Natures, Postcolonial
M. Sioh, DePaul University, Chicago, IL, USA
& 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
Glossary
Essentialism An identity as a given and immutable.
Global South An alternative term to ‘developing
countries’ referring to poorer countries that are mostly
located in the Southern Hemisphere. Most of these
countries are also former European colonies.
Objectivism A doctrine that holds that there is a
reliable correspondence between reality and an external
world that is observable.
Overdetermined A post-structuralist term signaling
originary conditions that will lead to a certain outcome.
Paradigm A concept, less defined and structured than
a model, used by Thomas Kuhn to refer to a worldview.
Relativism A theory that meaning is filtered through
our cultural and historical background and context and
often used in opposition to objectivism.
Social Construction A school of thought that claims
that reality is an artifact of its social and cultural context
and often used in opposition to essentialism.
Stereotype An oversimplified conception of members
of a group.
Introduction
The study of postcolonial nature is a theoretical engage-
ment with the impacts of colonialism on reconceptualizing
nature, usually forests and wild species, not only in de-
veloping countries but also in parts of the developed world
where racial minorities have to grapple with a legacy of
colonialism. Nature, in its popular sense, is taken to mean
essence or inherent properties, external to human society,
or the opposite of culture. Postcolonialism is a school of
cultural criticism concerned with the impact of colonialism
on both colonized and colonizing peoples in the present, as
opposed to postcolonialism which refers to the chrono-
logical break after political independence. Postcolonial
nature studies follow as a critique and an alternative
paradigm to sustainable development, and more generally,
the environmental movement. Postcolonial nature studies
is a hybrid of nature studies and postcolonialism, complex
areas of inquiry derived from, and given impetus by, the
intellectual currents of post-structuralism, postmodernism,
and social studies of science that became influential in the
social sciences and humanities in the 1980s and 1990s.
While definitions of both the terms ‘postcolonial’ and
‘nature’ are contested, multiple, and fractured, postcolonial
nature as a problematic is characterized by its definition
with respect to or in contrast with the stereotype of the
native.
The political significance of the widespread intel-
lectual acceptance of nature’s ontological character has
been its use to justify morally reprehensible programs of
conquest and material appropriation. This trend was
most clearly seen in the late-nineteenth- to early-
twentieth-century vogue for environmental determinism
which coincided with the era of high imperialism. In its
most basic articulation, environmental determinism
justified colonialism, because if we are what nature makes
us, then the populations of certain parts of the world are
born to conquer and lead just as others are born to be
conquered and led. The rise of natural history as a dis-
cipline was the result of European colonial activity by
scientist-explorers, such as James Cook, Alexander von
Humboldt, Joseph Banks, and, most famously, Charles
Darwin. Consequently, scholars have also traced the
origins of the modern conservation movement to the
European tropical-island colonies inspired by the search
for the Garden of Eden, itself derived from the
Zoroastrian, and therefore non-European, notions of
Pairidaeza (paradise) and garodaman (garden).
Postcolonial nature studies is concerned with the
epistemological and ecological consequences of this
construction of ‘natural’ history. Despite the twinning
of natural history with political ventures, even when
environmental determinism was succeeded by cultural
and landscape ecology in the second half of the twentieth
century, nature conceptions continued to be viewed as
politically neutral. Sustainable development is now the
prevalent model for managing nature in developed
countries that is being exported to the rest of the world,
including societies where respecting nature was the
custom before the advent of Western capitalism and
modernity. Sustainable development is seen by aid and
development agencies as especially urgent in developing
countries because environmental degradation there is
perceived, ahistorically and contextually in isolation, to
be caused by a combination of high fertility rates, ig-
norance, and irresponsible governments.
