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This dissertation examines the settler colonial, multispecies, and microbial politics of Atlantic salmon aquaculture in what is now British Columbia, Canada. Salmon aquaculture production systems enable 18 million Atlantic salmon to be raised in nets that are anchored to the seafloor in the coastal waters of British Columbia each year. Aquaculture is recognized as the fastest growing method of food production worldwide and is often positioned as a “blue revolution” capable of providing sustainable, affordable seafood in the midst of salmon population declines. In British Columbia, however, the raising of Atlantic salmon in critical Pacific salmon migration routes has engendered concerns about emerging industrial uses of the waterscape and the ability for farm-borne viruses to move between species. By investigating how industrial aquaculture is encountered, negotiated, and resisted on-the-ground, particularly by Indigenous communities in whose waters the practice is occurring, I instead propose that aquaculture is not a radical departure or a revolutionary break from the past, but is steeped within and dependent upon histories of colonialism, industrialization, and capitalism that have long transformed salmon and waterscapes into sites of state and economy-building.Stemming from ongoing uncertainties regarding the potential for pathogens to transfer between Atlantic and Pacific salmon, this dissertation particularly focuses on historic, scientific, and political controversies that surround salmon viruses. In the absence of state monitoring for salmon pathogens like Piscine orthoreovirus (PRV), Indigenous leaders and their allies travel to sites of aquaculture production to monitor the daily operations of farms and gather underwater video footage from within farm sites. Campaigns to enact stronger fish health protections and document the spread of viruses and pollution also become part of broader political movement aimed at reclaiming territory and restoring Indigenous forms of governance within coastal waterscapes. While pathogens come to reflect and reinforce colonial structures of dispossession, I argue that Indigenous-led efforts to track pathogens throughout salmon bodies and ecosystems are shifting power dynamics in ways that offer new possibilities for the “blue revolution.” This research brings scholarship on pathogens and industrial landscapes into conversation with enduring concerns about the material consequences of environmental injustice and colonialism. In situating aquaculture as part of an under-explored extension of settler colonial logics, structures, and governance into marine space, I suggest that the dominant framing of settler colonialism as land-based leaves large openings for understanding how colonialism and sovereignty are enacted in water-centered and maritime regions. Illuminating how industrial aquaculture and efforts to track pathogens take place within a broader politics of asserting sovereignty “at sea” reveals how historical inequalities and ongoing power dynamics become inscribed within oceans, with important implications for understanding contemporary ocean politics in the 21st century.

Since the 1980s, Sri Lanka’s ethnic conflict has caused the mass migration of over a million ethnic Tamils from their homeland, creating a transnationally interconnected Sri Lankan Tamil diaspora deeply engaged in homeland politics. This study focuses on the Tamil-Canadian diaspora, the largest Sri Lankan Tamil community outside of Sri Lanka. It seeks to explore the way particular histories of war, refugee migration, and a sustained relationship with media technologies and objects have shaped the Sri Lankan Tamil diaspora’s collective memory and diasporic consciousness. Through paying particular attention to second-generation Tamil-Canadians, this study investigates how this generation interacts with, are influenced by, and ultimately tries to contribute to this community’s evolving diasporic consciousness. Building an interdisciplinary methodology, this study blends together digital ethnography, participant observation, media and visual culture analysis, as well as in-depth interviews to consider various interrelated questions about the forces that shape the identity, collective memory, and political subjectivities of this diasporic community. This study argues that it is useful to approach this community and others like it through the framework of what it means to study a refugee diaspora. The refugee diaspora framework asks us to consider how diasporic communities that migrate to escape war are wholly shaped by the particular conditions of their violent dispersal and the continuities that stem from it. These continuities extend far beyond the legal term, ‘refugee’ and have lasting effects on the diasporic imaginings of future generations. This study also argues that the collective memory of this transnational diaspora is one that is maintained by both politicized narratives forwarded by community organizations and more amorphous and embodied memories and traumas carried by individuals and families. This collective memory is then continually mediated through what this study calls a visual landscape of identity, which is made up of the media technologies, media objects, local realities, imagined homelands, and inherited traumas that the Tamil-Canadian diaspora engages with. Finally, this study argues that in their place-making projects, the second-generation of this diaspora is learning how to contribute to an evolving sense of diasporic consciousness through integrating their unique experiences, perspectives, and political subjectivities into the tapestry of Tamil identity woven by the generations before them.

