Ideas - The 2024 Killam Prize Honours Canada’s University Researchers (Part 1)

Episode Date: November 29, 2024

One of the most important roles of a university is to advance research that benefits society. Meet two winners of the prestigious 2024 Killam Prize. Humanities winner Janine Marchessault's work looks at the crisis in Canada’s film and video archives, and Social Sciences winner Tania Li examines how the good intentions of international development affects the rural people of Indonesia. (Pt 1 of 2)

Hey there, I'm Kathleen Goltar and I have a confession to make. I am a true crime fanatic. I devour books and films and most of all true crime podcasts. But sometimes I just want to know more. I want to go deeper. And that's where my podcast Crime Story comes in. Every week I go behind the scenes with the creators of the best in true crime. I chat with the host of Scamanda, Teacher's Pet, Bone Valley, the list goes on. For the insider scoop, find Crime Story in your podcast app. This is a CBC Podcast. Welcome to Ideas. I'm Nala Ayed. I'm Nala Ayed.

Discovery. Insight. Innovation. At its best, this is what university research can offer society. The Killam Prize aims to identify and honour the best of those scholars in Canada.

The $100,000 annual awards are funded by the Killam Trust. The Killam Program is administered by Canada's National Research Council. Five winners are chosen, university researchers whose work is at once quite specific and broadly meaningful. As Bernie Miller, Managing Trustee of the Killam Trust, noted, the work matters. We're again experiencing dramatic change in global disruption and the continuity of our confidence in the power of research to solve the most daunting challenges and open up new vistas for thriving and for well-being persists. It's time to honour the 2024 Killam Prize winners, exceptional researchers, knowledge disseminators and trailblazers in their fields.

I was the emcee for the 2024 Killam Ceremony, held in Toronto in early November. It was an opportunity to meet this impressive cohort of university researchers, and it made me want to hear more about their work. So in this episode, two of the laureates join me to talk about their research in the fields of social science and the humanities. And coming soon, a second set of conversations with winners in natural science, engineering, and health science. Here's how I introduced my first guest at the 2024 Killam Prize ceremony. Janine Marchiseau is the winner of the 2024 Killam Prize in Humanities. She's of York University.

Dr. Marchiseau is one of Canada's leading media and art activism scholars. She's a prolific and dynamic researcher, curator, collaborator, and teacher, and principal investigator for an initiative called Archive Counter Archive. The project addresses the crisis facing Canada's moving image heritage, focusing special attention on groups whose audio-visual materials are most at risk of disappearing. Congratulations, Dr. Jane, merci beaucoup. So many of us imagine archives kind of as documents and books. Can you explain what kind of materials we'll be talking about here? different kinds of film, so 35 millimeter film, right down to super 8 film, small formats.

And we're talking about video. And video also comes in many different formats. So high 8, regular 8, you know, three quarter inch, one inch. So those are the media materials we're talking about. And then there's digital media, which is a whole other thing that we're talking about, our phones and our computers. What era were you kind of focusing on? Really post-war. So post-1945. And those are the materials that are really at risk. And they're the ones that over the next 10 years, 20 years at most,

will disappear. Why? Why are they going to disappear? They're going to disappear because they need specific kinds of care, and archives don't collect all the film and video that's been produced. all the film and video that's been produced. So archives, mainstream archives, have a particular mandate. And so they will collect materials belonging to famous people. They'll collect, so in terms of film, they'll collect feature-length films, but they won't collect the shorter films. And video is a hodgepodge of home movies, of short documentaries, of animations, of experimental films.

So there's only certain kinds of materials that are being collected, and the rest will disappear. Where would they normally be collected and sort of conserved? In Canada, we have Library and Archives Canada, we have provincial archives, we have municipal archives, and there are some community archives. The thing that's very unique about Canada is that we have an approach to archives

which is called the total archives approach, and it's very interesting. It grows out of the Massey Commission, and it was about collecting anything to do with Canada, but not differentiating. Other countries really differentiate, so they specialize. So if you're collecting audiovisual materials, that's what you collect,

and you have archivists who specialize in the preservation of those materials. In Canada, we don't have that. And as a consequence, we haven't really been that careful in how we collect those materials. And Canada, unlike other countries around the world, including developing nations, we have no audiovisual cultural policy, no archival cultural policy. And this to me is quite shocking when I found that out. Can you take me to the moment when you realize that there is this massive gap that needs to be closed? Yeah. I mean, my work has been about Canadian media history. So I wrote a book on Marshall McLuhan. I was part of a research project on Montreal's Expo 67, and we really looked at multi-screen experiments at Expo.

