A Narrative of Montreal Geology (I)
Introduction
BY NATHAN FERGUSON AND MICHAEL KISHCHUK
The oldest histories of a place are written not in words, but in rocks. What do the rocks of Montreal tell to those who try to listen? How can we translate their stories, and share this lithic narrative? Co-written by an anthropologist and a geologist, this series includes an introduction and two complementary myths of Montreal. Part two and part three forthcoming.
Montreal skyline. Photo taken from Mont Royal Park by Maya Lamothe-Katrapani.
The oldest histories of a place are written not in words, but in rocks. What do the rocks of Montreal tell to those who try to listen? How can we translate their stories, and share this lithic narrative? Co-written by an anthropologist and a geologist, we present here an introduction and two complementary myths of Montreal. These are origin stories as told by strata and sediment. Drawing upon scientific understanding and a deep sense of place, this is an early effort in convergent poetry, inspired in equal parts by swarm ethnography, standpoint feminism, convergent evolution, and the prolific artistry of biodiversity. We hope you enjoy.
What kind of narrative for a narrative of Montreal geology?
Storytelling has always been a part of our approach to knowing and naming the rocks. In 1863, Sir William Logan, child of a young Montreal, published his masterpiece Geology of Canada. The text is a classic in its field — certainly the most authoritative report on Canadian geology of its time, it remains a central artefact in the history of North American natural sciences. The document achieves a couple of things. First of all, it is a broad and extensive review of the geological history and character of the Canadian landscape and underground. Second, it obliquely captures some of the fractious controversies of the professionalisation of geology in the North Atlantic over the later half of the 19th century. Thirdly, it was a government-funded report meeting practical and political objectives. And finally, it implicitly and explicitly works to solidify the biostratigraphic research program in geology, more or less taking that principle for granted, treating it as if it were a consensus.¹ In other words, we can see the text as part of the closure of a famous black box, the solidification of a new fact, and one of the ‘last words’ of a century-long battle in the sciences to determine the age of the world. At stake, then, is a new temporality — a new way of seeing and reading the past through the present face of the earth.
According to historian of science William Eagan, Logan’s Geology can (and should) be read as an example of narrative science — an argument for fact that claims its authority as a result of its ability to ‘make sense’ as a coherent story. Eagan argues for this reading on the basis of Logan’s choice to structure the Geology as a historical and sequential account of the rocks in Canada (as opposed, for example, to a catalogic structure by type of rock, or a geographical sequence by province). In this era of geology, where technological and infrastructural conditions were such that the rocks themselves were still subject to a great deal of ‘noise’ — unclear data, imperfect measurement, and inaccessible regions — Eagan suggests that Logan wielded this narrative structure to bring order to an unruly landscape and the unruly mass of quantitative knowledge it had so far produced. In this case, storytelling becomes a scientific technique, calling on the ordering powers of the human imagination to bring forth the ‘evident’ design and meaning of a given physical environment or natural situation. Drawing on a heterogenous and disparate body of information, Logan can nonetheless become a kind of conduit for the sense and story of the earth; the rocks can suddenly speak or write themselves through him, revealing their “temporal sequence through stratigraphic unravelling of physical order” (Eagan 154).
Through this spokesmanship for the natural world, Logan also operationalizes (and thus normalizes) a certain kind of taxonomy: in his story, names for rocks are carefully chosen, either to demonstrate allegiances to a specific way of working (a specific way of reading the rocks), or else to demonstrate alliances to specific working groups (a strategic positioning of Canadian geology as its own school in the contentious terrain between Britain and the United States).
As a scientific text with a political project, Logan’s geology and the names it seeks to harden are inextricably bound up with the colonial effort. Proposing new names for Logan means erasing past ones. There are other, older ways of knowing the rocks — better or worse is not important; they were their own, they were different, and diversity in naming is a precious thing. We want this text to amplify the voices of contemporary efforts to recover these other names, to read them against the colonial ones, to practice resurrection and cross-pollination. Read Johnathan Ferrier, read Albert and Murdena Marshall, read Kim TallBear. Read Liz Howard. Let the new names get caught in your throat, speak the other names with a clear voice. Whisper your own names into the earth, secretly, bury them deep, and carry them with care and in cherishing.
