Nostalgia: Placing Histories in a Shrinking State

Chapter 1 explores how environmental scientists living in Smithers, BC, articulated new senses of place and collectivity in the wake of government retreat. Rather than simply investing in new collaborative relationships, many scientists there have also articulated their work as contributing to a shared legacy of activism that they saw as defining the town’s history. These nostalgic articulations have become increasingly crucial to rural researchers’ efforts to define the meaning and boundaries of scientific communities in the absence of institutional structures. The chapter shows how rural researchers displaced by government restructuring have emplaced their expertise in emergent genres of local history. By articulating expertise to belonging, however, some researchers have also helped to obscure the forms of mobility that allow Euro-Canadian researchers to live and work in the northwest—a place to which, unlike their First Nations neighbors, the majority of them first moved by choice.