So it was really media-driven. And I had another project, National Film Board of Canada's Challenge for Change. It's a citizen community media project, which also involves archives. And then more recently, I've been looking at the history of IMAX. So all of these projects involve going into the archives. And I met lots of archivists, which, you know, I have so much respect for archivists. They're, you know, doing this work quietly and nobody recognizes they are so, so important to our country's history. And all of them that I worked with, and this is about a dozen different archivists over a period

of, you know, 10 years or so, I kept hearing the same story, which is we are in trouble. There is a huge crisis looming around audiovisual archival preservation. And this is a global problem. If you look at UNESCO's Memory of the World project, it is about this loss of audiovisual media, this loss of history. But Canada is particularly bad, as I was saying earlier. There's no criteria, there's no policy, and so we really, really lagged behind. With film archives or video archives, they have a generalized training. So they can deal with maps and books and maybe video. But these media require very specialized care. I find that really surprising.

As you say, shocking. I wonder if there's an example of something that we've already lost. I run a project up at York called Cinemobilia. already lost. I run a project up at York called Cinemobilia, and it's a digitization project taking this infrastructure into community settings that don't generally have access to the larger archives. And we recently worked with an Indigenous artist, Marjorie Bocash, who just won a Governor General Award for Media Arts. And I've known Marjorie for many years. I was congratulating her on the win. And she said, oh, I have an archive that's filled with video that I shot starting from the late 70s of Indigenous gatherings, etc. And it's all in my attic. And

I have no means of preserving it. So I'm happy to say that we took 80 hours of that material and we digitize it. Now, you know, where is it going to go? So she wants to bring it back to different communities, but they don't necessarily have the resources to preserve them. So it's a very complicated network of care that really needs to be thought about. Can you speak to that specific example and just give us a sense of what it is that you saved by doing that? I would say with Marjorie's, Marjorie Bocascia's archive, she actually interviewed communities in Cape Croker about residential school experiences. She also documented language, you know, an Indigenous language that was being

spoken that wouldn't otherwise be documented. There's another project. This is a graduate student, Vanier scholar, Debbie E. Banks-Lums up at York University. Her project is Jamaican Diasporic Archives. And there is no Jamaican archive in Canada. And Diasporic Archives are another area that's very difficult not collected by mainstream or even provincial archives. And so she decided she would create a Jamaican archive of Jamaican communities in Toronto. It's an interactive sculpture. And so community members bring films, videos, photographs, and it all comes together in this sculpture that's going to go to different communities. And in each instance, community members can bring their materials,

get those materials digitized, but also just augment those stories, those unique experiences. I was surprised to hear you say, and you mentioned this a moment ago at the Killam Prize ceremony, that even large mainstream audiovisual materials are at risk, such as the IMAX films. For those who may not know, can you explain what IMAX was or is and what it represented in the 60s and 70s in Canada? IMAX was an invention by Robin Kreuter and Graham Ferguson. It grows out of Expo 67 multi-screen experiments. So by multi-screen, I mean eight different screens with different things going on on the screens. And they were like, what if it was just one very large screen

that was eight stories and where people sat in the cinema and were completely immersed in the image? I think cinema going right now is going through so many changes. People don't go to the cinema, but people will go to see an IMAX film because IMAX is an experience. So it's a cinema experience that was designed by artists for you to have an incredibly immersive, pleasurable, lose yourself inself-in-the-image experience. Revolutionary for the time. Revolutionary for the time. And, you know, the giant screen, I think, is where we're going in terms of cinema going. And so this was revolutionary. This was unprecedented. As you say, it's kind of, you know, mainstream, large-scale film production.

And yet, why didn't anyone step forward to preserve them? monetized it, and transformed it into a technology able to screen Hollywood images. So I think we don't consider IMAX itself as something that needs to be preserved. I mean, Christopher Nolan is making massive spectacle IMAX films. But I'm looking at the history of this invention. But I'm looking at the history of this invention. The first 30 years are incredible where these filmmakers just decided we're going to redefine cinema. So these are Canadian filmmakers deciding weemas around the world. And films were made for specific cinemas, and each film was different, and each cinema was different, and every experience was different. So it's hard to preserve those kinds of films, but nevertheless, you can do it. So the Cinesphere was very important, first permanent IMAX cinema, and there were dozens and dozens of films made specifically for the Cinesphere.