Marxist-influenced political ecologists have re-
sponded to this neutral conceptualization of nature by
arguing that nature is a product of profit-driven trans-
formation. Some Marxists have gone beyond arguing that
modern capitalism simply exploits and transforms nature
to argue that modern capitalism produces nature, and
that in turn, nature is used for political legitimation of
social relations. Cultural geographers and historians too
337
338 Natures, Postcolonial

have studied the role of nature as a symbolic source in perpetuate the current social inequalities and loss of
Western cultures for representing social ordering, or biodiversity resulting from the accelerating spatial ex-
in contrast, the role of nature as a common heritage in pansion of monocultural cash cropping.
masking social ordering. Particular aspects of nature can
be used to symbolize ontological group identity, such as
the giant redwood groves in the United States that came Post-Structuralism and Discourse
to symbolize the national magnitude as well as the an-
The challenge to the notion of an essential identity by
cient lineage of the new nation in the nineteenth century.
ecofeminists, and feminists in general, signaled the
Thus, conservation of the redwoods became synonymous
opening of the broader debate about the theoretical basis
with patriotism. Alternatively, nature conservation is seen
of knowledge. This set of challenges is often somewhat
as originating in the colonies where reformist scientists
simplistically referred to as post-structuralist, a mainly
attempted to recreate Eden to compensate for the in-
French school of literary theory that critiques the ra-
dustrial destruction of nature in their home countries.
tional, objective, autonomous, self-aware subject of hu-
However, the explicit theorization of cultural con-
manist thought. Theory has a privileged position because
structions of postcolonial nature emerged out of the fields
it governs the rules of judging knowledge: what counts as
of ecofeminism, post-structuralism, postcolonialism, and
evidence and what constitutes an argument. But theory’s
social studies of science.
privileged position depends upon the existence of an
underlying, unchanging external truth associated with
nature. The claim of a fixed, external nature has been
Intellectual Influences
challenged by Michel Foucault as an historically consti-
Ecofeminism tuted idea that emerged during the Enlightenment.
Hence, the social context of enquiry, rather than the
Ecofeminism links the domination of nature to that of
world in which the investigation takes place, constructs
women. In analyzing descriptive and normative state-
what we find, as opposed to us discovering a reality fully
ments about nature and women, ecofeminists observe
formed. Where ideology argues for single imposed truth,
that changes in the latter are often preceded by changes
post-structuralists, after Foucault, prefer the term dis-
in the former. Ecofeminists identify the turning point
course. The term discourse refers to a system of signs
in the constructions of nature and women as the
that constructs meanings that are then represented as
Enlightenment, before which nature was identified as a
essential truths. Discourse works by selecting and or-
nurturing mother and the center of an organic cos-
ganizing information, establishing relevances, defining
mology. This view is still central to non-European eco-
unities, and describing hierarchical relations between
logical models. From the sixteenth century onward and
them. Yet, for discourse to appear legitimate, meaning
with the advent of the Scientific and Industrial Revo-
must appear ontologically derived, so the rules for or-
lutions, ecofeminists argue that women and nature were
ganizing discourse must be obscured. Because per-
viewed as wild resources to be tamed and exploited
ceptions of racial, class, and gender differences and
materially, psychologically, and recreationally by harried
hierarchies frequently encode each other, interlocking
men/entrepreneurs. But ecofeminists in post-colonial
discourses strengthen each other to form, eventually, a
countries emphasize that their societies experience the
regime of truth. The post-structuralist turn in the social
triple domination that pose women, natives, and nature as
sciences and humanities has meant that theories are
inferior to men, Westerners, and technology. For ex-
viewed more as stories with their own assumptions,
ample, the introduction of land enclosures and highly
contradictions, and silences that challenge the cor-
capitalized, monocultural cropping for profit during
respondence between reality and representation. Instead,
colonialism devalued native women more than men
knowledge is perceived as partial, contextual, situated,
because women were engaged in subsistence agriculture
and reflecting power relations. Terms such as ‘nature’ and
and gathering wild forest products. The destruction of
‘native’ are constructed through language and are un-
women’s livelihoods and the unequal distribution of re-
stable in communication. Yet, even well-meaning policies
source access were justified in the name of theories of
are enacted based on assuming the immutability of
progress, gender, race, and nature. These theories ascer-
these terms, thus continuing the conditions that over-
tained the natural abilities of certain groups to partici-
determined the past environmental degradation.
