okanagan Valley is well known for. Figure 1. Utility boxes in Kelowna with Beautiful British Columbia covers (Photos by Chhavi Mathur) These images were introduced onto the streetscapes of Kelowna in 2012 when the City of Kelowna partnered with BC Tourism to use these magazine cover images on anti-graffiti wraps across the city. In a Facebook post dated 8th August 2012, the British Columbia Magazine (the new name of Beautiful British Columbia) page announced that “BC Magazine is working with the City of Kelowna to have nostalgic BC Magazine covers put on their utility boxes. The City of Kelowna has installed 20 boxes and expects to outfit a total of 100 boxes when the project is complete. There will be a mix and match of covers spanning 1960-1980s” (BC Magazine). Beautiful British 2 Columbia was a quarterly magazine started by the BC government in 1959 to promote tourism and publicize the region to potential visitors and potential settlers alike. It rapidly rose to immense popularity among local as well as global readers over the next two decades and issues of the magazine from the 1960s to early 1980s continue to be remembered as the classic and iconic phase of the magazine. While the old magazine covers chosen for the utility boxes in present-day Kelowna feature images from different parts of the vast province, many of these prominently display the Okanagan landscape. As a resident or visitor walking on the streets of Kelowna, this gives you a double view of the landscape. One, through your immediate vision as your eyes take in buildings and roads, people and cars, and from some places, the Okanagan lakeshore as well as the hills surrounding the valley. The other appears through these magazine images of the British Columbian and Okanagan landscape from the 1960s-80s, that wrap and disguise utility boxes across most central streets. When these images were first published in the magazine in the 1960s-80s, they would have attracted many tourists from elsewhere to visit places like Kelowna. Their presence on the utility boxes of Kelowna today, as BC Magazine’s Facebook post suggests, projects back onto the landscape an attractively displayed and nostalgic version of itself, selling these past images as stamps of the desirability of this landscape to its present-day residents. This memorialization of the magazine covers from the 1960s-80s also reaffirms these representations of the Okanagan and British Columbian landscape as forming the ‘authentic’ and ‘natural’ image of what the landscape is, both in past memory and in the present. In The Culture of Nature: North American Landscape from Disney to Exxon Valdez (1991), a study of the environmental cultures of North America, Alexander Wilson emphasizes the point that what is sold to us as natural is “always mediated. It is always shaped by rhetorical constructs 3 like photography, industry, advertising, and aesthetics, as well as institutions like religion, tourism, and education” (Wilson 12). In my thesis, I will be examining the ways in which the narratives and images around the Okanagan have emerged to shape the particular environmental cultures of the place. Specifically, I focus on the role of the popular and influential Beautiful British Columbia magazine – a historical and cultural artefact that is of key significance to the province of British Columbia as well as the Okanagan region – in constructing the settler colonial images, aesthetics, and narratives that have come to define as well as influence the material shaping of the Okanagan through the last century and beyond. This research is situated within the wider “Kelownafornia” research project on the Okanagan Valley. The title for the “Kelownafornia” project was inspired by the name of a rap video from 2011 by a Kelowna local artist Dollah D, which draws a comparison between Kelowna and California as places of prosperity, sunshine, and endless parties (Whitehouse)1. The research project aims to understand how the “Kelownafornia” myth of the Okanagan Valley has been constructed and how it interacts with, responds to, and overwrites its climate and biogeography. Beyond this it also aims to explore patterns of nature-culture interactions of the cross-border Okanagan/Okanogan watershed as a case study in the intersection of geopolitics, landscape aesthetics, and environmental discourse. 1 Link to “Kelownafornia” rap video by Dollah D: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dj0kWQPPBis&t=229s&ab_channel=TacticsEntertainment. 4 The Canadian Okanagan is part of a larger bioregion that extends across the United States/Canada border into Washington state (where it is known as the Okanogan). Despite being a part of a contiguous bio-geographical region, the Okanagan and Okanogan have come to develop vastly different characters. The Okanagan is considered one of the most unique biomes of Canada due to its arid/semi-arid landscape, with stretches of shrub-steppe grassland. that stands in contrast to the forest, mountain, prairie, and tundra landscapes the country is more well known for. On the US side of the border, on the other hand, the Okanogan is not accorded the status of a particularly rare or special habitat. The Okanagan has also grown to have strong cultural significance to the British Columbian landscape and is a prized agricultural, tourism and wine-growing region in Canada. The Okanogan by contrast, is not well known beyond its own geographical limits and does not carry the same sense of distinctive place-identity in the US. While there are some orchards and wineries in Okanogan, these are only a small handful and are not even half as well known as those in the British Columbian Okanagan, despite the growing conditions and varieties being much the same (Walton). The 2020 census indicates that the Okanogan County has a total population of 42,369 with the largest city, Omak, having a population of 4,752 (“Demographics”). Compared to this modest settlement, the largest city in the Okanagan, Kelowna, is around 150,000 and fast growing (“City Profile”). Kelowna is located in the Central Okanagan which has a total population of more than 222,000 people (“Living Here”). The two other main districts of the region are North Okanagan, with a population of 91,610 (“Our Communities”) and the Okanagan Similkameen, with a population of 90,178 (“2021 Census of Population”). This contrast draws attention to the divergent developmental and cultural trajectories of these two geographically contiguous yet politically divided regions. 5 In the summer of 2023 in July, I had the firsthand experience of driving across the US/Canada border along with other members of the “Kelownafornia” research team headed by supervisor Dr. Greg Garrard. We were heading from Kelowna to Portland, Oregon and our route took us from the densely settled Okanagan in British Columbia to the Okanogan in Washington State. As we left Canada the view gradually shifted from rows of orchards and wineries to give way to vast uninterrupted stretches of sparsely populated shrub-steppe grasslands on the other side of the border. Despite being part of a contiguous bioregion and habitat, the difference in character of the Okanagan and Okanogan landscapes was starkly visible. Around two years prior to this road journey I had made a far longer journey in the Fall of 2021 when I came for the first time to not only the Okanagan Valley but also to Canada. I grew up in South India, a long way across the world from the Okanagan. This journey brought me into encounter with landscapes and cultures that were quite unfamiliar to me. While I had relatives living in the Eastern provinces from whom I had heard of cities like Ottawa and Toronto, I had almost no prior knowledge of this region of Canada. Most people I knew back home in India had never heard of the Okanagan Valley before and knew of Canada mainly as ‘that very cold place’! From my relatives in Canada, on the other hand, I got the reassurance that of all the provinces of Canada, British Columbia had the best climate and while none of them had personally visited the Okanagan, they had heard that it was a particularly beautiful place. After a long and nonstop fourteen-hour flight, Vancouver was a blur of rain and travel fatigue. My eyes were, however, wide open through the next phase of my journey by bus to the Okanagan Valley, as they took in the completely new landscape of late fall in British Columbia. In the six-to-eight-hour journey along the Coquihalla Highway, my bus window framed several scenes of stunning beauty formed by the snow-capped mountains, glittering lakes, and forested 6 slopes of deep green and auburn-golden hues that passed by. While I had been on similarly long bus journeys in India, through varied and beautiful landscapes, this experience felt quite different. Apart from a mid-journey stopover at a town called Merritt – of which I only recall a Burger King and convenience store complex attached to a large parking lot – the route seemed to go along endlessly vast and uninhabited stretches of land with barely any signs of human activity. Yet, the highway itself was a flurry of action and held my fascination as much, if not more, than the beauty of the surrounding landscape. I had never seen so many strange and varied vehicles of different shapes and sizes and found myself taking pictures of these to send back to friends as one might at a zoo. There were, of course, the usual cars, but also cars with bikes or boats attached, pickup trucks, trailers, trucks that seemed the length of train compartments, and even entire houses being carried on wheels – to my new eyes these seemed very much like some strange and exotic beasts. As in my case, the process of getting to know a place can start much before the actual encounter with it. As I searched for and applied to graduate programs, I simultaneously scoured the internet for photographs of the places and cities I was looking at to conjure images of my potential futures. Searches for “Kelowna” and “Okanagan Valley” on Google Images brought up many views of green fields, brilliant blue lakes and, what was for me the most attractive, striking hills and mountains, all tinted golden by the light of a streaming summer sun (interestingly, none of the pictures seemed to show Kelowna in the winter!). My home in India was a valley in a rural, semi-arid region of Andhra Pradesh (a state in South India), and I was surrounded by hills with striking granitic and basalt rock formations. I had missed and yearned for this landscape of home in my four years away from the valley when I studied at a university located near the capital city of Delhi in the flat plains landscape of this region of North India. Somehow seeing the hills in the 7 photographs of the Okanagan immediately comforted me, giving me a strange and not entirely reasonable sense of kinship and warmth towards this distant place. Figure 2. “Okanagan Valley”, Hello BC, www.hellobc.com/places-to-go/okanagan-valley/. Figure 3. “Kelowna”, Hello BC, www.hellobc.com/places-to-go/kelowna/. 8 On some of my early walks around Kelowna, I marvelled at how similar the stark and bold aesthetics of this landscape and vegetation were to parts of the landscape of my home in India, while at the same time also feeling strange in many of its details – the plants, the birds and animals, the insects, colours, sounds, feel of the wind and of course, the temperature were all very different. While both places experienced low levels of precipitation, water scarcity was less obviously visible to me in the Okanagan, due to the presence of many large perennial water bodies in the valley, most prominent being the Okanagan Lake. In the small valley I came from, I had walked with ease almost everywhere and could feel, therefore, as though the landscape were imprinted on my body. Inhabiting the much bigger Okanagan Valley was a different experience. As a graduate student who did not own any vehicle, I was soon made painfully aware of the limitations Kelowna faced in its design for walkability and public transit system, the very two means of transport I relied on primarily, to get around. Mobility in and around Kelowna was very dependent on private vehicles that plied the road networks of the city and highways cutting through it. Moreover, most of the beautiful hill and forest landscapes surrounding Kelowna and the Okanagan Valley were accessible only by means of private transport, as the bus routes did not extend beyond the town limits. Going on walks here was much more of an event, requiring much planning and coordination with others who had the vehicles to transport people to the edges of the town. Strange as these had seemed to me at first, a few weeks of being in Kelowna also quickly acclimatized me to the sight of the many assorted cars, trucks, and Recreational Vehicles (RVs) on the road or parked outside houses. These experiences of moving to and learning a new place through the multiple refractions of images, social interactions, modes of access to landscapes, as well as the layered sediments and memories of other landscapes already existing within my body and mind, has come to inform my 9 research into the ways in which cultures and material environments are entangled and shape each other. The choice of closely studying the Beautiful British Columbia magazine emerged from preliminary discussions with my supervisor Greg on the scope of my research which was initially to focus on literary and artistic representations of the Okanagan landscape. During our conversations, he also mentioned the Beautiful British Columbia cover images on Kelowna’s utility boxes which had immediately caught his attention and intrigued him. These were very familiar and nostalgic for him as he recalled seeing them in his family homes while growing up in multiple different countries outside of Canada during the 1980s. Greg’s mother was from British Columbia and his parents undoubtedly had an ongoing subscription to the magazine. From the magazine and what he had heard from friends and family, he had carried impressions of the Okanagan as being a green, lush, and beautiful landscape prior to making the move to Kelowna in 2013. Coming from the UK and its verdant green rolling landscape, he was surprised to find the Okanagan to be a much more dry and stark landscape in contrast2. This catalyzed the seeding of the “Kelownafornia” project which considers the different ways and contexts in which cultural ecologies and landscape aesthetics are influenced. He then suggested that if I could locate the magazine’s archives it could serve as a rich source for uncovering the layers of narratives that have 2 This is from personal conversations with Greg and a part of this story can also be found in this YouTube video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iYhOU1PDoCM&ab_channel=UBCOkanaganKelownaforniaProject 10 shaped the Okanagan region of Canada. I found that the magazine’s archives, while not available digitally, were housed at the University of British Columbia Vancouver’s Rare Books and Special Collections. My exploratory visit to this archive motivated a shift in the direction of my research which came to focus on the available print archive of the Beautiful British Columbia magazine from 1959-2002. As I discovered while scouring through the archives, the magazine was initially established in 1959 by the provincial government of British Columbia and remained a provincially funded publication until 1983. During this time, it was shuffled between different departments, as it was first under the department of Recreation and Conservation, then moved to the department of Travel Industry with the Fall 1967 issue and was finally produced under a consolidated Ministry of Tourism from the Spring 1979 issue. By the end of 1983 it was sold to the private Jim Pattison company. It was sold back to Tourism BC in 2001, after which the trademark word “Beautiful” was dropped from the title to make it simply British Columbia Magazine. It is currently owned by another private company, the OP Media Group. The issues selected to appear on the utility boxes are, however, from the magazine’s early government funded phase as Beautiful British Columbia: Land of New Horizons, which has the most distinct, iconic, and recognizable design. This was also when the magazine was most popular, with a widespread local as well as global readership. The quality of production with a full colour print and geographical spread of readership was at this time quite rare and expensive, putting it in the company of magazines such as Time Magazine, National Geographic, or Newsweek. By 1973, there were 253,920 subscribers to the magazine. Of these, Canadians received 110,937 copies, US residents received 50,096, while the rest were delivered to overseas mailing addresses across 72 countries (“Greetings” 47). 11 In itself, “Beautiful British Columbia” is a somewhat vague and abstract phrase and beyond the allure of alliteration, it does not seem to describe any particularly unique or definitive character of place. This might be explained by the fact that most of the territory of British Columbia had been very fragmented until very recently. Because of their dramatic mountainous topography many of the interior regions were especially isolated and, as a result, far less populated and developed than the coastal areas like Vancouver. As such, there was not much geographical, political, or cultural cohesion across the vast and varied landscapes of British Columbia. According to the historian Jean Barman, it was only during the period of peace and prosperity in the 1950s, after the two World Wars and the Great Depression, that efforts to integrate the interior regions and develop these economically took off in a major way. Beautiful British Columbia emerged within this context at the end of the 1950s. Its subtitle, “the land of new horizons” also seems to allude to this pioneering spirit of “enterprise” and of crossing previously insurmountable boundaries into the “new” territories of the previously unexploited interior regions of the province. “Beautiful British Columbia” was subsequently taken up as the slogan for all license plates in the province and is still seen everywhere on the road. It is also a precursor to the other popular tourism campaign slogan of the province – “Super, Natural, British Columbia” – which also appeared on license plates. Literature Review The Beautiful British Columbia magazine archives of issues between the years 1959-2002 are the primary source material for this research. Michael Dawson’s history of the tourism industry in British Columbia, Selling British Columbia: Tourism and Consumer Culture, 1890-1970 (2004) provides a background to the economic and political context of this publication. Dawson alludes 12 to the importance of Beautiful British Columbia in creating the popular image and culture of the province, especially interior regions such as the Okanagan: “The needs of British Columbia’s more remote communities were similarly served by the establishment of Beautiful British Columbia magazine in 1959. Under the direction of the BCGTB [British Columbia Government Travel Bureau], this attractive colour magazine quickly gained a popular following in Canada and abroad” (Dawson 195). Despite the importance of Dawson’s book on the history of tourism in British Columbia, there has not been a close examination of the evolution of the magazine as well as a critical reading of the narratives and images of place that it presents. With this research, I hope to begin to fill that gap. Several books and studies in the fields of ecocriticism, environmental history, and historical materialism have laid the background for the approach I have taken for research on the environmental cultures in the Okanagan. This ecocritical approach derives from the historical materialism of Raymond Williams, which highlights the underlying material and economic basis of social and cultural institutions and processes. Williams, in The Country and the City (1975), emphasizes the ecological bent of this analytical approach. Through his combined sociological and environmental critique of different constructions of “nature”, he calls to attention the mutual entanglement of the textual, social, and material. Kate Soper’s book What Is Nature? Culture, Politics, and the Non-Human (1998) also carries forward this approach in exploring the social and political enmeshments in different conceptions of nature. Timothy Morton’s Ecology without Nature: rethinking environmental aesthetics (2009) also places pressure on the concept of “nature” and attempts to open ecocriticism to the reading of all cultural artefacts rather than only very explicitly “environmental art” or “nature writing”. My research attempts to examine a case study of how cultural artefacts participate in the making of environmental cultures from within the 13 specific historical, social, political, and economic contexts they are embedded in by enacting an ecocritical reading, through both textual and visual analysis of the Beautiful British Columbia magazine. Alexander Wilson’s book The Culture of Nature: North American Landscape from Disney to the Exxon Valdez is an important example of a broader scope cultural history of North American conceptions of nature. Whereas Wilson’s study spans a vast geography, covering the entire continent of North America in its examination of the relationship between nature and culture across both US and Canada, my research on the Beautiful British Columbia magazine’s role in constructing the image of the Okanagan Valley within the larger narrative of the province of British Columbia, has a more specific regional focus. This lends itself to a more localized and textured examination of the culturally and materially entangled modes of making a place, while placing it within the broader web of ecocultural landscapes uncovered by Wilson and others. Jean Barman’s historical account of the making of British Columbia, The West Beyond West: A History of British Columbia (2007), serves as a crucial grounding for my research. For more local environmental and cultural histories of the Okanagan I draw significantly on two articles, John Wagner’s “Landscape Aesthetics, Water, and Settler Colonialism in the Okanagan Valley of British Columbia” (2008) and Jason Patrick Bennett’s “Apple of the Empire: Landscape and Imperial Identity in Turn-of-the-Century British Columbia” (2006). John Wagner’s article raises one of the central questions this research aims to explore by pointing to the key role of ‘landscape aesthetics’ in settler colonial transformation of the material ecologies of the Okanagan Valley. Through a sustained and close reading of the popular Beautiful British Columbia magazine, particularly during its government-funded era between 1959-1983, I examine a crucial aspect of 14 the cultural making of landscape aesthetics that frame the Okanagan and comment on the material impact this had had. Summary of Chapters While my thesis is interested in closely understanding the Beautiful British Columbia magazine’s role in the making of a regional environmental culture and landscape aesthetic of the Okanagan, it situates this within the broader narratives of place surrounding the province of British Columbia. The structure of my thesis, therefore, begins with this broader scope in the first chapter, narrowing in on the representations of Okanagan in the second, before zooming out again to look at the evolution of the magazine through subsequent phases of its publication as well as a shifting context of political and environmental discourse. British Columbia’s expanding road and highway networks into the interior feature prominently in the magazine, especially in volumes from the 1960s and early 1970s. Chapter One of my thesis explores the link between ‘road culture’ and the idea and aesthetics that unify and make the place identity of the province as “Beautiful British Columbia”. Initially, I situate the evolution of road tourism in British Columbia within a broader examination of North American cultural narratives around roads, contrasting these with the place occupied by railways in cultural imaginations constructed in different geographical settings and time periods. I then move into a closer analysis of the narratives the magazine builds around roads and highways to frame and characterize the aesthetic imagination of British Columbia, and particularly the emerging importance of the interior landscapes of the province such as the Okanagan. Chapter Two performs a closer examination of the magazine’s participation in the construction of a settler colonial landscape aesthetic of the Okanagan Valley that has shaped 15 several transformations and ongoing colonization of the landscape. In it, I trace the history of the promotion of white colonial settlement, and with that the displacement of the Indigenous Syilx people in the Okanagan, through its construction of the region as a paradise of leisure and abundance that invites select populations to occupy and re-shape the land. I further analyze the way in which the magazine draws on White Christian imaginations of the “Garden of Eden”, “four season playground”, and an “oasis” to center an idealized image and narrative of the Okanagan. I also attempt to uncover the frictions and contradictions between the idealized landscape aesthetic of the Okanagan and the actual affordances of the environment. I close this chapter by reflecting on alternative Indigenous imaginations of the environment that are indicative of quite a different way of relating to the place. Chapter Three traces the evolution of the magazine beyond its original and classic phase as a government publication in the 1960s and 1970s, looking at the period when it was owned by the private Jim Pattison Group between 1984 to 2001. It examines not only the continuities and divergences in the magazine’s representations of the Okanagan Valley, but also the shifts in its overall character, politics, and agenda. The chapter follows the reinvention of the publication between the 1980s and 1990s, an era of increased public environmental awareness, and how it changed from a tourism magazine to a more journalistic and environmentally driven magazine. Tied to this, it also focuses on how the changing environmental politics of the magazine impacted and framed increased representation of Indigenous First Nation communities. Finally, it interrogates ways in which this privatized phase of the magazine carries over and perpetuates in new ways the older commercial and settler driven colonial agendas present in the earlier phase of the magazine. 