Understanding Settler Workers’ ‘Common Sense’ Responses to Indigenous Governance in the Western Canadian Wild Mushroom Industry

I met Rodney¹ and Jill outside the Nadleh Whut’en band office on a hot and sunny day in mid-June 2019. It was one year after the Shovel Creek wildfire tore through Nadleh Whut’en, Stellat’en, and Nak’azdli Whut’en Territories in Northern British Columbia, Canada. The fire burned over 92,000 hectares of boreal forest and led to large-scale evacuations (Sharp and Krebs 2019). I was joining Rodney and Jill as they made their daily rounds driving through their Territories as Indigenous ‘Guardians of the Land’. They were looking to meet the hundreds of settlers who had arrived on their Territories in the past few weeks to search among the burnt trees and ashes for morel mushrooms. Morels (Morchella sp.) are a strange looking but lucrative edible fungus which produce dramatic flushes of mushrooms the spring following large wildfires in the Canadian West. Transient commercial pickers follow these mushrooms across the region, visiting multiple burn sites to harvest morels and sell them into an international market where the majority are shipped to Europe and China. In the spring of 2019, Guardians like Rodney and Jill were surveying their Territories to sell Indigenous-led permits to these pickers to assert control over what can often be an unsustainable influx of industrial harvesters in an already-fragile post-fire ecosystem and community. As I hopped into the back of his truck on that sunny day in June, Rodney turned around, looked at me, my sunburn, and my notepad, and laughed: ‘So, you want to watch them swear at us, eh?’

While morels are harvested around the world, a few fire-adapted varieties of Morchella sp. fruit in mass quantities following large wildfires in the northwestern forests of North America (Larson et al. 2013). These post-wildfire flushes of morel mushrooms draw hundreds of commercial pickers, like those Rodney and Jill sought to find, into the burnt forests on Indigenous First Nation Territories in so-called British Columbia, Northwest Territories, Yukon, and Alberta every spring. Some other commercially harvested wild fungi, such as pine (matsutake) or chanterelle mushrooms, fruit in the same locations year after year, drawing mushroom pickers into First Nations Territories, annually, for decades. However, morel mushrooms are distinct in that they fruit en masse only the first year after wildfire—meaning that the morel industry moves from burn site to burn site every year, bringing the impacts of hundreds of (primarily settler) commercial harvesters to an area, with little time for local peoples to organize, govern, and respond to the industry.

Canadian provincial and federal governments provide little information regarding the ecological and social impacts of the transient morel mushroom harvest, and do not regulate the industry to prevent ecological or social harm. However, wildfire affected First Nations, such as Nadleh Whut’en, Stellat’en, and Nak’azdli Whut’en First Nations (NSN Whut’en), have a deep understanding of the disruption that can result from an influx of commercial morel harvesters to forests and nearby communities. Wildfires on NSN Whut’en Territories have brought not only long-lasting changes to the forest landscape and ecosystem, but floods of morel harvesters the following spring who leave behind hundreds of pounds of garbage along with human waste in key hunting and gathering areas.

In response to the combination of an often-disruptive influx of morel harvesters and lack of oversight on behalf of provincial and federal governments, First Nations have taken action to address the impacts of the mushroom industry. These Nations have circumvented the recognition-based regulatory processes (Coulthard 2014) involved in managing Crown land and resources by directly regulating the morel mushroom harvest through paid permitting schemes on their Territories. Permits to harvest morel mushrooms were first introduced independently by Tsilhqot’in and Secwepemc First Nations in 2018 following the 2017 Elephant Hill wildfire in British Columbia, who reported the schemes as useful to reduce the harmful impacts of the industry and, as a way of ‘roll[ing] out UNDRIP on the land’ (Wood 2021). The following season, other fire affected First Nations, including NSN Whut’en, followed with their own permitting schemes to assert jurisdiction over their Territories and reduce the negative impacts of the fire morel harvest on their lands and in their communities.

