Climate storytelling in Lytton,B.C.,Canada: Salvaging archives and cultural collections in the burn zone

Abstract

In 2021, a heatwave-fuelled wildfire burned through much of the town center of Lytton, British Columbia and large portions of neighbouring First Nations reserves, destroying homes, government offices, and businesses, as well as four significant cultural collections. In the wake of the fire, news media and government officials alike were quick to cast the event as a climate change phenomenon. These official understandings of the fire shaped policy responses, which imagined the future of Lytton as a net-zero, climate-resilient model community. For the affected communities, however, this framing of climate change as the cause of the fire obscured other causes—like the possible role of the train in sparking the fire—and local cultural and environmental histories that shape the region's relationship and vulnerability to fire. In a case study of the loss and recovery of the Lytton Chinese History Museum, this essay argues that local archival and cultural collections—even, and especially, when they are lost or damaged from environmental phenomena—provide a framework for climate storytelling built on the intersections between local environmental and cultural histories and global environmental transformations. Building on interviews and site visits with local cultural stewards, knowledge keepers, community members, and conservation professionals undertaken in the production of an audio documentary series titled Archival Ecologies, this article articulates an interdisciplinary methodology for post-disaster archival work and climate storytelling. Connecting cultural collections with their communities and geographies, this essay contextualizes archives in terms of their environments and formulates an approach to reading cultural collections when they have suffered environmental damage. Such collections offer pathways to nuanced, community-centered, historically informed climate stories and to the recovery of communities with complex histories.