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Abstract

This thesis deals with questions of remote community recovery post wildfire disaster by investigating remote community responses to the 2023 Downton Lake Wildfire. Given the increasing severity of wildfire in North America, research into the ways that rural and remote communities are contending with this reality are necessary to understand shifting relationships to rural identity. Currently, not enough attention is paid to the affective, emotional, and embodied responses to wildfire especially as experienced through lines of social difference including gender, race, class and ability. This study engages a multimodal research methodology including ethnographic, autoethnographic, Research-Creation events and outputs, and walking methodologies to discern what constitutes wildfire recovery and the emotional landscapes that make up the rural home. Key to this inquiry is the author’s intimate familial relationship to the research site and her affective and embodied responses to the wildfire. The author considers this wildfire through the lens of her own racialized and disabled relationship to this remote settler community. Through her artistic outputs, a creative non-fiction essay and an art show, the author demonstrates the necessity of investigating wildfire through Chinese Canadian lens simultaneously upsetting the white settler logic of where and how racialized bodies are allowed to take up space in the rural and within the field of wildfire research. Using walking methodologies, the author analyses the post burn landscape as a haunted landscape to excavate the social and environmental violences of white settler colonialism. Ultimately, she arrives at what she calls “grave sweeping as method” to consider the possibility of attending to the ongoing legacies of this violence. Through expert interviews and community focus groups, the author demonstrates the ways that wildfire continues to be deeply felt by community members. First the author shows the sensorial afterlives of the wildfire demonstrating how the wildfire is recalled through intense multisensory bodily reminders. She finds these moments of reckoning and recollection are disturbing and transformative for participants’ understanding of the rural home. Next, she investigates what makes up the rural home, showing how the rural home is heavily reliant on non-human features and relationships.