The Second Growth: Indigenous Resurgence, Settler Adaptation, & The Possibility of Repair in the Log Lands of the Canadian North
The Second Growth examines the future of forests, Indigenous authority, and settler life in the Nak’albun/Fort St. James region of northern British Columbia, Canada. Based on archival research, oral histories, and sixteen months of ethnographic fieldwork with non-Indigenous residents, logging contractors, and local officials and an Indigenous research methodology developed with the Binche Whut’en and Nak’azdli Whut’en First Nations, this dissertation traces how Dakelh resurgence is reshaping political, economic, and ecological relations in a landscape transformed by industrial forestry. It argues that reconciliation and decolonization are locally negotiated, procedurally uneven, and structured by ecology. I develop the concept of “second growth” to describe emergent relations among regenerating forests, Indigenous Peoples, settlers, and damaged lands. Borrowed from forestry, second growth names renewal after disturbance without implying restoration to an untouched past. In this sense, the term captures both the enduring harm of settler colonialism and the unexpected possibilities opened by Indigenous resurgence, ecological recovery, and changing settler dependencies.
I build this argument across five chapters. The first develops a theoretical argument for the ethnographic study of reconciliation. The second traces how settler colonialism and industrial capitalism transformed a Dakelh-governed forest landscape into what I call a “factory forest,” demonstrating how ecological degradation and dispossession operated as a single, intertwined process, creating “forest power”. The third examines struggles over endangered woodland caribou to demonstrate how sovereignty and property are renegotiated amid decolonization. The fourth introduces the concept of “reconciliation capitalism” to describe how expanding Dakelh control over forest tenures compels settler logging firms to become improvisational, non-colonial actors within Indigenous-governed markets. The fifth documents the emergence of an “enmeshed polity” in which shared infrastructure, ecological vulnerability, and Dakelh political resurgence bind a settler community and Dakelh nations into relations of mutual interdependency that depart from the frameworks of both reconciliation and settler colonialism.
The Second Growth analyzes the unstable middle spaces where colonial relations are challenged, partially reworked, and sometimes reproduced. It shows that Indigenous resurgence can create conditions for repair, but such repair remains vulnerable to ecological crisis, extractive capitalism, settler backlash, and resurgent Canadian nationalism. Ultimately, the dissertation argues that the future of the log lands will be shaped not by a simple transition from colonialism to decolonization but by negotiated coexistence, dependency, and renewal rooted in Indigenous authority and the industrial landscapes of the North.
Meeting ID: 948-2210-3662
Passcode: 200847