The introduction of fire morel permits on NSN Whut’en and other First Nation Territories in British Columbia fits into a broader argument among Indigenous leaders, scholars, and activists of the importance of ongoing Indigenous resistance and assertions of sovereignty over their lands and resources. Scholars have written extensively on Indigenous governance and environmental management, including regarding Indigenous management of wildfire regimes and post-wildfire landscapes in North America (Berkes and Davidson-Hunt 2006; Gottsefelt 1994; Kimmerer and Lake 2001; Lake and Christianson 2019). Given this context, many critical writers argue for Land Back, or, the return of land, resources, and jurisdiction to Indigenous peoples (Pasternak, King and Yesno 2019). There is significant evidence of the ecological, political, and social benefits of returning land to Indigenous peoples along with scholarship outlining the internal governance and decision-making within Indigenous Nations asserting sovereignty in what is now called Canada (Curran, Kung and Slett 2020, Todd 2014; Wilson and Inkster 2018). As a settler scholar, my goal here is to turn my attention towards the responses of settler resource workers who are increasingly finding themselves under Indigenous jurisdiction.

Those familiar with Canadian news and politics will undoubtedly recall several recent conflicts following Indigenous Nations’ refusals of various industry and development projects: the Wet’suwet’en’s refusal of the Coastal Gaslink Pipeline in British Columbia; Six Nations refusing housing developments on their land on #1492LandBackLane in Ontario; or the recent violent attacks from settler fishermen in response to Mi’kmaq fishermen exercising their treaty rights in Nova Scotia. From oil to housing development to lobster fishing, these conflicts following Indigenous assertions of sovereignty involved highly profitable or visible industries, which settlers claimed were central for livelihoods or the ‘national project’. Here, I interrogate settler workers’ negative responses to Indigenous jurisdiction in the morel mushroom industry, where it is more difficult to claim visibility and economic significance as the main reasons for their resistance.

By the time I had reached NSN Whut’en Territories, I had been searching for and harvesting morels for three years as part of a larger research project studying fire morel harvesting from 2017 to 2019. In this article, I draw upon ethnographic fieldwork conducted in the morel mushroom harvesting season on NSN Whut’en Territories in May and June 2019, where I conducted interviews with 56 participants, including 46 commercial harvesters, along with Indigenous Guardians of the Land, policy and land department employees, and other stakeholders. My previous experience with picking morel mushrooms in Alberta meant I was taken seriously by some of the more professional pickers. Claire, my field assistant, a white woman from Wales with an ageing camper van and plans for two years of ‘adventure’ exploring Canada, allowed us to fit in with some of the more exuberant, young harvesters we met. What was more important in gaining the trust and ‘insider’ status for much of the findings in this article, however, was my background as a white working-class settler.

As I will outline below, my position as a settler allowed me to access the insider experience of buyers’ tents, and to listen, engage, and challenge the ways ‘settler common sense’ (Rifkin 2013) was produced and enacted in these spaces. I aim to use my status as a settler researcher to understand and critique settler workers’ responses to Indigenous sovereignty and as a means of supporting Indigenous Nations in developing strategies to overcome settler resistance to their policies. As such, Nadleh Whut’en and Stellat’en provided me with additional questions to include in my interviews with commercial harvesters on their Territories, the answers to which I shared in a report in September 2019; it was through preparing this report that the blueprint for this article emerged. While my research relationship is with Nadleh Whut’en and Stellat’en First Nations, I use the term ‘NSN Whut’en’, which includes Nak’azdli Whut’en First Nation, throughout this article. ‘NSN Whut’en’ most accurately reflects Nak’azdli Whut’en’s involvement in the early stages of planning the permitting program and their inclusion on official documents regarding the permitting program, signage on the Territories, and permits issued to harvesters in 2019.

In the section that follows, I outline the effects of the commercial morel harvest on Indigenous lands and communities, and details of the permitting schemes aimed to address these impacts. Then, I take you to the mushroom trail, where settler-dominated buyers’ stations and camps create spaces for affective settler common sense (Rifkin 2013; 2014) to be produced and performed. Finally, I will bring you along to three of these buying camps, to demonstrate how settlers respond to Indigenous permits differently depending on the affective atmospheres of their camps as well as their positions within the capitalist market and to the settler state. Through visiting these camps, we can understand where the already-existing fissures in settlers’ common-sense claims to land and resources exist, as well as the means to leverage them to the benefit of Indigenous Nations, forest ecologies, and the most precarious of workers, too.