16 Chapter 2: British Columbia as a “Road-scape” While going through the archive of the Beautiful British Columbia magazines what immediately fascinated, amused, and somewhat puzzled me was how much roads and highways seem to feature in the magazine. They were not merely mentioned by way of route maps to different places but were also frequently the main subject of full-length articles, which were usually dedicated to the promotion and celebration of a particular highway. Visually too, the magazine was replete with scenic photographs of different roads cutting through or framing diverse British Columbian landscapes. Growing up outside the North American context, I had never really given a second thought to the roads and highways I had travelled by in India. Roads served a functional purpose in India, but travel routes were more often remembered by the names of towns and villages that were passed along the way and I would be hard-pressed to name even one important Indian highway or Figure 4. Cover image of a road through mountains. Beautiful British Columbia: The Land of New Horizons, vol. 2, no.3, 1960, pp.1. UBC Rare Books and Special Collections. 17 interstate road, let alone recall them by number. For this reason, I found it particularly intriguing coming across articles like “Roger’s Pass: North America’s Wonder Road” (from 1962) or “Curses? Anarchists? That’s Highway 3” (from 1978). Firstly, such titles indicated that these roads and highways were widely recognized and referred to by their specific names or numbers. Moreover, they also seemed to suggest that these roads and highways each had a sort of individual personality that went beyond just the landscapes and places they took travellers through and to. These roads were clearly culturally significant objects in their own right, enough so to be prominently featured in a magazine intended to promote tourism. Quite significantly, beyond being just the title of the magazine, the phrase “Beautiful British Columbia” also came to have a ubiquitous presence in every corner of the province since 1964, when it was made the official slogan on BC car license plates. This suggests that the particular “beauty” which was constructed during this phase of the magazine and the province’s history appears to have been closely tied to narratives of driving, and the culture of cars and the roads pictured in the magazine’s landscape photographs were central to this. Moreover, the Beautiful British Columbia magazine, in constructing an identity, narrative and aesthetic discourse around the province of British Columbia, played a key role in making roads and road-culture integral to the beauty of the region. This led me to explore the ways in which ‘roads’ and the ‘automobile culture’ of North America, as reflected in various genres of popular culture, came to be a significant element in the fabric that fashioned the contemporary landscape, culture, and imagination of British Columbia as a unified regional province of Canada. The representation of roads in the magazine may be viewed as an important example and piece of its participation in a larger political and cultural enterprise that sought to shape the collective imagination of a region with an accompanying re-shaping of its material landscapes. 18 Road Culture in North America The twentieth century in North America has been described by many as the “Automobile Age” and Ben Bradley notes in British Columbia by the Road: Car Culture and Making of a Modern Landscape (2017), that from the 1920s onwards, the state of a province’s road network came to be “interpreted as a barometer of its modernity” (Bradley 3). During this period, displacing the erstwhile centrality of rail transport, roads and cars also took over the North American cultural imagination with the emergence of distinctive genres of books, movies, and music centered around the idea of being on the road. A famous literary example is Jack Kerouac’s 1957 novel On the Road, which has been called the “supreme American Romance” and was highly influential in the 1960s counterculture movement in the US (McCrum). Similarly, the movie Easy Rider, which came out in 1969 and followed two Harley-riding white men travelling cross-country in search of freedom, also tapped into the rebellious and nonconformist sentiment of the counterculture movement in America (Bramesco). Songs about cars and driving proliferated with famous examples like “Roadhouse Blues” (1970) by The Doors or “Born to be Wild” (1968) by Steppenwolf. The lyrics of another song, “I’m in Love with My Car” (1975), by the band Queen, suggest not only the aesthetic, but also romantic, and even sexual appeal of the car and road: “I'm in love with my car/ Got a feel for my automobile/ Get a grip on my boy-racer rollbar/ Such a thrill when your radials squeal” (Queen 0:55-1:14). The genre of rock ‘n’ roll music which emerged in the 1960s was not only influenced lyrically by the imagery of roads and cars, but also by the sounds of the road which entered the modern, motor-machine-like soundscape of rock music that evolved further into heavy metal. The image of the open road came to symbolize modern America and its ideals of progress and freedom. 19 In “Romancing the Road: Road Movies and Images of Mobility” (1995), Ron Eyerman and Orvar Löfgren talk about the way in which the history of the road and its cultural resonances form an essential element of what is called the “American Dream” (55). The American Dream was tied to the narrative of progress and freedom conjured by the cultural imagination of the road. This imagination of the road and its evocation of the American Dream was not for all Americans equally, as it almost exclusively centered on the figure of white masculinity. Most road-trip novels and movies followed the gendered trope of an individual hero or male buddies out in the open outdoors in a quest for meaning that largely excluded women in their lives, who were left behind as part of the domestic scene. There were some exceptions to this, such as the adventures of the criminal couple in Bonnie and Clyde (1967) and later, Thelma and Louise (1991), which overturned the male buddy trope by following a female duo out on the road instead. Racially too, the road was not presented as a space for everyone as Eyerman and Löfgren note that the road was an “unsafe and unwelcome environment” for African Americans of both poor as well as more well-to-do classes. In much of African-American blues music, therefore, it was the train and not the automobile that symbolized hope for a new and better life (Eyerman and Löfgren 55) and road-centric themes in blues music more often brought out the “pain and grief of those on the road” (Slethaug 1). However, for the white majority who determined the dominant narrative, cars “came to symbolize the modern dream of mobility, and it was not the rhythm of rails, but the sound of rubber on asphalt that set the mind to hummin’ freedom’s song” (Eyerman and Löfgren 55). These cultural road texts have most prominently come out of the United States, but Canada too has its own road/highway mythologies, albeit ones that are heavily influenced by the image and idea of the “American road/highway”. In West/Border/Road: Nation and Genre in Contemporary Canadian Narrative (2018), Katherine Ann Roberts analyzes the asymmetrical 20 relationship and entanglement of Canadian and American cultures, focusing on the road narrative as one of the quintessential American genres that has also come to define Canadian culture in its appropriated and reworked forms (Roberts 12). Roberts focuses attention on road film narratives from Quebec such as Louise Belanger’s Route 132 (2010) and Robin Aubert’s A l’origine du cri/Crying Out (2010) (233). There are, however, more examples of road movies from across Canada such as Bruce McDonald’s 1992 Highway 61, a movie which starts in Pickerel Falls, Ontario (Gittings 154), or Goin’ Down the Road (1970), in which the main characters drive from rural Nova Scotia to Toronto (Gittings 158). My American Cousin is a 1985 Canadian film and a rare example of a movie made and set right in the Okanagan Valley of BC in the 1950s, the period during which the Beautiful British Columbia magazine also emerged. A review of the movie by Nina Darnton in The New York Times from 1986 gives the following synopsis of the movie: The first feature by the writer-director Sandy Wilson, it is a nostalgic reminiscence of growing up on a ranch in British Columbia in 1959. The story chronicles the summer awakening of 12-year-old Sandy Wilcox after her flashy American cousin Butch hits town in his red Cadillac convertible and provides a focus for her restlessness, fantasies and vague yearnings. (Darnton) The poster for the movie (see figure 5) centers not only the titular “American cousin”, but also his red Cadillac which is an important object in the movie. The attraction and glamour of the American cousin Butch is shown in the movie to be closely tied to this car. For instance, in one scene where Butch takes Sandy and her friend on a drive and engages in flirting with her friend Lizzy, the conversation is exclusively focused on the car, with Lizzy first commenting “Gee this 21 is a beautiful car, it’s so snazzy” (My American Cousin 43:38-43:42) and later exclaiming “I’ve never gone so fast in all my life!” (My American Cousin 43:44). This dialogue reflects Canadian desires and aspirations towards the sleek and thrilling modernity that American road and car culture symbolizes. Figure 5. Poster of My American Cousin (1985). IMDB, www.imdb.com/title/tt0089647. Numerous photographs in Beautiful British Columbia also participate in the making of a visual culture bound to a road-centric aesthetic, one that invites the reader’s imagination to traverse new frontiers of the region. In the introduction to The Road Movie Book (1997), Steven Cohen and Ina Rae Hark say that “the road has always been a persistent theme of American culture” (Cohan and Hark 1) by tracing the continuity of American road travel narratives in the post World War era to the foundational frontier mythology of the nation: “Forging a travel narrative out of a particular conjunction of plot and setting that sets the liberation of the road against the oppression 22 of hegemonic norms, road movies project American Western mythology onto the landscape traversed and bound by the nation’s highways” (Cohan and Hark 1). As can be seen from several images of roads leading into the far horizon in issues of Beautiful British Columbia (see the cover image of an issue in figure 4), the American frontier is not the only image of the frontier. Roberts asserts that “[t]o have a Canadian point of view is to be “on the frontier,” to be “above America but part of America, to have to cross frontiers”” (Roberts 13). This Canadian, and more specifically British Columbian spirit of the frontier is captured in the magazine’s subtitle “The Land of New Horizons”. This is a frontier beyond other frontiers, a land of new horizons, yet unexplored but being opened and conquered by the shiny new roads that now frame and make familiar and accessible these wild new landscapes. Train vs. Road Tourism in Two Cultures Images of landscape such as the magazine cover in figure 4 show roads as a seamless and almost natural element of the environment and indeed, the road mythologies of North America present roads almost as a foundational element of culture as well. Yet, the centrality of roads to infrastructure and culture in North America was not simply an inevitable product of modern industrial progress. This is made apparent by looking at post-modern cultural contexts in other parts of the world such as India. In contrast with road mythologies of North America, the railways always had a much greater hold on my cultural imagination. From their inception in colonial times to the modern India of today, the Indian Railways have been the most popular mode of mass transit. There is also a surfeit of train imagery and motifs that appear and recur in Indian popular culture, particularly in Indian cinema, which is as “mass” and popular a means of entertainment in India as railways is for transportation. 23 The romance of the railways is quite literal in many Indian movies, as trains often feature as a public site facilitating intimate, romantic, and sometimes transgressive encounters between strangers. In the 1972 classic Pakeezah (trans. The Pure One) the pivotal scene is set in a train (it is also the only scene I have a memory of), where a man accidentally enters the compartment of a sleeping courtesan and struck by the beauty of her feet, leaves her an anonymous note before leaving, leading to her fixation on this unknown and unseen stranger, for the rest of the movie (Pakeezah). The romance in one of the first mega-blockbuster hit movies of 1990s Bollywood, Dilwale Dulhaniya Le Jayenge (trans. The Bravehearted Will Take the Bride) or DDLJ, not only starts with an encounter on the Euro-rail but also reaches its climactic resolution by returning to the scene of a train, this time in India, with the heroine running down a railway platform to join hands with the hero as his train leaves the station (Dilwale Dulhaniya Le Jayenge). Later movies, such as the 2007 Jab We Met (trans. When We Met) and Chennai Express (2013) have also recreated and paid tribute to the iconic train sequence in DDLJ (Jab We Met; Chennai Express). Among South Indian films, one famous example of a train romance scene appears in the 2008 Tamil movie, Vaaranam Aayiram (trans. Thousand Elephants) (Vaaranam Aayiram). The impact of these train scenes came home to me in one conversation with a friend from Tamil Nadu, when he recounted how watching Vaaranam Aayiram shaped the fantasies of him and many other college boys in Chennai, changing their experience of train journeys – after this movie, they would often travel on trains with the hope that this may lead to a fateful encounter with some girl to spark their own love story! 24 Figure 6. Kajol and Shah Rukh Khan (names of actors) in the DDLJ train chase climax. “DDLJ and CHENNAI EXPRESS Train Scenes”, www.youtube.com/watch?v=qPVijZzUOaI&ab_channel=VishwaVenkule. Figure 7. Deepika Padukone and Shah Rukh Khan in Chennai Express in a scene that references the DDLJ train scene. “DDLJ and CHENNAI EXPRESS Train Scenes”, www.youtube.com/watch?v=qPVijZzUOaI&ab_channel=VishwaVenkule. 25 Through this connection to romance, the train also symbolized a space of transgressive freedom that challenged the status quo by allowing the formation of bonds outside of the limits governed by patriarchal orthodoxy and caste and religious boundaries. Yet this freedom is markedly different from the freedom of the road, as it is tied to the space of the public, as opposed Figure 8. Shahid Kapoor and Kareena Kapoor in train chase scene from Jab We Me. “Jab We Met”, Shemaroo, www.youtube.com/watch?v=jf2gOSORoqU&ab_channel=Shemaroo. Figure 9. Surya and Sameera Reddy meet on the train in Vaaranam Aayiram. “Vaaranam Aayiram - Train Scene”, www.youtube.com/watch?v=sCvLOTLPivE&t=250s&ab_channel=UnitedIndiaExporters. 26 to the private, insulated space of the car. In The Culture of Nature, Wilson claims that “driving is a private exercise, whether done alone or with company” (38). He goes on to describes the way in which car technology is enmeshed with the North American psyche of individualism that is tied to the frontier romance: The individual hero on the road, pushing back the frontiers and discovering this land for “himself”: this myth has a long and bloody history, particularly in American culture, and the car continues to play a part in it. It’s hard to imagine a technology that better discourages communal activity and an egalitarian experience of the non-human world. (Wilson 38) Unlike the romance of railways, which is centered on desire across the boundaries of community, in the romance of the road it is the landscape which becomes the object of a private and individualized desire. Road-oriented tourism is also, it could be argued, a channelling of this private desire to consume vast and empty landscapes. This can be witnessed in Beautiful British Columbia where a large number of photographs (figures 10-12 are examples of this) present the image of a single car on a road that is framed seamlessly to appear a natural part of an otherwise unpeopled, and therefore “wild” landscape. These photos have the effect of attracting an identification of the reader/potential tourist with this figure of an individual car driver who could partake of a seemingly unmediated experience of nature in isolation and privacy. The cars are themselves quite anonymous and non-descript. In this way, these photographs diverge from some of the surrounding North American pop culture of the time, as the object of the car is itself not fetishized and seems to serve as a mere placeholder for the experience of the road as essential to and completing the landscape. 27 Figure 10. Single orange car on Trans-Canada Highway. Beautiful British Columbia: Land of New Horizons, vol. 2, no. 4, 1961, pp. 44-45. UBC Rare Books and Special Collections. Figure 11. Car on Highway through Kootenay Park. Beautiful British Columbia: Land of New Horizons, vol. 3, no. 1, 1962, pp. 44-45. UBC Rare Books and Special Collections. 28 Figure 12. Car on Rogers Pass near Revelstoke. Beautiful British Columbia: Land of New Horizons, vol. 4, no. 1, 1963, pp. 44. UBC Rare Books and Special Collections. Where roads were central to North American tourist imaginations, as the name Indian Railways Catering and Tourism Corporation (IRCTC) suggests, the railways also played an important role in building the touristic imagination of India. The Indian Railways carries the tagline of “Lifeline to the Nation” on its official website, suggesting its essential place in the idea of India. It also claims to be “the prime mode of transport for all kinds of tourists from both domestic and international sector” (“Rail Tourism”, Indian Railways). Apart from the regular Indian passenger trains, a 2013 paper by David Geary also discusses how most tourism-oriented investments into transportation within India have been directed towards railways infrastructure, such as the Buddhist pilgrimage circuit and a number of luxury tourist trains (Geary 42). Wes 29 Anderson’s film, The Darjeeling Limited (2007), also takes inspiration from such luxury trains for its own fictional train journey which serves as the frame for the story of three American brothers travelling India and having all sorts of strange, whacky, and spiritual adventures through their encounters with the place, peoples, and cultures (Laing and Frost 25). While different natural landscapes are a part of these encounters, they do not take centerstage in the way the North American landscape viewed from a car does. This may be because India’s tourist appeal taps into the idea of an old civilization, so the landscape is incorporated into a wider social, cultural, and historical fabric, as opposed to the “new” and “empty” landscapes that power the western mythology of the American frontier landscapes. By the time Beautiful British Columbia was in publication, starting in the 1950s, the space of the train in the British Columbian cultural imaginary appears to have been pushed to the margins. Their representation in the magazine is miniscule when compared to ubiquitous presence of “road-scape” photographs and articles on highways in the magazine. Where they do appear, railways and trains are presented as the image of the exception, something novel, or a relic of the past. In the article, “They come by road, by rail…And they come by sea”, for instance, the train is offered as an alternate mode of travel to what is the norm, as the caption to a photograph of a train (see figure 13) says “in the face of increased highway traffic many are now turning to rail transportation for a more relaxed holiday” (“British Columbia...Transportation Hub of the West” 34). 