Countless authors have deconstructed both the romantic and the troubled history of wildness and wilderness, yet very few researchers have ever asked people: “What does wild mean to you?” In doing so, with our research we aim to understand wildness as a phenomenological and relational entity and aim to make sense of the multiple ways in which personal entanglements with particular places inform contingent and place-based ideas of wildness. Although there are many dimensions to both the experience and the idea of wildness, in this paper we reflect in particular on one: vitality. We draw our data from dozens of interviews held across Canada and base our interpretations on a combination of traditional Indigenous ecological knowledge, relational ontologies, and more-than-representational theories.
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