The Place Where You Live: The North American Continental Interior

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This is the second in a three-part series of posts arising from an assignment in a graduate course on global environmental history co-taught by Tina Loo (University of British Columbia) and Tina Adcock (Simon Fraser University) in Vancouver in the fall of 2024.

Lake O’Hara, British Columbia
by Tina Loo

I don’t think of myself as living in one place, because I often think of “living” as encompassing more than where we usually find ourselves when we’re not working. Instead, where I live are the places I’ve felt most alive, where I can get out of my head.

Lake O’Hara, one of those otherworldly blue alpine lakes in the Canadian Rockies, is one such place. It’s drawn lots of different people to it over the centuries, including me.1 I didn’t grow up in a family that hiked or camped – that’s not what my lower middle-class Chinese Canadian parents had any experience with. It wasn’t until I was an adult that I developed an altitude problem.

Mountains have sparked, deepened, and tempered some of my most important and lasting relationships. The first time I went to Lake O, it was in on skis, in February, at night. By the time we got to the Alpine Club hut, it was 11PM – pitch dark, everyone asleep. I woke up to see that we’d skied into an incredible cirque that surrounded a frozen, snow-covered lake. It wasn’t until the next summer that I got to hike in those mountains and see the blue waters.

Lake O’Hara. Credit: Amar Athwal.

It’s strange how close you can get to people and how well you come to know them when you share the experience of elevation gain. Not a lot of words exchanged. Just a lot of huffing and puffing and a collective sense of awe at the views. Once we were blessed by a close encounter with a wolverine. Mostly, there were ground squirrels wise to the ways of tourists and skilled in separating them from their lunches.

I’ve returned to O’Hara and the surrounding mountains many times over the years: they’ve been an anchoring constant in the midst of changes – some of them profound – in my own life and the lives of the people close to me. But it turns out that what I thought of as enduring and unchanging wasn’t.

Climate change is taking its toll on mountain environments the world over, and the Canadian Rockies are no exception. As glaciers retreat and expose the ground to warmer temperatures, all that is solid can melt into air, literally. The solid in this case was Abbot Hut, just above Lake O’Hara. Built on permafrost by Swiss guides in 1922, it sheltered generations of mountaineers. This past summer, just short of the hut’s one hundredth birthday, Parks Canada workers took it apart just as it had been put together, by hand.2

The photographs of part of the Hut dangling into the void were shocking. They brought the devastating effects of climate change home to those of us who know that part of the Rockies well. I’m not a climber, but the red roof of Abbot Hut was a marker, something to look up and out for when on the surrounding trails.

Abbot Pass Hut, showing erosion. Credit: Parks Canada.

As disorienting as that disappearance is, it’s the prospect of another vanishing that has me even more unsettled and anxious. We’re losing blue as filmmaker Leanne Allison argues.3 We’re losing the captivatingly jarring turquoise of mountain lakes like O’Hara. The colour comes from the way the light refracts from the glacial “flour” in the water, finely ground sediment released by melting ice. But as the ice goes, so too does the sediment, and with it the colour.4

Is losing the colour of a bunch of glacially-fed lakes the majority of people will never see really something worth worrying about, especially compared to the other effects of climate change, like more intense floods, fires, and hurricanes?

Yes – not because colours are more important than people, but because I think (hope?) seemingly small but profound changes like losing blue might have the power to communicate how the world is changing to a group of people whose privilege shelters them from its worst realities; urban, middle class North Americans like me. Leaves change colour. Lakes don’t. Or they aren’t supposed to. But we in the global north, and especially North America, are disproportionately responsible for making that happen.

What can we do about it? What can I do about it? Not really knowing where to begin isn’t a reason for not trying something. I’m going to start by staying away from the places where I’ve lived, including Lake O’Hara. It’s time to dwell closer to home.

Treaty One Territory
by Catherine St. John

Treaty One Territory. Credit: Catherine St. John.

I am from Treaty One territory. It’s impossible for me to write about my home without mentioning this. I was born in southern Manitoba, and I had lived there all my life until the past two months, when I moved to Vancouver for graduate school. As a proper Manitoban, I’ve lived a lot of my life in a car. Most of this time has been spent on the two- and-a-half-hour drive from Winnipeg to Minnedosa, Manitoba, where my paternal grandma lives. The drive there is flat. Really, really flat. The Red River valley is one of the flattest regions in the world, the land levelled by glacial Lake Agassiz around five thousand years ago.5

The drive to Minnedosa, with snow! Credit: Catherine St. John.

When I was a child, I didn’t know that there was history all around me during the drive. I assumed the fields had always been the yellow of the canola or the gold of the wheat. As I grew up, my mom, an avid gardener and native plant enthusiast, taught me southern Manitoba used to be tallgrass prairie, which is now one of the most endangered ecosystems in the world.6 I began to see the history of Manitoba from the window of the car. Colonization has changed the land. The prairie was drained and tilled, partly by my great-great-grandparents, who had come to Manitoba in the 1880s. Various farms my family used to own are spread across southern Manitoba, and we drive past one near Carmen on the way to Minnedosa. This fact instills many long-term Manitobans with pride. For me, it doesn’t.