30 Figure 13. The caption to this image of a train says “In the face of increased highway traffic many are now turning to rail transportation for a more relaxed holiday. Shown in this photograph is a Canadian National Railway passenger train following the canyon of the mighty Fraser River into Vancouver”. Beautiful British Columbia: Land of New Horizons, vol. 2, no. 3, 1960, pp. 34. UBC Rare Books and Special Collections. Another article on “Railroadin’” (see figure 14) introduces the image of the train as something “[g]hosting out of yesterday in ungainly silhouette”. While it refers to newer modern trains, these too are relegated to become “tomorrow’s ghosts”. Two other articles on trains are titled “Once Upon a Train…” and “Museum Train”, suggesting that trains now only had a historical value of interest for the province and were not seen as defining the present moment in quite the same way. 31 Figure 14. Photograph of train silhouette in “Railroadin’”. Beautiful British Columbia: Land of New Horizons, vol. 11, no. 3, 1969, pp. 30-31. UBC Rare Books and Special Collections. Figure 15. “Once upon a train…”, Beautiful British Columbia: Land of New Horizons, vol. 16, no. 4, 1975, pp. 32-33. UBC Rare Books and Special Collections. 32 Figure 16. “Museum Train”. Beautiful British Columbia: Land of New Horizons, vol. 17, no. 4, 1976, pp. 30-31. UBC Rare Books and Special Collections. Post-1950s: Roadways Displace Railways The railways did not always occupy this marginalized space in North American and British Columbian culture. In the late 19th century, the railroad had, in fact overtaken the road as the most favoured mode of transportation across the North America (Skidmore 43). The history of how the railways were displaced and roads and cars came to have foremost importance for transportation in British Columbia is tied to the political history of the province leading up to the 1950s, the period in which the publication of Beautiful British Columbia emerged. The ubiquitous presence of roads in the magazine’s visual and textual content is reflective of the importance that roads and road culture had gained during this time. This was also a pivotal period of growth, development, and political change in British Columbia. The 1950s marked the start of the Social Credit party’s rise to power in the government 33 under the leadership of William Andrews Cecil (W.A.C.) Bennett. This phase of governance in British Columbia was crucial in cementing the identity of the province as we know it today. Up until then, British Columbia was still a relatively young province. It had come to exist as a single united territory under the British crown only in 1866 and officially entered the confederation as a province of Canada five years later in 1871. As Jean Barman notes in West Beyond West, however “the acquisition of a permanent political status did not denote internal cohesion” (Barman 5). Barman attributes this lack of cohesion to province’s varied and “extraordinarily difficult terrain” that posed many barriers to access, “more often isolating newcomers than drawing them together” (Barman 5). British Columbia is almost entirely mountainous and for a long time, this posed a great challenge to its geographical, social, and political unity. Well into the first half of the 20th century, there remained a sharp divide between the interior regions of BC versus what is known as “Lower Mainland” BC, which encompasses Greater Vancouver, Fraser Valley, and the Sunshine Coast. Towns located in interior BC were often physically cut off from each other and especially inaccessible from the more urban Mainland regions on the coast due to the treacherous mountainous terrain of the interior province. Much of the interior, which includes the Okanagan Valley, was seen as lagging behind Vancouver in terms of infrastructure and economic development, giving rise to an image of a neglected hinterland. The Canadian Pacific Railway (CPR), which was completed in 1885, played a central role in bringing settlers and economic investment and development to British Columbia in the first few decades of the province’s existence (Dawson 23). To offset the costs of the railways, tourism was promoted as a means of supplementary income and the CPR also constructed hotels along its lines (Dawson 24). As the terminus of the CPR, Vancouver’s economy was boosted greatly and with the opening of Hotel Vancouver in 1887, tourism in the city also thrived (Dawson 24). In the early 34 1900s, the Tourist Association of Victoria also negotiated with the CPR to have them expand their network to better connect the Pacific Northwest to the rest of North America and develop tourism further in the city of Victoria (Dawson 27). As long as tourism was tied to the railways it remained concentrated within specific locations such as, for example, Vancouver and Victoria. Most other parts of British Columbia did not benefit to the same degree. For a number of years tourism initiatives in BC were mostly run through local and private organizations and Dawson observes in Selling British Columbia that the provincial government’s attitude to the industry “was ambiguous at best” (Dawson 80) for much of the early decades of the 20th century. Gradually, however, there was a growing push from promoters of tourism towards the creation of an official Government Travel Bureau. The discourse and vision of tourism shared among these promoters was decidedly centered around the growing appeal of the automobile which was recognized as having the potential for a wider distribution of the tourism economy. In short, tourism development throughout the province was seen as going hand in hand with the improvement of road networks (Nelson 214; Dawson, “Taking the `D’ out of Depression” 36). In their thesis dissertation on The Presentation of Landscape: Rhetorical Conventions and the Promotion of Tourism in British Columbia (1994), Ronald Nelson contrasts the way in which trains and boats created “a site-specific or linear orientation” of tourist traffic with the automobile’s encouragement of “a more regional and less urban pattern of tourist traffic” (Nelson 214). Major railway transportation companies which had previously had a monopoly on tourism were opposed to the creation of a Government Travel Bureau that would help in promoting regional automobile-oriented tourism (Nelson 217). E.H. Adams, who strongly advocated for the tourism industry in the 1930s was, however, vocal about the key importance of improved road networks in boosting tourism, despite being the vice-president and comptroller of the British Columbia Electric 35 Railways (Dawson, “Taking the `D’ out of Depression” 39). Eventually, a Bureau of Industrial and Tourist Development was created for British Columbia in 1937 and a year later it was renamed the British Columbia Government Travel Bureau with a mandate that was even more focused on tourism promotion. Due to poor existing road infrastructure, the vision for an expanded regional-scale and automobile-oriented tourism did not, however, come to full fruition until the post World War boom in the 1950s. The rise of the Social Credit Party in 1952 and the political personality of W.A.C. Bennett, who served as premier of the province for the following two decades, came to symbolize a new era of politics and governance in the province and a shift in focus to the development of the interior. The Social Credit Party and Bennett’s politics had emerged from a frustration with the existing political order which was biased towards Vancouver and marginalized the interior regions. Bennett, who had moved as a youth from the Maritimes to British Columbia, had a particularly special connection with the Okanagan and had established his life in the town of Kelowna (Barman 291). The new government formed under him was also much more representative of the diversity of British Columbia’s regions (Barman 298). Following World War II, Canada had also entered a period of economic stability and prosperity. This postwar boom, combined with a new political will, gave the push towards a transformation in the economic and industrial development of British Columbia, with an emphasis on the interior regions. Barman describes the following ways in which the province was transformed: Badly needed physical infrastructure as well as major hydroelectric projects were built across the province. As never before, economic expansion was directed towards ameliorating regional disparities. While earlier booms had benefited different parts of the 36 province, no comparable attempt had been made previously to link profit-making from resource exploitation to development of the interior and the north. (Barman 286) Beautiful British Columbia also reflected the shifting agendas of governance and province-building, not only through the focus of its articles but also a dedicated page in each issue carrying a message from the premier, as well as from the minister of the department it was published under. The message from the premier (W.A.C. Bennett) in the very first issue of the magazine (1959) pays tribute to the beauty of the “unspoiled territory” of the province, but places equal emphasis on the “modern works of man” located within it, advertising all the various industrial developments and achievements of the province. Bennett also takes care to include and give importance to places from all the different regions of the province in this opening message: “And you can take your pick of cities: Greater Vancouver with a population larger than Minneapolis and St. Paul Figure 17. “A Message from the Premier of British Columbia”. Beautiful British Columbia Land of New Horizons, vol. 1. no. 1, 1959, pp. 3. UBC Rare Books and Special Collections. 37 combined; Victoria, green, serene, and wonderfully scenic; Williams Lake, Quesnel, and Prince George boom towns of the Cariboo. And Penticton, Kelowna, and Vernon jewel cities set in the Okanagan orchard country” (“A Message from the Premier of British Columbia” 3). Massive projects for the construction of road and highway networks were chief among the efforts to ameliorate regional disparities and open the interior for economic development. Prior to the two World Wars, BC had few and poor-quality roads and while there had been some progress over the 1920s and 1930s this would change in a big way during the 1950s. Barman notes that “during the first six years of Bennett’s tenure the government spent more money on improving transportation than in the entire history of the province” (Barman 298). This provincial effort also fit into a wider push to strengthen a sense of National links across Canada with the construction of the Trans-Canada Highway between 1949 and 1970, as previously the North-South axis of transit across US/Canada border had been much stronger than the East-West axis within the country. The maps below (taken from British Columbia by the Road) show the massive expansion of the interior road network in BC, from the year 1925 to 1970. From the 1925 map we can see that major roads were mostly near the US/Canada border and coast, whereas interior BC and the neighbouring province of Alberta are almost entirely cut off. The 1970 map shows a definite inward growth in road connectivity. 38 Figure 18. Comparative maps of BC Interior Road networks in 1925 (left) and 1970 (right). Ben Bradley, British Columbia by the Road: Car Culture and Making of a Modern Landscape, UBC Press, 2017. This expansion was also directly promoted in Beautiful British Columbia through the “Message from the Premier” in several issues. Volume 2, issue 2 features the following message written by W.A.C. Bennett: In extending the red carpet to British Columbia’s visitors, we’ve taken concrete steps to make your visit more pleasant than ever before. In the fiscal year 1959-60, more than $104 million worth of highway construction has been administered by our Highways Department. Nineteen new bridges were completed and another 45 are under construction. Vast industrial and power projects will begin this year. In every city, hotel and motel accommodation is ready. Marinas dot our sheltered shores. (“A Message from the Premier of British Columbia” 3) In the 1950s and 1960s, with increased government attention and promotion, British Columbia did experience a boom in the tourism industry which continued to grow alongside and be organized around increasing car travel on the expanding highway networks of the province. Statistics of 39 visitors entering in automobiles from the US to British Columbia also reflect this. Within a span of twenty years – from 1926 to 1946 – the number of automobile passengers crossing the border only increased from 272,303 to 535,785. After this, however, just within five years, the number had doubled to 1,016,000 in 1951 and continued to increase dramatically over the next two decades, reaching 3,071,600 in 1971 (Dawson 3). Road Vistas: Road-scape Reconstitutes Landscape Alexander Wilson speaks of how, with the merging of car and camping technologies, new highways in North America were “not only a measure of the culture's technological prowess but they were also fully integrated into the cultural economy” as they “were talked about as though they had an important democratizing role: the idea was that modern highways allowed more people to appreciate the wonders of nature” (Wilson 30). In British Columbia, they were also seen as evening out regional disparities and expanding the image and spatial imagination of the British Columbia to include and give more prominence to the landscapes of the interior. With the new roads, British Columbia moved towards being a better connected as well as more established and cohesive entity as they significantly reshaped the way in which landscape and place were seen and experienced: Bradley describes the way in which roads reconstituted landscapes in the following passage: As motorists proceeded down public roads, they saw only some aspects of the places they passed through. The roadside was not just the border of a new kind of road but itself a new kind of place: ribbon-shaped, often complexly planned, and crowded with various and particular things, some occurring naturally, some predating the automobile, and some 40 deliberately constructed to take advantage of their location. Far from being just the frame for the landscape, the roadside was a vital part of it – indeed a place in its own right. (Bradley 6) Several long-form articles in Beautiful British Columbia magazine very strongly give this sense of constituting the road as “a place in its own right”, as they follow a pattern of focusing on a particular highway to trace different points of interest along its route for several pages. One such article that traces the route of Alaska Highway over ten pages is titled “Alaska Highway: Road to Adventure”. Contrary to its phrasing, the “adventure” advertised in this title is not, however, located in any one place that serves as a destination. Rather, being on the road is itself that place or destination of adventure. Figure 19. “Alaska Highway: Road to Adventure”. Beautiful British Columbia: Land of New Horizons, vol. 2, no. 4, 1961, pp. 27. UBC Rare Books and Special Collections. 41 Figure 21. “Highway 5 and the Yellowhead Route”. Beautiful British Columbia: Land of New Horizons, vol. 10, no. 4, 1969, pp. 18. UBC Rare Books and Special Collections. Figure 20. “Highway 16”. Beautiful British Columbia: Land of New Horizons, vol. 3, no. 2, 1961, pp. 34. UBC Rare Books and Special Collections. 42 This article and others like it (see figures 19, 20, 21 for example) create this new sense of place by stringing together diverse and disparate sites along the ribbon landscape of a road. While connecting certain places together, roads and their prominence in such tourism promotional material also stripped many of these places of their natural, cultural, and historical depth. What was imagined as the landscape of the place became predominantly influenced by the strip section views that were accessible by road. The structures and boundaries of visibility and exclusion created by this expansion of road networks had concrete impacts, especially for First Nation communities, and Bradley points to the ways in which this further contributed to the geographical and occupational marginalization of these communities (111). They were often barred through legal and racist restrictions from participating in the roadside tourism economy and because of this, they were “barely visible to the motoring public” (Bradley 111). This also meant they were left out from the way in which roads re-organized and arranged a new imagination of landscapes as well as their histories. Bradley comments that “with Indigenous peoples out of sight and out of mind, most of the motoring public’s experience of history in the Interior fed into the “vanishing American” discourse that had been prevalent during the late 19th century and that lingered through sub-sequent decades” (111). This absence also aligned with North American road mythologies that were tied to the concept of the frontier to further erase First Nations from white-settler perceptions and imaginations of place. The prominence of road photography in Beautiful British Columbia also suggests the way in which landscape aesthetics were shaped by the new obsession with roads and highways. The caption accompanying figure 22 says: “Highways are synonymous with progress. This beautifully patterned interchange near Chilliwack typifies the dynamic expansion in British Columbia’s road system which spreads throughout this entire beautiful province (“Chilliwack” 30)”. On the one 43 hand the equation of highways to progress gives importance to the functional role of these transportation networks in boosting the economy, as well as providing the metaphorical idea of a road going forward. What is also interesting, however, is the description in this section of the road as a “beautifully patterned interchange” that belongs in the wider landscape of a “beautiful province”. The photograph frames the geometrical pattern of the road interchange as a central feature of the surrounding landscape and here, the road is both the way by which the beauty of the province is accessed as well as an integral part of this beauty. Figure 22. Full spread photograph of road intersection. Beautiful British Columbia: Land of New Horizons, vol. 3, no. 3, 1961, pp. 28-29. UBC Rare Books and Special Collections. The magazine also contributed greatly to the idea of “highway vistas”, a phrase introduced to describe a photograph (see figure 23) accompanying an article on a new highway in the very 44 first issue of the magazine: “Superb blacktop super-highway carries travellers swiftly between Vancouver and Squamish over what one engineer calls “Highway vistas, overlooking Howe Sound, whose superlative ocean view is unequalled, even in other great scenic areas of BC” (“The Upper Levels Highway” 42). Figure 23. Picture of a “Highway Vista” in BC. Beautiful British Columbia: Land of New Horizons, vol.1 no. 1, 1959, pp. 42. UBC Rare Books and Special Collections. Part of the visual aesthetic that this highway vista snapshot attempts to conjure, with its sharp angle of framing and a white car flashing near the bend, is also a sense of the speed of passing through a landscape by road. This is further emphasized by the accompanying text of the article: “Already acknowledged to be one of the most scenic routes in North America, the highway allows fifty-45 mile-an-hour speeds for almost its entire length” (“The Upper Levels Highway” 43). Highway vistas are one of the dominant visual motifs that recur in the magazine and some of these images are framed in such a similar way, they could almost stand in for each other (see figures 10-12). Nature parkways, which started being built in the 1930s around North America (Wilson 29), are perhaps, the best examples of the way in which the concept of “highway vistas” was deployed. David Louter’s, Windshield Wilderness: Cars, Roads, and Nature in Washington National Parks (2006), discusses the intersection between the two state projects of park making and road building in Washington State, which lies just across the US/Canada border from the Canadian Okanagan. While certain kinds of human activity and development were excluded from park spaces as they were perceived as marring the natural beauty of the landscape, roads and cars were, in fact at the center of the experience of nature or the “wilderness” presented to tourist through these parks. Louter describe the careful design, planning, and use of native materials that went into ensuring that highways through parks blended in with the topography of the landscape and reinforced the illusion for park visitors that “roads emerged naturally from the earth” (62). Bradley has also looked at how similar relations between “automobility and the environment” were constructed and managed in “two of the largest, most accessible provincial parks in the BC Interior – Manning and Hamber” (16). While giving an illusion of being a natural part of the landscape, parkways, in the design of their curves and designated resting spots also directed what people saw of the nature around them and “instructed drivers about how best to appreciate the scenery out the window” (Wilson 9). Some of the “highway vista” photographs and their accompanying captions in Beautiful British Columbia indicate how roads directed sightseeing through the province’s landscape. The photograph in figure 10, for instance, shows the way in which the beauty of Griffin Lake is framed by the Trans-Canada highway and the caption to the photograph in figure 11 once 46 again calls attention to “British Columbia’s pattern of superb highways”, which here, gives access to views of Kootenay Park. Figure 24. Photograph showing “some of the rugged grandeur to be seen on the Canyon route between Hope and Lytton”. Beautiful British Columbia: Land of New Horizons, vol. 2 no. 1, 1960, pp. 28-29. UBC Rare Books and Special Collections. The article accompanying figure 24 is titled “Smooth, Easy Travel in the Rugged Fraser Canyon”. Here the description of the travel through the road in the pictures, as “smooth” and “easy” contrasts with the use of “rugged” to describe the landscape. The allure of this new kind of road-scape or “highway vista” is that it brings together two things – the idea of freedom offered by a rugged wilderness and the ease of modern civilization. In fact, this idea of freedom in the wilderness is very much tied to the ease and speed with which one can pass through this wilderness. The magazine often uses the word “freeway” and even, occasionally, “skyway” to refer to highways, both these terms suggesting the connection of speed and freedom. The target audience 47 of such promotional material seems to be particularly aimed at male tourists, as it taps into existing stereotypes of masculinity and male fantasies of adventure and conquest of wild natures. It also resonates with wider North American cultural imaginings of the road. The 1968 Steppenwolf song, “Born to be Wild”, which also featured in the iconic and influential road