Author: Chris Chang-Yen Phillips

Paleontology and Wildness as Heritage Performance in the Burgess Shale

| Chris Chang-Yen Phillips
Hikers walking up to the Mount Stephen Trilobite Beds in Yoho (illustration by Chris Chang-Yen Phillips).

This is an academic presentation about my masters research, delivered at the AMPS Prague – Heritages conference on June 29, 2023.

High in the Rocky Mountains of Canada’s Yoho National Park, the Burgess Shale fossil beds demonstrate dilemmas presented by fossil-rich World Heritage Sites. Designated in 1980, the Burgess Shale bears remains of 500-million-year-old marine organisms that science writer Stephen Jay Gould (1990) once called “the world’s most important animal fossils.” While it was later absorbed into the Canadian Rocky Mountain Parks site, the designation continues to reverberate. It increased the importance of the Burgess Shale’s “discovery” in 1909 as part of regional identity and mythmaking in the Rocky Mountain parks. It also increased fossil theft and led to tighter Parks Canada access restrictions.

If, as Phillip and April Vannini (2021) argue, wildness is not an innate property but “an emergent outcome of activity, of performance, of inhabitation,” then wildness here seems to be a performance of scientific research, and tightly regulated interpretive hikes.

In this paper I will show that like other “natural” heritage sites in Canada (such as Joggins and Dinosaur Provincial Park), the Burgess Shale’s heritage value equally springs from past research conducted at the site, and ongoing reverence by those who hike up to seek physical contact with the deep past. As Patrick Boylan (2008) has noted, few sites have been designated for their geological importance alone, and fewer still for the richness of their fossils. I will argue that World Heritage designation can expose the relative power of interest groups making claims on fossil sites.

This presentation includes elements from my thesis research, being conducted at the University of Alberta under the supervision of Dr. Liza Piper.

Making Space for Fossils

| Chris Chang-Yen Phillips
An interpretive hike guide from the Burgess Shale Geoscience Foundation at the Mount Stephen Trilobite Beds in 2016.

I’m in the middle of a master’s degree program at the University of Alberta, pursuing an MA in history focused on paleontology and power in Yoho National Park. My supervisor, Liza Piper, has taken me under their wing on a larger SSHRC project investigating environmental history in the Rockies.

This episode of my history podcast Let’s Find Out presents a chunk of my research project so far. In this episode, we travel to the Burgess Shale: a set of incredible fossil beds in Yoho National Park, preserving 500-million-year-old soft-bodied sea creatures. Today, it is part of a huge World Heritage Site: it has expanded to encompass all of Yoho National Park here in BC, Jasper and Banff, Kootenay, and three BC provincial parks. But back in 1980, the Burgess Shale sites at the Mount Stephen Trilobite Beds and the Walcott Quarry became the first little nucleus of that World Heritage site.

We find out how these fossil sites ended up on that list, what kind of information and evidence and argument were used to lobby for a spot, how it changed this space, and what it all means.

My work has been supported by a graduate research fellowship from Dr. Piper, a Dianne Samson Graduate Travel Award, a Walter H Johns Graduate Fellowship, a Canada Graduate Scholarship – Master’s from SSHRC, and a Eleanor Luxton Historical Foundation Graduate Fellowship.

I almost forgot we won

| Chris Chang-Yen Phillips

The other day a friend asked me (delicately), “What’s it like having a government that hates you?”

I laughed, partly because he assumed I agreed with the premise of his question, and partly because I do.

It’s crushing. It’s been hard since Alberta’s provincial election this year, I won’t lie. Your friends and family and neighbours and fellow shoppers elect a new government, and one of its first priorities is outing queer kids to homophobic parents. Next on the list is setting up a snitch line for reporting un-Albertan activities. And of course, cutting the only actual mechanism everyday Albertans have ever had to see a fraction of the true cost of burning carbon.

What does a queer journalist who loves the planet do?

You think about moving. You think about where you could even move in 2019 that’s more sane than this place. You think about all the people you know who want to give up. And you think of the people you depend on you, and your light.

You watch the new Dark Crystal series, and try to remember why people fight in the darkest night. You remember how much people need stories that show them how to hope.

It’s reminded me why we’ve been making a season of Let’s Find Out all about the ways humans and nature have shaped each other in our city. Trying to show that our relationships with the land are complicated, that we don’t have to be antagonists. We are creatures who have built massive hydro dams to dilute our pollution downstream, who have turned grizzly bear country into canola and wheat and buried the memories. But we are also experimenters bringing apricots to our city streets all the way from Harbin, and we are creatures who feel kinship with a new country because we find the same high bush cranberries we had back home.

Last weekend my friends and I went tree planting in Fulton Ravine. I got there a bit late and I wasn’t super speedy with my shovel, so I think I only planted four of our little white spruce saplings. But it felt good, and right. It felt like refusing to let the void win.

Today I got on my bike to head home, and I remembered that my husband had texted to encourage me to breathe in some of this nice fall air while it’s here. So I took the long way home. I went a few blocks out of my way and started down the 83 Ave bike lane. And when I stopped at a red light, I looked back and saw a friendly neighbour behind me, Conrad Nobert.

We talked about our travels, and about Greta Thunberg. And then Conrad said hey, we’re biking down the bike lane you wrote about. You helped make this happen.

And I’d almost forgotten. Back in 2012, when Isaak Kornelsen was biking down Whyte Ave, and was killed by a truck driver. It hit so many of us around here hard. I never even met him. But he was young and mattered and it was so unnecessary. The cruelest part of it all was overhearing a bus driver talking about it right afterward with a passenger. He said, “Why didn’t he just ride down 83rd Ave? I feel bad for the driver.”

I was furious when I heard that. I went home and wrote a blog post about all the reasons Whyte Ave was the best of some terrible choices. Every other street north and south for six or seven blocks was full of one-ways, or dead-ends, or even more dangerous traffic. The part I almost forgot was that we won.

Conrad and others pushed hard to make our roads safer. After that, we started to get real protected bike lanes in this city. Conrad said it felt great being able to take his teenage kids down this one, and see little kids using it all the time too.

What does it feel like to live in Alberta these days? It feels dark a lot, it’s true. But sometimes it also feels like maybe, just maybe, we’re lighting it up again too.