ABSTRACT

This chapter explores how children’s relations within the particular mountain place might be reconceptualized and rematerialized as refusals of the separation of children from meaning making about events such as those described in the opening excerpt, events that entangle settler colonial governance and anthropogenic extractivism. It also explores possibilities for thinking through children’s relations to the place in ways that might act not only as a refusal of their separation from colonial possession and dispossession on Burnaby Mountain, but also as a refusal to dwell only in the extractive relations. The chapter examines the concept of geotheorizing to work by engaging with orientations toward children’s mountain encounters. As the opening retrospective narrative illustrates, settler colonialism and its intimate entanglements with capitalist extraction have come together as active presences on Burnaby Mountain, a forested mountain on the west coast of Canada. Burnaby Mountain is located in a suburban city in Greater Vancouver.