Partnerships in place: Facilitating rural local government entrepreneurialism in Newfoundland and Labrador

Rural local governments across Canada, including those in Newfoundland and Labrador, struggle with many of their day-to-day operational activities, including providing appropriate drinking water, wastewater, and garbage collection services, among other essential services, and rarely have capacity to facilitate local economic development activities. In recent times, entrepreneurialism has been noted as having potential for rural local governments, yet little research has been completed to determine its presence and relevance for municipalities in Newfoundland and Labrador. In response, we examined eight case study local governments in Newfoundland and Labrador to determine if, and how, entrepreneurialism was present in municipal efforts to increase economic prosperity in their communities. Findings suggest that while rural local governments continue to face challenges due to declining support for rural development from provincial and federal governments and increased downloading of responsibilities, some communities have established ways to remain resilient through partnerships and building on place-based assets. This exploratory study provides a basis for further in-depth research to determine the extent and approaches to entrepreneurialism in local government in rural Newfoundland and Labrador.     

A boat perspective: local geographic knowledge of fish harvesters in Change Islands,Newfoundland

People whose livelihoods depend on the natural environment have detailed knowledge of the lands and waters surrounding their communities. This paper presents research on the traditional geographic knowledge of fish harvesters in Change Islands, Newfoundland. Our findings, based on “kitchen table mapping” and other ethnographic methods, demonstrate that residents of coastal communities have extensive geographic knowledge associated with a way of life centred on fishing. This knowledge is reflected in a “namescape” that includes hundreds of toponyms that are not present on existing maps and that reflect meaningful connections with local history and cultural heritage. Fish harvesters also have distinctive ways of conceptualizing the landscape and the seascape, which is reflected in the geographic terminology they use. Overall, their way of looking at the environment, in contrast to the bird's-eye perspective that prevails in western cartography, can be characterized as a “boat perspective”. Their geographic knowledge has practical value for improving existing cartographic information and developing sustainable resource use strategies. At a broader level, their distinctive ways of interpreting the “earthscape” provide alternative ways of understanding space and place, and can help us identify our assumptions about how we define geographic features and represent them on maps.     

George Woodcock and the Doukhobors: peasant radicalism,anarchism, and the Canadian state

For the British-Canadian writer and intellectual George Woodcock, the Doukhobors – a persecuted radical Christian sect, many members of which emigrated from Russia to Canada at the turn of the twentieth century – were a continual source of fascination. A cause célèbre for a host of nineteenth-century thinkers, including Leo Tolstoy and Peter Kropotkin, the Doukhobors were frequently portrayed as the exemplars of the viewer’s particular ideological beliefs. The present article examines Woodcock’s shifting interpretation of the Doukhobors, mapped onto the development of an intellectual career that saw him emerge as a leading anarchist thinker, and his broader transition from a British writer to a Canadian public intellectual. Where once he saw the Doukhobors representing anarchism in action, as his politics matured his view of the sect became more complex. Rather than living anarchists, he came to see the Doukhobors’ experience as a powerful reminder of the forces of assimilation at work in modern democracies that threatened the liberties of dissenters. Reflecting Woodcock’s revised anarchist politics, the Doukhobors’ story now became a key component of an intellectual vision that cast a probing light on Canadian history and Canadian cultural politics.     

Journeying from “I” to “we”: assembling hybrid caring collectives of geography doctoral scholars

Completing a PhD is difficult. Add a major earthquake sequence and general stress levels become much higher. Caring for some of the nonacademic needs of doctoral scholars in this environment becomes critical to their scholarly success. Yet academic supervisors, who are in the same challenging environment, may already be stretched to capacity. How then do we increase care for doctoral scholars? While it has been shown elsewhere that supportive and interactive department cultures reduce attrition rates, little work has been done on how exactly departments might create these supportive environments: the focus is generally on the individual actions of supervisors, or the individual quality of students admitted. We suggest that a range of actors and contingencies are involved in journeying toward a more caring collective culture. We direct attention to the hybridity of an emerging ‘caring collective’, in which the assembled actors are not only ‘students’ and ‘staff’, but also bodies, technologies, objects, institutions, and other nonhuman actors including tectonic plates and earthquakes. The concept of the hybrid caring collective is useful, we argue, as a way of understanding the distributed responsibility for the care of doctoral scholars, and as a way of stepping beyond the student/supervisor blame game.     

“Verily the Road was Built with Chinaman’s Bones”: An Archaeology of Chinese Line Camps in Montana

Transcontinental railroads conveyed information and resources that fueled the Gilded Age’s quintessential financial and political corporate corruption and related social inequalities. Construction of the transcontinentals required massive numbers of laborers who lived in temporary “line camps” along the railroad grades. A sample of spatially and ethnically segregated Chinese line camps along the transcontinental Northern Pacific Railroad in the Rocky Mountains of northwestern Montana provide historical and archaeological examples of the Gilded Age’s pervasive racist mistreatment of the Chinese, culminating in Chinese exclusion laws.