The Ends of Research: Indigenous and Settler Science after the War in the Woods

Review By Joseph Weiss

July 30, 2024

BC Studies no. 222 Summer 2024  | p. 156-158

Anthropologist and Science and Technology Studies scholar Tom Özden-Schilling’s ethnography announces its complex, sometimes ambivalent intentions in the clever double meaning of its title, The Ends of Research. In one sense, Özden-Schilling’s text is concerned with familiar questions in the anthropology of science: towards what ends do scientists conduct research? How are they located in different social worlds, and how do those worlds shape their research in its practice and its goals? At the same time, though, Özden-Schilling is specifically interested in what happens after regular and consistent support for research ends. In spaces in which once (seemingly) stable government and grant funding has vanished, how do scientists continue to make their lives and conduct their research? How do researchers engage their projects of self and self-making in conditions of ongoing instability, in the worlds which echo with the promises of what “might have been,” both scientifically and otherwise?

Özden-Schilling explores these questions in a social, political, and economic landscape that is also conditioned by the temporalities of aftermath: Gitxsan, Gitanyow and Wet’suwet’en territories in northern British Columbia, with Smithers as its primary scientific hub. Engaging with both Indigenous and settler researchers and scientists who have made their lives as forest managers, digital mapping experts, and other modes of environmental science, Özden-Schilling traces the ways in which his interlocutors have navigated careers shaped by the so-called “War in the Woods” – the fierce opposition to and blockades against clear-cut logging led by First Nations activists in (and beyond) northern B.C. in the 1980s and early 90s – and the landmark Delgamuukw and Gisday’wa case that followed. Özden-Schilling characterizes this period as a time of immense potential, in which settler and Indigenous researchers were differently recruited towards vast projects of technoscientific data-collection supported by substantial grants, as both colonial and First Nations governments attempted to manage the demands of land claims proceedings and a seeming reconfiguration of the terms of relationship between the settler state and the Indigenous Nations whose lands they claimed as their own. Crucially, however, this did not last, as shifts in provincial governments, on the one hand, and tensions within the different Indigenous leadership bodies, on the other, led to substantial downsizing of environmental research and the erosion of professional and economic stability for research scientists.

Özden-Schilling’s book is interested in the worlds this ongoing instability has made for what he terms “rural researchers,” scientists and technicians “whose institutional affiliations have shifted over time, or who have never held permanent positions within a single organization,” but who continue to invest “lingering ambition” in their “shifting, uncertain roles” (19). Most of the book is concerned with fine-grained portraits of some of these scientists, and Özden-Schilling elegantly shows how they shift between an almost elegiac sense of the unfulfilled promises of the past and the ways in which some elements of what was promised could still be brought into existence in the present.

One of the great strengths of the text is Özden-Schilling’s careful attention to these ambivalences, persuasively demonstrating that the small-scale and partial nature of the scientific projects his interlocutors pursue does not render them bereft of world-making potential. He presents his interlocutors as competent and capable of navigating recurrent cycles of research investment and retraction, neither helplessly naïve nor overwhelming cynical, but both he and his interlocutors are clear that this has engendered myriad different compromises (and modes of being compromised) that are not how they might have wished things to be. Another strength of the text is its richly considered engagement with the material of research and the many lives of scientific artifacts, particularly maps. Indeed, the text is at its most vivid as Özden-Schilling moves between conversations with researchers narrating their own archive of scientific materials and the analysis of the complexities of those materials themselves, both as historical objects and the grounds upon which future research projects could still be built.

Where I would push the text further, by contrast, is the in the ways that it considers the specific settler colonial dimensions of its analysis. One of the central claims of the text is that, on the one hand, both settler and Indigenous researchers have experienced similar conditions of precarity in the wake of the War in the Woods, but those conditions have engendered quite different life courses and navigational strategies for White as opposed to First Nations actors. I think this is important, and Özden-Schilling is clearly aware and committed to avoiding reified representations of “dynamic Western expertise” vs “static Indigenous cultural knowledge” (e.g. 159-161). However, this commitment to presenting a shared field of rural researcher precarity, albeit one that is differently navigated, risks eliding the specifically colonial dimensions of this precarity for Indigenous Peoples. It would have been productive if the text had been more willing to scale out and consider the work that the instability of colonial government projects and funding structures does to position Indigenous scholars as necessarily dependent on a settler monopoly on the terms and resources of technoscience, work which can, in turn, justify ongoing colonial subordination. As Özden-Schilling himself acknowledges in his conclusion, likewise, it would have been useful had he spent more time engaging with the perspectives of First Nations land defenders and those explicitly in engaged in anti-colonial activism in the present (228), which could also have given the work a more precise and firmer critique of colonialism without sacrificing its sensitivity or care for nuance and ambivalence.