Despite that there are very few Nation-to-Nation treaties between Indigenous Nations and the Canadian state in British Columbia and treaty processes have been largely unsuccessful (Alfred 2001), around 95% of land in the province is deemed ‘Crown land’. A result of the racist doctrine of discovery, these unceded Indigenous lands are claimed to be held by the provincial and federal governments for industrial use in the ‘public good’. Activities on these lands in the public good include the timber industry, as well as by Canadian citizens for recreational and subsistence uses, such as camping, fishing, hunting, and foraging. While some hunting and gathering activities are regulated through permits or licenses on Crown land by federal and provincial governments, such as fishing or collecting protected plant species, wild mushrooms are for the most part excluded from these categories. As such, the Canadian wild mushroom industry remains largely unregulated by federal and provincial governments. While mushroom products being sold to consumers are regulated for food safety, the quantity of mushrooms harvested, the value of the domestic and international sales, the number of workers involved in the harvest, and the social and ecological impacts of the harvest are difficult to determine. However, while these impacts are not measured by provincial and federal governments, which instead offer vague ‘how to harvest’ instructions on their websites with little more information about the industry, First Nations governments have increasingly been vocal about the negative social and ecological outcomes of the morel mushroom harvest—as well as the opportunities for Indigenous governance and industrial leadership.

Nadleh Whut’en, Stellat’en, and Nak’azdli Whut’en are three neighbouring First Nations located in what is now commonly referred to as north-central British Columbia. The First Nations are home to Dakelh (Carrier) peoples and cover Territories around the Nechako River and Fraser Lake. Following the 2018 wildfire season which affected all three Nations’ Territories, Nadleh Whut’en, Stellat’en and Nak’azdli Whut’en collaborated on a joint effort to regulate and manage the inevitable influx of morel mushroom pickers which would come the following spring.

NSN Whut’en First Nations had various motivations for introducing morel mushroom permits in the 2019 season. As one Guardian of the Land told me as I rode in the back of their pick-up truck, plans for the influx of mushroom pickers began almost as soon as the fire was extinguished in the autumn of 2018. The motivations for introducing a permitting scheme included practical reasons to address the issues emerging from the morel harvest, for example, as a means of reducing the amount of litter and human waste left behind by the mushroom camps, and for security purposes in order to monitor the names and license plates of buyers and pickers in the Territories.

More significantly, the permitting schemes function to help NSN Whut’en assert their jurisdiction of non-timber forest product management on their traditional Territories. Mitch, a consultant who works with First Nations governments to develop their morel permitting schemes, described that while a small number of Indigenous people in fire-affected areas participate in the morel mushroom hunt (a greater proportion participate in the harvest of other wild mushrooms), Indigenous Nations want to be involved in the morel industry beyond as a source of cheap, flexible labour. Directly asserting jurisdiction over their traditional Territories, including on so-called Crown land, allows Indigenous Nations to regain control over the management of the ecological systems on their land and gain economic power. As Shiri Pasternak (2020, p. 303) describes,

Permits for morel mushroom harvesting fit into long-term strategies for self-determination through increased sovereignty and responsibility over the First Nations’ traditional Territories. As one member of NSN Whut’en staff put it, directly managing and regulating resources on their traditional Territories helps not only in the outcomes of the morel harvest, but also in the First Nations’ positions in government-to-government negotiations with provincial and federal governments.

The morel mushroom permit system was introduced a few weeks after the first commercial harvesters arrived on NSN Whut’en Territories in June 2019. All harvesters and mushroom buyers on NSN Whut’en Territories were asked to purchase a permit, which cost $20 CAD for pickers and $500 for buyers, along with registering their names and license plates with the Nations, and a signed agreement for behavioural expectations. The permits were distributed by Guardians of the Land, local members of NSN Whut’en Nations like Rodney and Jill who visited each mushroom buyer’s camp every day throughout the harvesting season to meet pickers and buyers and sell permits. Teams of Guardians nearly always included an Elder, as well as one or two additional younger First Nations members. Guardians were also trained in conflict resolution by the permitting consultants in order to reduce instances of violence and increase uptake by pickers.

