Tina Adcock
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tinaadcock.bsky.social
Tina Adcock
@tinaadcock.bsky.social
4.3K followers 1.4K following 430 posts
Cultural and environmental historian of Canada and the Sub/Arctic. Author: *A Cold Colonialism: Modern Exploration and the Canadian North.* Co-editor: *Made Modern: Science and Technology in Canadian History.* Now researching energy and queer histories.
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tinaadcock.bsky.social
Reading this newly released book and enjoying it so, so much, and then I saw @newestpress.bsky.social’s cheeky little disclaimer on the copyright page and I was like 😂😂👏👏 #cdnhist
The colourful cover of Cruising the Downtown: Celebrating Edmonton’s Queer History, edited by Kristopher Wells and the Edmonton Queer History Project A partial view of the copyright page of Cruising the Downtown, with the line “No bison were harmed in the making of this book” highlighted
November 9, 2025 at 4:21 AM
tinaadcock.bsky.social
I did get this one, though!
Cover of the book The Past and Future Land: An account of the Berger Inquiry into the Mackenzie Valley pipeline, by Martin O’Malley
November 9, 2025 at 2:09 AM
tinaadcock.bsky.social
Please, Dick Turner, tell us what you REALLY think about Indigenous land claim and resource politics in northern Canada in the ‘70s 🙃🙃🙃
Striking blue and yellow cover of the book Sunrise on Mackenzie by Dick Turner. The subheadings read, Berger be damned / Land claims have already been settled / There’s no brotherhood in the Brotherhood / Southern do-gooders should learn the facts
November 9, 2025 at 12:25 AM
tinaadcock.bsky.social
I have to say, I was unaware that there was a moment in Canadian publishing when the no-name brand and iconography extended to books 😂
The cover of Allan Hustak’s book Peter Lougheed in the distinctive yellow and black design associated with the No Name brand in Canada
November 9, 2025 at 12:15 AM
tinaadcock.bsky.social
My incredibly esoteric used book haul, in case anyone’s interested
A stack of books against a wall, with spines displaying their titles, including The Great Fur Opera, The Cold Light of Dawn, and I Was No Lady Two pamphlets on a hardwood floor, entitled The Land of Peter Pond and The North-West Passage
November 8, 2025 at 11:51 PM
tinaadcock.bsky.social
Saskatchewan Historical Baseball Review! The High Schools of Guelph! Believe me, Canada’s histor(iograph)y is verily a world of wonders ✨
A shelf of book spines, including the titles Saskatchewan Historical Baseball Review and The High Schools of Guelph
November 8, 2025 at 10:28 PM
tinaadcock.bsky.social
@arnkeeling.bsky.social Here’s the in-situ shot of your and John’s book!
A close up of Sandlos and Keeling’s book Mining Country amid other books on a messy shelf
November 8, 2025 at 10:24 PM
tinaadcock.bsky.social
It appears literally impossible for me to go to the Edmonton Book Store without spending four or five hours there and waking away with a huge stack of books 😅😅😅
An aisle lined with black and light wood coloured bookshelves filled with colourful rows of books on either side.
November 8, 2025 at 10:11 PM
tinaadcock.bsky.social
Glacier National Park in southeastern British Columbia has beautiful alpine hikes. This is an August view from one of the summits! #ParkChat
A blue sky with wispy clouds over a rugged mountain scene, with ice and forest visible in sun and shadow.
July 31, 2025 at 1:20 AM
tinaadcock.bsky.social
It was almost certainly Elk Island National Park, just east of Edmonton, where I grew up. A beautiful slice of Aspen parkland ecotone. Plains bison (present, or more likely absent) probably figured in that story, since their preservation was part of the park’s origin story! #ParkChat
Aspen trees and shrubs line a small blur lake. Scudding clouds float across a blue sky. It’s springtime. It’s beautiful. Detail from a sign warning people not to get too close to bison in Elk Island National Park. A person in a yellow windbreaker and blue jeans with an 80s feathery haircut runs away from a charging bison.
July 24, 2025 at 1:56 AM
tinaadcock.bsky.social
The sheer spaciousness of Grasslands National Park in southern Saskatchewan is hard to put into words. The sky is high and the horizon very faraway. The only other place remotely similar I’ve visited was the high plains in western Nebraska.
A gently rolling grassy landscape interspersed with bare rock behind a blue sky with scudding clouds.
July 24, 2025 at 1:49 AM
tinaadcock.bsky.social
Banff National Park, the first national park in Canada — also the site of Canada’s first large-scale internment camps against Euro-Canadians, during WWI #ParkChat
A snowy riverbank, with snow-capped mountains in the distance, conifers to the left, and open water to right A statue of a man, meant to represent internees of Austro-Hungarian/Ukrainian heritage imprisoned during the First World War in Banff National Park. A wreath of flowers sits to the statue’s left, leaning against a memorial plaque. A coniferous forest is in the background.
