Tom Özden-Schilling, The Ends of Research: Indigenous and Settler Science After the War in the Woods. Duke University Press, 2023. 320 p. IBSN 9781478027669.

Keywords: rural, Canada, settler-colonialism, indigenous, expertise, place, environmental science

In The Ends of Research, Tom Özden-Schilling takes us through a nuanced and detailed account of both Euro-Canadian and First Nation researchers in the ‘ambiguous afterlives’ of a resource conflict in British Columbia, and how through their varied research projects they produce potent relationships to place whilst enduring the professional precarity brought on by the withdrawal of the state. He details the complex hopes and difficulties faced by researchers, and the subtle politics of the fine-grained environmental science they practice, as well as the potentials and potencies of the scientific artefacts they produce.

Özden-Schilling begins with the question of who ‘won’ the War in the Woods, using the futility of this question to begin to unpack the ambiguous legacies and place of those involved in it. This ‘war’ was a period of intense protest by First Nations groups (namely, Gitxsan and Wet’suwuet’en) and citizen activists around the clearcutting of forest in British Columbia in the 80s and 90s. This, too, is a conflict that is far from over, with protests again flaring up in 2021, and where the underlying injustices remain unresolved. While the book does not focus on the activists themselves (reflected on later, p. 229), the period of activism and protest ran parallel with a proliferation of research projects that brought researchers from other parts of the country to the region, as well as the funding of indigenous mapping projects, as part of an effort from the state to better ‘know’ the ecological terrain to ‘govern better.’ The Ends of Research is focused on these researchers, and how they understood their modes of knowledge production in relation to these wider struggles, and how they find their place and articulate claims after being left in the lurch by the withdrawal of the state.

Thematically, Özden-Schilling focuses on how the politics of expertise intersects and relates with issues of indigeneity and coloniality, and the various lives and effects different techno-scientific artifacts and techniques have. He details both the particularities and convergences of Euro-Canadian and First Nations researchers, and the different ways these professional and social communities of researchers work to maintain viable connections to place and profession. This is skilfully done, balancing an account of the different interests informing both settler and indigenous science while maintaining interior heterogeneity to each group, giving an interwoven narrative of the politics and practice environmental science in northwest British Columbia.

In the first chapter, Nostalgia: Placing Histories in a Shrinking State, we consider the role of Euro-Canadian researchers that moved into the region. Here, Özden-Schilling discusses ‘rural researchers’ and their fraught relation with the state: one the one hand, they are nostalgic for the technocracy that brought them security and authority, but this inability to secure solid financing has also led them to develop other ways to guarantee a place in this environment they have come to feel obligated toward. We are given a detailed account of how these researchers negotiate this position, and how they interlace their scientific expertise with their position as residents in the area, producing fine-grained and detailed ecological knowledge, as well as how through this they write themselves into the future of the area. Özden-Schilling’s use of ‘rural researchers’ neatly captures this fraught position, wherein they balance commitments to place with pro