In October 2025 the authors organized a workshop in Thunder Bay, Ontario. The Niniibawtamin Anishinaabe Aki Gathering (stand up for Anishinaabe land gathering) brought together First Nations leaders, community organizers, civil society groups, and scholars to discuss plans for nuclear waste disposal, critical mineral extraction, and associated infrastructure development in northern Ontario. Several cross-cutting themes emerged over the course of the event. Conversations mostly hinged upon prospective critical mineral extraction in the "Ring of Fire" development area and a proposed high-level radioactive waste repository in northern Ontario. Numerous delegates referenced federal and provincial "fast-tracking" legislation as a serious challenge to Indigenous rights. First Nations leaders spoke about the challenges they face in meaningfully participating in decisions because their institutional capacity is taxed with addressing social crises in their communities. Several legal challenges that create uncertainty regarding critical mineral extraction and nuclear waste disposal were discussed. Another common theme was the limitation of settler decisionmaking processes, including the use of colonial courts to advance Indigenous justice. Several delegates spoke about the value of coalition building and grassroots mobilization. In the context of debates about using critical mineral extraction and nuclear power generation to drive the transition away from fossil fuels, some delegates noted it is important to consider whose way of life will be sacrificed for the clean energy transition.

Scholars have promoted strategic environment assessments as a solution to the limitations inherent in projectspecific environmental assessment. This paper uses a political ecology approach to examine two strategic assessments of offshore hydrocarbon extraction in Arctic Canada. It focuses on ascertaining whether the strategic assessments reproduced the limitations that political ecologists have identified with project-specific assessments, especially the tendency to legitimize status-quo extractivism. Our analysis identifies significant differences between the two assessments in terms of scope, transparency, and treatment of economic alternatives, with one assessment more transparent, robust, and critical of hydrocarbon extraction than the other. However, both strategic assessments were limited by factors political ecologists have identified with project-specific assessment, including reproducing and legitimizing extractivist development paradigms. Drawing on a strategic -relational approach to political ecology, we argue that the differences between the two assessments, as well as their shared limitations, can be partially explained by the different balance of forces surrounding hydrocarbon extraction in each region. Because of their flexible and ad hoc nature, strategic assessments are seemingly more sensitive to variations in political context than their project-specific counterparts. In temporal and geographic contexts where the balance of forces is tilted in favor of extractive industries, strategic assessments are increasingly likely to produce outcomes favourable to industry.

The development of indicators as tools for ecosystem monitoring is a key step in the management of marine protected areas (MPAs). This study uses previously developed sex-specific body condition indices, blubber thickness, and girth, to assess temporal changes in body condition from 2000 to 2015 in harvested Eastern Beaufort Sea (EBS) beluga whales (Delphinapterus leucas). Specifically, the goals were to (1) examine seasonal and inter-annual trends of beluga body condition indicators over the harvest season; (2) evaluate associations of body condition indicators across sexes; and (3) test annual means of each body condition index for correlations to regional scale environmental drivers (i.e., the Pacific decadal oscillation (PDO) and sea-ice minimum (SIM) in the Beaufort Sea). Significant seasonal changes in male blubber thickness and female girth indices demonstrated the importance of short-term seasonal drivers. Whilst inter-annual changes in girth and blubber thickness indices revealed longerterm changes, that were correlated between males and females. Only the male girth index had significant relationships with environmental drivers: a negative relationship with the PDO at a zero-year lag, and a negative relationship with the SIM at a two-year lag. The PDO is believed to capture broader environmental changes occurring at wintering habitats and migration routes of the EBS beluga that reveals connectivity between the EBS beluga home range and body condition metrics. While body condition metrics for harvested EBS belugas are regularly collected under a long-running beluga monitoring program, the interpretation and application to MPA monitoring remains difficult. We recommend the continued collection of both girth and blubber thickness measurements along with the inclusion of Inuvialuit Knowledge and observations to strengthen interpretations and inform monitoring of beluga health.