But those films are now in storage and really in very bad shape, but it costs money. It costs money to preserve them, and somebody needs to take it up as a project. Could you talk about how something like Archive Counter Archive can begin to solve this crisis? So Archive Counter Archive is a collaboration between 20, now it's grown to about 35, different community and artist-run archives in Canada that sit on collections of largely analog audiovisual material, film and video that are at risk. And those collections are dying, essentially, and there's no money from the government to preserve them.

Canada Council only funds production. production. So we decided, all right, let's form a kind of think tank and set up a network to engage with the problem. So that's what we've been doing. I don't think we're providing solutions, but we're discovering all kinds of things about archives that, you know, archives are not one thing. So when audiovisual archives live in different communities, they serve different functions. Communities use them for different reasons. So in Indigenous communities, archives are stories, and they're stories that are connected to bodies, and they're passed down, and some are meant to be shared, some are not meant to be shared. In the LGBTQ community, archives and stories are so important for building intergenerational relationships. In diasporic communities, those archives don't exist, and they actually need to be created. And one of the things that I'm very proud of with Archive Counter Archive are the artist residencies because we set up these residencies in different archives

and artists discovered materials and activated different materials. And it's exciting. So it gets people talking about archives. And archives are not simply things that are shut away, but they're actually activated. And, you know, we have screenings of archival materials and people identify with those materials. I'm speaking to Janine Marchisson, winner of the 2024 Killam Prize for Humanities. You know, McLuhan talked about artists as the creators of anti-environments. You know, fish can't see water.

So artists make the environment visible. the environment visible. And that's why I really think one of the contributions that Archive Counter Archive has made is this methodology of bringing artists into archives and finding things in the archive, magical things that unlock stories. So the two artists, they were the first two artists that we had as part of the project, and they were both at Library and Archives Canada paired with an archivist. And Jennifer Dysart, Métis Cree filmmaker, found a film that was shot in the early 1950s for the Catholic Church in northern Manitoba of the Cree community living there. And her family is Cree. She used this film. She appropriated it, re-edited it because it was quite derogatory,

made it just a beautiful community portrait. And part of what Counter Archive does is bring archival elements into unusual settings, create projections. So at Nuit Blanche two years ago, Jennifer took her re-edited film and projected it on the archives of Ontario for the evening. And it was so, yeah, it was just, it was beautiful and lovely and everybody could see it. And then that film just keeps generating more events, more insights. She's going to bring it back to the community and have community members try to identify the people in those films. And that's another aspect of these archival films is that for indigenous communities, these are their kin. These are people that belong to the community.

So archives open up, they enrich our lives, and they are generative. They add a whole other dimension. And part of Archive, Counter Archive's mandate is to find educational uses for these archival materials. You know, I teach film history at York University. At the beginning of the year, my students are always like, are we watching silent black and white films for the whole semester? And then we do, we talk about projections. We talk about doing installations, doing things with archives, what's called activating the archives, where people become interested in history as seen through film.

So it's a whole other art form. The archive itself is a medium. It's like a musical instrument. Almost like another level of colorizing old film. another level of like colorizing old film. Exactly, exactly. It's not the same. It's actually a whole new experience. And AI is doing incredible things with archives, and we'll see how that develops. I think that will be part of the solution to the problem. We were living at a time when audiovisual material, I mean, we're swimming in video and audiovisual material. And I wonder how it is that the hierarchy of that material can be determined. How do we decide what's most important to be preserved and taken care of as opposed to things that may not be as important? Yeah, I think that's a great question because not everything can be saved. And that's the work that needs to happen in Canada,

and that's why policy is really important because what you have is you have an advisory board connected to different communities, and together they can decide, yes, this person, this person's archive needs to be preserved. But we don't have that right now. And Archive Counter Archive, I think, is the beginning of starting to have that conversation within Indigenous communities, within different communities. And the project that W.E. Banks, Shlom's project with the Jamaican community, that's a beautiful project because it is bringing communities together and getting them to think about why is this material important to the community? Why should this be preserved?

