Familial Environmental History of the Scottish lowlands and the Grand River Valley, Ontario, Canada.
October 23, 2024 By: Victoria Hodgson
To start, let us consider my positionality as a white Scottish settler living on the unceded territory of the Pentlatch, K’omoks, and Laich-wil-tach First Nations. On my mother’s side, I am a second generation Scottish settler. On my father’s side, my mixed anglo-saxon settler relatives began settling in Eastern Canada as early as the mid-eighteenth century. It is important to consider my positionality at the start of this paper as it contextualizes my place in the world and encourages personal reflection as I explore my family’s environmental history.
I chose to explore both my maternal and paternal familial environmental histories. My maternal environmental history is connected to the lowlands of Scotland, near the community of Paisley. As for my paternal ancestry, my grandfather’s family settled along the Grand River in south-western Ontario in the mid-eighteenth century. The Grand River, tributary to Lake Erie, is an area rich in Indigenous and settler-colonial history. My paternal ancestry connects me to this place and its ancestral keepers.
The lowlands of Scotland are largely considered to be wetlands, primarily blanket bog and raised bog ecosystems. According to Smout T. (2005), “blanket mire (also known as blanket bog) covers about a million hectares of Scotland. Raised bogs, those remarkable domed structures of peat and sphagnum moss… cover about 27 000 hectares in Scotland” (p.99). In doing this exploration, I learned that bog ecosystems and the natural resources within them were critically important to the survival of ancestral Scottish people. The peat mosses that grow in bog ecosystems, specifically in the blanket bogs common throughout the Scottish environment are reported as having been the best fuel for heating and cooking in traditional Scottish homes. One report from 1630 says that “there is no occasion here for stoves; the hearths are well supplied with peat…” (Smout, 2005, p. 100). However, despite the integral role that bog ecosystems played in the warmth and survival of Scottish people, economic pressures motivated certain influential individuals to consider how bog ecosystems could be “improved to better value” (Smout, 2005, p.100) from as early as the year 1710. As the industrial era approached, Scotland’s bog ecosystems were managed through an agroecological lens – by prioritizing the ways in which the ecosystem can serve the human economic interest. During this time and into the mid-twentieth century, much of Scotland’s bog ecosystems were drained and reforested with Sitka spruce and Lodgepole pine. Today, “only 9 percent of the Scottish bogs… even approach a pristine state” (Smout, 2005, p.101).
Without a doubt, bog ecosystems and the critical peat resources that grow within them were integral to the survival of my familial ancestry in Scotland. Information on the opinions my ancestors had on the non-human natural world around them is knowledge I am not blessed with having. However, it is likely that prior to the move towards industrialization in the mid-eighteenth century my Scottish ancestors would have lived and worked closely with the environment and ecosystems around them. As an individual who communes with nature and finds peace with it daily, I resonate with my Scottish ancestors inner knowing about the natural world. I have often felt drawn towards bog ecosystems, so learning how influential these ecosystems would have been to my ancestors’ lives and survival has felt like a “coming home.” The move toward agroecology and industrialization saddens me. Nonetheless, I like to think that my Scottish ancestors continued to feel some connection to the land, and that this ancestral connection is what fuels my present inner knowing of (and communion with) nature and the non-human environment.
As we transition into the exploration of my paternal environmental history, it is critical to recognize that the Grand River valley in what is now known as south-western Ontario “has witnessed an Aboriginal presence for the past 13 000 calendar years” (Warrick, 2012, p.156). My family’s ancestral history and settler legacy exist as a brief chapter in relatively recent history, somewhere around the mid-eighteenth century. Considering the interconnectivity of the land (nature and the non-human environment) and Indigenous peoples, it is impossible to consider the environmental history of any region in Canada, North America, and any other region with a colonial presence. With that said, “the Six Nations (or Haudenosaunee) and the Mississaugas (or Anishinabek) are the Indigenous or Aboriginal peoples of the Grand River Watershed, located in south-western Ontario” (Warrick, 2012, p.154). What is important to understand is that this area has been inhabited by different nations at different times throughout its history and “prior to the 1780s, the Six Nations and Mississaugas shared the rich fishing, hunting, and trapping grounds of southern Ontario in a treaty referred to as ‘the Dish With One Spoon” (Warrick, 2012, p.155). However, “the Grand River Valley was purchased by the British Government in the spring of 1784 from the Mississaugas, who had been hunting, gathering, fishing, and gardening there before Six Nations settlement” (Warrick, 2012, p.155). As far as I understand, my paternal relatives would have settled in the Grand River Valley shortly after this land purchase.
Archeological studies have shown that the Grand River and its surrounding areas would have seen a transition from a more nomadic hunt and gathering lifestyle, to an agricultural lifestyle around 1500 years ago following the advent of the corn crop, maise. Members of the Mississaugas and Six Nations would have been farming the arable Grand River land with the “three sisters crops” (maise, squash, and beans) for over a thousand years (Warrick, 2012). When colonizers arrived in the area, they recognized the Grand River Valley as the incredibly arable farmland that it was and still is today. Settlers, like my paternal relatives, would have received sections of land from the British Government to establish farms where colonial crops like carrots and potatoes would have been grown.
My grandparents’ and parents’ relationships to land certainly echoed an agroecological perspective, of nature and the non-human environment serving to satisfy the economic interests of the colonial powers that dominate the land. From a very young age, I recognized an inner knowing that connected me to nature in an entirely different way than my family taught me. Exploring my familial environmental history, I have been offered clarity on why my parents and grandparents perceive(d) nature as a resource with the sole purpose of satisfying economic interests. Understanding how non-human environments have influenced my ancestors, my great-grandparents, my parents, and myself, has left me feeling a great sense of interconnectivity to them and to the lands they call(ed) home.
References
Smout, T. C. (2009). Exploring Environmental History. Edinburgh University Press. p. 99 – 112.
Warrick, G. (2012). Buried Stories: Archaeology and Aboriginal Peoples of the Grand River,
Ontario. Journal of Canadian Studies, 46(2), 153–177.