The Archive of Place

Unearthing the Pasts of the Chilcotin Plateau

By William Turkel

SERIES: Nature | History | Society

UBC Press

The Archive of Place weaves together a series of narratives about environmental history in a particular location – British Columbia’s Chilcotin Plateau. In the mid-1990s, the Chilcotin was at the centre of three territorial conflicts. Opposing groups, in their struggle to control the fate of the region and its resources, invoked different understandings of its past – and different types of evidence – to justify their actions. These controversies serve as case studies, as William Turkel examines how people interpret material traces to reconstruct past events, the conditions under which such interpretation takes place, and the role that this interpretation plays in historical consciousness and social memory. It is a wide-ranging and original study that extends the span of conventional historical research.

Awards

2008, Winner - Clio Award (British Columbia), Canadian Historical Assocation

RELATED TOPICS: BC Studies, Canadian History, Environmental History, Environmental Studies, Geography, Historical Geography, History, Indigenous Studies, Regional Studies

In this unorthodox and intriguing book, William Turkel uses the Chilcotin Plateau, an arid and sparsely settled region of west-central British Columbia, to ask a series of questions about how we acquire and use knowledge of the past.
... This is an engaging and rewarding book. Like much recent work in British Columbia history, it writes First Nations people into the general history of the province, a hugely important project for North American histroy more generally.
An amalgam of the material and the representational, the natural and the human, place allows Turkel to move some way toward transcending the old human-environment dichotomy that bedevils the writing of environmental history. James Murton, Environmental History Journal, Volume 12, Number 4

William Turkel’s great achievement in this book is to show how once taken-for-granted accounts of geophysical processes, Aboriginal occupancy, and colonial settler society have now come to underpin sharply conflicting understandings of history. Julie Cruikshank, author of Do Glaciers Listen? Local Knowledge, Colonial Encounters, and Social Imagination

William J. Turkel teaches history at the University of Western Ontario.

Foreword: Putting Things in Their Place / Graeme Wynn

Preface

Acknowledgments

Part 1: Deep Time in the Present

1 Fish Lake

2 Prosperity Gold

Part 2: The Horizon of Experience

3 Mackenzie

4 Grease Trails

Part 3: Shadowed Ground

5 Converging towards “Banshee”