Paper short abstract:

This paper explores settler relationships to land in the Cape Breton Highlands, and their collisions with indigenous communities and Parks Canada. I argue that protection agencies must consider settler relationships to land, and would benefit from working to foster their growth in local communities.

Paper long abstract:

In the 1930s, the Nova Scotia government expropriated land from several hundred families during the formation of Cape Breton Highlands National Park (CBHNP). This resulted in widespread local resentment of the parks agency, which I argue sometimes manifested in resentment toward the land itself—feelings which persist to some extent into present generations. Following the recent popularization of community co-management, when Parks Canada in CBHNP planned a moose harvest to restore boreal forest health, it partnered with a Cape Breton Mi'kmaq organization. Some members of the local non-indigenous community responded negatively, saying they felt left out of the decision-making process and the benefits of the harvest—echoing the resentments of the 1930s expropriations.

Drawing from fieldwork completed before the conception of the moose harvest, and from news reports and media interviews about the project, I use the CBHNP case study to explore how an anthropological perspective might illuminate better ways of navigating indigenous-settler relationships in protected areas, and settler relationships to land more broadly in these areas. The latter, I argue, matter because local activities connect with protected ecosystems, and because care for place in settler communities furthers conservation goals on local and global scales. Anthropologists are well positioned to imagine how conservation projects can respect and nourish existing relationships to land; we can and should also imagine how such projects can go further and work to foster new relationships to land—what MacKenzie (2004) calls "resubjectification" in a Scottish case study—in the settler communities local to protected areas.