But these are the conversations that need to happen, and they haven't happened. And what does happen is one archivist who is so important to our history, but it lands on their shoulders to actually decide this will be preserved, this will not be preserved. Yeah. But when we look, I mean, because of the technology that exists today, so we have social media, YouTube, Vimeo, these are kind of user-uploaded platforms, and so automatically they're digitized, right? I mean, that's what they are, they're digitized audio- visual material. Can the existence of these kinds of, can the digital existence of this kind of material help preserve things, do you think?

Well, I hate to tell you this, but anything born digital actually has a lifespan of 10 years. So we think it's safe. We think it's safe because it's in the cloud, but do not trust that. Do not trust that cloud. And, you know, the best thing to do is to get a hard drive and to load things onto hard drives. You know, every time you change your phone, every time you change your computer, you're losing material. Hard drives also age and hard drives break and you can lose that material. That's why actually born digital is the most fragile. But we have the illusion that it's not fragile and that it's just, oh, I don't have to worry about it now. But when you start to really think about it, every time you change your phone, you lose a little bit, or it's uploaded to the cloud,

or you buy storage on Google. But these things are all, it's very, very precarious. Archive Counter Archive technically ended or ends in 2024, where we are right now. Is there a plan to continue? Is there a new version? Yeah, it's going international. So what we want to do is to keep building on what we've done and to connect with international archives. We're really interested in community-based archives and archives at risk. So we are in a world in turmoil, and archives are really hard hit.

So we're interested in archives that are very vulnerable, setting up relationships between archives that have resources and archives that don't have resources. So we're working with an archive in Cairo. We're working with an archive in Ghana, an archive in Rio, and setting up relationships with our archives here. But archive-counterarchive was not an opposition. It was always meant to be a counterarchive, as a community archive, setting up the relationship between community archives and then larger archives that have resources.

So we want to start that conversation. I think it's started. And then now move out internationally. There are programs that already exist. There's one called Safe Haven that are working with archives in the Ukraine, for example, Palestinian archives. So that's, you know, and in the context of climate change, my goodness, you know, this is, as the world is, I call it transformation, to be positive, but really this, we are in a state of transformation, and we have to think about care and safekeeping.

How has this way of thinking and doing this work changed you as a researcher and as a teacher? How has it changed my way of thinking is I never looked at archives. I use archives, but I don't think about them. archives, but I don't think about them. And as I started to look at community-based archives and look at also the work that artists are doing with archives, archives as generative, not simply as preserving, but as things that are, when they connect to communities, when they are activated, when people speak back to the archives. When my students learn from archives, when I have an assignment at York University where they have to look at their own family archives and think about preservation, you realize it's such a rich and exciting, dynamic, generative area of research. So, yeah, it's completely transformed the way that I engage with history. Janine Marchisson, thank you so much and congrats on your award.

Thank you so much. You're listening to Ideas and our spotlight on winners of the Killam Prize for Excellence in University Research. Ideas is a podcast and a broadcast heard on CBC Radio 1 in Canada, on US Public Radio, across North America on Sirius XM, on World Radio Paris, and in Australia on ABC Radio National and around the world at cbc.ca slash ideas.

You can also find us wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Nala Ayed. My name is Graham Isidore. I have a progressive eye disease called keratoconus. And being I'm losing my vision has been hard, but explaining it to other people has been harder. Lately, I've been trying to talk about it. Short-sighted is an attempt to explain what vision loss feels like by exploring how it sounds.

By sharing my story, we get into all the things you don't see about hidden disabilities. Short Sighted, from CBC's Personally, available now. The annual Killam Prizes are $100,000 awards given to working Canadian scholars who have demonstrated sustained research excellence, making a significant impact in their fields. That's true of my next guest, who I first met and introduced when I hosted the 2024 Killam Prize ceremony. I am pleased to introduce the winner of the 2024 Killam Prize in Social Sciences, Tanya Lee of the University of Toronto. Sciences, Tanya Lee of the University of Toronto. Although the world is urbanizing, at least half the population of Asia continues to live in rural areas under conditions that are still evolving.