movie Easy Rider, is one popular example that captures the romance of the North American highway and motoring culture with the opening lyrics: “Get your motor runnin’ / Head out on the highway/ Looking for adventure…” (0:14-0:23) and refrain, “Like a true nature's child/ We were born/ Born to be wild” (1:07-1:13). This, like the image of “smooth” and “easy” roads through “rugged landscapes”, enacts a seductive and paradoxical merging of what is modern, industrial, and man-made with the sense of something primordial and wild. Roads to Okanagan In My American Cousin, there is a reference to the poor state of Okanagan roads as compared to American highways in the 1950s, with Butch’s American mother, Dolly, criticizing how “skinny” they are and wondering what one would do “if another car is coming the other way” (1:17:35-1:17:40). To this Sandy’s mother, Kitty replies, “Why, you just pull over and let them pass by!” (1:17:40-1:17:44) which draws much incredulity from Dolly. In My American Cousin, this scene is also supposed to comment and poke fun at the snooty arrogance of Americans, especially, as it comes towards the end of the movie, when Butch has had a fall from grace and his sleek image of rebellious glamour has been considerably deflated to instead valorize the stolid and sensible Canadian structure of family. However, it also reveals the Canadian anxiety of catching up with America that was particularly focused on roads, which were symbols of progress and modernity. As a region in interior BC, the Okanagan in the 1950s was heavily promoted as a newly opened up destination of easy travel. The characterisations of the roads to the Okanagan in 48 Beautiful British Columbia were also an important part of the image built around it as a place and sought to counter and reframe narratives that cast this region as a backward hinterland. While portrayal of these roads borrowed from the some of the American tropes of road mythologies, they also modified these considerably. In many ways the Okanagan region was packaged to be a family-friendly holiday destination and as such the roads, too, were shown as a tamer version of the wild highways through “rugged landscapes”, with just the right dose of adventure mixed in with comfort and leisure. Wilson notes in The Culture of Nature that the car also lent itself to the restructuring of the traditional nuclear family, as family, car, and family-car “are bounded entities that discourage unregulated exchange” (39). Figure 25. “Lazy Days Ahead!”, Beautiful British Columbia: Land of New Horizons, vol. 2, no. 1, 1960, pp. 38. UBC Rare Books and Special Collections. The article “Lazy Days Ahead”, accompanied by the image of a highway running between Kelowna, Vernon and Oyama, some of the major cities of the Okanagan, characterizes this highway as ideal for lazy driving, reinforcing the sense of this as a place of leisure and comfort: 49 Holiday driving and camping should be a lazy business. And it can be just that almost anywhere in British Columbia, as the scenes on these pages show. The clear, clean water and skies, the comfortable stopping places along the way, whether campsite or motel, provide rest and relaxation as well as some of the most spectacular scenery in the world. Your first drive through the province will convince you here is where to enjoy your lazy days, to their fullest. (“Lazy Days Ahead” 38) In this description, while there is passing reference to “spectacular scenery”, there is a greater emphasis on the roadside amenities that make the drive safe and comfortable and nature easy to access. Figure 26. “Hidden Highway”, Beautiful British Columbia Magazine, vol. 22, no. 2, 1980, pp. 28-29. UBC Rare Books and Special Collections. 50 A later article from the fall 1980 issue of the magazine, focuses on the Highway 33 which has one end starting in Kelowna. The title of this piece is “Hidden Highway” and portrays parts of the Okanagan as hidden treasures and quiet tucked away places: This 129-kilometre-long Highway 33 links the central Okanagan with the Boundary region. On the way it passes through the West Kettle River valley and a dry timbered country varied and colourful in both scenery and history. This is a quiet part of the province, a part that has a charm and grace still unspoiled by the hustle and bustle of the 1980s. (Shewchuck 29) This “Hidden Highway” is portrayed as simultaneously bringing ease of travel access to this area, while still helping preserve the regions “unspoiled” nature from the “hustle and bustle” of development. The highway is further described as framing the defining images of this landscape, passing through “the land of orchards” and “blue water” to the shrub-steppe vegetation of “chokecherry and saskatoon berry bushes” (Shewchuck 29). This framing of the place through highways is even more evident in the article titled “Okanagan Oasis” from the magazine’s summer 1979 issue, which makes the reader imagine themselves on the Highway 97 into the Okanagan valley: It's a scorching August day. The temperature is more than 30°C. You are driving north- ward up Okanagan Valley. Heat waves shimmer before you on the blacktop of Highway 97. On one side rise steep, baked clay cliffs, and, below, appears what seems like a mirage in this desert-like scene: the inviting deep blue of Okanagan Lake. You press on, following bend after bend, until you espy something as surprising as the lake: a lushly green oasis city strung out along its far shore. (McGill, “Okanagan Oasis” 34) 51 This passage reads as the word-equivalent of a highway vista photograph. The shifting landscape of contrasts, with the desert country on the one hand and the oasis of the Okanagan Lake on the other, are both framed by the bends of this road. Even the sense of heat is described to be mediated by the “blacktop” of Highway 97. Figure 27. “Okanagan Oasis”. Beautiful British Columbia Magazine, vol. 21, no. 1, 1979, pp. 34-35. UBC Rare Books and Special Collections. Roadways are what made it possible for the accelerated settler colonization of the Okanagan in the 20th century that is also represented by Beautiful British Columbia magazine’s promotion of the region. Contained within the magazine’s descriptions of the road journey to and through the Okanagan are several of the images that came to give a regional definition and identity to this area during the 1960s to early 1980s: the oasis and the desert, orchard country, a garden of Eden and a land of leisure, comfort, and abundance. These are images that continue to persist into 52 present framings of the place as well. In my subsequent chapters I look more closely at some of these and examine the impacts they have had on the landscape as well as the human-environmental relationships in the Okanagan. 53 Chapter 3: Landscape Aesthetic of the Okanagan “But he also can turn a barren wilderness into an oasis with water! He can make springs flow into desert lands and turn them into fertile valleys so that cities spring up.” [TPT Bible, Psalm 107.35-36] For most people in British Columbia and Canada today, the Okanagan Valley is synonymous with an abundance of wine, fruit trees, lakes, warm and pleasant summers, and mild winters. While it has recently also been gaining more of a reputation as a site of yearly wildfires and dry heat spells, these more idyllic images of the place as a paradise on earth continue to persist. The Okanagan landscape is widely associated with the term “beautiful”, and this ideal image of the Okanagan landscape is closely tied to the visual representation of the place in the Beautiful British Columbia magazines, especially from the 1960s and 1970s. This is apparent from the re-emergence of the cover photographs, printed against the backdrop of the fruits such as apples, cherries, peaches, and grapes, across the city of Kelowna on its utility boxes. Here, two of the most important characterizations and selling points of the region come together – its aesthetic appeal and its agricultural productivity, which is also integral to the aesthetics used to market the place for tourism. As the magazine’s name, Beautiful British Columbia, suggests it has a central preoccupation with creating and ascribing aesthetic value to the places it represents. As the first full colour magazine published in the province, visual elements stood out as the dominant mode of representation. According to Nelson in The Presentation of Landscape, the publication of the first issue of Beautiful British Columbia, in 1959, actually marked the point at which “photographs supplanted textual description” in provincial promotional material (Nelson 364). It was this 54 increased emphasis on visual imagery in the magazines that really solidified a cultural imagination of the Okanagan landscape in the minds of its numerous local and global readers. The idea of “landscape” is itself very closely bound to visual and cultural perception and curation of environment. According to the Online Etymology Dictionary the word ‘landscape’, which comes from the Dutch landschap was initially used to mean a “painting representing an extensive view of natural scenery” (c. 1600) and only acquired the additional, and now widely used, reference to a “tract of land with its distinguishing characteristics” in 1886. While this first meaning was more explicitly about the aesthetic framing and recreation of an observed environment, it still carries on into the other use of the word as there is always an act of mental imaging and the abstraction of objects and their boundaries that goes into defining a landscape and its elements, which are usually only those most easily brought into human vision. More recently, since the early 20th century, it is also used as a verb “to lay out lawns, gardens, etc. plant trees for the sake of beautification”, which implies physical reorganization of land and vegetation (“Landscape”). This third usage of the word as “landscaping” creates a link between the first two as a re-organization of the material landscape to match or create a desired aesthetic. The landscape aesthetics that are promoted through cultural texts such as Beautiful British Columbia relate to all three of these meanings. As discussed in the first chapter, highway vistas, landscapes intentionally organized around roads to present a desired aesthetic, were an important example of this. Landscape aesthetics such as these are indicative of cultural perception, framing, and valuing of specific features of the environment, but also have a bearing on material relations to environment, which in turn shape transformations of the environment. The material history of the Okanagan Valley bears testament to this culturally entangled framing and remolding of environment and landscape. Before white settlers came to the Okanagan, 55 it had been home to the Indigenous Syilx people since time immemorial. Up until this time, the Syilx people had shaped the landscape to suit their needs in different ways, particularly through practices such as prescribed burns to contain forested land, expand grassland ranges for hunting, and encourage the growth of berry plants (Abbott and Toohey-Wiese 19). Since white settlers began inhabiting the region in the 1860s, there have been several phases of transformation of the environment in the span of a little more than 150 years. John Wagner’s article on “Landscape Aesthetics, Water, and Settler Colonialism in the Okanagan Valley of British Columbia” (2008) examines the way in which white colonial landscape aesthetics have played a central role in the phases of reconstruction and transformation of the Okanagan Valley. Wagner distinguishes the landscape aesthetic created by European settlers from those that were created by Indigenous communities previously by pointing to “the fact that it had been created as a marketing tool well before most settlers arrived in the valley. It provided settlers with a ready-made European perspective but also with a charter for colonization and ecological transformation” (Wagner 30). Rather than a landscape aesthetic created from years of living and mutual co-creation of community and environment this was in many ways an imported and external projection onto the Okanagan region. The landscape has been repurposed in many ways, from making it suitable for a ranching industry in the early years of colonial settlement to the development of an irrigated agricultural and orcharding economy in the early 20th century to the establishment of commercial and boutique wineries from the 1970s onwards, as well as the marketing of the region as a “recreational playground” for tourists and more recently, a “retirement center” for the wealthy (Wagner 23). Wagner, moreover, particularly points to what he calls an “oasis aesthetic” as being a central motif of these varied and iteratives phases of colonization and transformation of the Okanagan region. 56 The Oasis/Desert Paradigm The oasis aesthetic is woven through much of Beautiful British Columbia’s presentation of the Okanagan. This is most explicit in the article titled “Okanagan Oasis” from the summer 1979 issue of the magazine. As discussed in the last chapter, this article frames the image of the region’s landscape through the lines and bends of Highway 97. These lines also frame the separation of and direction of movement from desert to oasis, as Highway 97 is described as a road leading through a scorching desert landscape into the “lushly green oasis city” of Kelowna (“Okanagan Oasis” 34). Without the initial image conjured of scorching temperatures and a bare desert landscape devoid of moisture and cool air, the destination city of Kelowna, and its cool imagery of blues and greens would not be quite as enticing. This contrast of extremes amplifies the sense of a magnetic pull towards this “oasis city”. This aesthetic of binary contrasts frames the Okanagan Valley through a separation of land and water, where a seemingly abundant water is held and contained in certain pockets as the “oasis” and is near absent in the surrounding, but less visible “desert landscape”. John Wagner describes the oasis aesthetic as a “landscape aesthetic built around the lush, oasis-like qualities of orchards and lakes set among a dramatic, arid and mountainous backdrop” with orchards being replaced by vineyards and golf courses in later stages (Wagner 23). The following passage from an article in the Winter 1965 issue of Beautiful British Columbia on “Richter Pass Highway”, one of the major routes running through the Okanagan, articulates just such an aesthetic imagination: As the eastbound traveller descends gently from Richter Pass, at an elevation of 2,237 feet, to Osoyoos, at 900 feet, he passes from the dry forest zone to near desert conditions. According to the people who live there, you are in “Canada’s Valley of the Sun”. The 57 valley is also endowed with water corralled by mountains into lakes which offer sandy beaches, swimming, and boating. This is Osoyoos. (“Richter Pass Highway” 11) This description makes a point to first reassure the reader of the gentle nature of the journey to say that this is not a threatening but welcoming space for the incoming traveller (or settler). As in the “Okanagan Oasis” article, the “near desert conditions” are introduced here only to be passed through on the way to the water “corralled by mountains” into contained lakes which form the centre of this scene and facilitate the human activities of enjoying “sandy beaches, swimming, and boating”. The series of adverbs used here, such as “endowed”, “corralled”, and “offered” imply the land and its resources were a gift specially arranged and offered to the white settler communities. This obfuscates the fact that these lands were already lived in by Indigenous people and were not freely given, but forcefully taken by settler communities. While the oasis aesthetic of Okanagan derives from the idea of the oasis in a desert, the desert is kept on the very edges of this imagination to emphasize instead the abundance of the oasis as a gift to white settler populations. 58 Figure 28. Photo of Vaseux Lake, Beautiful British Columbia: Land of New Horizons, vol. 8, no. 4, 1967, pp. 4-5. UBC Rare Books and Special Collections. This photo of the Vaseux Lake in the Okanagan shows the image of a lake held within the bowl-shaped vessel created by the valley and its colour gradient emphasizes the contrasts of the blue lake, the greens of irrigated and cultivated patches of land bordering the lake and brown, ochre, and deeper green shades of the surrounding mountains and grasslands. To the credit of the magazine, the photograph does not appear edited for colour to match the blue-green oasis aesthetic and as a result of this, also serves as visual interruption to the overall narrative of the publication. Yet, in other ways, the photograph does serve the settler colonial gaze on and understanding of the landscape. While this is not a perfectly aerial shot, its framing gives the impression of a bird’s eye view or a mapped spread of landscape. The sense of something mapped with marked forms and features is particularly apparent around the lake which is tightly circled and contained by the defined line of the road, implying an understanding of the water body as fixed and having perfectly stable boundaries. 59 In this picture and in many of the articles centering on the Okanagan, the lakes and the so-called oasis created by them are the center of focus. The surrounding semi-arid landscape has significantly less presence in the magazine. Yet, where it does feature, it is mostly presented in dramatic contrast to the ‘oasis’ as the ‘desert’. An article titled “Plants of the Pocket Desert”, for instance, begins with this line: “For most people, British Columbia is a land of rain forests, rolling grasslands and tree-clad mountains. But tucked away at the south end of the Okanagan is something different: the province’s “pocket desert” contained within Vaseux Lake Provincial Park” (Taylor and Szczawinski 36). While this article uses the term “desert”, this is not entirely accurate. Areas of the Okanagan have many features of a desert habitat. Yet, it does not actually have a desert climate, since it has a much higher level of precipitation than what is officially classified as “desert”. Figure 29. “Plant of the Pocket Desert”, Beautiful British Columbia: Land of New Horizons, vol. 17, no. 4, 1976, pp. 36-37. UBC Rare Books and Special Collections. 60 The phrase “pocket desert” and language of containment is also significant in the article’s framing of the semi-arid landscape. Even though this forms a significant portion of the non-urban and non-irrigated lands, “pocket desert” suggests something that can be tucked within a pocket and mostly ignored or forgotten. This also inverts the Oasis-Desert relationship, in which an Oasis is a small area in a desert that is rich in moisture and therefore, treated as something precious. Yet here it is the illusion of an abundant and overflowing oasis that is pushed to the forefront of the environmental imagination by the dominant imagery of orchards, lakes, and wineries found throughout the magazine. The desert is instead reduced from a complex web of precarious ecological relations to a sort of cute “pocket” novelty with its own unique and sellable charm. The perception of the desert as a “pocket” is also framed by the national border as the semi-arid landscape of the Okanagan is but a part of the much vaster Columbia Plateau, most of which lies across the border line in the United States. As implied by the description of the desert as “something different”, there is a sense of otherness projected onto the semi-arid features of the region’s landscape. This otherness also carries a tinge of exoticization. For example, the fall 1971 issue of the magazine features a write-up titled “Africa in Canada” about the Okanagan Game Farm in Penticton. According to this article, this game farm was opened after “extensive research revealed that the southern Okanagan not only resembled the habitat of the Central African Plateau, the desert lands of Asia Minor and the highlands of South America, but of course, was ideal for native animals” (Sismey 33). This statement creates a strange comparison of the suitability of the habitat for seemingly “exotic species” and its suitability for “native animals”. The construction of this sentence and its emphasis on the finding that this region which resembles all these different lands is also “ideal for native animals” has the effect of making these native species seem even more exotic than the presence of 61 orchards, wineries, golf courses or any of the other newer introductions to the Okanagan landscape brought by white settlers to the region. The photo accompanying the article shows a giraffe, an animal native to African Savannah landscapes and certainly not what you would expect to find in the Okanagan. Yet, the semi-arid landscape of the Okanagan is made foreign to itself through this exoticization by the importing of several animals from far-away lands. The magazine informs us that the Okanagan Game farm had around 300 animals in 1971 from different parts of the world. This number grew to nearly 1200 animals before the place was closed down in 1999 (Michaels). Figure 30. “Africa in Canada”, Beautiful British Columbia: Land of New Horizons, vol. 13, no. 2, 1971, pp. 33. UBC Rare Books and Special Collections. UBC Rare Books and Special Collections. Even as the desert features as this “pocket” attraction, it is the created “oasis” landscape of settlements near the lakes that are portrayed as the most natural and abundant form of landscape 62 in the region. An article titled “The Valley is a Garden” begins by emphasizing the contrast between the settled and irrigated garden cities and surrounding semi-arid landscape: “In the driest border of the country, innocent of man and irrigation, the cactus, sagebrush and greasewood wear golden crowns in celebration” (Beardsley 6). When the valley is portrayed as a “garden”, the desert-like characteristics must be relegated to the border. Moreover, the words “innocent of man and irrigation” also call attention to the role of human intervention, particularly in the form of irrigation put in place by white settlers, in transforming this landscape to a garden. This “oasis aesthetic” and narrative around the Okanagan landscape and its material transformation through irrigation into a garden emerge from a particularly white Christian framework of imagination and understanding of the world. The biblical epigraph to this chapter would not be out place in one of the magazine’s articles on the Okanagan valley and captures very well the story the magazine tells of the settlement of towns such as Kelowna: “But he also can turn a barren wilderness into an oasis with water! He can make springs flow into desert lands and turn them into fertile valleys so that cities spring up” (TBT Bible, Psalm. 