Open Collections

Donald, Madeline Carroll

University of British Columbia

This thesis is an investigation into human modes and methods of interaction with Okanagan riparian habitats. In it I tell two stories: 1) a story of doing research with riparian places, and 2) a story of a particular riparian place. The first story is about, and part of, research done by me, a visitor-scholar (non-Indigenous to this place), and prioritizes the ethics of multi-being relations and multimodality in its formulation and communication. The second story explores the riparian place forming in the margins of Brandt’s Creek, at the bottom of the Okanagan Valley, in syilx territory and Kelowna, British Columbia, Canada. The riparian here is in the process of becoming, a product of its unruly heritage and the spectral ecologies that both precede and co-exist with it. The research process described is one of creating thickness in relationships to place—both mine and others’—by layering varied ways-of-being and doing. These methods were learned and developed in multi-being conversation with and about the riparian and create an experience of corrugation, which amplifies attention in a time and place by making connections to prior experiences. In the semi-arid Okanagan, riparian habitats are the wettest places a non-aquatic being can be. As such, riparian places are important meshworks of relations and possibilities for habitation. They are also places of categorical inconsistency—seasonally contingent, neither land nor water—made marginal through settler colonial and capitalist practices of invasion and acquisition, and an imaginary of place that relies on place-as-property. These two stories explore modes and methods for the analysis of settler colonial socio-ecologies—manifestations of relations between humans and the multi-being and diverse material worlds in which we live—with a focus on living sustainably in and among wetness.

Text

2024-05-16

Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International

http://hdl.handle.net/2429/88332

Interdisciplinary Studies

University of British Columbia

UBCO

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/