Dr. Lee's multi-decade field-based research is focused on Indonesia. It examines the changing rural scene from two angles. First, how family farmers and indigenous people adapt to new markets, generating change from below, and also changes generated from above. The challenges faced by rural people when large corporations occupy vast areas of land for plantations, but offer few jobs. Once again, congratulations to Dr. Tanya Lee. If you could just tell me about your early connections in life to Asia. Okay. So I was actually born in Singapore. My dad was in the British Navy. He was Canadian by origins. As a teenager, my parents moved back to Singapore. So I had very formative kind of

intellectual experiences, age 15 to 17, which is when I think a young person becomes interested in the world. And there I was in the center of Southeast Asia with some amazing history teachers who were teaching us about what was going on in Vietnam and Indonesia and Thailand. And then in our school holidays, we went off traveling on the bus, on the train as a bunch of teenagers. So that was my introduction to the region. How does that influence you, the way you think, the way you look at the world? Right. I think I became aware right way you look at the world right i think i became aware right from the beginning that the world was really you know a big place all kinds of people lived there you know i went on to work a lot on questions of kind of poverty and development

and southeast asia isn't the worst of that i think that fact, it was on a flight from Singapore back to England when we got delayed in Bombay and took a airport, the airline took us to a hotel and we passed along the road, you know, where people were sleeping in drainpipes and kids were sleeping on bits of cardboard beside the road. And I remember, you know, this is my 17-year-old self thinking, this is not normal. Like something has happened here. Something has happened to these people. And although I can't do anything about it now, I have sort of made it my long-term interest. And such a vivid image that it stays with you. I can picture it to this day.

And in fact, in Southeast Asia, I hadn't seen desperate poverty or abandonment at the same level. But then, you know, as you get to know things in more detail, you know, you understand more about how society works. So can you draw the line from those early experiences to your career choice? It's like that great enormous countryside. The number is that half the people of Asia, I mean Asia has most of the people of the world, and at least half of them still live in the countryside. Even now? Yes, absolutely. Still live in rural areas and get most of their livelihoods from agriculture in some form.

And so that's not what know, that's not what hits your eye if you're living in Singapore or some of these big Asian metropolises, but I became very aware of like the other half. So where does Indonesia fit into this story? So I had learned, you know, earlier career, I'd learned the language. Malay and Indonesian are almost the same. So in our field, anthropology, because we do fieldwork, you know, we're there in communities talking to people, language is a huge thing. And the investment that we make in learning languages, you know, learning about history and culture, building networks. And I started on a postdoc in Indonesia. And once you, most of us tend to stay with the place where we have really invested. Could you just give us a sense of the

kinds of rural landscapes that you like to work in? So I've worked in different places. I worked in sort of indigenous mountain territories, which are, you know quite remote i don't know if that's i enjoy that it was very strenuous because no roads and a lot of hiking but you know that's where people live so that's where you go the plantation landscape is of course um when no one could say it's uh you know it's completely transformed so every tree every mango tree every rubber tree every farmstead everything has been bulldozed and replaced by lines of palm so that kind of landscape gives me the creeps you know i couldn't say i like to work in this landscape but again it's interesting because i my colleague pujo um grew up in a plantation, a tea plantation.

And he said that for him growing up, like the neat rows of tea bushes, you know, clinging to the contours, he said he thought it was beautiful. So we're anthropologists, right? We have to try to understand not just how we viscerally react to a landscape, but what other people are seeing. Indonesia is a very specific context, and the work you're doing there is specific to the place. I wonder if you could speak to how the research is relevant beyond Indonesia. I guess the book that has received the most attention uses the case of Indonesia

to talk about what I call the will to improve. So that's a big question. It's like, what is this kind of mentality that makes people often in the global north, in the west, think that they have the obligation, the right to undertake what in colonial times was often called a civilizing mission, you know, is now called international development. But it still comes down to this idea that experts, often from elsewhere, will look at a country like Indonesia and come to the conclusion that there's the various deficiencies and things which are wrong there, which need to be improved there, and here we are with our solutions.

So that question of the will to improve, what it is, how it works, all of the things which are done in its name, has a global resonance. And so many people who read my work are not specifically interested in Indonesia, but in the ideas, in how we can understand this phenomenon of experts and development agencies going around the world diagnosing problems or you could say you know uh and then coming up with prescriptions and recipes for how things should be fixed so it was the idea it's the idea that travels beyond the context and that draws readers into my work um very often they're not indonesia specialists right but that's the context in which I developed these ideas. It's fascinating because we live in a time when foreign aid and foreign assistance is controversial.