pate in the introduced agricultural practices and deemed
a material world not incorporated into the capitalist
system as wasteful. Ecofeminists from postcolonial soci-
Postcolonialism and the Natural ‘Other’
eties argue that such theories thought to be universal and
objective are actually masculinist, ethnocentric, and his- Postcolonial studies emphasize that the social relations
torically specific, and policies informed by them will only bequeathed by colonialism are more than just political or

economic but also a cultural process imagined and
energized through language. The interest in the legacy of
colonial representations can be traced to post-structural
theories inflected through Edward Said’s classic critique
of Orientalism, which questions how ideas acquired the
status of natural truths during the period of high im-
perialism in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
Orientalism supplied colonialism with an enunciative
capacity which was transmitted from one generation to
the next through repetition and institutional embedd-
edness. Postcolonialists argue that political independence
has been merely cosmetic and that colonially dictated
representations have been redeployed and reaccentuated
through administrative forms, institutions, and relation-
ships. Said argued that recurrent, systematic tropes and
asymmetries in representation – which he described as a
discourse – ran through colonial texts. Colonial culture
has to be understood as a material network of con-
nections between power and knowledge. The Orient
exists for the West, and is constructed by, and in relation
to, the West. It is a mirror image of what is inferior and
alien (‘Other’) to the West. Orientalism is a style of
thought based upon an ontological and epistemological
distinction made between ‘the Orient’ and ‘the Occident’
in which an essentialized image of a typical Oriental is
represented as culturally and, ultimately, biologically
inferior. In the same manner, postcolonial nature scholars
have analyzed the way nature, even in its positive con-
structions, was conceived as a native-dwelling ‘other’
space to the spaces of colonial towns and plantations, and
as the ultimate visible symbol of the difference between
European civilization and its wild ‘Other’.
While postcolonial theorists agree that neocolonial
power depends upon its authority to fracture the sub-
jectivity of its native subordinates by encouraging them to
identify with Western values and cultural norms, critics
of Said such as Homi Bhabha argue that the critique of
Orientalism asserts too much intentionality and direction
in the flow of power. Instead, Bhabha emphasized the
instability and hybridity of identity and ambivalence in
neocolonial relations. For Bhabha, the point of stereo-
types is precisely that the endless repetitions assuage
colonial insecurity by fixing identity. But even stereo-
types can have a temporary purchase on imagination that
allows a discourse to judge and control. Stereotypes de-
rive their power precisely because they are unstable and
ambivalent and can be modified to change with times.
The colonized and postcolonized themselves accept
certain stereotypes of power and show their ambivalence
in their desire for Western tools and symbols of power –
science and technology. Postcolonial scholars instead
urge us to be attentive to how signification is affected by
particular sites and contexts of enunciation, or what
Donna Haraway has called ‘situated knowledge’. In
Bhabha’s ‘mimicry’ concept, native copying of white
Natures, Postcolonial 339
behavior is never quite the unadulterated homage to a
superior culture, because the performance and enunci-
ation are always different from the original and intended.
In the course of translation from their sources to the rest
of the world, scientific ideas, narratives, and theories are
rearticulated into hybrids that dilute the intentions of
power. For postcolonial nature scholarship, Western no-
tions of nature conservation are examples of the slippage
between, and hybridization of ideas as paradigms of re-
source management and sustainable development are
absorbed, yet undermined, through being spliced onto
notions of national sovereignty and local practices of
territorialization. These notions of conservation may
sometimes work against Western power, but they almost
always work against indigenous tribal groups who ex-
perience a double colonization.
Gayatri Spivak takes up the issue of addressing mul-
tiple levels of colonization by using deconstruction
techniques to examine contradictions in official texts and
subplots and minor characters for the different stories
they tell us. While postcolonial nature studies have relied
on deconstruction of archival documents and unofficial
texts such as letters and diaries to open up different
narratives of colonial and postcolonial natures, arguably,
it is Spivak’s notion of ‘strategic essentialism’ that has
been most usefully deployed in practical struggles over
control of material resources. Strategic essentialism refers
to a strategy that while strong differences may exist be-
tween members of ethnic minority groups, it is some-
times advantageous for them to temporarily ‘essentialize’
themselves and bring forward their group identity in a
simplified way to achieve certain goals. Spivak has since
disavowed the ways in which she claims the notion of
strategic essentialism have been mis-used. This has been
used not only by certain native groups to emphasize their
suitability to manage natural resources in Western soci-
eties but also by tribal groups in the Global South in
alliance with international conservation groups. However,
Spivak has cautioned postcolonial scholars on whether it
is ever possible to represent anyone or anything else
accurately or whether we should abandon attempts to
represent an ‘inaccessible blankness’.
