A fog hangs over the dirt road I walk. It’s quiet apart from the occasional chilly wind. Today, drops of perception hang from the needles of spruce trees growing where road meets forest. The melted snow reveals a damp forest floor blanketed in moss. Signs that spring is awakening forest life are revealed in the shape of small leaf buds and furled fern fronds. Peeking inside feels like peering into another world from the road. It isn’t long into my walk before I find a worn-out for-sale sign posted amongst the trees. The sign, posted there, seeks to make claim over one of North America’s rarest types of forests.1 This predominantly old-growth ecosystem in Eastern Canada is known as the Wabanaki Forest and spans across the Maritime provinces of Canada, the Gaspé region of Quebec and into the US state of Maine. I walk a small portion of this forest range in southeastern New Brunswick. The lands on which this unique forest grows are covered by the Wabanaki Confederacy formed by the Wolastoqiyik, Passamaquoddy, Mi’kmaq and Penobscot during the 17th century resulting from interregional political structures developed by these nations prior to European arrival.2 Later, the Wabanaki Confederacy played a key role in resisting ongoing expansion during the 17th and 18th centuries through fighting a series of conflict on land and sea with the British Crown.3
Prior to European settlement, old-growth forest was estimated to encompass half of Wabanaki lands and the average tree age was around 150 years.4 Today, the Wabanaki Forest continues to be home to upwards of 30 species of trees. Among them are the balsam fir, yellow birch, sugar maple and red spruce.
In Canada, lands directly controlled by Indigenous peoples account for only 0.2% of the country’s land mass. This number illustrates the greater settler colonial initiative of Indigenous land dispossession. As such, the settler project is contingent upon the process of violent seizure and control of Indigenous lands and peoples. Land, and the lives entangled with it, have thus translated into the possibility of an economic future for the settler state, particularly, through extractive resource sectors like forestry and mining. Ongoing violence has worked to justify the occupation and exploitation of Indigenous lands through a variety of mechanisms. These include legal doctrine, forced assimilation practices, forced and restricted movement via the reserve system and destruction of land and its more-than-human inhabitants. Notably, the Doctrine of Discovery played a critical role in the dispossession of Wabanaki lands. The doctrine provided “legal” and moral basis for land seizure within the Wabanaki and the assertion of settler control over sovereign Indigenous nations.
Today, land dispossession continues to manifest through the parceling, division and sales of stolen lands.
Today, land dispossession continues to manifest through the parceling, division and sales of stolen lands. This is known as a pioneer lie- a story that forces the lands complicity into colonial narrative through ecological transformation.5 This lie is enacted by settlers when they transform the land from a dynamic, relational entity to one of property and ownership. The “for sale” sign posted on this land acts as a pioneer lie, through its assertion of rightful ownership and economic opportunity. The sign claims and conceals.
I continue my walk down the winding dirt road. As I walk, I am careful of the deep rivets in the soft reddish soil. I’ve walked this same path many times, yet it’s always changing. Recently, logging trucks have carried hundreds of pounds of trees away from where they once grew. Alongside the rivets, I leave behind my own footprints to join the occasional deer tracks.
As I walk deeper into the forest, I can hear the gentle rolling of the spring water running beside the road. In the distance a crow calls out.
Across the Wabanaki forest where I walk, there has been ongoing and rapid deforestation. The area in which I live is no exception. Today this forest is among the most endangered in Canada. In 1980, the province of New Brunswick established the Crown Land and Forest Act. The act outlined a set of practices allowing for clear cutting and monoculture re-plantation on “crown lands.” The Act remains intact to this day and has led to rapid deforestation. Accompanying this deforestation is the plantation of quick-to-mature softwood trees. As I walked by the clear cutting on the dirt road, I wondered what the winged, the four legged, and the fined would say if I consulted them about this.
The road continues to wind deeper into the forest, and I notice another sign. “NO HUNTING OR TRESPASSING WITHOUT WRITTEN PERMISSION,” it reads in bold font. It’s hard to ignore: a warning, where a larger colonial transgression has been made and yet to be reconciled. These trees now bear that contradiction. While such signs appear frequently on winding country roads like this one, they call to attention how settler domination is claimed, enforced and continues to haunt through colonial boundaries. This continues despite how the land on which this sign is found remains unceded.