It's not as accepted as it used to be. And I just wonder if you could just briefly talk about the importance of understanding this, the consequences of the will to improve at a time like this? Well, it's tricky, right? Because on the one hand, you could say, well, what's worse than the will to improve could be, we don't care, right? Not our problem. So that would be even worse, right? So, you know, in making this kind of critique, on the one hand, you know, we want to emphasize that we are linked like canada and indonesia are linked canada and china canada and india these big agrarian economies like we are already connected so to to turn away from that and say you do your thing we'll do ours like this is

not historically accurate and it's not accurate also in terms of flows of resources, finance, populations, and everything else. So if we are already connected, the I don't care, not our problem, isn't a sufficient answer. So there's a fine line. Yeah, there is. So what then is the relationship? The problem with the will to improve, or the one that I examine in the book, is the, you know, it's a very specific kind of power and a specific kind of knowledge which says, I, expert, me, can diagnose the problems in your life and can prescribe fixes for them. I know how you should live. I know what you should do. Perhaps even I know what you need. So this kind of, one could say, patronizing attitude, and we've seen the consequences of it in Canada in relation to our of people decide that they know how to improve another side. So that's what I've been exploring.

It's not to say that the will to improve is evil or that it hides malevolent motives. Often I say, I can take this will to improve at its word. motives. Like often I say, I can take this will to improve at its word. My brother worked for the Canadian Development Agency as the chief of Canadian aid in Indonesia for a decade. And I know him to be very, you know, intelligent and amazing guy, also has, like me, a background in anthropology. So it's not a question of ill will or lack of expertise. It's something in that relationship which is intrinsically troubling. And we should, at minimum, be ready to scrutinize it and to be aware of it. Like in the name of what truth or what power is it on me, you know, to diagnose and to fix. So how does that will to improve manifest itself specifically in the context that you're looking at, which is farming in Indonesia? What comes to mind is one particular

farmer, indigenous highland farmer, one evening sitting in his little wooden house with my Indonesian research colleague, Aryanso Sanghaji, we were talking to him, light of a candle, and he was telling us about his life. He said, like, we were living in the mountains. At first they came to us and they said, you cannot live in these mountains because of erosion. And then he said, but there was no erosion. We've farmed in these mountains for generations. We know how to do this. It's when the loggers come up and build a logging road, that's when you get erosion, right? So in his own way, he was questioning this expertise in the name of his own knowledge and his own truth. Is that a typical response? Well, I mean, you know, I guess

anthropologists like most, probably like journalists, you know, we are attracted to people who have an interesting analysis and who are themselves perhaps sort of indigenous intellectuals. They have their own critique, their own analysis, and we're drawn to them because they're interesting and they have things to say. But then he went on and he said, you know, we were told we had to leave the mountains and live here in this valley, but the land they gave us, he said, is prone to to flooding they said they gave it to us but it because it was empty land but it was empty for a reason because the locals in the valley know that this is not good farmland so they gave us land which is of no use to us and they told us if we

move it will improve our lives what did it bring us nothing this type of thing right so this is just to say none of that was ill-intentioned, but the result was actually to define problems and impose what were claimed to be sort of beneficial solutions in a way which really did not have that outcome, and to stimulate a sort of a critical pushback, which is also part of the picture. pushback, which is also part of the picture. I'm speaking to anthropologist Tanya Lee, winner of the 2024 Killam Prize for Social Sciences. Another current issue in Indonesia agriculture is the situation around palm oil, which of course many people will know is a controversial crop used globally in food and consumer products and fuel. Can you talk

about, can you describe what's happening with palm oil plantations? That's been the focus of my research for the last 15 years. And together with an Indonesian colleague, Pujo Smedi, we wrote a book called Plantation Life, Corporate Occupation in Indonesia's Oil Palm Zone. And you can see from the title, Corporate Occupation, like what we were really reflecting on or examining is the fact that the Indonesian government has given one third of Indonesia's farmland to corporations only for oil palm. So not even other crops or mines, just for oil palm. And of these, some are international companies, but many of them are Indonesian owned. They're owned by Indonesian tycoons and different guys. So it's not a question of kind of bad foreigners. It's a question of a form of development which entrenches corporations as the ones that control the land.

