by Tracy Qiu, Doctoral Candidate, Concordia University (Montreal)
This article is a summary of a presentation from ELA’s 30th Annual Conference. The presentation, Decentering the “Tree Museum”: Colonial Narratives in Environmental Conservation and Botanical Science, asked the following questions:
- What are some visible and invisible ways that colonial history and ideologies influence environmental conservation, botanical science, and ecological landscaping practices?
- What can be gained from understanding the conservation movement in terms of European settler-colonization? Why might we want to visibilize these influences?
- And finally, how can decolonization or decentering practices be applied in this context?
Introduction
I grew up with a Chinese and settler-Canadian experience of nature through my parents—who immigrated to Canada to work in the biological sciences—and my grandparents—who were farmers in the Chinese countryside. As a professional horticulturist, I was trained in the European tradition of ornamental gardening. My relationship with landscape, like many, is a jumble of influences, including culture and experience.
As someone who researches decolonization and botanical gardens, I often examine my assumptions about nature and environment, as these values and practices influence the way I interact with said environment. This is not unique to me, as we are all products of our upbringing, including our biases, prejudices, and the beliefs that we hold to be universal truths.
I spend a lot of time thinking about colonization and landscape: what do these terms mean in different contexts? How can our understanding of these terms be applied to our modern landscape profession? And most importantly, how does this affect the way we—as landscape professionals—connect with plants and people?
The History of Natural Science and Environmentalism
Concerns about the environment have been recorded as early as the Roman Empire, throughout medieval Europe, and across ancient China, India, and Peru. In pre-industrial civilizations, issues such as the prevention of disease, pollution of drinkable water, and soil management were important topics. In Western history, concerns about resource conservation, and preserving natural spaces became prevalent after the Industrial Revolution. By the 20th century, these concerns evolved into middle-class lobbying groups, which eventually became the origins of Western environmentalism. We can see some of this history reflected in the evolution of ‘tree museums.’
The ‘tree museum’ (from Joni Mitchell’s song “Big Yellow Taxi”) is a pop culture reference to arboreta, botanical gardens, and other living collections that act as repositories for plant biodiversity while providing ornamental green space for leisure and recreation. Originally a ‘parking-lot’ for plant collections during the time of Western colonial expansion, most modern botanical gardens and arboreta have pivoted to focus on environmental conservation including public research and education about habitat loss, landscape degradation, and threats to biodiversity.
Colonization, Gardens, and Nature
Why seek to decolonize and decenter these ‘tree museums,’ or the field of environmental conservation and landscaping in general? The botanical garden—as a type of institution—is implicitly linked with dominant beliefs from European colonial expansion. Whether opened in the 1800s or the 2000s, many botanical gardens unconsciously reproduce these ideas, such as the superiority of Western scientific knowledge (universal taxonomies and repositories of data), the portrayal of non-Europeans as ‘wild’ or ‘exotic’ (both plants and people), dominant perceptions of land-use and resource management (what ‘counts’ as gardening and who decides this?), and the development of anti-conquest narratives (harmless intellectuals brave savage lands to ‘rescue’ plant species).
One example of this is the exclusion, overwriting, and erasure of Indigenous and traditional knowledges, including European peasant/folk knowledges, and other non-Western ways of understanding the environment. During colonial expansion, Western naturalists decided what was recorded and what was left out. Names, creation stories, mythology, and other elements considered ‘unscientific’ were excluded from European botanical records. Despite the intentions and efforts of the ethnographer, colonial records were often inaccurate or unhelpfully vague in the proper usage of medicinal plants.
British colonial authorities in the Americas deemed Indigenous peoples as ‘non-cultivators,’ failing to recognize their land-use practices because they did not align with British agricultural standards. This centering of European land management was one of several justifications for land dispossession and reallocation towards colonial interests (Deur and Turner, 2005). These practices extended into modern environmental practices, where many Indigenous communities were forced to leave homelands that are now the United States National Parks.
Historically, people of color were considered ‘uninterested’ in the environment, due to 1960s research that framed environmental activities from a traditional, Western, and upper-class perspective. Activities such as birdwatching, hiking, and mountaineering did not factor in that people of color were less likely to be geographically and financially mobile, and more likely to recreate in city parks or local outdoor spaces instead of national parks. Concerns from communities of color often focused on land rights, pesticide reduction, waste disposal, civil rights, and public health in urban environments and were dismissed as related to discrimination and poverty as opposed to environmentalism.
Though the intention of preserving green space and natural resources for future generations is a positive one, the field of conservation is not without its criticisms, particularly in regards to a lack of diversity, lack of accessibility, and long-held gatekeeping of ‘environmental activities.’ Western conservation has not always been the most inclusive and barrier-free of spaces, and as such, modern environmental organizations have been working on shifting these perceptions by identifying these dominant narratives and creating space for marginalized voices.
Decolonization and Environment
Decolonization has different meanings depending on how the term is being used. In general, I see decolonization as a process of visibilizing, acknowledging, and intervening in past, present, and ongoing impacts of colonization. It is, at its core, linked to colonization and its impacts – one cannot exist without the other. From a geo-political perspective, decolonization can refer to a process where colonized nations gain independence from the colonizing nation. From a sociocultural context, decolonization refers to movements and objectives related to Indigenous and colonized peoples including political self-determination; restorative justice; intellectual revitalization; financial reparations; cultural resurgence; and the restitution of land. Often, cultural and environmental institutions—including museums and gardens—are referring to decolonization in social, cultural, and intellectual frameworks. This is also where my own work lies: as a gardener and a researcher I am interested in seeing colonial botanical history from a different lens and reframing the ‘imperial gaze’ of botanical gardens as cultural institutions.
