This is the second post in a short series of reflections from participants of the 2025 Canadian History and Environment Summer Symposium on Contamination and Rebirth in Hamilton, Ontario, organized by Jessica van Horssen at McMaster University.
I watched a blackbird swoop at four different people in Bayfront Park, Hamilton on May 31st. First was a child, who swung a water bottle in retaliation. Shortly after was a man leading his family down the little side path, but he was swiftly rebuffed by a flash of black wings and a beak. The next two people, who I explicitly warned about a blackbird nesting – that it would swoop – went anyway. And wouldn’t you know it. The blackbird swooped.
I was standing in Bayfront Park with a group of 30-some Environmental Historians, which isn’t the beginning of a joke, it’s just what happens when the Canadian History and Environment Summer Symposium (CHESS) brings together our niche subsect of the historical discipline. The theme of CHESS this year was “From Contamination to Collapse,” fittingly hosted in Steeltown, otherwise known as Hamilton. We toured the Hamilton Harbour waterfront, considered how late-nineteenth century beekeepers were early environmentalists, and discussed the practicalities of fieldwork. Our readings focused on themes of contamination from industry and remediation efforts in public parks, asking us to challenge narratives of inevitability. In particular, I was thrilled to see such an emphasis on utilizing photography and visual analysis in history. That weekend prompted an enormous amount of thinking, but I will focus on two main ideas here: the question that underpinned every interaction I had with Hamilton; and the way art and photography can illuminate and obscure the answers to that question.
Ken Cruikshank and Nancy Bouchier’s book The People and the Bay asks a simple question of Hamilton Harbour: whose harbour is it? Whose harbour to shape, to protect, to use? As a historical work it focuses on the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, but I found myself asking this question as I left home for CHESS in May 2025.
Whose harbour? Whose city? Whose noise, pollution, yard, views, garbage? Whose nighttime sky and whose responsibility to keep it dark to help birds navigate? Whose streets, used by pigeons, people, cars, cats, and trees? Attached to a chain link fence along Christie Street in Toronto, where I visited prior to attending CHESS in Hamilton, is a plaque commemorating a dead racoon (Image 2). Was she in familiar territory or the unknown? Whose memories take priority when we rebuild, destroy, or expand? Whose home?
I realized in Bayfront Park that many humans answer the “whose” question with a casual violence, individually and systemically. Is it the pigeon’s city? No, humans answer. We set up spikes on awnings to keep them away. We use bigger spikes in parks to keep people from sleeping. Was it the blackbird’s park? Only if it’s polite, those four people answered. Their use of the path seemed to overshadow the blackbird’s need for space. Is it the racoon’s street? We don’t want them living here, we answer. I suppose if the racoon cannot live on the street, the only option is to die there. This casual violence is a form of Othering; a response to what we perceive as not belonging. What does or doesn’t belong is ever-shifting and culturally constructed, however. Perhaps if we conceptualized pigeons and blackbirds and racoons as having their own entitlement to space, there would be fewer clashes between human and nonhuman. Perhaps casual violence would be replaced with unremarkable coexistence.
Where CHESS captured my imagination this year was in the focus on photography. Siobhan Angus, an Art Historian at Carleton University and our keynote speaker, and Warren Cariou point to Caribou’s photographs in their article “Tar Remedies: Methods of Return and Re-vision on Colonized/Contaminated Land.” Cariou develops images with bitumen he collects himself. He transforms a material we associate with razed ecosystems into art, specifically images that reveal the enormity of bitumen processing. Cruikshank and Bouchier’s article “Remembering the Struggle for the Environment: Hamilton’s Lax Lands/Bayfront Park, 1950s-2008” utilizes a photo essay to illuminate the changes to Hamilton Harbour. Those photos reveal the varied reasons to take photographs of our environment, from real estate advertising to activist messages.
Visual analysis enriches both of these works and offers a new perspective most environmental historians are likely unfamiliar with. There is immense power in utilizing visual and creative media in our research, not least of all because they are a type of primary source. But caution is required. One of the strengths of environmental history is how interdisciplinary approaches are often entrenched in our research. Visual analysis is another opportunity for that collaboration. Too often we assume photographs capture a moment of pure, unadulterated reality. Like any primary source, however, there are considerations of bias, of perspective, of manufacturing and editing the end result.
Consider the typical photograph of an industry that degrades the environment: you can likely imagine the photo taken from a distance, showcasing the enormity of the mine or the oil sands and the way the surrounding forest or mountain was cut down to make room for progress. Because of the distance required for that perspective we do not see the people required to run those facilities, to design and zone and build. Showcasing the enormity of the mine may contribute to the inevitability narrative we are so desperate to challenge. A starting point for this interdisciplinary approach may be The Handbook of Visual Analysis, edited by Theo van Leeuwen and Carey Jewitt.
Images are powerful tools. So are questions. This year’s CHESS had me wandering away from home, wondering whose city am I really in? Whose home am I stepping over without realizing? I was prompted to consider the “whose” question as both a historical line of inquiry and a contemporary reflection. It prompts examination of justice, power, and entitlement. Importantly, it begs us to consider the human and nonhuman entities that might answer that question.
The blackbird answered the question “whose path?” in Bayfront Park. It swooped.
Suggested Reading
Angus, Siobhan and Warren Cariou. “Tar Remedies: Methods of Return and Re-vision on Colonized/Contaminated Land,” in Environmental Humanities, 16:2 (July 2024): 478-494.
Bonnell, Jennifer. “Early Insecticide Controversies and Beekeeper Advocacy in the Great Lakes Region,” in Environmental History, 26:1 (January 2021): 79-101.
Bouchier, Nancy B. and Ken Cruikshank. The People and the Bay: A Social and Environmental History of Hamilton Harbour. Vancouver: UBC Press, 2016.
Bouchier, Nancy B. and Ken Cruikshank. “Remembering the Struggle for the Environment: Hamilton’s Lax Lands/Bayfront Park, 1950s-2008,” in Left History, 13:1 (Spring/Summer 2008): 106-28.
Cruikshank, Ken and Nancy B. Bouchier, “Blighted Areas and Obnoxious Industries: Constructing Environmental Inequality on an Industrial Waterfront, Hamilton, Ontario, 1890-1960,” in Environmental History, no. 3 (July 2004): 464-496.
Jerolmack, Colin. “How Pigeons Became Rats: The Cultural-Spatial Logic of Problem Animals,” in Social Problems, Vol. 55, No. 1 (February 2008): 72-94. Van Leeuwen, Theo and Carey Jewitt. The Handbook of Visual Analysis. SAGE Publications, 2001.