And because they're there with the permission of the government, they also end up effectively not controlling the government so closely linked with it. linked with it that as with another kind of occupation like a military occupation or a colonial occupation government officials and so on become collaborators of the corporation they're the ones that give the permits and they actually have an official above board task of facilitating the corporate mission almost like an economic occupation. Yes, but it has a political component because of the way that government and the law become subordinate to the corporate enterprise. So again, not malevolent in intention.

The argument for this is that it brings jobs and development to rural areas. So with my colleague Bujo from Gajah Mada University in Indonesia, we set out to ask, well, what is the form of development? What is the nature of these jobs? If that's the rationale for this form of development, let's take a look and see how it actually works out on the ground. So is it as advertised? I mean, do local jobs get generated?

No, not really. Corporations tend to prefer to bring in migrant workers from other parts of the country because they're more easily disciplined. Less expensive. Well, it's not necessarily that, but you imagine a local farmer whose land has been taken over by the corporation.

He's already grumpy for a start. And for a second, his relationship, you know, he has social relationships locally. Maybe granny died and he has to go off to a funeral. If you bring in migrant workers from other parts of the country, their sole goal is, you know, do the work, do the overtime, max out, you know, to send money home. So it is a disciplined workforce. Since the colonial period, it's been like this. So the jobs generated are not great, especially for the locals. They tend to get short-term contract jobs, which are not like casual outsourced kinds of things. which are not like casual outsourced kinds of things.

But you also have to look at what they lose. So on the one hand, you don't gain jobs. On the other hand, you've lost access to farmland. This was not empty land. This was people's own agroforest and own farmland. Are these open-ended kind of arrangements? I mean, the concessions that the government gives are 35 years renewable. Incredible. So that's half a person's lifetime.

Well, and it's renewable. It's a generation and more. So, you know, the local population, I mean, if there's just one plantation, it's one thing. But when it's a third of the farmland, entire districts are now blanketed with plantations back by back and so there's only tiny little spaces in between where the original inhabitants can try to eke out a very difficult existence so that's what we studied in that book and it's not great news like it's not a happy story and it's not the story that the government likes to tell which is the story of jobs and development but one thing one way that our research i think is quite useful is that the debate against palm oil i mean you mentioned now that it's a controversial crop but that i think is often misplaced because there's nothing wrong

with the crop it's a very productive crops easy to grow it is very productive of oil per hectare. Like if you were to try to grow as, you know, say the world needs vegetable oils in some kind, and we know half the products in Canadian supermarkets contain palm oil. It's massive. But it doesn't have to be grown by corporations. So what we're arguing is there's nothing wrong with the crop. Indonesian farmers love to grow it. They say if we have six hectares of palm oil, we can send our kids to college. Two hectares covers the farm costs. Two hectares covers family living costs. Two hectares is our investment fund. They feel it can make them prosperous. Two hectares is our investment fund.

They feel it can make them prosperous. So there's nothing wrong with the crop. The problem is the corporate-dominated model which squeezes out the smallholders and the farmers really gives them no chance to get in on this lucrative opportunity. So, you know, as a scholar, again, it becomes more complicated because the simple narrative is bad crop. And a lot of the press in Europe is focused on the orangutan. Again, it becomes more complicated because the simple narrative is bad crop. And a lot of the press in Europe is focused on the orangutan. It's like charismatic species, forest loss, you know, orangutans lose their habitat.

Because that's a simple story. So in our discipline in anthropology, you know, it's a more complex story. It's not that the crop is bad. It has to do with the mode of development. And that requires understanding more about the history of Indonesia, of its land laws, of its political culture, of its etc. Right. So. And you're right, in my world, that's not a very well-known story. Yeah. The nuance that you introduced to that. Could you speak to why the government in Indonesia isn't asking for more accountability from corporations? There's a few things. The first is that the laws favor corporations.