I still feel a connection to the land in Manitoba, and I miss it. Most people find it plain and boring, but I don’t. I love the freezing winters and the big sky. I’ve felt somewhat uneasy since I came to Vancouver, hemmed in by the mountains and surprised by the sea. When I go back to Manitoba, however, I don’t feel as if I can frame it as “going back to where I belong.” That’s not true. My presence there is founded upon stolen land and a broken treaty. For it to belong to me, and for I to belong to it, something must change. The Canadian and Manitoban governments need to govern with First Nations and the Métis nation. We must respect Indigenous laws and acknowledge Treaty One’s full meaning. Hopefully, when Canada slowly changes our governance structures, all prairie people can begin to have a better relationship, a humbler relationship, to the land that we live on. I want to belong to the Red River Valley. I hope that one day I can.

The road home. Look — goldenrod! Credit: Catherine St. John.

As I watch the prairies fly by in my father’s car on the road to Minnedosa, it’s not just flat farms. I can catch the purple of the asters and the yellow of the goldenrod and the bluegrass next to train tracks and in between roads. Some of the tallgrass prairie remains. It’s altered, but it’s there, as long as you know where to look.

South Side, Chicago, Illinois
by Morgan Jennings

The author’s aunt’s home in Ashburn, Chicago, Illinois. Credit: Phillys Pearson

Most of my favorite childhood memories occur in some of the worst neighborhoods in the United States. Despite their portrayal in the media, my recollection of them is filled with friendly neighbors, lively children, and local pride. As you walk down the uneven and cracked sidewalks, you can’t help but juxtapose them with the pristinely kept lawns and facades of the distinctly Chicagoan bungalows. My grandparents’ houses sat in two neighboring towns on the South Side of the city. Stories of the lively local factories overshadowed their reality: they sat abandoned in open fields, frequented only by mice and bored teenagers either wanting to find an unclaimed spot to tag or people who lived inside. As I walked to the park with my sister and grandfather, I’d be confronted by empty storefronts which had been open for business only a week ago. When I’d ask my grandfather what happened, he would just look at the buildings and say, “They left.” This defeated sentiment was lost on me at the time, as I was only concerned if the Wendy’s was still there so we could get our Frosties on the way home.

Once my grandparents passed away, this scenery became one I experienced from a distance, like it is for so many others. South Side neighborhoods like Pullman and Harvey seemed only to exist in books recounting their glory days as one of the few places Black people could look to for well-paying jobs. Seldom did these stories touch on the fact that the sons and grandsons of Pullman porters still lived in and maintained the houses their fathers had secured. You could smell their barbeques on hot summer days and hear their music well into the night. The rhythmic thumping of Chicago house music still reminds me of wishing everyone would leave so I could go to sleep.

The author’s father’s childhood home in Roseland, Chicago, Illinois. Credit: Charles Jennings.

For an area so central to the development of Chicago, only twelve miles away, their streets served as a reminder that its residents were not wanted in Chicago. The gridded streets which were invented to optimize travel seemed to always find a way to stop in a dead end, or a temporary diversion barricade with a notice of repair dated sometime in the early 2000s. Despite this, life on the South Side continues. The few buildings left standing are decorated with various plaques celebrating 100 years of serving the community. After my grandad’s funeral, my dad drove us through those streets and would point to all the places where his own memories presented another version of Roseland. Where he took my mom when she snuck out to go with him to a party, where he met his lifelong best friend, where he’d get doughnuts with his dad, et cetera, et cetera. As we ate those same doughnuts, he looked over and said, “I’m so glad you both will have so much more.” Those words stuck with me; I wish more people could hear them. I wish everyone from an underprivileged background could know that they were worth so much more than they’ve been given.

Morgan Jennings is a M.A. Student in History at Simon Fraser University. Her research is focused on the development of the late Ottoman Empire and early Middle East. 

Notes

1. Lillian Gest, History of Lake O’Hara in the Canadian Rockies at Hector, British Columbia (British Columbia: Lake O’Hara Trails Club?, 1989); Jon Whyte, Tommy and Lawrence: The Ways and the Trails of Lake O’Hara (Banff: Lake O’Hara Trails Club, 1983); Elio Costa and Gabriele Scardellato, Lawrence Grassi: From Piedmont to the Rocky Mountains (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2015).
2. David Hik, Zac Robinson, and Stephen Slemon, “The Abbot Pass hut, an iconic mountain refuge, is dismantled — due to climate change,” Canadian Geographic, 4 July 2022; Canadian Press, “Century-old stone hut built by Swiss guides in the Rockies dismantled due to erosion,” CBC News – Calgary, 13 July 2022.
3. Leanne Allison, dir. Losing Blue (National Film Board of Canada, 2023).
4. Kevin C. Rose, David P. Hamilton, Craig E. Williamson, Chris G. McBride, Janet M. Fischer, Mark H. Olson, Jasmine E. Saros, Mathew G. Allan, and Nathalie Cabrol, “Light attenuation characteristics of glacially-fed lakes,” Journal of Geophysical Research, 119 (July 2014): 1446-1457; Rachel Ward, “‘Brilliant blues’ of mountain lakes change as glaciers shrink, new research suggests,” CBC News – Calgary, 28 January 2020.
5. Shannon Stunden Bower, Wet Prairie: People, Land, and Water in Agricultural Manitoba (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2011), 3-6.
6. Kenneth R. Robertson, Roger C. Anderson, and Mark W. Schwartz, “The Tall Grass Prairie Mosaic,” in Conservation in Highly Fragmented Landscapes, ed. Mark W. Schwartz (Springer New York, 1997), 63, 70.
Featured Image: Southern Manitoba from the car. Photo by Catherine St. John.
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Tina Loo

Professor at University of British Columbia
Tina Loo teaches Canadian history and environmental history at the University of British Columbia. She's written on wildlife management and the social and environmental impacts of hydroelectric development. Her current project is an examination of forced relocations in postwar Canada.

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