I arrive at an opening in the forest that has been newly clear cut. Above me I hear the crow croaking from where it’s perched in a lone tree. What remains are tree stumps, the circumference of my arms. On the ground another NO TRESPASSING sign lies face-up with the fallen branches and splintered bark. There are no longer any trees to which it can be nailed. So, the sign lays there with forgotten authority, barely noticeable. It now reads less like a warning and more like a whisper.
Avery Gordon describes those people, objects, places, and connections that are supposedly no longer there, and therefore “haunt” social reality.6 Haunting, in Gordon’s words, “is one way in which abusive systems of power make themselves known and their impacts felt in everyday life, especially when they are supposedly over and done or denied.”7 This is particularly resonant as settler meta-narratives continually locate colonialism in the past, rather than what Patricia Monture calls a living phenomenon. The legacy of resistance across these lands starting in 17th century with the Wabanaki confederacy continues to this day. In 2023, Mi’gmawe’l Tplu’taqnn Inc. (MTI), a group representing eight Mi’kmaq communities in New Brunswick, expanded an existing land claim made in 2016 by Elsipogtog First Nation. The 2016 claim covered approximately one third of New Brunswick. Following this initial claim by Elsipogtog, Wolastoqey nations filed similar title claims in 2020 detailing how the provincial government has failed to uphold its obligations outlined in the Peace and Friendship Treaties signed from 1725-1779. Together with previous claims, the entire province now falls under the 2023 claim made by MTI on behalf of eight Indigenous communities.8 These claims make acutely visible the haunting taking place within the settler imaginary. They serve as a present reminder that this land is unceded and has indeed been stolen. Chief Rebecca Knockwood of Amalmgog First Nation, represented in the MTI Claim, explains “we can no longer sit back and be spectators in our homeland. It’s now the time to govern lands for the protection and benefit of future generations.”9 Land, therefore, continues to be the literal and metaphorical grounds upon which settler colonialism asserts itself, and from which Indigenous nations resist.
Confronting colonial haunting requires us to have a sense of what’s been lost, but also, an orientation towards the future.
Confronting colonial haunting requires us to have a sense of what’s been lost, but also, an orientation towards the future. Walking in place allows us to do this. It creates a trajectory to be more than in place, but with it. I know if I were to look amongst the stumps, I would find salamanders hidden in the fallen logs and vernal pools where frogs might lay their eggs. From above the crow still watches.
I walked the land within the larger landscape of the MTI land claim and in doing so began to imagine an alternative path. My walk has now come to an end, but this story hasn’t. According to Gordon, haunting usually represents a loss but at other times it is a path not yet taken and “from a certain vantage point, the ghost also simultaneously represents a future possibility, a hope.”10 There is still much walking left to be done.
Notes
1 Nature Conservancy Canada (n.d)
2 Wolastoqey Nation in New Brunswick (n.d).
3 Ibid.
4 Simpson, 2015; Mosseler et al., 2003.
5 Wysote and Morton, 2019.
6 Gordon, 2008
7 Ibid., 16.
8 Urquhart, 2023.
9 Ibid: para 9.
10 Gordon, 64.
Bibliography
Gordon, Avery F. Ghostly Matters. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008.
Mosseler, A, J A Lynds, and J E Major. Old-Growth Forests of the Acadian Forest Region. Environmental Reviews 11 (S1): S47–77, 2003.
Nature Conservancy Canada. Wabanaki (Acadian) Forest. N.d. https://www.natureconservancy.ca/en/what-we-do/resource-centre/forests-101/wabanaki-acadian-forest.html
Simpson, Jaime. Restoring the Acadian Forest: A Guide to Forest Stewardship for Woodlot Owners in Eastern Canada. 2nd Edition. Nimbus, 2015.
Urquhart, Mia. Mi’kmaw First Nations expand Aboriginal title claim to include almost all of N.B. CBC, 2023. https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/new-brunswick/mi-kmaq-aboriginal-title-land-claim-1.6749561
Wolastoqey Nation in New Brunswick. Our History. N.d. https://wnnb.wolastoqey.ca/about-us/our-history/
Wysote, Travis, and Erin Morton. The Depth of the Plough: White Settler Tautologies and Pioneer Lies.” settler colonial studies 9, no. 4 (2019): 479–504.