107.35-36). In this framework the desert signifies only two things: a barren land that is lifeless and has no intrinsic value of its own and a wilderness that has been untouched by human action, in other words “innocent of man and irrigation”. In this binary framing of landscapes of this region as either a desert or an oasis, the desert is placed below the oasis and in subservience to it, as its only purpose is that of the empty space that can be turned by “man” into all that is good in its opposite, the oasis. The language present in the bible as well as in the magazine, through words like “wilderness” and “innocent”, conjure the idea of “virgin land”, an uninhabited space or blank slate that lends itself to acts of colonization and settlement. 63 Marginalization of the Syilx People The Okanagan region was most definitely not an uninhabited land. Indigenous Syilx communities had arrived in this region several thousands of years prior to the white European settlers. Adapting to the semi-arid climate which was largely unsuitable for agriculture, they had “developed and perfected a hunting and gathering economy” (Bennett 66) which involved seasonal movements across different parts of the land. It was only in the early 19th century that Europeans began to enter the region, first as fur traders, then missionaries, then gold miners and finally, as settlers (Wagner 25). Towards the latter half of the century, as they began to settle the area, they imposed such changes on the political, cultural, as well as material landscape of the region as to increasingly alienate and marginalize native inhabitants. The creation of the 49th parallel as an international boundary between US/Canada sharply divided the land inhabited by Indigenous communities of the Okanagan, enforcing a split between what eventually became the Okanagan Nation Alliance on the northern Canadian Okanagan side of the border and the Coleville Confederated Tribe on the southern US Okanogan side. Jason Patrick Bennet, in his article “Apple of the Empire: Landscape and Imperial Identity in Turn-of-the-Century British Columbia” (2006), asserts that the imposition of this land boundary not only undercut the material basis of the Indigenous communities across this region but also undermined their cultural relationship with the land: “while this foreign survey line certainly impeded the free and seasonal movements of people, the disruption it caused also centered on whose image of the landscape would prevail” (Bennett 66). It could also perhaps be said that the imposition of this survey line in fact created the idea of a landscape in the Okanagan by making the surface of land available as a plane for capture and control and subject to the sharp division of boundaries that correspond to national territories as well as private and public property. In 1858, the official creation of the colony of British Columbia 64 “represented a redefinition of the land which invited colonial newcomers as “natural citizens”, replete with the rights and privileges afforded to such membership, while simultaneously excluding the original inhabitants as little more than foreigners” (Bennett 67). In such a way, a completely alien understanding of land and territory brought in by white settler colonists served to completely undercut the relationship Indigenous communities had built with the place over thousands of years3. By the time the formation of Canada happened in 1867, however, many Syilx Okanagan had gotten together to defend their existence and had managed to negotiate a promise from the Dominion of Canada to formally reserve land for them. This still meant, of course, that the terms of their living on these lands were largely determined by the colonial government which had displaced them. Surveys for establishing Indian reserve land had begun by the provincial government in the 1870s in what had been called the Joint Indian Reserve Commission (JIRC). For the most part, the provincial government policy veered towards keeping reserve allocations as small and restricted as possible. One of the commissioners who headed the JIRC in 1878, Gilbert 3 From where we stand today, and especially through the language and pre-given concepts we have at our disposal, it is hard to say exactly what the disrupted Syilx Okanagan imagination of the Okanagan might have been. What we might be able to retrace from this standpoint through historical study and even through listening to contemporary Indigenous voices is limited and already shaped in ways that make it legible to a dominant colonially influenced framework of understanding. However, acknowledging the way in which colonization channeled and imposed certain concepts around land and landscape opens space for speculative imagining of what could exist outside of this. The importance of practices such as ‘Land Welcomes’ and ‘Land Acknowledgements’ in Indigenous reconciliation efforts today show that ‘land’ holds an important place in Indigenous imagination today but the way in which it is spoken of also indicates a different conception of it. A Syilx elder, Pamela Barnes, says in her land welcome, “We look at our relationship to the lands as not owning the lands in the western concept of land ownership but that we borrow these lands from our great great great great grandchildren” (Territorial Welcome). To some extent, this still draws on a colonial language of ownership even as it tries to counter it. Yet, it also hints at a possibility of conceptualizing places in ways that do not give in to the land-based, territorializing imaginations of colonialism. 65 M. Sproat, was slightly more sympathetic to the Indigenous peoples and held the view that they should have arable land allocations on par with those of white settlers (Pooley 43). His policies, however, focused more on groups in the North Okanagan and did not extend to the Syilx people of Central Okanagan (Pooley 44). The Westbank Band was completely bypassed in his survey and while they were eventually allocated reserve lands, they remained excluded from the cattle ranching economy of the Okanagan. Peter O’Reilly who served as commissioner to the JIRC in the 1880s refused to recognize the need for any further allocation of land to Indigenous populations and many reserves were left vulnerable to further incursions by white settlers on their land (Pooley 47). The geographical and political colonization of the land and marginalization of Indigenous inhabitants was supported by the material transformations of the space. Early settlers established a vast cattle ranching industry in the area, as features of the region such as the valley’s open grasslands and easily accessible water from lakes and creeks lent itself well to this (Wagner 25). The capture and fencing of expansive tracts of previously free land as private property for ranching had the impact of further excluding both Indigenous inhabitants as well as much of the wildlife they depended on. Bennett notes that this, combined with the implementation of reservations, greatly curtailed the range and freedom of movement of the Syilx Okanagan people and “profoundly disrupted” their traditional pattern of life (Bennett 68). Wagner also points to the ways in which the ranching industry contributed to loss of biodiversity and environmental degradation of grasslands. Wagner goes on, however, to assert that “the most severe losses in the region have occurred as a result of the more intensive pattern of agricultural, residential and industrial development made possible by the later introduction of an irrigation-based tree fruit industry” (Wagner 26). 66 Over the early 1900s there were a series of water legislations and amendments to legitimize damming, storing of water, and make it a public resource. Beginning in the early 1900s, the meandering waters of the Okanagan River were re-engineered to make it a channelized and diked waterway allowing it to serve the purposes of navigation, flood control and irrigation (“Restoring Nature’s Curves”). Bennett describes the way in which irrigation served as a “critical ‘tool of Empire’” in the Okanagan at the turn of century by allowing for a new articulation of the landscape as a “proverbial Garden of Eden”: “In place of grazing herds of cattle on vast arid ranches, hundreds of neatly rowed seedlings fed by diverted creeks with cement flumes and earthen ducts refashioned the contours of the land. Under the unforgiving heat of the summer sun, developers planted a vast garden in the desert” (Bennett 68). Donna Senese and others, describe in their 2012 paper titled “The Okanagan Wine Region of British Columbia, Canada” (2012), the transformation of the landscape between 1904 and 1914 using similar imagery: “In half a generation, the area’s landscape turned from brown to green and took on the look and feel of a well-manicured and bucolic agricultural landscape” (Senese et al. 83). As alluded to earlier, these transformations derived from a Christian imagination which had both a missionary impulse as well as an expansionist agenda. Okanagan as the ‘Garden of Eden’ The town of Kelowna, which was established in 1905, emerged from the Oblate Christian missionary establishment founded by Father Charles Pandosy, Father Richard, and Brother Surel in the 1860s. Father Pandosy’s mission and the Christian roots of the settlement are still commemorated as a part of the heritage of the city (“History of Kelowna”). It was, moreover, a Christian vision of an ideal society and landscape that led to the emergence of the oasis landscape aesthetics that has transformed and dominated the Okanagan, in different iterations over the 67 subsequent decades continuing to the present day. The first small fruit gardens started with the first introduced apple seedlings to the Okanagan regions were planted by the Okanagan Mission in 1862 (Dendy and Kyle 3). The expansion of irrigation infrastructure in the valley subsequently facilitated the extensive cultivation of fruit orchards that formed the image of a “garden of Eden” complete with its apple trees. Part of the further mission to realise this vision of Eden was also populating the valley with the right kind of people. The development and promotion of the orcharding industry was guided by certain racial, class-based, gendered and biblically informed ideals for society. The Indigenous populations inhabiting the Okanagan were largely pushed to the sidelines of this imperial imagination and they were seen by white settlers not as residents of Eden “but only a facet of its scenery, used to historize the apple orchard and British claims to it” (Bennett 73). Much of the prairies in Western Canada had a large population of labouring class East European migrants who were involved in the cultivation of cereals such as wheat. Colonial government advertisements to attract settlers to British Columbia, and the Okanagan in particular, were however much more specifically targeted at a middle class, gentrified Anglo-European population of settlers: “Guided by dreams of rank and privilege, European settlers converged on the Okanagan Valley in 1861 at the invitation of a colonial government eager to attract “gentlemen to this Kingdom”” (Bennett 67). “Murton describes how nearly twenty-five thousand middle- and upper-class Britons emigrated to BC between 1891 and 1921” (Murton 30). The Okanagan, partly because of its relative geographical isolation, could be held out as a more exclusive space than areas such as metropolitan Vancouver. For instance, while most railway crews in the Pacific Northwest were made up of diverse groups of immigrants, particularly Chinese and Indian immigrants, the Anti-Asian sentiment was especially strong in the Okanagan and they were adamant that railway 68 companies only brought in workers from Northern and Eastern Europe (Hodge 6). There was an effort to build the place up as an idyllic and elite society of luxury and leisure, and the projection of orcharding as a cultured and gentlemanly activity helped set it apart from what was considered the intellectually inferior and coarse labour of wheat cultivation in the prairies: “To highlight the bounty of the orcharding landscape, promoters emphasized the associated attributes of leisure and social activities for the continued refinement of the cultured settler, since “life in Kelowna is by no means a continuous round of toil” (quoted from Kelowna Board of Trade)” (Bennett 79). A lot of promotional literature inviting settlers to the Okanagan implicitly and explicitly referenced the myth of Eden. Bennett notes how this portrayal of the Okanagan landscape as “divinely ordained” and “grounded in the act and purpose of Creation itself” made “the appeal of a rural occupation to a good Christian mind” much stronger (Bennett 72). 69 Figure 31. Advertisement for gift subscription for magazine – “Still time for BRITAIN and EUROPE mailing”. Beautiful British Columbia: Land of New Horizons, vol. 3, no. 3, 1961, pp. 45. UBC Rare Books and Special Collections. While Anglo-European white gentlemen were appointed as caretakers of this new garden of Eden, women were cast in much more passive role within the structure of this idyllic society. Bennett calls attention to the way in which the Edenic paradise of fruit farming created in the Okanagan was also a “highly feminized landscape, embodying a significant sexual element in its invitation for men to tend the fertile earth” (Bennett 72). In a lot of the promotional literature and pamphlets about the Okanagan, young girls and women feature in photographs standing amidst the orchard trees as a part of scenery. The Beautiful British Columbia magazine played a role in continuing to perpetuate this visual tradition through the 1960s and 1970s, as women when 70 featured in photographs, are presented largely as passive yet aesthetic aspects of the scenery. The following photograph is a perfect example of such a framing of women within landscape. The woman presented in side-profile is not viewing the same scene that the reader of the magazine is presented with and as such, does not serve as a point of identification for the viewer of the picture. We are not viewing the scene with her but viewing her as one part of the scene. Her pose is demure, lady-like and passive as she stands still with her legs held close together and hands crossed at the back. With blonde hair and a delicate peach coloured summer dress, she fits the stereotypical standard of white feminine beauty, and her figure is framed within the reflection of the sky on the water in such a way as to make her an unobtrusive and seamlessly “natural” element Figure 32. White woman in dress gazing over the view of Vaseux Lake near Osoyoos. Beautiful British Columbia: Land of New Horizons, vol. 3, no. 1, 1961, pp. 34-35. UBC Rare Books and Special Collections. 71 of the landscape. This fusion of landscape and woman makes both subject to what is implicitly coded as a “male” gaze in these photographs. The following photographs from various issues of the magazine show women posing for photographs among the blossoms and fruits of the orchards, with three of these featuring as the cover photo of the issue. The first two images also explicitly introduce a person with a camera in addition to the figure of a woman encircled by blossoms within the frame of the picture. Figure 33. Beautiful British Columbia: Land of New Horizons, vol. 2, no. 1, Spring 1960, pp. 1. UBC Rare Books and Special Collections. Figure 34. Beautiful British Columbia: Land of New Horizons, vol. 2, no. 1, Spring 1960, pp. 18. UBC Rare Books and Special Collections. 72 Figure 35. Beautiful British Columbia: Land of New Horizons, vol. 7, no. 1, Summer 1965, pp.1. UBC Rare Books and Special Collections. Figure 36. Beautiful British Columbia: Land of New Horizons, vol. 4, no. 1, Spring 1962, pp. 1. UBC Rare Books and Special Collections. The accompanying caption to the third photo says, “Many of nature’s beauties are featured in the Okanagan Valley. Here is a delightful contribution” (“Everything’s O.K. in the Okanagan” 2). This not-so-subtle reference to the woman on the tree once again equates the white settler woman to the “nature’s beauties” featured in the Okanagan Valley. Bennett reads such representation of women amidst the orchard landscape as a personification of the fertility of the landscape and “the sexualized exchange between man and Nature” by which it is brought into domesticity and orderly cultivation. The fourth picture showing a woman offering a basket of peaches from neat rows of fruits exudes this sense of fertility, bounty, domesticity, and order, representing the Edenic Utopia this new society aspired to. An article titled “Welcome to Apple Country” (see figure 37) is 73 accompanied by a full-page photograph of a woman’s face and inviting smile framed between apple blossoms placed opposite another photo of harvested apple bounty. Figure 37. Face of woman framed by apple blossoms, Beautiful British Columbia: Land of New Horizons, vol. 12, no. 2, 1970, pp. 2-3. UBC Rare Books and Special Collections. The attempt to create a Garden of Eden with an exclusively Anglophile society founded on Christian values and a conservative social order was successful up to a certain extent. Bennett describes how promoters of this imperial Garden of Eden landscape and social order of the Okanagan “had ultimately to confront the paradox that the privileged society they longed to establish rested on the backs of those non-Europeans and labouring classes they so desperately wanted to banish from paradise” (Bennett 65). Chinese migrants had started coming to the Okanagan as early the late 19th century as farm labour and Japanese migrants also started entering the valley at the turn of the century to work in the orchards. The start of the first World War 74 precipitated a shortage of white male labour and this made necessary the inclusion of women in the labour force as well as non-white races who had been looked on as “inferior”, into the exclusive orcharding society. Kelowna’s Chinatown is estimated to have “peaked in the 1930s “between 400 and 500”” (Keyes and Aguiar 13). The 1940s, however, saw a spike of Anti-Asian racism in the Okanagan, particularly after Pearl Harbour in 1942, which lead to a “sharp downward trend in non-white residency” in the Okanagan again (Hodge 9). Daniel Keyes and Luis Aguiar’s 2021 book titled White space: race, privilege, and cultural economies of the Okanagan Valley shows that Okanagan has retained a pattern of being coded as a “white space” throughout its settler history and remains even today as one of the most ethnically homogenous settlements in the province and the country. At the same time it continues to rely heavily on minority migrant populations (from Mexico, for example) for seasonal labour in orchards and wine production (Hodge). Alongside orcharding, grape growing and winemaking was another agricultural industry that was made possible and began to take root after the introduction and expansion of irrigation infrastructure and technologies in the Okanagan Valley. Although commercial wineries in the valley only took off in a big way from the 1970s onwards, winemaking and grape cultivation in the Okanagan has a heritage and tradition that goes all the way back to the early days of white settler colonialism in the region. According to popular legend, Father Pandosy is said to have planted the first grapes in the area. There was some trialing of grape growing in the early 1900s and in the 1920s commercial grape cultivation began on a small scale, largely for the fruit market as well as the emerging wine industry in other parts of the province (Senese et al. 83). In the 1960s and 1970s government regulations pushed to protect grape cultivation in British Columbia by mandating that 81% of grapes used in wineries be grown within the province. Coupled with increased sales of domestic wines in British Columbia, this resulted in vastly increased acreage of 75 vineyards over the next couple of decades (Senese et al. 84). In 1988 the Canada-US Free Trade Agreement forced the federal government to remove tariffs that had insulated local industry from the global market. In response to this, the B.C. wine industry transformed significantly as growers across the province were paid to pull out “undesirable” varieties of grapevines and replace them with superior quality vines that would be more competitive in the market. The hardy, cool climate, and disease resistant French hybrids had been the backbone of the industry from the 1950s to early 1970s (Ross 5) and they were used for blended wines. These were replaced by the superior and government-approved vinifera grapes imported from Europe to produce higher quality premium wine (Ross 6). Okanagan wines began being marketed much more internationally and the wine industry expanded even more through the 1990s and 2000s. The following image shows the first two pages of an article on “Okanagan Grapes” from the 1964 Fall issue of Beautiful British Columbia and gives an indication of this growing industry in the 1960s as it boasts of “close to one thousand acres of vineyards” (“Okanagan Grapes” 23). 76 Figure 38. “Okanagan Grapes”, Beautiful British Columbia: Land of New Horizons, vol. 6. no. 2, 1964, pp. 22-23. UBC Rare Books and Special Collections. The language used in the article quite explicitly incorporates this new agricultural development on the land into the Christian utopian narrative of the valley: It is recorded in biblical history that a bunch of grapes “borne between two men on a staff”, was the chief exhibit offered to Moses and the children of Israel as proof of the fact that the land of Caanan flowed with milk and honey. Today the people of the Okanagan Valley of British Columbia are convinced they live in a land of milk and honey and they will show you close to one thousand acres of vineyards to prove it. (“Okanagan Grapes” 22–23) Wagner discusses how the development in wineries as an industry in the Okanagan was yet another iteration or reconfiguration of the dominant “oasis aesthetic” projected onto the valley by white settlers. The connotation of the Okanagan as a sort of “promised land” for Anglo-European settlers, flowing with milk and honey, adds to earlier metaphors of the place as an “oasis” and a “garden 77 of Eden” that had been promoted in the context of the establishment of orchards. It also makes the progression of the landscape towards vast coverage of vineyards seem like a divinely ordained phenomenon rather than the result of carefully engineered irrigation infrastructure, much human labour, and marketing to sell the appeal of the region’s grapes and wines. Just as the establishment of orcharding in the Okanagan had been accompanied by the narrative of a utopian paradise to encourage the migration of Anglo-European settlers into the valley, the emerging wine industry in the valley has grown to be closely tied with the tourism industry to draw in regular visitors and revenue. Ironically, even though most of the varieties of grapes grown in the Okanagan are imported from across continents, wine tourism relies very much on the narrative of local landscape. The 2012 article by Donna Senese and other authors discusses the importance of the concept of terroir or “place-based authenticity” of wine to the synthesis of the Okanagan wine and tourism industry. This synthesis takes the shape of branding, marketing, and sale strategies that treat wine not as a standalone product, but as something embedded in “localized experiences, discovery, and consumption of cultural products along with the lifestyles associated with them” (Senese et al. 87). By promoting the cultural identity of the place as tied to this relatively recent transformation of the landscape by settler communities, the wineries and their vineyards are further cemented as a “natural” and “essential” feature of the landscape. 