Social Studies of Science and Construction of
Nature and Natives
Deconstructing representations of race and gender have
achieved significant purchase in the intellectual arena,
but the application of the same methodology has en-
gendered heavy resistance in the context of nature
studies. While not claiming that the material world is
entirely socially constructed, because nature cannot ex-
press itself, post-structuralists, who would include social
constructionists in their ranks, contend that there can be
340 Natures, Postcolonial
no objective view of nature since we are always left with
human representations that construct nature through
language, in particular those of scientists. Critics of the
social constructionists contend that this is tantamount to
stating that all knowledge is relative, and that there can
be no standards for judging among knowledge claims.
Because science is used to enforce moral codes and jus-
tify rewards, then controversies about scientific know-
ledge have repercussions for moral discourse. Nature in
postcolonial countries is triply disadvantaged through the
arbitration of mainly male, white scientists and indigen-
ous scientists who disavow native knowledge as part of
their claim to legitimacy through an alliance with
Western scientific rationality. Within the field of social
studies of science, proponents contend that scientific
enquiry was more subjective, flexible, and historically
contingent than was previously acknowledged, in terms
of who belongs to a community, whose views are noted,
and how consensus is reached. The newer generation of
social scientists (1980s onward) studying science differs
from the older generation who claimed that although
knowledge is subjective, truth can still be known through
experience, whereas the newer generation argues that the
‘truth’ of a statement is based on the degree of its links to,
and embeddedness within, other statements. The focus
on representation and relativism as opposed to subjective
and experiential knowledge has implications for
postcolonial nature scholars who have shifted methodo-
logical emphasis to archival sources in place of em-
pirically measurable information.
Understanding why certain representations of nature
prevail becomes a matter of determining the degree of its
links to, and embeddedness within, other discourses such
as gender, colonialism, nationalism, and global capitalism.
One way of approaching the issues of linkages and
embeddedness is as a network made up of various dis-
courses that interact, sometimes in contradiction to each
other, but with an overall discernable direction. The
process of acquiring allies, both human and nonhuman
(such as machines) can be examined using Bruno Latour’s
network theory to understand how discourses are trans-
lated into practices of power. Latour’s network theory
proposes that in order to acquire the status of truth, a
paradigm must acquire allies. Like the post-structuralists,
Latour sees a scientific claim as a regime, which acquires
the status of truth when it has collected enough allies,
which can be in the form of interlocking discourses. Fact
construction is a collective activity, and consensus lies in
the creation of a network of commensurabilities, meaning
that participants must agree on the general aim of the
project at hand even if on a point-by-point basis they do
not agree. Within contemporary nature discourses, sus-
tainable development is the corporate identity that gov-
erns the way the material world can be shaped and
deployed, because its ambiguous definition allows it to
mean different things to different constituencies. Simul-
taneously, sustainable development incorporates the
language and concepts of powerful existing discourses of
colonialism, race, gender, class, science, and progress,
which while not unchanging over time, have been reac-
centuated to subvert non-Western views of nature.
Interlocking Discourses: Postcolonial
Natures
Modern dualistic and individualistic rationalities under-
pin environmental research and practice, which have been
redeployed to the detriment of non-Western practices of
nature conservation. While discourse does not unilaterally
determine what can be said about, and done to, nature, a
whole network of interests is involved whenever ‘nature’ is
invoked. In summarizing the theoretical treatments above,
the various significations of nature stem from its place in
social relations of power. Postcolonial nature is given
meaning through specific material and discursive prac-
tices; its physical transformation embodies the (neo)co-
lonial relations of power through which dominant images
are produced. Colonial power relations were starkly
symbolized in opposing landscape formations of forests
and plantations. Nature, symbolized by forests, was cast as
the negative ‘other’ of the plantation’s modernity and role
as an oasis of scientific order, just as natives were cast as
the negative ‘other’ to Europeans. These images are
projections of nonspatial signifiers onto the physical space
of nature. As the physical environment changed, forms of
consciousness – perceiving, symbolizing, and analyzing
nature – were also reconstructed. In the process, the co-
lonial and capitalist transformations legitimated a set of
symbols that placed Europeans and technology above
natives and nature. Imperialism was not just the result of
the power to take over territory but also a justificatory
regime for its actions.
Postcolonial nature is an idea that has a history and a
tradition of thought, imagery, and vocabulary that have
given it reality and presence in society in the same
manner as contemporary discourses on the Global South
that are beyond any correspondence with a real place.