While I try to provide a simple summary of decolonization, it’s important to emphasize how and why it is so complex. There is no universal definition for decolonization, and to try and enforce one feels colonial in its boundaries. It’s easy to oversimplify the process of colonization as a one-directional funneling of resources from the Global South to the Global North, with non-Europeans depicted as passive bystanders or powerless victims. For example, it’s true that the history of botanical collections included gifts from administrative officials, purchases from local nurserymen, and collaborative efforts between plant enthusiasts of many nations. However, I’ve found that most botanical gardens don’t engage with the darker history of physical, epistemic, and cultural violences related to colonial appropriation and scientific imperialism. In my understanding, decolonization requires not only the acknowledgement of harms inflicted through colonization, but also the acknowledgement of the resistance, agency, and resilience of local actors in colonized spaces.
Examples of decolonizing interventions can include removing unnecessary and offensive terms and images, acknowledging past and present colonial harm, shifting focus away from colonizer narratives in history, participating in land-back movements for unceded territories, and supporting community-led initiatives such as language and knowledge resurgence movements,, sovereignty and self-governance, and reparations, repatriation, and re-appropriation.
Decentering and Decolonizing Interventions in Environmental Organizations
I also use the term de-centering when looking at a broader global history of plant collections, botanical knowledge, and environmental conservation. De-centering identifies what is at the ‘center’ of our story and asks us “What happens if we shift that center to focus on a story less commonly heard? What does this change about our understanding of the world?”
This can be applied in many ways, with or without the label of ‘decolonizing’ or ‘decentering.’ Simply seeking to examine the narrative – to shine light on what has historically been hidden or overlooked, can do a lot to change perceptions. Some examples of botanical gardens and decolonization include the Royal Botanic Garden Kew’s approach from a scientific and curatorial perspective, such as expanding their research programmes through historic collections in order to present decentered narratives of plant exploration, or digitizing herbarium specimens and archive collections to expand global access and support decolonial research in the sciences and humanities.
The term ‘decolonization’ can be an advantage or an obstacle depending on political climate and societal perspectives, and in the North American context, is strongly linked to Indigenous movements. The Canadian City Parks Report (CPPR) on Reclaiming Urban Spaces described their Indigenous-led reclamation project as a decolonial and re-Indigenizing act that deliberately addresses the dark history of Canada as a European colony, including current efforts in reconciliation as well as continued investigation into residential schools.
Returning to earlier examples of European-centered ethnobotany, Wendy Makoons Geniusz and other Indigenous educators are bringing communities together to decolonize Western botanical knowledge. In Our Knowledge is Not Primitive: Decolonizing Botanical Anishinaabe Teachings, Geniusz combs through European ethnographies of North American plants, removing offensive terminology and language along the way. She presents this information to groups of Anishinaabe elders and practitioners, whom she works with to decolonize by double-checking the accuracy of names and descriptions, as well as crowd-sourcing the methods of using plants in food and medicine. All of this results in a de-centered educational resource that combines the historical collection of Indigenous knowledge with a modern application of Indigenous cultural resurgence and decolonial practices.
Another example is the shift in perception of what counts as ‘gardening’ and ‘cultivating.’ Western gardening styles are being recognized as one way of gardening, with more space being created to understand other ways of managing landscapes—including forest gardens and permaculture, especially in reference to Indigenous land management practices. Visiting the Montreal Botanical Garden’s First Nation Garden was an interesting experience for me that highlighted how much of my own idea of ‘gardening’ and ‘cultivation’ was subconsciously influenced by European colonial history, as well as how much of my vision of ‘wilderness’ is also created by human hands.
Finally, there is the broader conversation around decolonizing and decentering the sciences as a whole. Contemporary environmentalism has become more inclusive of socially-related environmental movements such as pollution mitigation, waste management, land rehabilitation, environmental justice, urban landscapes, and accessible green spaces. Today we see more representation from underrepresented groups in traditional outdoor activities (such as the Audubon’s Black Birders Week), as well as more of a push to create access to traditional conservation spaces. On the other side, we also see more acknowledgement of urban environmental activities and urban nature, as well as an increasing number of environmental justice organizations.
It’s clear from this year’s presentations and discussions at the ELA’s Annual Conference that environmental organizations are actively shifting the perception of environmentalism and conservation to include more diverse and non-traditional environmental concerns. Organizations are no longer assuming that terms like nature and wilderness hold the same meaning for all participants. We all have experiences with landscape and environment that have shaped us as individuals, and decolonization and decentering seeks to accept the multiple truths that these experiences hold.
In order to participate in decolonizing processes and practices, ‘tree museums’ such as botanical gardens, arboreta, and other living collections will need to take a deep and reflexive look at their institutional identities, and how they connect with scientific imperialism, European supremacy, Western narratives, and the parallel histories of Indigenous and local actors throughout history.
Tracy Qiu is a doctoral candidate at Concordia University (Montreal), where her thesis research explores how botanical gardens address their colonial origins while tackling contemporary issues of diversity and inclusion. Her interests in questions of access and “belonging” in botanical garden spaces have led her to deeply engage with public gardens and I.D.E.A. work, particularly in areas of racialized identities and decolonization. She has a multidisciplinary background in visual arts, ornamental horticulture, and critical race studies, and environmental humanities. In her spare time, she works as a facilitator and educator for public gardens looking to reconcile their inherited colonial histories with their complex modern identities in order to remain relevant, resilient, and connected.