78 Figure 39. Photograph from “Fruit of the Vine”. Beautiful British Columbia: Land of New Horizons, vol. 17, no. 2, 1975, pp. 36-37. UBC Rare Books and Special Collections. This full-spread image from the Fall 1975 issue accompanying the article “Fruit of the Vine” presents rows and rows of vineyards as the quintessential image of the Okanagan landscape. The image also perfectly captures the dominant oasis aesthetic of the Okanagan with its framing of mountains in the background, richly irrigated and verdant green vineyards in the foreground and an arresting band of brilliant blue water sandwiched in between. Echoing this visual, a description of the region from an article titled “The Valley is a Garden” reads: 79 Broad, blue, and serene, the Okanagan’s sensitive and ever-changing mirror of lakes lies lazily in the hollow of the valley’s hand, fills the lowest places with jewel colour, and wends its way southwards like a casually dropped string of aquamarines. They are at once the life-force and playground of the valley. Without them, all would be dry and parched by summertime. With their thirst-quenching waters, they have created and fostered their own jewel setting of garden and park, vineyard and orchard. (Beardsley 6–7) This passage conjures up a sumptuous and tempting picture of a paradise that is brimming with vibrant colour, riches, beauty, fertility, and life. Again, this description of the Okanagan as an Eden centers the sharply defined and visible body of lake water and landscapes enabled by the channelized irrigation system built around this water. The imagination of the Okanagan here is most apparently one that is created from a separation of desert and oasis as two absolute binaries of absence and abundance. The image of the oasis seems to almost completely overshadow and erase that of the desert in the description. Yet, the desert remains as a looming threat of what could have been and still could be in place of the oasis without the tools of irrigation to harness and control water – that is a “dry and parched” landscape and an endless thirst. Okanagan as a “Four Season Playground” In contrast to that harsh and bleak image, the Okanagan as an oasis becomes a “garden”, a “park”, and a “playground”. This idea of leisure is central to the white settler culture, narrative, and imagination of the place. A phrase that appears often in the magazine as well as other promotional literature for the Okanagan region is “four season playground”, which also echoes the tag of “evergreen playground” that is used for British Columbia as a whole. The idea of an all-year 80 playground also extends the Christian metaphor of the place as a “Garden of Eden” with the most idyllic lifestyle where residents can engage in innocent and child-like delight. An article in the summer 1961 issue of the magazine is titled “Pleasure puts the OK in Okanagan”, emphasizing this quality of the region. In the same vein, an article from the summer 1965 issue is titled “Everything is OK in Okanagan” and carries the following passage advertising the place: If you talk to any resident of British Columbia’s Okanagan Valley for more than 40 seconds, it is likely you will become obsessed with the idea that in this lovely district, fun was first discovered. The Valley people, from Osoyoos in the south to Mara Lake, north of Enderby, are convinced that nowhere else in the world is so much recreation to be found either in winter or summer. (“Everything’s O.K. in the Okanagan” 2) This quite hyperbolic statement portrays residents of the Okanagan as quite singularly focused on recreation and leisure and with no other cares in the world. In The Culture of Nature, Wilson writes of how tourism “redefines the land in terms of leisure” (Wilson 22). The projection of leisure onto the Okanagan landscape, however, not only targets the temporary vacationing tourist, but also simultaneously attempts to sell the Okanagan as a more permanent lifestyle of leisure for potential new residents. In more recent years, this narrative has led to the reinvention of the place as a retirement hub with the creation of several segregated communities for the elderly that sell an “idyllic image of retirement” that “includes the outdoors, a never-ending playground, a pre-work, child- and adolescent-like life” (Aguiar et al. 129). The “four season” element of this playground is also emphasized to strengthen the appeal of the region for residents and tourists. Okanagan in the summer seems to be the image that is featured the most frequently on the pages of the magazine as the place is repeatedly advertised as 81 a land of warmth and sunshine. However, there is something for every season with Okanagan blossoms pictured in spring issues, outdoor sports and festivals in the summer, the Autumn fruit harvest, and skiing and other winter sports for the cold months. An article from the winter 1964 issue tries to drive home this point by proclaiming Vernon, one of the biggest towns in the Okanagan, the “Winter Capital of British Columbia” in its title. It goes on to say, “No one will challenge the position of the Okanagan as a summer holiday area. However, more and more British Columbians and visitors alike are taking a new look at it as a place they would most like to spend a winter holiday” (“Vernon: Winter Capital of British Columbia” 6). Figure 40. Photo of skiers. Beautiful British Columbia: Land of New Horizons, vol. 6, no. 3, 1964, pp. 2-3. UBC Rare Books and Special Collections. Summer issues of the magazine are full of images of the Okanagan, ranging from picnic and campsites found in the region to festivals and events like the Kelowna Regatta – a water sport festival that is termed the town’s “highlight of the year” (“Everything’s O.K. in the Okanagan” 10). Most of these images serve to project and bolster the “oasis aesthetic” created around the 82 region. From the images of picnic sites and campsites below, it is evident that lakes and beaches serve as the magnet around which summer activities are promoted. Figure 41. “Boat Launching Sites”, Beautiful British Columbia: Land of New Horizons, vol. 1, no. 1, 1959, pp. 8-9. UBC Rare Books and Special Collections. This comes through even more in the image below from an article on the British Columbia Summer Games hosted at Penticton. The main photograph frames the lake-water form cornered by beach and waterfront properties. The three accompanying images on the side show the activities enabled by the harnessing of this water. Swimming in what looks like a man-made pool, sail-boating on the water, and golfing, which while not a water sport still requires incredibly water-intensive maintenance. 83 Figure 42. “Summer Games”, Beautiful British Columbia: Land of New Horizons, vol. 20, no. 1, 1978, pp. 30-31. UBC Rare Books and Special Collections. The colours associated with an oasis landscape are predominantly blue and green and most of these images do highlight this palette. However, the dry browns that also characterize Okanagan summers cannot be completely hidden from view. The article titled “Okanagan Oasis” has plenty of blues (see figure 43). The green is mostly represented by photos of expansive golf courses (figure 44). Behind the vivid manicured green of the foreground, however, rises the stark brown of a sparsely vegetated hill, underlining the arid quality of the climate and surrounding landscape. 84 Figure 43. “Okanagan Oasis”, Beautiful British Columbia Magazine, vol. 21, no. 1, 1979, pp. 34-35. UBC Rare Books and Special Collections. Figure 44. Photo of golf course. Beautiful British Columbia Magazine, vol. 21, no. 1, 1979, pp. 42-43. UBC Rare Books and Special Collections. Contradictions in the ‘Oasis Aesthetic’ An oasis is a concentration of wetness held in an otherwise arid surrounding of land. While the imagery of desert and oasis paint very starkly contrasting pictures, these are in fact not separate but enmeshed ecologies. The representation of the Okanagan landscape in the Beautiful British Columbia magazines leans heavily on a white Christian binary imagination of desert and oasis ecologies in which the desert is all but bracketed away into insignificance to push forth an “oasis aesthetic” of plenty that barely contains any trace of this desert. The idea of the Okanagan as an oasis centers the image of an abundant, visible, bounded, and easily extractable water. This cultural imagination of water has a direct bearing on the construction of the landscape itself, the material changes brought upon it, and their longer-term consequences. Wagner points to the ways in which the economic and socio-ecological landscape created by the oasis aesthetic in the Okanagan 85 threatens to contradict and undermine itself by fuelling ever-increasing water scarcity and degradation of its ecology: Since 2002 the Okanagan River has also been classified as one of Canada’s most endangered rivers (Rae 2005:1). As demands on water resources escalate due to a combination of rapid population growth, agriculture, tourism development, and climate change, water supply and quality are also becoming issues (Cohen et al. 2004; Cohen and Neale 2007; Okanagan Basin Water Board 2008; Rae 2005). The series of lakes in the valley bottom provide the illusion of water abundance, but average renewal rates for these lakes is very low. (Wagner 24) The oasis aesthetic that has created the Okanagan as it is today, is increasingly unable to sustain its own illusion. Wagner suggests that this challenge necessitates the articulation of “a more sustainable landscape aesthetic rooted in local ecologies” by Okanagan residents (Wagner 22). To step out of the dominant oasis landscape aesthetic it is useful to turn to other existing cultural imaginations of the place to be found in the stories, art, and thinking of the Indigenous community of the Syilx people in the Okanagan. Water or “siwɬkʷ” is a central concern for the Okanagan Syilx Alliance, but their conception of “siwɬkʷ” emerges from a very different sensibility than the settler colonial imagination of water. The Okanagan Nation Alliance came out with a “Syilx Nation Siwɬkʷ Declaration” in 2014 which outlines their ideas around and relationship to siwɬkʷ. It begins with the lines “Water is life/ Water is our relation/ Water bonds us to our ancestry, our descendants, and our land” (“Okanagan Nation Water Declaration”). The central theme in this understanding of water is relational, highlighting the bonds of kinship, reciprocity, and responsibility with water as a life-giving force cherished not only for the present 86 but also for the past and continuing futures. This is markedly different from the way in which the “oasis aesthetic” presented in publications such as Beautiful British Columbia frame water as a an ever-extractable resource and prized commodity to be used to serve settler colonial purposes in its multiple historical iterations. Syilx thinker and poet, Jeannette Armstrong, expresses a very different way of sensing and experiencing waters in the living environment through her poem “Water is Siwɬkʷ” (2003). The fluid opening lines of the poem evoke water not just as a separate element of an environment but as a living, moving presence emerging from and composing all creation and life: siwɬkʷ she murmured is an emergence the subsequence of all else a completeness of the design transforming to be lapped continuously onto long pink tongues in that same breathing to be the sweet drink coursing to become the body a welling spring eternally renewing a sacred song of the mother vibrating outward from the first minute drop formed of sky earth and light bursting out of the deep quietness (Armstrong 1–6) The movement of the poem, which is made up of several phrases that run into each other continuously and without definite break, is also suggestive of the flow of waters. This is not a flow that is from one point to another, but rather through myriad webbed and spiralling paths. It also speaks of the siwɬkʷ as being in a continuous state of transformation, to become different bodies and life-forms. This sense of transformation is again expressed in these later lines: …the way of ice piled blue green layer upon layer over eons sustaining this fragment of now so somewhere on her voluptuous body the rain continues to fall in the right places 87 the mists unceasingly float upward to where they must and the fog forever ghosts across the land in the cool desert wind where no rain falls and each drop is more precious than blood (Armstrong 26–31) These lines give a simultaneous sense of a much longer geological timeframe of ever-present movement and transformation. It also traces water in its multitudinous forms found everywhere, from layers of ice, rain, mists, fog and even the “cool desert wind where no rain falls”. These lines, which seem to move up and down through a cross-sectional view of the earth and its atmosphere, show the way in which wetness pervades the material textures of the world without being restricted within any bounded space or land surface. Yet, this is underscored by the awareness of it as a life-giving element “more precious than blood”. This sense of preciousness is not restricted to the desert alone, where there is less, but throughout the interconnected earth. It also important to note that the preciousness of water does not center humans alone, but all life equally. …her song is the sky's way holding the gossamer filaments of rainbow together guarding the silent drift of perfect white flakes where the moose stop momentarily to look upward her song in the forest ensuring a leaf shaped just so captures each glistening droplet to celebrate the vast miles of liquid pumping through the veins of the lion parting undulating savannah grasses lifting great Condor wings soaring last circles in the mountains of Chile accumulating in the places it chooses to pool in subterranean caverns moving through porous stone seeping and wetting sand deep inside of her caressing thunder eggs and smooth pebbles at her heart 88 This song is the way (Armstrong 33–43) The poem lyrically expresses water as a song and way of life breathing and beading through every little and big creature and element of our world, across continents, deep in “subterranean caverns” and up in the sky. This expansive meaning of water is far removed from the settler colonial understanding of water that sees the water as a bounded liquid body and territory and a resource to be controlled to work the land to human purpose. In the Syilx imagination, the presence and absence of waters is not framed through a binary of ‘water’ and ‘land’, ‘oasis’ and ‘desert’, or ‘abundance’ and ‘barrenness’. A critique of this binary imagination is echoed in the work of Anuradha Mathur and Dilip Da Cunha, landscape designers and environmental thinkers. They question all such binaries as implicit ‘acts of design’ that materially shape specific places as well as whole regions in ways that serve particular human ends, and yet end up creating conditions that undercut the sustainability of the very ways of life that they seek to promote. The following quote is from their website as a call to a new critical design practice and pedagogical initiative titled “Ocean of Wetness”: 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. (Mathur and Da Cunha) 89 The Okanagan is a microcosm of larger cultural, political, and ecological phenomena that are re-shaping material realities across many regions of the world while yet carrying its own locally rooted historical and material context and imprints. If policymakers in British Columbia and residents of Okanagan were to heed the call of the Okanagan Water Declaration, it would also imply a process of decolonizing the imagination to reorient cultural relationships to the material environment of the place. To work through this process has not only local, but global implications, as such decolonizing is required to address several interrelated and complex socio-ecological problems that have emerged because of colonial Christian and capitalist frameworks of understanding. 90 Chapter 4: Evolution of the Magazine through the Privatized Era (1984-2001) Today the Beautiful British Columbia magazines from the 1960s and 1970s find a special place in Okanagan memory, particularly in the city of Kelowna where their covers are prominently displayed on utility boxes at various strategic locations. While this era of the magazine and the image and narrative it stood for has been embedded within the city infrastructure and collective imagination of the Okanagan, the magazine’s life and evolution has extended well beyond that period as it is still in publication by the private OP Media Group under the title “British Columbia Magazine”. This passage in the “About Us” section of the current BC Magazine website draws a sense of continuity with the early phase of the magazine: British Columbia Magazine has been British Columbia’s scenic geographic and travel quarterly since it was launched in 1959. We strive to inform and entertain our readers with in-depth and highly visual story packages that present the natural diversity of this province and the many opportunities for exploration and adventure. We maintain a long tradition of well-researched stories that cover parks, wilderness, and wildlife, travel destinations, outdoor adventure, and recreation, geography, ecology, conservation, science, and natural phenomena, remarkable people, First Nations culture, heritage places, and history. (“About Us”) While there exists a broad and surface-level overlap between many of the topics featured in the magazine then and now, when compared with the opening “Message from the Premier” in the very first 1959 issue of the magazine, this description reveals many shifts in the magazine’s agenda and focus. It covers the range of environmental, cultural, history and heritage related topics from a lens that quite straightforwardly targets tourists and travelers. As discussed in the first chapter, the 91 “Message from the Premier of British Columbia” in the first issue draws not only attention to touristic attractions but also advertises the province for potentially permanent settlers. It calls attention to both the “unspoiled beauty” of the province as well as the “modern works of man” and burgeoning industry and wealth of the province. The message ends by proclaiming “the contentment of living in a land that is still brand new”, a thought aligned with the magazine’s subtitle of the time, “the land of new horizons”, in other words an ‘uncharted’ and ‘unoccupied’ land open for new settlement and development (Bennett 3). This tagline was only removed in 1979, probably because the strongly colonial overtones it carried were no longer widely acceptable. A New Face of the Magazine While I will not be examining the most recent avatar of the magazine, I will trace the evolution of the magazine over the 1980s and 1990s here. This period was a crucial turning point for the magazine as after more than two decades of being a government-backed and driven publication, its ownership and publication rights were sold to a private company, the Jim Pattison Group, in 1983. It was published under this new banner from the Spring 1984 issue and remained under the Jim Pattison Group (or later Great Pacific Industries, a member company of the larger group) until it was bought back by Tourism British Columbia in 2001. Right from the very first issue under a private company, the style and format of the magazine shows significant changes. Probably the biggest change was that there was no longer any message or directive from the premier or provincial ministers and, instead, the editor’s role was much more prominently highlighted. In the issue of Spring 1984, editor Bryan McGill makes this announcement about these transitions: “With this issue we are making a few improvements within the format. Together with a revamped index and new masthead, I will be using this column to introduce each quarterly issue to you. These changes are aimed at furthering your reading enjoyment” (2). 