This dissertation considers cultural negotiations of climate change in the Arctic and sub-Arctic, especially the Inuit co-governed territory of Nunavut, Canada, through an analysis of material and conceptual “icescapes.” Icescapes are embodied encounters between humans and ice that are framed through performance (broadly construed to mean embodied, iterative, creative practices) and that create ecological relationships. This research focuses on interviews and 20th and 21st-century works of multiple mediums and genres, including film, literature, digital art, dogsledding, and biological research; it is methodologically rooted in performance, literary, and film studies, Indigenous studies, ecology/biology, gender and sexuality studies, and science and technology studies. This project contributes to understanding how global environmental concerns manifest within severely affected localities, increases awareness of the Canadian Arctic as a crucial part of American history and futurity, and models performance-based environmental research and advocacy. Performance has been an undertheorized form within the environmental humanities; this dissertation centers performance studies analyses which emphasize embodiment and illuminate modes of creative, immersive engagement with climate change as a conceptual and material process.Historically, dominant governmental and philosophical approaches to environmentalism in North America have been rooted in homogenizing visions of humanity. This dissertation works to correct for this deleterious generalization by attending to gender, race, and coalitional, transnational efforts toward environmental justice. This emphasis builds upon the insights of Kyle Powys Whyte, Sheila Watt-Cloutier, and interlocutors in Iqaluit, Nunavut who have argued that climate change (and other environmental imbalances) are constitutively intertwined with pre-existing structures of inequity, including racial capitalism and settler-colonialism. Though it is often positioned as a novel crisis and “rupture” in history, climate change is equally a manifestation of long economic and ideological histories.Arctic ecosystems and performance practices based in and upon those ecosystems are central to the past, present, and future of climate change communication. By orienting audiences materially and conceptually, icescapes can naturalize, problematize, and innovate ways of relating to the more-than-human world. These mediated encounters produce environmentally consequential dynamics between humans and nonhumans and shape widespread ethical imaginaries. This research deepens and diversifies how contemporary climate change might be understood and confronted.

With their signature red sweaters and bright red .308 bolt action rifles, Canadian Rangers have become an established military presence in some of Canada’s most remote regions. Originally established as a symbolic representation of Canada’s sovereignty on the Northwest coast at the start of the Cold War in 1947, their presence in the Arctic functioned to protect Canada from any potential Northern invasion. Today, Rangers act as scouts and guides in the arctic meant to alarm the military of any suspicious activity, without actively engaging in combat. Rangers are expected to join the organization equipped with their own gear and already trained in surviving and navigating on the land. Located in almost 70 communities across the Northwest Territories, Nunavut, the Yukon, and Atlin, BC, Canadian Rangers in the 1st Canadian Ranger Patrol Group (1 CRPG) are viewed as a critical part of the arctic defense strategy. Sinceiithe Organization’s inception in 1947, the employment of local and Indigenous personnel has been advertised as a cost-effective way to bring money, skills, and employment to the north while simultaneously securing Canadian sovereignty in the region Due to their geographical location and the unique living conditions, most Canadian Ranger patrols are comprised of Indigenous personnel who use skills accrued over generations of living on the land to do their work. Because Rangers are expected to come to the organization fully trained, with extensive knowledge of “living on the land,” their traditional knowledge is re-branded as the foundation of arctic military training.Simultaneously examining the experiences of both Indigenous and non-Indigenous personnel, my research examines how Indigeneity becomes a key factor in the Canadian state’s strategy to consolidate national sovereignty in the arctic. Focusing on 1 CRPG, my research aims to expand an understanding of the Canadian arctic military landscape. Examining military infrastructure through the everyday, lived experiences of Indigenous and non-Indigenous personnel within communities and at the headquarters, this research is informed by settler studies and critical Indigenous studies approach to studying how ideas of race, whiteness, and indigeneity are constructed from a colonial, military perspective. As Ranger identity is constructed from the fabric of colonial ideology, the project explores how Indigeneity is reformulated under a bureaucratic, military gaze.In the twenty-first century, the Canadian Rangers have emerged from the shadows to become a visible example of diversity and inclusion in the Canadian Armed Forces. Challenging this, this dissertation argues how the progressive representation of the organization hides its truly settler colonial identity. Using ethnographic research to examine how Rangers are recruited, administered, and paid, this project shows how settler colonialism relies on Indigenousiiipeople to establish Canadian state sovereignty in the Arctic, doing so under the guise of a humanitarian ethic that scripts Indigenous people as needing assistance into modern life. Recognized as a people with a relevant culture and the necessary skills to manage the Arctic region, but paradoxically imagined as in need of state assistance, Indigenous people find themselves caught between their own economic needs and the ambitions of the settler state. This dissertation examines how settler soldiers participate in the colonial management of the Arctic through the Rangers. It focuses on how settler soldiers construct themselves in a white settler imaginary as a people who brings civilization to the Arctic.