In exchange for participation in the permitting scheme, NSN Whut’en First Nations offered basic services to mushroom camps. To reduce the litter and human waste left behind from mushroom pickers and buyers’ camps, the First Nations introduced large garbage bins at each buyer camp along with outhouses which were serviced by contractors hired by NSN Whut’en. Further, the First Nations included maps of the Territories, contact information, information about UNDRIP and Indigenous jurisdiction, and search and rescue assistance for pickers harvesting on their lands. While permit sales brought in some revenue, representatives from both Nadleh Whut’en and Stellat’en confirmed that the costs of implementing the scheme, including waste collection, outhouses, staffing, consultant fees to set up the regulation, and fuel to travel around their Territories to monitor buying camps, vastly exceeded the revenues received through permit sales. However, the ecological and social benefits of permitting to the surrounding forest and local community, as well as the ability to assert jurisdiction over the non-timber forest products on their Territories, were deemed worth the scheme’s cost.

While NSN Whut’en were not the original First Nation governments to introduce permits for harvesting morel mushrooms, the 2019 harvesting season was the first time many of the commercial pickers had been asked by Indigenous nations to pay to harvest the fungi. Many harvesters were, to put it lightly, not happy with this intervention in their previously unregulated industry. Pickers and buyers were angry and worried and the prospect of needing to pay to pick morel mushrooms and claimed the First Nations were trying to ‘get their fingers in the pot’. Certainly, the introduction of morel permitting was experienced as an affront to many harvesters’ livelihoods, who were often living on very little income and relied on the cash-based industry to survive. However, more significantly, their resistance to the permitting schemes was born from the affront to what Aileen Moreton-Robinson (2015, p. 81) refers to as ‘[white] possessive logic’ of so-called Crown lands, where ‘white ownership of the nation [is] part of common-sense knowledge, decision making, and socially produced conventions’. In other words, harvesters’ resistance was borne from their ‘settled expectations’ (Mackey 2014), or, their ‘settler common sense’ (Rifkin 2013; 2014).

Settler common sense extends upon understandings settler colonialism as a structure (Wolfe 1999; 2006) and logic, where the assertion of Indigenous jurisdiction over what settlers refer to as Crown land challenges their understandings of Canadian history, law, and land tenure. Instead, settler common sense refers to the affective dimensions of settler life, and ‘asking how emotions, sensations, psychic life take part in the (ongoing) process of realizing the exertion of non-Native authority over Indigenous peoples, governance, and territoriality in ways that saturate quotidian life but are not necessarily present to settlers as a set of political propositions or as a specifically imperial project of dispossession’ (Rifkin 2013, p. 323). In this article, I aim to extend upon Mark Rifkin’s work within American literary studies and understand how ‘actually existing’ settler common sense manifests and falters among settler resource workers in the Canadian morel industry. Through this work, I hope to demonstrate how settler workers’ common-sense and taken-for-granted claims to mushrooms and land are key to understanding and addressing settler antagonism towards Indigenous authority.

The wild mushroom industry is easily overlooked as part of extractive colonialcapitalist processes, perhaps because of the practice of wild mushroom gathering among Indigenous peoples²; the role of mushroom harvesting as a hobby, sustenance, or other-than-capitalist practice (Barron 2015, Fine 2003); or because work exploring the commercial harvesting of one species, such as matsutake mushrooms (Tsing 2015), can be misinterpreted by readers to represent the political economies of all mushrooms. Of course, fungi can also be useful tools to understand colonial histories (Tsing 2012) and to navigate so-called ‘blasted’ landscapes (Tsing 2014). Thus, precisely because morels are often overlooked in the settler-colonial lens and viewed as ‘sustainable’, the morel mushroom harvest is an excellent means of exploring the quiet, unspoken ways settler common sense is produced through everyday worker experiences and relationships.

