A CASE STUDY IN SOLASTALGIA: PAST, PRESENT, AND FUTURE IMPACTS OF RESOURCE EXTRACTION, AMENITY MIGRATION, AND SEA-LEVEL RISE ON COASTAL FIRST NATIONS’ CULTURAL HERITAGE

Globally, the coastal zone is under pressure from industrial-scale resource extraction and development (coastal sprawl). These practices, typical of late modern capitalism, have resulted in the planetary-scale destruction of maritime heritage landscapes. To further complicate matters, rising seas over the coming centuries will drown most of the world’s coastal heritage sites. The mainstream response to these compounded crises has been cultural resource management.

I present a case study based in shíshálh First Nation territory within British Columbia’s amenity-rich “Sunshine Coast.” I discuss the Nation’s heritage stewardship plan and coastal change impacts within their territory. The level of heritage site disturbance is demonstrated to be very high, with 75% of sites disturbed or destroyed and 88% at immediate risk of inundation and/or erosion resulting from sea-level rise. In shíshálh territory, resource extraction and residential development emanate from and serve the needs of elites in distant economic and political cores. Consequently, the shíshálh are limited by the state in their ability to protect their heritage.

Indigenous maritime heritage landscapes are highly threatened and vulnerable, and state-sanctioned cultural resource management has failed to protect them. Indeed, I posit that modern resource management facilitates (permits) the destruction (clearance) of Indigenous heritage places, resulting in psychosocial dislocation experienced as “solastalgia”—an irrevocable and inconsolable loss of a sense of place and belonging. In this way, cultural resource management may be considered an “anthropogenic disaster,” and part of the problem, not the solution.

The combined impacts of coastal change on maritime heritage landscapes has significant consequences for the health and wellbeing of not just Indigenous communities, but all of humanity. Without confronting modernity and its underlying Enlightenment philosophy of growth, development, and progress, the maritime heritage crisis will remain intractable.