Movement, Power and Place: The Biography of a Wagon Road in a Contested First Nations Landscape

Abstract

This paper explores the biography of a wagon road located in the First Nations (indigenous) territory of the Stl'atl'imx of the lower Lillooet River Valley in southern British Columbia, Canada. While the road is best known as a route to the Fraser Canyon during the Fraser River Gold Rush of 1858, here I investigate its multiple lives. Adopting themes from symmetrical archaeology, I show that the wagon road was not a passive outcome of colonial action but instead shifted in form and meaning as it interacted with the human and non-human world. I draw on archival documents from the Royal Engineers and oral accounts from the Stl'atl'imx of the lower Lillooet River Valley to illustrate how people, places and things were woven into the landscape through bodily engagement with the road. This paper thus highlights the complexity of the colonial encounter and the importance of movement and the materiality of movement (roads) in understanding the diversity of interaction in tensioned landscapes.

‘The Stubborn Light of Things’. Landscape, Relational Agency, and Linear Earthworks in Later Prehistoric Britain

“…Insights from assemblage or meshwork-based theories of relational agency can be combined with existing survey and excavation methodologies, and biographical and phenomenological approaches to generate specific, long-term landscape histories (e.g. Bender et al, 2007;Chadwick, 2010;Gibson, 2015;R. Johnston, 2008; for affective poetics of place see Bristow, 2015;Edmonds, 2004;Pearson, 2007).…”

Returning home: heritage work among the Stl’atl’imx of the Lower Lillooet River Valley

“…Through saying its name, remembering and commemorating its position in the physical and cultural landscape-its memory was shared and legacy passed on to future generations (Collignon 2006, 101-11;Gibson 2015). By adopting the phonetic spelling (In-SHUCK-ch) of Nsvq'ts rather than the word itself, they maintained the meanings and connections to the original place name while ensuring that how they identified themselves was easily pronounced, used and remembered.…”

Interdisciplinary approaches to a connected landscape

“…The idea of artefacts and monuments having 'biographies' that express their changing networks of connections is now a familiar one (eg Gosden & Marshall 1999;Joy 2009;Witcher et al 2010). The same, of course, applies to landscapes, though in a much more complex fashion than the usual term 'palimpsest' implies (see, eg, Samuels 1979;Gibson 2015;Kolen et al 2015). We are interested not just in the process of landscape change, but in the connections between different pasts and different presents, such as the later impact of the Iron Age hillforts, and the interaction between enclosures and tracks of differing dates.…”