Harvesters rely on the policies, logics and structural conditions which allow settler industries to extract mushrooms on unceded Indigenous lands, of course. However, much of the work to reproduce common-sensical claims to land and extraction is affective: most morel mushroom pickers do not see themselves as participating in dispossession, or even accumulation. In fact, many are participating as a way of ‘being sustainable’, ‘living off grid’, or ‘getting away from society’ and ‘the rat race’. As Lauren Berlant (2007, p. 277) describes it, [harvesters] ‘…do not know fully what they are doing, flinging themselves at life in order to be in proximity to something that is strangely both enigmatic and simplifying’. Along the mushroom trail, that something is the promise of settler access to ‘off-grid’ adventure, easy cash, and freedom from state interference on Indigenous lands. Thus, in the day-to-day experience of the commercial morel harvest, settler colonial and white possessive logics are dissipated into taken-for-granted structures of feeling which allow harvesters to reproduce themselves, the industry, and settler claims to land (Moreton-Robinson 2015).

Claire and I were afraid we’d picked a bad burn when we arrived on NSN Whut’en Territories in late May. We drove along logging roads for hours and saw hundreds of hectares of burnt forest, but no mushrooms, and no mushroom pickers. That is, until we drove by an RV with a tent set up along the forest service road, with a middle-aged settler man sitting in a lawn chair in the sun. We pulled up to the tent, and the man yelled, ‘You here for mushrooms?!’.

This buying station was run by Wayne and his wife Sharon, both middle-aged settlers who had participated in the mushroom industry for several years, though mostly picking and buying pine and chanterelles. They were contracted with the largest of the mushroom companies and were the first buyers set up on NSN Whut’en Territories. The company boss determined their spot. As Wayne put it,

And, as he predicted, the tents came.

Wayne’s camp, perhaps because of the obvious location and early set-up, attracted a number of commercial pickers who were not very experienced harvesting morel mushrooms. While more seasoned pickers would stop by to visit or sell their early-season harvests, the harvesters who spent the most time with Wayne were young adult men. Most were in their 20s or early 30s and had less than three years’ experience picking morels. When I talked to these young harvesters, the majority of whom were from Québec, British Columbia, and Alberta, they discussed how they came to pick morels for the adventure, and to make some easy money between other temporary and precarious gig jobs, like driving Uber, working in restaurants, tree planting, or panning for gold. These young, inexperienced pickers were on the mushroom trail for socializing and experience as much as they were for money, as Matt, a twenty-something man from British Columbia told me:

As Philippe and Anne-Marie, young pickers from Québec, explained, going to spend time in nature in British Columbia was a common activity among young people from their province. These young people use a trip to British Columbia as a coming-of-age adventure, where they can assert their independence and ‘make it on their own’ while doing piece work, camping, and exploring the bush. Their rights to work, leisure, and adventure on Crown land is taken as a common-sense given, and no pickers questioned their inherent rights to harvest morels on NSN Whut’en Territories. Thus, for these pickers, spending time in a mushroom camp was a good way of providing an opportunity to meet new people, as well as provide some safety from the rough aspects of the wilderness on NSN Whut’en Territories which worried many of the newer campers (bear encounters were a particularly common fear). As such, Wayne’s camp, especially in the early weeks of the season when the mushrooms were still few and far between, was full of harvesters sitting around the campfire, drinking beer, smoking weed, and talking.

The conversations around the campfire in the first few weeks of the season are excitable and in anticipation of the morel season. Wayne and the harvesters would talk about how many mushrooms they were about to pick, the various species of morel mushrooms that were on their way, the money they would make, and the things they’d do with the fast, easy cash. Pickers, many of whom in individual conversations and interviews often disclosed feeling apprehensive about the prospect of ‘roughing it’, performed affective labour (Hardt 1999, Singh 2013) through these conversations, to build an excited collective atmosphere which helped them ward off their feelings of uncertainty and wariness of the risks associated with the morel harvest. Having Wayne and his family nearby at their buying station in case they needed something to drink, some advice, or help with their vehicles, also helped these pickers ward off their anxieties and feel secure that their experiences of ‘roughing it in the bush’ would have their limits.