So the government is part of the system that gives the corporation so much power. Indonesian land law, since colonial times, has not recognized customary land ownership. colonial times has not recognized customary land ownership so everyone most indonesians do not have land titles they access their land their land based on custom and that works fine if it's just you and me i know what's mine you know what's yours we won't mess with each other right customary systems are fine until a corporation comes along and says, I've got a certificate issued by the government. You people are illegal squatters on state land. Now you have to go. So it's the law is a problem. And the government is, of course, part of the law. Could you give us an example of a farmer or farm family that you met who are grappling with the situation? So one person we call in the book

Patlua, I remember again talking to him. I met him many times. And, you know, he said he was an older man and he said, I get panic attacks. He said, you ask me how we're going to manage here. And he said, I wake up in the night in a sweat because how are we going to live? What's going to happen to my children and grandchildren? So he said, this was set up all wrong from the start the company took everything and left us with nothing and now he said there's oil palm everywhere except the graveyard

right so he was um he was pushing back you know analytically he was pushing back, you know, analytically he was pushing back saying, this was all set up wrong, it shouldn't be like this. But his capacity to actually change the situation is extremely limited. So back when the old authoritarian order of Indonesia collapsed in 1998, like many Indonesians who'd suffered under this regime, like they attempted to push back. They blockaded the plantation and, you know, they made a big noise. Some people came in, government officials and politicians, to mediate a settlement. And 20 years later, the settlement has not been implemented been implemented so you know is it's one step

forward two steps back right they they don't really have the capacity and the government is not even though it might temporarily broker something is not serious about changing the relationship such that the people on the spot are recognized as partners in plantation affairs with a voice at the table, a place to bring up their grievances, a place to say, okay, fair is fair. You need to make a profit. You're a company. We understand that. We too need these things. And these are the kinds of solutions that the local farmers, including Patlua, was describing. He was saying, we could work it out with them. We know they can't give everything back, but they won't even talk to us.

They won't even acknowledge that we are here. They won't even recognize that we too need to live and have been here for generations before they came so it's it's an it's an unpass and it was interesting you know his his analysis of that unpass right this is a person again who's kind of thoughtful and knowledgeable and that's the wonderful thing why i love my discipline of anthropology because it's my job to to listen to, you know, to not to come in. It's the opposite of the will to improve. I don't come in with the answers. It's like, so what's going on here?

Like, you know, tell me, how did this happen? You know, what do you think about it? What have you tried to do? Like, how do you see the ways forward? What are you running into, you know? And I find that I'm often densely sad as in these situations but in a different way inspiring because it shows you that people don't just roll over and stop thinking or stop struggling in their way right right? And that's the part of this work which I find endlessly interesting.

Have you decided how to use the award, like the financial award that comes with the Killam Prize? Well, so actually I've decided to give quite a big chunk of it to my Indonesian colleagues. Wow. They, unlike me, do not have a good salary and a nice pension. You know, they're pretty hand to mouth. So one person, the activist with whom I did most of the research for the World to Improve, who has been researching mining issues in his province, and he's actively right

now working with villagers who are dealing with a massive, a huge influx of Chinese mining into his province. So his sponsor can send a few thousand dollars his way. And my Indonesian colleague, Pooja, with whom I did the book, he is always finding ways to channel funds to his students, to other researchers. So I figured those two, they know I don't need to micromanage it. They know how to make good use of resources, and I trust them completely. So that's my main plan. The other initiative that I've decided to address with some of these funds

is a group at University of Toronto called Hearing Palestine, which is nestled under the Institute for Islamic Affairs, Islamic Research. It seems to me a really important initiative because, firstly, it's about hearing. In a university, everyone's voices should be heard. They bring in speakers who are very interesting, given what's happened in the world and you know for me in this past year I got the news about this award and I thought great but I've really struggled to celebrate and this is one reason so I thought okay small thing I can do with the funds since these funds come to me personally so I have discretion over what I want to do with them, that this

is something that I would like to do. Thank you so much for telling us about all of this really important work. My pleasure, thank you. And huge congratulations on the award. Thank you very much. University of Toronto anthropologist Tanya Lee. She is one of the 2024 Killam Prize winners for research excellence featured on this episode of Ideas. I'll speak to more scholars in part two, coming soon.

Thanks to the Killam Trust, the National Research Council of Canada, Massey College, and all of the Killam Prize winners in making these episodes possible. The producer of this episode is Lisa Godfrey. Lisa Ayuso is the web producer for Ideas. Technical production, Danielle Duval, with help from Shirley Gao, with thanks to Joe Costa. Our senior producer is Nikola Lukšić. The executive producer of Ideas is Greg Kelly, and I'm Nala Ayed. For more CBC Podcasts, go to cbc.ca slash podcasts.