Enclosed Edens, Contested Waters & Failed Utopias: An Ecocritical Reading of Epistemic Land Claims in Okanagan Literature

This doctoral dissertation, Enclosed Edens, Contested Waters and Failed Utopias: an Ecocritical Reading of Epistemic Land Claims in Okanagan Literature, examines regionally specific literary sites of intersection, conflict and transformation. Focusing on the Okanagan region, which rests in the southern heart of British Columbia and remains the unceded territory of the Syilx Okanagan people, this dissertation observes literature from the region as an epistemological field. This dissertation primarily deploys an ecocritical and bioregional approach to literary analysis. This work also employs autotheory, a mode that seeks to lay bare some of the “entanglement of research and creation” and “reveals the tenuousness of maintaining illusory separations between art and life, theory and practice, work and the self, research and motivation” (Fournier 2; 2-3). Building on Frank Davey’s neologism “regionality” (15), this dissertation observes the region as an ideologically diverse space where many voices communicate what Laurence Buell terms “a terrain of consciousness,” through which humans may ponder their relationships with the region and the other-than-human (Buell 83). These “terrains of consciousness” function as what Lorraine Code terms “instituting imaginaries,” as they can disrupt and defamiliarize master narratives and initiate counter possibilities capable of interrogating and making new, established social structures (31). This dissertation offers a sustained examination of regionally born imaginaries through literary works by writers, including Susan Allison, Jeanette Armstrong, Jason Dewinetz, George Bowering, Nancy Holmes, Patrick Lane, John Lent, Alice Barrett Parke, Harold Rhenish, Laisha Rosnau and Dania Tomlinson. This dissertation aims to trace the contexts that inform the finding and making of home within the Okanagan by situating the study in the specifics of the habitats and inhabitants of the region. Each chapter focuses on a contested topographic feature, including orchards, lakes, and small cities. Through this examination, we might trace a common thread of seeking to reconcile one’s singular subjectivity within the “tangles and patterns” of a violent and vexed settler colonial history and within in a distinct geographic region (Harraway 1). As the ecological and emotional toll of the settler colonial project is felt acutely by the region’s residents, we might also discern an invitation to reassess after epistemic failure and to chart new ways of being within the bioregion.