92 Figure 45. Changed design of magazine in Spring 1984 issue with Editor’s Notes and index of contents. Beautiful British Columbia Magazine, vol. 25, no. 4, 1984, pp. 2-3. UBC Rare Books and Special Collections. In the summer issue of the following year, the “Editor’s Notes” includes the results of a survey conducted amongst 40,000 resident readers in British Columbia about what topics they would like to see more of in the magazine as well as suggestions for improvements. The most popular topics listed were “wilderness and adventure” (62 percent), with “history” (46 percent) and “wildlife” (44 percent) close behind, then “rural life” (36 percent), with a somewhat less popular topic (with only 18 percent of votes) being “city life” (McGill 2). The note also explains the hike in subscription price from $7 to $7.95 as a trade-off for continuing to have minimal advertising in the magazine (as the suggestion to increase adverts was very unpopular among readers). This signalled a new era of the magazine, where it was no longer a funded voice-piece of the provincial government, but a profit-making private enterprise that needed to maintain 93 competitive prices and relied on increased engagement with and responsiveness to its reader-base to retain its value. It is also worth noting that the questionnaire focused on BC residents even though the magazine claims to have had more than 300,000 readers in various countries, adding up to a total readership of more than a million (McGill 2). While it is hard to point to the exact reason for this shift in priority from global to local readership, the publishers seemed to recognize that there was a better market closer home for this new phase of the magazine. The magazine later expanded the space for reader response by introducing a section called “Inside Passage” with the Fall 1993 issue, which was a “place for items of interest passed along to us by insiders – in other words, short items submitted by our readers” (“Submissions from Readers: Inside Passage” 5). This later morphed into a page titled “Mailbox”, where letters from readers responding to different articles were published. Representation of Okanagan: Continuities and Divergences While perhaps not as frequent in its appearance as during the government-funded phase of the magazine, the Okanagan continued to feature in a number of articles in the magazine. Many of the typical images and phrases used to describe the region remained ensconced in the language and narrative established in the early phase of the magazine. An article on the Okanagan from spring 1989 is titled “You Can Play by Day & Luxuriate by Night” and builds on the image of the valley as a “four-season playground” and “Garden of Eden”. The article also contrasts the gentle, tame, and luxurious experience of holidaying in the Okanagan with the more rugged and rough experience of camping in other wilderness areas of British Columbia, comically assuring the reader that “no one will force you to camp” (Neering 31). Another article from the same year in its winter issue is titled “Lakeside Vision” and reconjures the valley’s established oasis aesthetic through a 94 very colonial gaze evident in its narration of the history of the settlement of Summerland in the Okanagan: As we stand above Summerland, on the western shore of British Columbia’s Okanagan Lake, it’s difficult to imagine the scene as it was when John Moore Robinson arrived in 1902. Moore had a heavenly vision for the dry and rugged land he beheld. He saw orchards and vineyards rising from the dust, becoming fat with peaches, apples, apricots, plums, cherries, and grapes. He saw his pockets lined with gold. (Blake 36) The “heavenly vision” that the writer imagines the pioneer John Moore Robinson had for the “dry and rugged” landscape’s transformation to an oasis of plenty, quickly converges with an almost gluttonous sense of entitlement and possession of this landscape. The resources of the land are seen as a means of fattening the white settler’s pockets with gold. The present-day images that accompany this passage are meant to showcase the ongoing bounty of the landscape – luscious fruit, a sparkling water playground, and bountiful fields with young summer revelers. These images, and many such others of the Okanagan, continue to frame this landscape as a gift to white people, as the Indigenous Syilx people and other people of colour are rarely ever present in them. 95 Figure 46. “Lakeside Vision”, Beautiful British Columbia Magazine, vol. 31, no. 4, 1989, pp. 36-37. UBC Rare Books and Special Collections. While the history of orcharding remained an important part of the heritage of the region as presented in the magazine, the images and stories of orchard blossoms and harvests had gradually faded from the magazine over the 1970s, giving way to more articles advertising the rising wine industry in the 1970s. During the privatized phase of the magazine from the 1980s to the end of the 20th century, there are practically no articles on the orchards of the Okanagan. Surprisingly, there are also barely any articles spotlighting the wineries of the region. One article in the fall 1984 issue, titled “Wineries Maturing with Age: Going for Greatness”, humorously talks about the recent improvements in the quality of wines coming out of the Okanagan: “Not long ago, a serious wine lover in this province was likely to groan at the mere mention of the local product. He might counsel the visitor, “the water’s fine – just don’t go near the wine!” But more and more, British Columbia’s aficionados are changing their tune” (Wassermann 20). The dig at the early iterations 96 of Okanagan wine signals a significant departure from the tone of the government-funded period of the magazine, which was much more effusive and unqualified in its praise of the region and any such economic enterprises within it. Yet, some of the older colonial and gendered messaging around the land remains embedded in this article. In talking about the challenges of introducing premium vinifera varieties of grapes from Europe to the Okanagan, whose climate and soil were quite different, it describes the process as the “struggle to tame the noble shrew” (Wassermann 22). In the subsequent years, this aspect of the Okanagan’s burgeoning tourist economy seems to go out of focus, getting less and less attention in the magazine. A lot of the articles on the Okanagan begin to introduce somewhat different perspectives and a shift in focus on the region. An article in summer 1986 issue, titled “Pocket Desert” by Gordon Peachey, seems at first an echo of an article from 1976 called the “Plants of the Pocket Desert”. It certainly forefronts the idea of a “pocket desert”, or the desert in the Okanagan as a contained and tame space. This is a description of the history of the landscape from the article: The first of many threats to the special natural history of the southern Okanagan began with the arrival of European fur traders in 1811. In the 1920s, the South Okanagan Land Project – an extensive irrigation scheme changed the bottomland from desert to orchards. This provided farming opportunities to soldiers home from World War One. As charming orchard communities flourished, many valuable plant and animal habitats were lost. Luckily, the pocket desert has only been affected by grazing. However, many animals need more untouched wilderness to survive. (Peachey 13) There is a clear shift in slant in the historical account of the settling of the Okanagan presented here, as it highlights the conservation issues that have resulted. While orchard communities are 97 still denoted as “charming” the native semi-arid ecosystem is also recognized as “valuable” and its loss is lamented. The “pocket desert” is, therefore, seen as an important habitat for protection. Later, in the summer issue from the year 1997, in which the “pocket desert” is listed as part of an article on the “7 Wonders of the West”, this environmental critique is much more strongly expressed. The old-growth grassland and endangered and extinct species of the Okanagan are explicitly described as the “earlier victims of encroaching Okanagan urbanization and valley-claiming irrigation” (Wood and Sinclair 31). Yet another article again recenters environmental concerns in the Okanagan with the title “Osoyoos – A town rediscovers what really counts: its environment”. In this article residents are described as having rediscovered that the ‘real gold’ does not come from “industrial development” but rather from their clean and beautiful environment which encouraged the growth of the town as a tourism hub and retirement centre. Through the analogy to the gold rush this is, however, tied to the story of white occupation and settlement of the land in pursuit of gold. After not finding gold in the Okanagan, the gold rushers are described in the article as waking up “to the realization that the real gold is all around them. It’s the beauty of the land. It’s the fresh air. It’s the fresh water. It’s the warm climate. They stay and become settlers” (Neering 38). The environmental message here is accompanied by a troubling naturalization of colonialism and settler society, once again by the implication that the land was a gift freely offered and waiting to be taken up by the white settler. Interestingly, a couple of years later, the spring 1994 issue of the magazine features a letter in response to this article from reader Frank Western Smith, the president of the Osoyoos Museum Society, praising the impact it had on further encouraging the rise in new residents and industry in the town. He claims that immediately after the magazine’s publishing of this article, “a housing 98 roll commenced”, also influencing the industrial parks in Osoyoos to sell out (“Submissions from Readers: Inside Passage” 4). Unlike the 1960s and 1970s, from the 1980s onwards articles focusing on the various roads connecting different settlements and tourist destinations are few and far between. By this time, car culture and roadways were already quite well entrenched in the North American and British Columbian psyche. There was also probably less reason for the privatized magazine to advertise government infrastructural projects. A couple of articles do however point towards continued efforts to better connect the Okanagan and attract even more migration to it. The summer 1987 issue has a feature on the newly opened “Coquihalla Highway 5” announcing that “suddenly where there was impenetrable wilderness, a freeway came into place, and a vast province shrunk” (Price 24). The language and rhetoric around roads and the conquering of wilderness here closely mimics that of older articles on roads from the 1960s-70s that were discussed in the first chapter. A couple of decades into the massive expansion of road infrastructure in the province, the writer here is only much more assertive about the central place of roads in the British Columbian experience of landscape: “The mental maps of British Columbia are first of all road maps; their visual memories are a sequence of roadside corridors and windshield vistas. Distances are measured in time and climate, not in miles and kilometres” (Price 25). The article emphasizes better connectivity to the Okanagan as one of the key goals of the highway project: “Eventually, Phase 3 will connect Merritt with Peachland, providing more options for the tourists exploring B.C.’s wine country, the orchardists shipping fruit to city, the fisherman searching for trout, the hiker after new frontier” (Price 24–25). Two years after the completion of this third phase of Coquihalla highway, an article appears in the fall 1992 issue of the magazine titled “The Connector”, describing the impact of this new 99 route on traffic to Okanagan. It suggests that this new link is responsible for Kelowna’s dramatic rise in economic development and population in the past six years and a changed perception of the place as not only a good tourist destination but also place to live in and participate in other growing businesses in the region. While this is presented in a largely positive light, the mayor of Peachland interviewed in the article indicates that all these changes towards a busier and more bustling Okanagan are not welcomed by all residents, especially “newcomers who moved here to avoid this kind of so-called progress” (Coyle 27). In the summer 2000 issue of the magazine, this sentiment is much more strongly present in an article titled “The New Okanagan” which carries this headline: “Strip malls, traffic jams, and proliferating subdivisions are crowding out the serene lakeshore lifestyle that brought the hordes here in the first place. How ironic” (Neering 35). This line quite effectively puts its finger on the contradictions and unsustainable nature of the central construct and narrative of the Okanagan as a settler’s paradise and oasis. It goes onto talk about not only the recent history of increased migration into the Okanagan since the completion of the Coquihalla highway in 1990, but also the longer-term transformations to the landscape since the beginning of settler colonialism in the Okanagan and their detrimental impact on the ecosystem. ‘Ours to Cherish’: An Environmental Turn These gradual shifts in the discourse of the magazine around Okanagan reflected an overall turn in the magazine’s tone, direction, and agenda towards a more environmentally and politically conscious publication. This was also a response to shifting public discourse in North America and more specifically in the province of British Columbia, where environmental and conservation issues were gaining importance in political debates and conversations. An environmental movement had been building up since the 1960s, catalyzed by work such as Rachel Carson’s landmark book, Silent Spring (1962). In the United States, several environmental regulations were 100 introduced in following decade, first with the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) in 1969, and then the Clean Air Act in 1970, Endangered Species Act in 1973, and Clean Water Act in 1977 (Wolters and Steel 186). The passing of the Endangered Species Act in particular created a new public consciousness around environmental well-being that was often tied to the conservation status of visually recognizable or striking species. Over the 1980s and 1990s several environmental issues became an arena of public battle leading to a sharp sorting of political positions. South of the border, in the United States, this was first brought to fore in a big way with the Spotted Owl controversy and court case, which pitted many environmentalists and concerned citizens against the logging industry and the state. The US Fish and Wildlife Services (FWS) had rejected a citizen petition to list the Northern Spotted Owl as an endangered species, an act which would result in great restriction on the clear-cutting of the species’ forest habitats. This led to a series of highly public court cases and further assessments eventually enacted a “major shift in public land management” by prohibiting further timber sales within the Spotted Owl’s habitat (Wolters and Steel 187). This and other such environmental movements of the time, however, created very polarized and class-tinged positions in their bid to preserve a ‘pure nature’ from human intervention, as articulated in an essay by Richard White titled “‘Are You an Environmentalist or Do You Work for a Living?’: Work and Nature” (1996). The title of the essay is taken from a bumper sticker found commonly in one of the logging towns in Washington state which was “badly crippled by both overcutting and the spotted owl controversy” and draws attention to the division between environmentalists and the working class whose livelihoods were affected by conservation movements (White 171). This Spotted Owl case set an important precedent in the US, also influencing environmental movements north of the border in British Columbia. The Clayoquot Sound protests 101 through the 1980s and 1990s was one of the biggest movements that marked this transition towards environmental politics in the province. This conflict was over government policies of resource extraction in the collection of inlets and islands of Clayoquot Sound on the west coast of Vancouver Island, an area inhabited by First Nation Ahousaht, Hesquiaht, and Tla-o-qui-aht communities, collectively known as Nuu-cha-nulth (“First Nations of Clayoquot Sound”). A thirteen-year long battle began in the early 1980s with protests against logging permits granted by the ruling Social Credit Party government for Meares Island and pitted environmental organizations, First Nation communities, and the opposition New Democratic Party in alliance against the logging industry and ruling Social Credit party government. This led up to one of the largest civil disobedience movements in Canadian history in 1993, called the “Clayoquot Summer”, in which around ten thousand people joined protests against the clear-cutting of forest and about a thousand were arrested (“History”). This put pressure on the provincial government to enter into negotiations with the Nuu-cha-nulth Council to have greater involvement of First Nations communities in forest management (Turkington 22). While the magazine had already been promoting more articles around wildlife and nature prior to this, the winter 1989 issue of Beautiful British Columbia more overtly marked the emerging political consciousness around environmental issues for the first time. The editorial note explains that “because British Columbians are becoming increasingly concerned about their environment, we plan to include in our usual mix of stories more attention to landscape or wildlife at risk” (McGill 4). This issue features two stories about communities and environments adversely impacted by logging (one is centered in the Carmanah Valley and another on coastal rainforest areas in the province such as Clayoquot Sound). Both are aimed as a political critique of government policy, as the editorial notes indicates: 102 The crux of the problem in B.C. is that it is land both extraordinarily beautiful and rich in natural resources. In seeking prosperity for B.C., the government has traditionally put more emphasis on using natural resources for export, such as in the mining and forestry sectors, rather than rationalizing and preserving them. However, tourism, the new boy on the block, has been booming in the last two decades, largely because travelers want to experience B.C.’s environment. (McGill 4) While carrying an environmental message, the perspective presented here emerges from and is clearly rooted in the interests of the tourism industry of the province. The rationale for the preservation of the environment here is predicated on its aesthetic value for the purposes of the tourism economy rather than any intrinsic or other value. At the same time, many of the articles going forward from this point seem to bring out the contradictions and conflicts between the promotion of tourism and environmental well-being. A main feature from spring 1991 focuses on the Clayoquot Sound struggle and the editorial note points to tourism as a major contributor to the problem: “While Tofino fights to control its own destiny on how Clayoquot Sound is used, it is also striving to maintain its identity against mass-consumer tourism” (McGill 4). The typical, mass-consumer tourist looking to find “a strip of fast-food outlets, large-scale hotels, chain stores” is no longer desirable and is described as annoying. On the other hand, there is a new ideal type of tourist that the magazine does seem to wish to appeal to and draw in: “Best appreciated is the tourist who shows up with slickers, gum boots, cameras, and binoculars, ready for walks on beaches blasted by wind and surf, encounters with whales, and hikes through rain forests” (McGill 4). Another article on “Ellerslie Lake” in the spring 1994 issue even questions whether tourism is any better than logging in its impact on ecologies as it carries this quote from a local resident: ““I’m not sure if I’d rather have the loggers or the tourists. 103 At least the loggers, they come in and take what they want, and then they’re gone. The land is left quiet again and begins trying to heal. Once the tourists come, they will be back every year” (Cowell 12). In the same vein, the cover story of the spring 1998 is titled “Eco-Tourism Boom: How Much Can Wildlife Take?” and the editor, Bryan McGill, writes that “the question of “destroying what we love” insinuates itself throughout this issue of Beautiful British Columbia” (McGill 4). In the context of the article on threatened ocean life, more regulated whale-watching companies are contrasted with “private boaters” and “stealthy Kayakers” who lack restraint. Here again, there is a call for a more sensitive and restrained model of tourism as well as an idea of the ideal tourist. Post the Clayoquot Sound summer, the aesthetics and design of the magazine also gradually shifted to project a more “environmental” image. The fall issue of 1993 (figure 48) introduced a new design layout for the magazine’s contents page. Comparing it with the contents page of the previous issue (figure 49), the text is much less cluttered and contained and the single glossy image of natural beauty visually dominates the double spread page. The presence of human faces, communities, and technologies are conspicuously absent. In subsequent issues, sections categorizing articles such as “Wildlife”, “Ecological Preservation” or “Environment” are included in the contents page. From fall 1994, the magazine also included updates on a tree-planting program for children started by the company in a box titled “Keeping B.C. Beautiful”. In highlighting that this program was “replacing more than the fibre the magazine uses to publish four issues a year” the company emphasized their moral and environmentally conscious stance and practice (“Product and Company Information” 4). 104 Figure 47. Contents page. Beautiful British Columbia Magazine, vol. 35, no.2, 1993, pp. 2-3. UBC Rare Books and Special Collections. Figure 48. Contents page. Beautiful British Columbia Magazine, vol. 35, no. 3, 1993, pp. 2-3. UBC Rare Books and Special Collections. From the spring 1995 issue up until the end of 2001, when it was sold once more back to Tourism BC, the magazine adopted the subtitle “Ours to Cherish” (see figure 49) to Beautiful British Columbia as a call to care for the natural beauty of the province. In addition to the cover 105 photos and inside spread of these issues reflecting the increased focus on special and threatened natural habitats, landscapes, and wildlife species in BC, the back cover was also standardized to be blue or green (colours associated with environmentalism) with a dedicated frame called “Glimpses” for photographs of wilderness or wildlife (see figure 50). The magazine’s description also changed hereafter to a greater focus on issues of an environmental nature: “Under its banner of “Ours to Cherish”, the magazine publishes well-researched stories on and superb photography of B.C.’s magnificent scenery, parks, wilderness, wildlife, geography, ecology, and heritage” (“Product and Company Information” 4). 106 Figure 49. Cover page with “Ours to Cherish” subtitle. Beautiful British Columbia: Ours to Cherish, vol. 37, no.1, 1995, pp. 1. UBC Rare Books and Special Collections. Figure 50. Back cover with “Glimpses” frame. Beautiful British Columbia: Ours to Cherish, vol. 37, no. 1, 1995, pp. 48. UBC Rare Books and Special Collections. 