Nature has been made to stand for many things: as a
resource in itself for export, as an impediment to capit-
alist agriculture to be replaced with plantations, farms,
and ranches, and as a source of fear and a symbol of
anxieties about national identity. Moreover, the domin-
ance of the discourses that turned nature and the Global
South into negative places lies in their ‘knitted-together
strength’, that is, the very close ties between socio-
economic and political institutions. Applying actor-
network theory to postcolonial nature, we see that the
status of nature depended on its role within the colonial
enterprise, as well as the larger project of progress upon

which postcolonial nationalism would depend. The fol-
lowing are common tropes in narratives of the post-
colonial nature–native nexus.
Resource Management and Environmental
Stewardship
The most dominant, and still the most dominant, trope of
colonial and postcolonial nature is its economic potential.
During the colonial era, European perceptions of land-
scapes were always inflected through the needs of empire.
Natives were seen as too lazy and/or too ignorant to
exploit nature to its fullest potential. Although the value
of plantation (or ranch) products, and timber was eco-
nomic, the justification for replacing the forests (and
grasslands) went beyond the purely economic to integrate
modern concepts of rational order and scientific progress.
While exploiting nature is now associated with con-
temporary environmental degradation rather than being
praiseworthy, appropriation and exploitation of nature
nonetheless goes on. The forestry industry and the en-
vironmental movement represent ‘nature’ or ‘wilderness’
as a realm separate from ‘culture’ while relocating it
within the abstract space of the global commons through
representations and rhetorical practices of responsible
stewardship in which Western-trained scientists, bur-
eaucrats, and capitalists are better managers of nature
than native peoples.
Liberal Western attitudes toward the nature–native
nexus take two forms: romanticization and alliance with
tribal groups as the last innocent links to nature or an-
tagonism and hostility toward many governments in the
Global South as irresponsible stewards of global com-
mons and oppressors of tribal groups. Both forms involve
essentialization of natives either through a fetishization of
the exotic in the case of tribal peoples and their ‘oneness’
with nature, or the subtle implications of ignorance,
oppression, or corruption, or all three in the case of post-
colonial states that do not comply with Western en-
vironmental conservation models. Of course, the trade in
stereotypes need not necessarily be unidirectional or
disempowering. Employing strategic essentialism allows
disempowered groups to represent themselves as the best
equipped to halt environmental damage wrought by ex-
ternal sources and conserve nature because of their
perceived special kinship with it. This is not to deny the
validity of the experience and situated knowledge but to
highlight that if disempowered groups are to achieve
their aims of controlling their immediate environment,
they need to incorporate the language of power.
Territorializing Nature
From the perspective of governments of developing
countries, Western environmentalism is a neocolonial
Natures, Postcolonial 341
interference in its sovereignty and the championing of
tribal peoples and knowledge a Trojan horse for under-
mining the attempts of developing societies to modernize
and escape poverty. This view was most forcefully ar-
ticulated in the 1990s by Malaysia’s then Prime Minister
Dr. Mahathir, who harks back to the colonial en-
couragement of native innocence and unworldliness that
had disastrous consequences – the theft of native lands
and resources by Europeans. Historically, colonial con-
servation authorities saw indigenous peoples as the main
cause of environmental destruction through native agri-
cultural practices and hunting (which Europeans referred
to as ‘poaching’). Hence, conservationist ideas in post-
colonial states have been associated with political
conservatism. Indigenous or traditional ecological
knowledge, then, can only be essentialized and praised
when there is nothing to fear from it. Ironically, given the
stress on neocolonialism, for tribal peoples, the loss of
ancestral lands through appropriation or physical deg-
radation has resulted in a condition of double coloniza-
tion, first from the Europeans and then from the majority
ethnic population in the post-colonial nation-states.
But in the latter half of the twentieth century onward,
nature construction has proceeded in tandem with state
building. Transforming the physical landscape has been,
and is, closely related, to political landscape formation.