It took us a while to find Johannes’ station, which was, even in morel-harvesting terms, off the beaten path. This buying station was not necessarily meant to attract the masses nor new pickers who would be more likely to bring low-quality or too-small morels to the tent. Instead, Johannes, a sixty-something year old German settler who had immigrated several decades prior, ran a camp which was populated by long-time, professional morel harvesters. Johannes himself was a long-time buyer with over twenty years’ experience in the industry, and, unlike Wayne, was quiet and, at least at first, less willing to discuss his feelings about the industry with Claire and me. Nevertheless, he welcomed us around the campfire at his camp, and encouraged us to sell our best morels to him when we stopped by nearly every evening.

Unlike the young, precarious harvesters at Wayne’s camp, experienced, middle-aged pickers like Doug, Hamish, and Paul, while recognizing that the mushroom industry was unfair in its structure, do not see the ruthlessness of the capitalist industry as a barrier to their success. These pickers are much more prepared for the conditions of mushroom picking, and are more profitable in their harvesting, regularly earning at least few hundred dollars a day. As a result, the services and care provided by NSN Whut’en Guardians are, while nice to use, seen as unnecessary for those who were ‘serious’ about picking mushrooms. Claire and I enjoyed spending time at this camp, because the atmosphere around the (very small and contained) campfire was much more relaxed, and the pickers were much more willing to share their knowledge about morel harvesting with us. Unlike the young pickers at Wayne’s camp, experienced harvesters do not perform the same affective labour to produce an energetic atmosphere of anticipation around the mushroom hunt; these harvesters know they are going to find morels and make money. For these pickers, more than even the young adventurous harvesters at Wayne’s camp, the right to freely harvest morels on NSN Whut’en lands is treated as an unspoken, obvious fact. They quietly and professionally get on with their work, as through their rights to harvest were the same as their rights to clock in at any other workplace. For these harvesters, their common-sense claims to land were not associated with adventure and coming-of-age, but rather with their rights to extraction, commerce, and complete freedom of movement on Indigenous Territories.

This quiet assuredness about their inherent right to harvest morels means that, generally speaking, experienced long-time pickers are more annoyed and resistant to the idea of Indigenous permitting than younger and less experienced ones. As Max, an experienced but younger buyer down the road described the folks that spent time at Johannes’ camp,

Despite the subdued nature of Johannes’ camp and a few exceptions who purchased permits straight away because ‘it was only twenty bucks’, this group of harvesters was generally the most difficult for permitters to work with. While they are not as openly violent and threatening in their conversations about the permits, nor as confrontational as some of the more heated pickers from Wayne’s camp, many repeatedly refused to purchase permits. Perhaps due to their common-sense claims to transience on Indigenous lands, some pickers moved from camp to camp to avoid crossing paths with the Guardians, while others simply walked away from the permitters when they are approached. When their common sense was challenged, these pickers drew upon many of the same myths as those from Wayne’s camp: instinctively referring to ‘Crown land’ and claiming that the RCMP has ultimate authority on NSN Whut’en Territories. As Eva Mackey (2014, p. 246) outlines, calling upon settler ‘jurisdictional imaginarie’ to reinforce common-sense claims to land is not unique to the mushroom trail. However, unlike at Wayne’s camp where the atmosphere was one in anticipation of an altercation with the Guardians of the Land, once their claims about Crown land were dismissed by the permitters many experienced pickers instead had the instinct to move, shift, and evade regulation.

Many of the other buyers’ tents we visited throughout the harvesting season were similar to Wayne’s and Johannes’: combinations of young pickers and old-timers, with various atmospheres of entitlement, excitement, and uneven conflict when asked to purchase harvesting permits. When we came across Ronnie’s station, however, the atmosphere was immediately distinct, as the buying camp was run by an Indigenous man from Nak’azdli Whut’en Nation.

For the most part, Indigenous peoples are relied upon largely in passing for their labour in the morel industry and are not always welcomed in camp communities, like when locals came to sell their small amounts of morels harvested to be dismissed by buyers like Wayne and Johannes. Ronnie’s buying station upended this dynamic. Ronnie has been part of the mushroom-buying industry for decades and was contracted with one of the largest mushroom companies. His approach to attracting commercial pickers was very similar to other buyers, however, when working with local pickers, particularly Indigenous locals, on the Territories on which he bought mushrooms, Ronnie takes a different approach than many buyers. Most buyers, like Wayne and Johannes, usually offer instructions only at buying table, and do not engage with Indigenous local peoples beyond purchasing their mushrooms and sending them on their way. Instead, Ronnie told me that he regularly arrives early in the season and spends a few days teaching locals, including Indigenous pickers, about how to find and harvest morels:

As a result of this early engagement with locals, Ronnie’s tent was distinct in the early days of the season in that many people who spent time there were Indigenous pickers from the local area. As a result, Ronnie’s camp was gossiped about extensively throughout all of the settler camps, and treated as a threat to buyers’ incomes and, sometimes, harvesters’ safety. For example, when Ronnie first opened on NSN Whut’en Territories in 2019, settler buyers (and the pickers who associated with these buyers’ camps) spread rumours about him improperly weighing scales, selling illegal drugs, and hosting ‘dangerous’, ‘dishonourable’ people in his camp. While any mushroom camp draws a heterogeneous group of characters, when Claire and I visited Ronnie’s camp, we quickly understood ‘dangerous’ to be the other buyers’ shorthand for ‘not one of us.’ The folks spending time at Ronnie’s camp were outsiders to the rest of the camp communities we visited. they included a mixture of Indigenous and settler locals who were not part of the mushroom-picking circuit and thus not taken seriously among most commercial pickers; extremely introverted ‘lone wolves’; and a few long-time pickers who were, for one reason or another, out of favour with the rest of the community.

However, despite the rumors, Ronnie was among the most successful buyers across all of NSN Whut’en Territories. Some evenings, he bought twice as many mushrooms as the other buyers we met, with hundreds of baskets filled to the brim with fresh morels piled underneath his tents. Ronnie believed that other buyers ‘talked shit’ about him because he outcompeted them in the mushroom trade. Settlers feeling threatened by Indigenous people successfully participating in settler-dominated resource industries is not a novel occurrence. For example, during the settlement of the prairies, Indigenous peoples who were successful at agriculture, and therefore threatening for settler farmers, were excluded from the market through government policy (Carter 1993). Whether farmers appealing to the government or mushroom buyers spreading rumours, settler workers often close ranks when threatened by Indigenous economic power. It makes sense, then, that threatened, indignant structures of feeling and related logics are extended to Indigenous nations issuing permits as well, where harvesters claim that NSN Whut’en charge fees for permits in order to ‘make a buck’:

However, unlike the antagonistic atmospheres at buying stations like Wayne’s and Johannes’, where atmospheres of settler common sense could emerge in the form of inherent claims to adventure, commerce, and transient freedom on Indigenous lands, Ronnie’s station disallowed these structures of feeling from emerging in the same way. Once seated at the table with Ronnie and other local and non-local Indigenous pickers, settler harvesters were confronted with their understandings of land tenure and extraction regularly and directly. Ronnie, who despite coming from Nak’azdli Whut’en was charged a permit due to his employment with a Vancouver-based mushroom company, was open about his disdain for white pickers who resisted paying for permits to harvest mushrooms. At Johannes’ camp, some settler professional pickers repeated claims about Crown land to justify their resistance to Indigenous jurisdiction, and, because there were no (openly-identifying³) Indigenous pickers or buyers regularly spending time at the camp, interventions opposing these ideas were rare around the campfire. However, at Ronnie’s camp, because of Ronnie’s outgoing nature, as well as the heterogeneous mix of settler and Indigenous commercial participants and locals, harvesters’ ‘settled expectations’ (Mackey 2014, p. 242) of access to Crown land were actively discussed, disputed, and debated around Ronnie’s tent. And, for Indigenous pickers and buyers like Ronnie, it was personal:

Unlike at Wayne’s and Johannes’ tents, where settler colonialism was considered a past event by pickers, at Ronnie’s tent, the mushroom industry was explicitly related to histories of reservations, dispossession, and oppression:

However, while at camps like Wayne’s, which had affective atmospheres which encouraged heated, angry responses to discussions of these histories and issues, most interactions about permits, Indigenous Territories and histories were discussed with a laugh at Ronnie’s camp. The quiet, evasive instincts of pickers like those at Johannes’ camps were also challenged in this mixed atmosphere: put simply, it is difficult to walk away from a permitter from NSN Whut’en in front of the Nak’azdli man who pays you for your mushrooms. Taken together, while all morel camps are full of sometimes strange, ‘outsider’ characters, the dynamics at Ronnie’s buying station suggests that camps run and frequented by Indigenous people do not develop atmospheres of settler common sense in the same ways as camps dominated by settler pickers. Settler responses to the challenge of Indigenous permits—the instincts to fight and the instincts to evade—are diminished when Indigenous economic power is found both inside and outside the mushroom buying station.