107 The phrase “Ours to Cherish”, however, also suggests a claim to place. This claim was, however, far from uncontested as several Indigenous communities had been living on the land from time immemorial before the coming of settlers and the establishment of the province as British Columbia under the Crown. This claim is even more questionable given the context that about ninety five percent of British Columbia is unceded territory without any treaty signed between the settler government and Indigenous communities of the province (First Peoples 14). Representations of Indigenous Communities In the early phase of the magazine as a government funded publication in the 1960s and 1970s, there were only a few rare articles that spoke about Indigenous communities, and these were usually historical pieces or carried an anthropological gaze on some aspect of Indigenous craft, culture, and tradition that stood out as striking and attractive. In contrast to that, the magazine’s representation of Indigenous communities rose dramatically in the 1980s and 1990s and began to look more at the ongoing lives of Indigenous communities. The editor’s note for the spring 1985 issue of the magazine, carrying an article on the Ahousaht nation, says: “Over the years we have done stories on the distinctive cultures and history of British Columbia’s first people. But, for the first time, and in this issue (p. 38), we are presenting a glimpse into the day-to-day life of a native Indian village” (Haegert and Coull 2). The growing number of articles carrying Indigenous voices also had a lot to do with their association with the environmental movements of the time. An article in the spring 1995 is titled “The Elders Speak” and features elders from several different Indigenous nations giving an account of their community’s connection to their lands, observations of growing environmental problems, and pieces of 108 ecological wisdom from their community’s myths, traditions, and stories. Annie Kruger, an elder of the Okanagan people from Penticton, for instance, laments the hollowness of contemporary environmentalist discourse: “People are talking about it now but not in the sense I’d like to see it. Nowadays, talk is cheap” (Haegert and Coull 21). She goes on to contrast Indigenous values of caring for the environment with modern business-oriented thinking: We were put here as caretakers of this land…we aren’t being heard you know. My old people have been talking about this, how you have to conserve everything, only take what you need and make sure everything’s clean. The business doesn’t think much of the environment and water. They invented a filtering machine supposed to purify water, even swamp water, they said. It seems like they’re utilizing the environment to make dollars – dirty the environment so they can invent something to clean it up again. (Haegert and Coull 21) This simultaneously critiques the extractive logic of economy in mainstream settler society, while also offering the revisitation to Indigenous teachings and ways of living as a more sustainable alternative. A number of articles also highlight the ongoing struggles of First Nations communities to have more of a say in the management of the lands they inhabit. The Fall 1995 issue, for instance, gives platform to two different stories of Indigenous communities fighting for the preservation and co-management of their environment. One of these articles focuses on the Nemiah Band’s efforts to stop logging in their area and establish the “Ts’yl-os Park” in Nemiah valley by the Chilcotin mountains (Grescoe and Grescoe 6). The other article focuses on the Gwaii Haanas National Park, described as what was “once the scene of one of the country’s seminal environmental battles” and 109 now “co-managed by Parks Canada and the powerful native people, the Haida Nation, who won the battle” (Grescoe and Grescoe 36). Even while this framing of Indigenous peoples as guardians or custodians of nature empowered them in certain ways, it also continued to limit their political position under what would be better described as neocolonial rather than postcolonial structures of governance. Bruce Willems Braun, in his essay titled “Buried Epistemologies: The Politics of Nature in (Post)colonial British Columbia” (1997), points to the way in which the kind of portrayal of Indigenous people seen in environmental magazines like Beautiful British Columbia of the 1980s and 1990s maintained an imbalance of power: Ironically, by locating native culture resolutely in the realm of the ‘traditional,’ the writer and photographer can retain a contradictory political posture that articulates support for land claims as well as a desire for preservation. These very different political struggles become conflated through the assertion that traditional native culture was not ecologically disruptive and, if it remains ‘authentic,’ should never be. In turn, by staging this region as ‘nature’ and the Nuu-chah-nulth as ‘traditional,’ the environmental movement establishes its own right to be modern, scientific, and enlightened spokespersons for nature (and ‘natives’) in the region, and the legitimate opponents to corporate capital. (Braun 23) By tying Indigenous culture to the ideas of ‘traditional knowledge/wisdom’ and ‘nature to be preserved’, these communities are constructed as static and unchanging (in much the same way as earlier historical and cultural tourism-oriented pieces turned them into the equivalent of museum artefacts). Braun goes on to point out that Indigenous communities had their own longstanding yet evolving systems and conceptions of “ownership, political authority, and social and ecological 110 responsibilities” (Braun 25). The boxing of Indigenous culture with a “preserved” static tradition and nature, however, also undercut the political agency of these communities in (post)colonial British Columbia and Canada. Sentiments on both sides of the divide around environmental politics are reflected in reader responses to the Beautiful British Columbia articles in the “Mailbox” section of the magazine. In the winter 1998 issue, one such response carries the complaint that the magazine is too environmental: You’re too environmental. Your magazine has changed in the last three years. You are no longer a travel magazine telling about towns, people in specific towns, and specific areas of B.C. You are now an environmental magazine, with a political agenda. There are too many general photos about trees, or animals, or parks, or issues. (“Mailbox” 5) This message expresses great discontent with the editorial changes seen in the magazine in the 1990s, as well as a nostalgia for the older character of the magazine which according to this reader, was without a “political agenda”. The older version of the magazine was government funded and clearly did have a political agenda, one which was often explicitly expressed through the messages from the premiere and ministers at the start of each issue. As discussed in the first two chapters, this was to promote and advance the province’s industry, economy, and infrastructure, as well as encourage further migration of settlers to less populated interior regions of the province. Letters from other readers in a subsequent issue, however, disagree with the critique of the first reader, one of them even praising the environmental focus of the magazine as showing “editorial integrity (“Mailbox” 44). It is important to note, however, that despite the new face of the magazine as an environmental magazine, it did not ever completely shed its ties to the tourism industry of the 111 province. As less and less space was devoted in the main magazine to more typically mainstream tourist interests, a magazine pullout called Beautiful British Columbia Traveller was introduced in 1992 to advertise scenic tourist destinations and activities, festivals, and hotel deals. This supplement was only distributed within the province, suggesting that the targeted group of holidayers were now a much more local demographic. While the magazine’s focus and contents clearly changed across the decades leading up to the close of the 20th century, its new identity and direction in the 1980s and 1990s carried its own internal contradictions. Even as it tried to engage with the different priorities of the changing socio-political milieu of the province and its readership, it could not stray too far from its origins, rooted in the mainstream connotations of its title. Beautiful British Columbia responded in different ways to changing notions of ‘beauty’ that were politically as well as culturally determined to assert a settler colonial territory and identity, and it has in turn played its part in shaping these notions as well as their material consequences. 112 Chapter 5: Conclusion In the preceding chapters I have attempted to uncover the multiple ways in which the Beautiful British Columbia magazine reflects an attempt at claiming and capturing land by constructing and controlling the dominant narratives and aesthetic imaginations of the province’s different regions. In the context of the Okanagan, it does so by projecting a Christian and Anglo-European imagination and ideal of a “green” oasis onto a complex semi-arid ecology that can hardly sustain this image, as is becoming more and more evident through its growing environmental concerns. Rewriting the Okanagan landscape, both discursively and materially, has also been an important tool in the settler colonial erasure of Indigenous claims to and relationships with the land. The Syilx Okanagan never ceded their territories to the Canadian government, but the land was taken nonetheless, displacing these communities. Cultural texts such as Beautiful British Columbia helped to obfuscate the violence of this by presenting the image of the landscape as a “Garden of Eden” or “oasis in a desert” waiting as gifts for the white Christian settler colonialists, and at the same time removing Indigenous peoples from the picture entirely. While a turn to a less obviously colonial rhetoric and more politically progressive language is seen beginning in the 1980s and 1990s phase of the magazine, representation of Indigenous peoples is still trapped within the trope of the “ecological Indian” and maintains the same imbalance of power relations between settler and Indigenous societies. White Space by Keyes and Aguiar, gives an account of the neocolonialism that persists today in the white settler culture in the Okanagan: Whiteness permeates contemporary representations of the ideal Okanagan life in magazines, maps, posters, institutions, and websites that picture the region as a literal 113 contemporary paradise for white bodies. These texts inoculate viewers against the colonial history of the valley and its neocolonial present by framing representations of the region in white innocence. (6) The popular representations of the “ideal Okanagan life” referred to in this passage follows in the same narrative tradition, which was established in Beautiful British Columbia, portraying the space as a garden of white leisure and prosperity. Kelowna’s present-day commemoration of the memory of the Beautiful British Columbia magazine through the reproduction of its cover photographs on Kelowna’s electricity transformer boxes signals an ongoing projection of this earlier idealization of British Columbian and Okanagan landscapes. It is also a reaffirmation of the role of tourism in giving the city its identity and meaning, especially since the largest concentration of the utility boxes with the magazine images are found in the places most frequented by tourists such as outside the Airport or in the tourist-friendly downtown streets. Among other images printed on some of the utility boxes in Kelowna are old fruit crate labels. An article published by the CBC on September 17, 2022, titled “How the century-old history of Okanagan’s bold fruit crate labels is being kept fresh”, speaks about how these utility box decorations aim to keep the history and heritage of the city alive. The article does further allude to the colonial nature of the legacy reflected in the fruit crate label images chosen for the boxes. For example, one of the fruit crate labels is “Occidental: Canadian A1 Apples”. “Occidental”, a racially and colonially loaded term that equates “Western European” with civilization and is positioned in opposition to “oriental” (Szeto). In the fruit label “occidental” also stands in for Canadian identity, thereby asserting white presence and claim on place over and above that of Indigenous populations or the many Asian communities brought to Canada as agricultural labour. 114 There is a need to examine the settler colonial legacy of the Beautiful British Columbia magazine, and other cultural artifacts of the past century, but this needs to be done in a closely engaged and critical way, not simply through a valorization and reaffirmation of the images constructed by it. While images of the Beautiful British Columbia magazine were ubiquitous through the Kelowna cityscape, one of the greatest challenges I faced in getting a closer knowledge and understanding of the magazine was the inaccessibility of a comprehensive archive of the magazine. There was no digitized archive of the magazine, and it took some searching to finally locate the physical archives in the basement reading room of the UBC Vancouver Rare Books and Special Collections. As the archive could not be borrowed out of the library and there was a limit to the number of scans that could be requested from the library, I had to eventually take all the photographs of the magazine on my phone camera within the very short span of time I had on my research visits to Vancouver. Greg and I also tried initiating and procuring funding for the digitization process of the magazine archive; but this proved to have further hurdles as even after several emails and phone calls with people in the different organizations that have published the magazine, it was still hard to find who held the current copyrights to the magazine. Digitization of the archives would be a highly recommended step to facilitate further research on Beautiful British Columbia and its significant cultural impact in the province. The environmental culture of most towns in the Okanagan continue to align in many ways with the image of a green oasis or garden of Eden through the maintenance of extensive golf courses and suburban “lawn-scapes”. Every summer, there are also hordes of tourist flocking to sun themselves on the myriad lake beaches scattered across the valley or participate in wine-tasting tours. However, even as the idea of Okanagan as a “summer paradise” has persisted, this image is now regularly and forcefully punctured as the Okanagan appears in the news as a “summer hell” 115 instead, in the wake of new and more persistent wildfires each year. In August of 2023, my second summer in Kelowna, we experienced possibly the worst wildfire in recorded BC history, burning more than 2.84 million hectares of forest and land (Turner). The wildfires reached several settled areas, particularly in West Kelowna, prompting the evacuation of several residents, many of whom lost their homes and property to the fires. Even those areas, such as my neighbourhood in Rutland, that weren’t directly in the path of the fires, were made unliveable by the intensity and concentration of smoke pollution. Within a couple of days, it had impacted our health to such a degree that my roommates and I were compelled to brave the drive through thick layers of smoke to flee Kelowna until the fires abated and the air cleared again. For at least a week the Okanagan landscape became an apocalyptic vision of blazing red fires and persistent eerie grey smoke that formed a shroud over all that the Okanagan summer is prized for – the sunny beach, the blues of Okanagan Lake, and the lush greens of its wineries, orchards, and lawns. It is very striking that wildfires barely make any appearance in the Beautiful British Columbia magazine before the 2000s and especially never in relation to the Okanagan. This may be attributed to the fact that the late 20th century was a period of aggressive wildfire suppression in BC. A rare article in Beautiful British Columbia that mentions wildfire, appears in the Spring 1960 issue, titled “Water Bombing Forest Fires”. The article expresses confidence in the ability of the province’s newly acquired aerial firefighting technology – the Martin Mars flying boats – to handle any forest fires. The article frames forest fires as among the “greatest threats to British Columbia’s economy” and its forest timber resources, after which it also mentions the destruction of wildlife as a secondary concern (“Water Bombing Forest Fires” 15). Before the period of settler colonization, Indigenous communities had practiced cultural burns that were part of ceremony, and also served to check any concentrated growth of forests that would be more susceptible to 116 wildfire as also to revitalize the soil and encourage the growth of medicinal and food plants, mushrooms, and other such vegetation of interest to them. In 1874, with the Bush Fire Act, British Columbia became the first province to ban cultural burns, a move that was motivated by the aim to “remove ceremony and assimilate Indigenous Peoples” (Boutsalis). According to a 2023 article by Marc-André Parisien and others, the trend between 1950-2000 had been of steadily decreasing numbers of wildfires as well as the area burned by wildfire, due to a large extent to “increasing fire suppression effort and effectiveness” as well as cooler and wetter climate patterns (Parisien et al. 2). This went hand in hand with the rise of the timber industry and the extensive plantation of single stand coniferous trees at the expense of a diversity of broadleaf and hardwood trees, thus sowing the seeds for a type of forest that would be much more vulnerable to wildfires (Owen). After decades of fire suppression and the build up of over a century of what is termed as a “fire deficit”, there has been an abrupt explosion in wildfire activity from the year 2000 onwards. In the last seven years alone the province has experienced four of the most severe wildfires on record (Owen). These fires can no longer be suppressed and the felt need to relearn from Indigenous approaches and their practices of living with rather than against fire, is becoming both urgent and evident. While cultural burning practices are regaining acceptability and legitimacy as a valid means of engaging with fires that ravage the vulnerable forest landscapes in Canada, according to Amy Cardinal Christianson, a Metis fire research scientist interviewed for an article published in The Narwhal in 2020, these “efforts are localized and siloed, with strategic partnerships often formed between Indigenous communities and local organizations or forest rangers” (Boutsalis). A concern among Indigenous communities is that their cultural knowledge of fires is extracted and used instrumentally to inform policy, without involving them in meaningful partnerships. Many 117 current efforts end up taking a form where members of Indigenous communities with decades of experience in working with fires are made to be foot soldiers rather than allowing them to take leadership roles where they have real decision-making powers in the implementation of these policies and practices. As the cracks in the imposed settler colonial landscape aesthetics and environmental cultures deepen, it is also clear that a move towards reestablishing a sustainable relationship with the environment in the Okanagan, British Columbia, and Canada as a whole, has to go hand in hand with a move towards the decolonization of the land and its people, both those who are Indigenous as well as those who arrived as settler colonists and immigrants. In the wake of increasing awareness and knowledge of the brutal impacts and cultural genocide enacted on Indigenous populations by the residential school system in Canada, there has been a greater impetus in the past decade towards truth and reconciliation between the Canadian government and Indigenous communities in Canada, including the Okanagan more specifically. In 2015, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada came out with several calls to action to: 1) redress the devastating legacy of the residential school system in areas of child welfare, education, language and culture, health, and justice in Indigenous communities and 2) repair relations between the provincial and federal governments of Canada and Indigenous Nations and moving towards goals aligned with the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (Calls to Action). Following this, the Indigenous Languages Act was passed in 2019 by the Canadian government to support and fund Indigenous language revitalization programs and mandate their presence in most higher education institutions in Canada (“Indigenous Languages Act”). One such example of a language revitalization initiative in the Okanagan is the Paul Creek Language Association that has built curriculum for the nqilxwcn language of the Okanagan Syilx 118 people (Johnson). Such efforts may in time help them to find a voice from within their own language and culture to participate in larger political and environmental conversations. For the Syilx Okanagan Nation Alliance, there have been a few significant developments in the advancement of their Nation Title and Rights strategy. In 1964 Canada had entered into the Columbia River Treaty (CRT) with the United States to coordinate flood control and hydroelectric energy production without any consultation with the Syilx Okanagan Nation or other affected First Nation communities. The CRT was opened for renegotiation in 2018 and this time the First Nation peoples have also been included as participants of these negotiations (Annual Report 2020-2021 10). Among important wins for the First Nations is an interim agreement to share a portion of revenue from the Columbia River Treaty with the Ktunaxa, Secwepemc and Syilx Okanagan Nations (“Agreements Address Columbia River Treaty Impacts on Indigenous Nations”). Since 2019, the Syilx Okanagan Nation has also been involved in the Columbia River Salmon Restoration Initiative (CRSRI) in a collaborative partnership with the Secwepemc Nation, Ktunaxa Nation, Province of BC, and Government of Canada, an important step towards taking “stewardship responsibilities for salmon and food security within Syilx Okanagan territory” (Annual Report 2022-2023 10). The Syilx Okanagan Nation is also in the process of buying back 2,310 acres of their land from the O’Keefe Range Lands in Vernon and has petitioned the Canadian Trust Fund to finance this purchase due to their prior claims on the land (“O’Keefe Range Lands Purchase”). These are some incremental steps towards greater jurisdiction of governance and land ownership for the Syilx Okanagan Nation. More comprehensive steps towards reconciliation with the Indigenous communities will perhaps need to go hand in hand with a realigning of the region’s developmental trajectories in tune with the material affordances and realities of the local ecology of the place. 119 The Syilx Okanagan Nation Alliance expresses their own commitment to the values of community, governance, and collaboration for environmental stewardship in the following statement: We, the Syilx Okanagan people, feel a deep connection with our land and with our relatives, the animals and the trees, the rocks and all living things that share the environment. The relationship Syilx Okanagan people have with their land forms the basis of Syilx Okanagan governance. On a basic level, Syilx Okanagan communities work in unison to manage local resources. By working collectively, Syilx Okanagan beliefs and values are infused into Syilx Okanagan external relationships and partnerships. (“Partnerships”) I recently attended a conversation between scholar-activist Naomi Klein and Syilx thinker and writer Jeannette Armstrong on the topic of “Syilx-Led Climate Justice in a Global Context” which situates the role of local Indigenous communities within global networks of solidarity for climate justice. Armstrong also emphasized in the Okanagan context, a need for people – both white settlers and others – to “re-indigenize” with the land, learning from the Indigenous communities with the longest relationships with the land to also form their own bonds of belonging, kinship and reciprocity with the land and its inhabitants. The story of the impacts of settler colonial landscape aesthetics on the Okanagan environment is a microcosm of phenomena across a world that is enmeshed in neocolonial networks of power and capital that have wrought havoc on local ecologies as well as groups of oppressed people in every corner of the world and continue to do so. It may not be politically and economically profitable in the short-term for the Canadian government to confront and make amends for its settler colonial history. Doing so would mean giving up its interests of controlling 120 the use of natural resources in Canadian territories (through mining, oil extraction, hydroelectric energy production, and so on) by relinquishing more decision-making powers to First Nation councils. And yet the movement towards truth and reconciliation is necessary in and of itself as a moral imperative and obligation of the Canadian settler society in the Okanagan. Moreover, Canadians will need to heed the growing calls towards social and climate justice. 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Thesis/Dissertation
eng
Interdisciplinary Studies
Vancouver : University of British Columbia Library
Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International
Graduate
Garrard, Greg
Paradise found : the settler colonial legacy of Beautiful British Columbia magazine
Text