Monitoring marine protected areas requires simplifying complex marine ecosystems into a suite of indicators. The Tarium Niryutait Marine Protected Area (TN MPA), the first MPA in the Canadian Arctic is located in the Inuvialuit Settlement Region, NT and is selecting indicators for monitoring. Proposed health indicators for the TN MPA species of interest, the Eastern Beaufort Sea (EBS) beluga, include the body condition metrics blubber thickness and girth. Sex-specific body condition models for both metrics were developed to account for age, size, location, and timing of harvest from belugas harvested from 2000 to 2015. Models were tested to determine if the spatial variation is detected in the condition of belugas between the three areas of the TN MPA and between belugas harvested inside to outside of the TN MPA. Lastly, we assessed belugas from entrapment events to determine if indicator thresholds could be developed. Three of the indicators (girth male, girth female, blubber thickness male) contain both temporal and spatial factors, signalling the significant influence of year and harvest location on condition. Male belugas harvested from the western area of the TN MPA had smaller mean blubber thickness and girth compared to the other TN MPA areas, whereas there was no significant difference in female condition across the TN MPA. There was a significant difference inside and outside the TN MPA for all four indicators, with larger mean blubber thickness inside the TN MPA, females exhibiting larger mean girth and males exhibiting smaller mean girth inside the TN MPA. Indicators confirm that belugas from entrapment events had significantly lower body condition than belugas harvested during the summer and can serve as thresholds for condition indicators. This study provides guidance on the selection and use of condition indicators for their application in monitoring the TN MPA and demonstrates that careful consideration is required for indicator development and selection.

Book Review| May 01 2018 Review: British Columbia By the Road: Car Culture and the Making of a Modern Landscape by Ben Bradley British Columbia By the Road: Car Culture and the Making of a Modern Landscape by Ben Bradley. Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2017. vii + 309 pp.; notes, bibliography, index; clothbound, $89.95; paperbound, $34.95; eBook, $34.95. Jonathan Peyton Jonathan Peyton University of Manitoba Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar The Public Historian (2018) 40 (2): 178–180. https://doi.org/10.1525/tph.2018.40.2.178 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Jonathan Peyton; Review: British Columbia By the Road: Car Culture and the Making of a Modern Landscape by Ben Bradley. The Public Historian 1 May 2018; 40 (2): 178–180. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/tph.2018.40.2.178 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentThe Public Historian Search This content is only available via PDF. © 2018 by The Regents of the University of California and the National Council on Public History2018 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

This article, part photo-essay and part treatise, explores the interplays of history, photographic representation, and archival circulation at work in colonial imaginings of coastal canoes. Inspired by the work of Walter Benjamin, we analyze the archival photographic record in British Columbia to challenge narratives of progress; instead, we insist that Benjamin's notion of the "optical unconscious" provides a method for reading canoe photos against broader logics of representation and colonial modernity. Our empirical reading of the colonial archives produces a circumscribed account of the representation of the canoe as a persistent technology of Indigenous mobility, labor, and lifeways, but also as a technology, the "disappearance" of which was used to assert narratives of decline and colonial progress. We conclude by suggesting that this article could be read as part of an emerging convergence of critical visual methods within both human geographies of the sea and mobility studies. In this sense, we suggest that the photography-based methods taken here hold potential for growing geographical engagements in marine mobility studies.

From 1867–1966, miners at the Sao Domingos Mine in Beja Province, Portugal, extracted copper ore from an open pit and produced sulfur at an adjacent roasting complex. Like many post-industrial landscapes, the mine was never remediated after closure—the working enterprise is survived only by industrial ruins, a pit filled with acidic water, and a desiccated landscape where almost nothing can grow. Yet out of these ruins, a new economy has been built on the social, geological, and environmental heritage of the landscapes left behind. Environmental historians should consider the historiographical possibilities that emerge out of the claims to environmental, economic, and social “potential” produced in the creation of an industrial heritage tourism economy amidst the post-industrial landscape of the Sao Domingos Mine.

Vancouver's revitalization' has been characterized by the influx of upper-end restaurants and bars into parts of the city home to marginalized communities. We argue that some of these establishments code Vancouver's complex racial and colonial present as a benevolent remembrance of things past. We employ and compare three modes of analysis to underscore the relationship between the historical geography of colonialism/imperialism and its modern guise in Vancouver. First, critical toponymy looks at the connection between place names and meaning. We then take a postmodern framework to explore the production of authenticity and heritage in bars emphasizing a colonial era decor. Finally, we draw from Stoler's notion of imperial debris' to argue that these places are literally the detritus of empire revitalized as the material markings of nostalgia. In each part of the article, we demonstrate the critique offered by a different means of historical analysis. We conclude that the deployment of historical markers in the gentrification of Vancouver ultimately demonstrates the use of history as a claim to locality.