Stewart - Better Nature

Whitmans descriptions of the land, the lakes, the grass and trees and bushery reflect the qualities that make his poetry so striking: extravagant language, galloping syntax, endless catalogues of his own gloriousness, and that of the world around him. The diary also reflects the qualities that make Whitman, in many ways, a typical late-19th-century white settlera subject produced through the legal and social regimes that figured (some) Europeans, and their descendants, as entitled to the lands and labour of Indigenous people and other people of colour. Whitman travelled Canada easy in the conviction that the land was the rightful property of a great race of farm-families. He praised the goodness of the Dominion government for keep[ing]entire faith with [] all its Indians; describing a visit to Ah-me-je-wah-noong (Aamjiwnaang, near Sarnia, Ontario), Whitman complained that the communitys reservea beautiful and ample tract of landhad been left undeveloped and was quite an eyesore to the Sarnians. As Lenore Keeshig-Tobias makes clear, settler colonial ideas about nature, land, and resources are very much ideas about race. In Whitmans work (as in much Canadian and American cultural history), the new world is an empty and available placea place without any people in it.

It is a place of primal naturalness, a place of raw beauty and possibility that must be brought to usefulness and fruition through settler governance. As members of Indigenous communities have often pointed out, the idea that Canada grew out of a vast wilderness continues to circulate in popular and official histories, (To return to Keeshig-Tobias, settler entitlement to lands, trees, and minerals hinges on the idea of an empty, unused wildernessthe refusal to acknowledge that the land was already someones home.) In considering how these colonial conceptions continue to find expression in Canadian culture and politics, Better Nature puts Whitmans diary into conversation with archival texts, news stories, opinion pieces, municipal guidelines for the management of public greenspace, email spam, and fundraising for environmental NGOs. In using Whitmans diary in this way, Better Nature considers him as, in many ways, a very ordinary individualnot only in the 19th century, but in the 21st century as well. The point is not that he failed to transcend the tenor of his time, but that contemporary Canada has likewise failed. U t his project began while i was studying Indigenous-based analyses of colonialism and work toward decolonization; it is necessary to acknowledge the specific writers and thinkers to whom Better Nature is most indebted (see Major Debts/Reading List). Better Nature runs this risk, as it mostly remixes settler voices (one exception is Chief Joe Capilanos polite interrogation of King Edward, quoted on page 55) and reflects on settler institutions and attachments. Better Nature runs this risk, as it mostly remixes settler voices (one exception is Chief Joe Capilanos polite interrogation of King Edward, quoted on page 55) and reflects on settler institutions and attachments.

In contrast, work toward decolonization is necessarily Indigenous-led and Indigenous-focused. Decolonization is about restitution, and it will not emerge through existing forms of Canadian culture, politics, or law (including forms of reconciliation that ultimately work to shore up the nation). Perhaps what this project offers is a partial record of how my conception of Canada is shifting as I learn, as I come to see the horizons of my home as imagined and impermanent. In this learning I am not singular, but accompanied and guided by people (in real life and in books), non-human beings, and landscapes that are at once familiar to me, and unknown. U This manuscript was completed on Swxw7mesh, xwmkwym, and sllwta territory.