Ronnie was happy to continue working with the Vancouver-based mushroom company in future seasons. However, tracing the effects of an Indigenous-run buying station in challenging the common-sense atmospheres and behaviours among settlers in the morel industry provides insight into the possibilities which would emerge from Indigenous involvement on a larger scale. Some Guardians and locals throughout the season mentioned early plans for greater involvement in the morel harvest, where First Nations would not only regulate, but participate in the industry as buyers. This, they argued, would allow First Nations to earn additional income for the band, as well as offer higher prices for mushrooms to help out the most precarious of harvesters.

As the season wore on, the majority of pickers and buyers purchased NSN Whut’en morel harvesting permits from Guardians of the Land like Rodney and Jill. Pickers also benefitted from the resources made available to them through the First Nations’ scheme, including the garbage and washroom facilities and maps of the Territories, along with information about Crown land and UNDRIP included in their permit packages and the opportunity to chat with locals. The practical interventions included in NSN Whut’en’s permitting scheme not only helped reduce the ecological and social impacts of the morel harvest in 2019, where the First Nations managed to divert hundreds of pounds of litter and human waste and avoid violent conflicts. The services and strategies NSN Whut’en utilized expanded the already-existing fissures within settler worker’s attachments to their ‘common sense’: their experiences as precarious workers in a capitalist, extractive industry, and their experiences of feeling simultaneously left behind and surveilled by the Canadian state. As Moreton-Robinson (2015, p. 81) writes,

The fissures in settler harvesters’ common sense at Wayne, Johannes’ and Ronnie’s camps emerged from realizing that they were, in fact, not able to access all that they expected from the common-sensical and white-possessive promises of Crown land and settler society. It is not Indigenous nations’ responsibility to resolve the fissures which settler workers experience. However, I have demonstrated that ‘actually existing’ settler common sense relates to both antagonism towards and adherence to Indigenous jurisdiction; identifying and leveraging fissures in this common sense opens possibilities for broader, more long-lasting transformations across the mushroom industry and beyond.

As Indigenous Nations increasingly assert their rights to control resources on their Territories in what is now commonly referred to as Canada, settlers will inevitably fall under this jurisdiction. Indigenous-settler alliances and solidarity involve questioning claims to place and belonging (Grossman 2017) and unmaking of settler assumptions, pedagogies, and common sense (Hiller 2016), even among ‘environmentalists’ (Curnow and Helferty 2018). Understanding what motivates settler workers’ reactionary responses to Indigenous jurisdiction allows us to identify where possibilities lie to change course, both within industries like morel harvesting, and as part of a broader objective to return land to Indigenous peoples. Precarious workers’ struggles have already been identified as key in developing working-class environmentalism in a transnational context (Barca 2014). Beyond this, for workers in resource industries like the morel harvest, discontents with precarious conditions can be addressed not only through labour activism and ‘just transitions’ but, perhaps surprisingly for the workers themselves, through assertions of Indigenous jurisdiction. Visits to Wayne, Johannes, and Ronnie’s mushroom-buying camps show us pathways for settler workers to accept regulation by Indigenous nations, particularly when Indigenous power is present both around and within the industry. These examples of pragmatic acceptance demonstrate the ways Indigenous power is entangled with environmental and resource worker justice, underlining the importance that Indigenous nations are supported in their work to assert jurisdiction and leverage the already-existing fissures in settler common sense and resistance to Indigenous authority on their lands and Territories.

CARLEY-JANE STANTON is a white settler from Treaty 6 Territory and a DPhil. Candidate in the School of Geography and the Environment at the University of Oxford. Their postgraduate research explores the political ecology of settler colonialism and post-disaster opportunity in Western Canada.