According to Max Weber, an important function of the
state then is to demarcate where the boundaries of its
territory lie and to maintain order within those bound-
aries. In the context of forest-based decolonization wars
and the Cold War in the 1940s through to the 1970s,
nature in the form of the tropical forest was socially
constructed as undesirable. Since the state’s boundary is
the limit of the state’s coercive supremacy, then the for-
est, as beyond the control of the state, was perceived as a
frontier that had to be territorialized. Forests were the
antonym to the controlled domain of the colony or the
nation-state and the synecdoche for insurgency. During
the Cold War, decolonization military campaigns often
segued into insurgencies in many newly independent
countries. Once seen as securely territorialized by the
colonial powers, post-colonial states became new terri-
tories to be colonized as frontiers between the West and
Communist Russia and China. These forest-based in-
surgencies became the symbol of this unterritorialized
world. The US Secretary of State, Dean Rusk, resisted
troop pullout from Vietnam by claiming that the alter-
native was a world situation that disintegrated into the
‘law of the jungle’.
Finally, post-colonial states needed a positive pro-
jection of territorialization and some postcolonial nature
scholarship has focused on large-scale agricultural
schemes as constructions of a new nature. Multiple
repetitions of agricultural rituals across space act as
positive productions of state power, while making it
342 Natures, Postcolonial
fruitful for capitalism. The scale, organization, and
standardization of state-supported agricultural schemes
marked them as the ‘new nature’ for a modern nation
produced through scientific techniques.
Criticisms
In general, criticisms on postcolonial nature studies have
focused on the overemphasis on textuality and culture.
Marxists, especially, criticize its methodological lack of
empirical groundedness and paying insufficient attention
to other more traditional configurations of power such
as capital. The multidisciplinary nature of postcolonial
nature studies also poses the challenge of how to avoid
incoherence in such a wide-open field. Moreover, much
work remains to be done in the area of contesting con-
structions of nature in the Global South. Ironically, the
criticisms themselves reflect the deeply rooted problem
at the core of the debates on essentialized notions of
authentic representation and epistemic legitimacy taking
place across the humanities and social sciences whenever
the terms ’native’ and ’nature’ come into play. However,
the fact that postcolonial nature studies is a hybrid of
different schools of research augers well for its devel-
opment as an alternative and more respectful paradigm
for the relationships between society and nature, and
within societies by heeding different voices.
See also: Land Change Science; Nature; Political
Ecology; Postcolonialism/Postcolonial Geographies;
Poststructuralism/Poststructuralist Geographies;
Sustainable Development.
Further Reading
Demeritt, D. (1994). The nature of metaphors in cultural geography and
environmental history. Progress in Human Geography 18, 163--185.
Escobar, A. (1995). Encountering Development: The Making and
Unmaking of the Third World. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University
Press.
Grove, R. H. (1995). Green Imperialism: Colonial Expansion, Tropical
Island Edens and the Origins of Environmentalism, 1600–1860.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Gupta, A. (1998). Postcolonial Developments: Agriculture in the Making
of Modern India. Durham, NJ: Duke University Press.
Marglin, S. (1996). Farmers, seedsmen, and scientists: Systems of
agriculture and systems of knowledge. In Marglin, F. E. & Marglin, S.
A. (eds.) Decolonizing Knowledge: From Development to Dialogue,
pp 185--248. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Merchant, C. (1989). Ecological Revolutions: Nature, Gender and
Science in New England. Chapel Hill, NC: The University of North
Carolina Press.
Moore-Gilbert, B. (1997). Postcolonial Theory: Contexts, Practices,
Politics. New York: Verso.
Morgan, S. (1996). Place Matters: Gendered Geography in Victorian
Women’s Travel Books about Southeast Asia. New Brunswick, NJ:
Rutgers University Press.
Prakash, G. (1999). Another Reason: Science and the Imagination of
Modern India. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Said, E. (1978). Orientalism. New York: Pantheon.
Schama, S. (1995). Landscape and Memory. Toronto, ON: Random
House.
Shiva, V. (1988). Staying Alive: Women, Ecology and Development.
London: Zed Books.
Sioh, M. (1998). Authorizing the Malaysian rainforest: Configuring
space, contesting claims and conquering imaginaries. Ecumene 5,
144--166.
Sioh, M. (2004). An ecology of postcoloniality: Disciplining nature and
society in Malaya, 1948–1957. Journal of Historical Geography 30,
729--746.
Willems-Braun, B. (1997). Buried epistemologies: The politics of nature
in (post) colonial British Columbia. Annals of the Association of
American Geographers 87, 3--31.