While working on my first book, I took a tour in Yellowstone National Park that focused on wolves with a group of Americans. In fact, wolves were incidental to my research; they could have been bison or grizzlies or coyotes. For that book, I was interested in how nature writ large was understood in cultural politics. But I was surprised when Americans began lauding Canada for saving wolves, unlike the US which had persecuted them to such a degree that they needed to be reintroduced. This struck me as fascinating case of misplaced Canadian exceptionalism, because my sense was that Canada had done very little to protect wolves. It seemed more like an accident of geography. Indeed, wolves in Canada generated both light and heat as their presence, and the animals themselves, seemed both venerated and despised. There is very little ambivalence on the subject of wolves.

So, I set about trying to understand those strong emotions and often violent reactions. As I researched, I began to see that stories about wolves acted as a kind of settler colonial pedagogy: about good and bad animals, how nature should be made to submit to human will, and who can occupy the land. I think they still work in the same way today, though the tenor of those stories has changed. And so, I wanted to think about how power has been written on the body of the wolf in Canada and how that might be unwritten or rewritten differently. 

I hope that readers consider that the stories we tell actively shape the land and ideas about whom – human and more-than-human – is entitled to dwell on it. The stories that settlers have told about wolves since the early founding of Canada were steeped in blood. Those stories shaped interactions with wolves that were predicated on a kind of hyper-exaggerated violence that bordered -- in some cases -- on torture. This was in large part, in my view, because wolves threatened the economic and political stakes of the nation.  

But there have always been better stories to tell. Listening to Indigenous wisdom about human-wolf relations has much to offer a conversation about practices of coexistence, respect, and humility; this was a major theme in the book. And I would also say that wolves themselves can teach us what forms of multispecies justice can look like, if we care to listen. Their howls carry stories too, signaling not just loss, but co-presence, renewal, and the potential for new ways of sharing the land. 

This book took 10 years to write; during that time, I lived with it almost every day. But once a book released into the world, you often have very little sense of how it is received. This recognition is a tremendous honour that  allows me to see how, in my own very small way, I can contribute to more justice-oriented ways of living.  

This award also inspires me to continue doing transdisciplinary work that can often feel risky, as if you are stepping on disciplinary toes, or not fully versed enough to make strong claims. What the Canada Prize offers, I think, is a recognition that this sort of work matters and indeed, if we are going to find better ways of living in a world beset by interlocking crises, we need draw on a range of ways of knowing and being.