Geotheorizing mountain–child relations within anthropogenic inheritances^*

* Research conducted in author's previous affiliation as a doctoral candidate at University of Victoria, British Columbia, Canada.

ABSTRACT

This paper focuses on children’s relations with what is now known as Burnaby Mountain in British Columbia, Canada. In particular, it grapples with encounters with the mountain, atop which several childcare centres are located. The mountain, on unceded Indigenous Coast Salish territories, has become a contested site of colonial capitalist extraction due to a proposal to build a tar sands oil pipeline that would tunnel through the mountain. Sustained protest action emerged at the site amidst initiation of test borehole drilling activity by the pipeline company. In this paper, I engage with the potential of geotheorizing children’s relations as a critical response that interrupts dominant understandings of what is seen as appropriate for young children’s curriculum. I consider the effects of refiguring children’s subjectivities through geologic and geontological relations for the normalization and resistance of settler colonialism’s human-centric and extractive structurings.

KEYWORDS:

• Geotheorizing
• geontology
• early childhood
• settler colonialism
• extractivism

Acknowledgements

The author thanks the anonymous reviewers for their invaluable comments on an earlier version of this paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

* Research conducted in author's previous affiliation as a doctoral candidate at University of Victoria, British Columbia, Canada.

1. See Nxumalo (2015) for a detailed description of the research project, which was conducted with ethics approval from the University of Victoria. In this ethnographic action research project, over a period of three years, I spent approximately 5 hours weekly, working alongside educators in each of four childcare settings (each licensed for up to 25 toddler to preschool-aged children) on Burnaby Mountain. This participatory project was intended to support educators in complicating and critically reflecting on practices, such as through engaging with the ethics and politics of everyday practice.

2. This is a term that is being used to describe the current geological epoch in which human activities have irreversibly damaged the earth, such as seen in unprecedented species extinctions and climate change (Crutzen 2006; Steffen, Crutzen, and McNeill 2007). This term, while risking the pitfalls of re-inscribing universalized visions of Man as saviour, also holds promise as a call to radically change our views of children's relations with the more-than-human world towards more entangled, and less human-centric perspectives (Taylor 2013).

3. See Nxumalo (2015, 2016) for detailed discussions of the settler colonial histories of this mountain and mountain forest.

4. In this paper, I use Indigenous to refer broadly to North American Indigenous ontologies that are resonant with my location on Coast Salish territories. It is nonetheless important to note that there are important irreducible and place-specific differences in Indigenous knowledges that reflected in their multiplicities, complexities and dynamisms.

5. Thank you to Dr Patrick Lewis for pointing me towards this quote.