Names are important — in making this claim we are inspired by Ursula K. Le Guin's fantasy of names as underpinning the magic and logic of the world in A Wizard of Earthsea. Logan was a great storyteller (or at least a very well-positioned one): through story, he won his naming games, and he too has found his way into the taxonomy of the rocks. Almost as if he were assumed into the ranks of the saints and angels, Logan finds himself immortalised in a number of Loganite and Weloganite minerals present in the Canadian earth (not to mention the country’s tallest peak, Mount Logan in the austere and gorgeous Kluane chain). Imagine that — a reading so persuasive and so influential that the school which he inspired ended up discovering and reading him into the very text, the very ground that he spent his life working to decode!
A yellow weloganite crystal from the Francon Quarry in the St. Michel district of Montreal. Photo by Didier Descouens, CC BY-SA 3.0.
Pictured above is a yellow Weloganite crystal dug up from the Francon quarry in the Northeast of Montreal. Not all storytellers of Montreal geology have had the same luck as Logan, the same access, or the same leverage. The fullness of time has given Ann Phyllis Sabina Stenson her flowers, but the Francon quarry was not initially so yielding or generous to her. When she arrived in Montreal to work for the Geological Survey of Canada (a successor to Logan’s Geological Survey of Montreal), women were barred from working in or around the site, and Sabina had to pay quarry labourers informally to bring her samples from the earth. In 1966, Sabina’s x-ray powder diffraction tests turned up a mineral that was nowhere to be found in the existing databases. This was (Sr₃Na₂Zr(CO₃)₆ ·3H₂O) — a new rock, asking through her instruments for its own name at last. Sabina called the mineral Weloganite.
Fifteen years passed, and times had changed: digging was no longer only a man’s work, and Sabina by this point was namegiver of nine new crystals (Montroyalite, Hochelagite, and Franconite among them). In 1980, the geologist James Jambor identified (Na₄Zr₂TiO₄(CO₃)₄) in the Montreal earth — Sabinaite.
What kind of stories do the rocks want to tell? How can we try to be more responsible listeners? We have a few ideas. First of all, let us continue to invite more into the listening. The politics of access in science are as contentious and bitter as ever; let Ann Sabina’s story testify in favour of open source, of increased mobility, and of the careful and patient deconstruction of the walls, fences, and policies that keep us from getting closer to the land. Second, let us attune ourselves to the rhythm and style of the rocks’ speaking. If there are in fact narratives to unearth from the geology of Montreal, they will probably be slow stories, long stories, stories of transformation under pressure — stories of explosion punctuating the deeper stories of dormition. To those familiar with the older practices of poetry, the transformation of Logan into a conduit for the story of the rocks will not be very strange — here, Logan is serving as a poiētḗs, vessel and voice of the muses. In his case, the muses sing the story of the earth, the lógos of the gê.
In what follows, we have tried to follow these speculative principles of a more responsible storytelling. We have opted for multiplication of perspectives: the first text is a myth-essay by a geologist-poet; the second is an essay-poem by a geographer of myth. Both authors are interpreters of space, but we participate in different schools of interpretation. In other words, this is an early effort in convergent poetry, a style of storytelling inspired in equal parts by swarm ethnography, standpoint feminism, convergent evolution, and the prolific artistry of biodiversity. In this writing, we have tried to capture some of both the slowness and the drama of the rocks.
Notes
¹ Stratigraphic geology is concerned with the study of rock layers (strata), and their interpretation in terms of a general sequential time scale. Biostratigraphic geology is concerned with assigning ages to rock layers according to the fossil assemblages found within a given unit of rock.