July 24, 2025 at 1:38 AM
tinaadcock.bsky.social
Overseen this morning at an “outdoor classroom” showcase. One of the infant/toddler programs at SFU Child Care is explicitly teaching the environmental humanities, and I love it!! #envhum #envhist
A picture of a laminated, coiled booklet with the title “Co-Cultivating Reciprocity with the More-than-Human,” depicting the backs of kids crouched down and reaching toward soil, framed by ferns.
July 11, 2025 at 7:23 PM
tinaadcock.bsky.social
Here's the reading list, if anyone's interested! #aghist #foodhistory
A list of articles published since 2019 in the history of Canadian food and agriculture: 1. Bradley and Hadlaw, "Fruitleggers, Fruit Police, and British Columbia's Black Market in Orchard Fruit, 1935–1975" 2. Brosnan, "Preserving Winescapes amid North America's Urban Sprawl" 3. Duchesne, "Fertile Pairings: A Cultural History of the Early Commercial Mandate of the Société des alcools du Québec (1968–1978)" 4. Goodchild, "The Reluctant Cheesemaker: Craft Work and Conflict in Ontario's Nineteenth-Century Cooperative Cheese Industry" 5. Gora, "From Meat to Metaphor: Beavers and Conflicting Imaginations of the Edible" 6. Knight, "Preaching 'the Gospel of Clean Fish': Rational Consumption at the Canadian National Exhibition, 1913–1919" 7. Knight and Sutherland, "The Pacific Salmon Experiment in Northern Ontario and the 'Indian Problem'" 8. Komori, "The Canadian 'War of the Two Sugars': Homegrown Sugar Beets and the Racial Stratification of Labour" 9. Larsen, "Economics and Emotion: The Ideological Debate Over Prairie Grain Marketing, 1973–1996" 10. Luby with Niisaachewan Anishinaabe Nation, "Manomin as Teacher" 11. Murton, "Subsistence Production and Commodity Production in the British Imperial Food System: The Case of Nova Scotia Apples" 12. Nurse, "Canada's Rotten Egg Scandal: The Politics of Food in the 1970s" 13. Payne, "Nature's Bread: The Natural Food Debate in Canada, 1940–49" 14. Stunden Bower, "Irrigation Infrastructure, Technocratic Faith, and Irregularities of Vision: Canada's Prairie Farm Rehabilitation Administration in Ghana, 1965–1970" 15. Stunden Bower, "Women's Garden Work, Agricultural Rehabilitation, and Gendered Knowledge from Below on the Canadian Prairies, 1930–46" 16. Sedef Urus, "'A Spirit of Encroachment': Trees, Cod, and the Political Ecology of Empire in the Newfoundland Fisheries, 1763–1783" 17. Yakashiro, "Daffodils and Dispossession: Nikkei Settlers, White Possession, and Settler Colonial Property in Bradner, BC, 1914–51"
July 2, 2025 at 4:25 PM
tinaadcock.bsky.social
Though I say it myself, this week in my course on the #envhist / #aghist of BC was an absolute banger. The articles by Yakashiro and Komori are must-reads for Canadian historians and others interested in the intersections of race, settler colonialism, and agricultural labour.
The skeet lists three items under a week about race, agriculture, and horticulture on a syllabus about the environmental and agricultural history of British Columbia. They are: 1. Alejandro Yoshizawa and Wendy Phung, “Covered Roots: The History of Vancouver’s Chinese Farms,” a Youtube video published under Chinese Canadian Stories, a UBC initiative, in 2012 2. Nicole Yakashiro, “Daffodils and Dispossession: Nikkei Settlers, White Possession, and Settler Colonial Property in Bradner, BC, 1914–51,” BC Studies, published in Autumn 2021 3. Jane Komori, “The Canadian ‘War of the Two Sugars’: Homegrown Sugar Beets and the Racial Stratification of Labour,” in Historical Materialism: Research in Critical Marxist Theory, published November 2023.
June 29, 2025 at 2:59 PM
tinaadcock.bsky.social
Me, upon seeing this in my inbox this morning: LETS EFFING GO

Me, then noting the time stamp: o no, all the collectors of arctic books who did not get this during daycare dropoff probably got there first
Screenshot of an email advertising books from “the collection of noted Arctic botanist AE Porsild” as sold by Patrick McGahern Books, with a photograph of Porsild (pipe in mouth) in profile
June 10, 2025 at 7:42 PM
tinaadcock.bsky.social
Thought-provoking and intriguing to list Stefansson and Wilkins under the "Sand" rather than the "Snow" section of the book... 👀👀👀
An excerpt from the cast of characters listed as part of the front matter for the book "Sand, Snow, and Stardust: How US Military Engineers Conquered Extreme Environments," by Gretchen Heefner. The relevant entries read: "Vilhjalmur Stefansson, polar explorer with an interest in Inuit clothing" and "Sir Hubert Wilkins, problem solver with a penchant for color swatches and camouflage." Wilkins is best remembered today as a polar explorer.
June 9, 2025 at 8:52 PM
tinaadcock.bsky.social
Excited about this one! Thanks, @uchicagopress.bsky.social! #willbereadingsoon
Photo shows the cover of a book entitled "Sand, Snow, and Stardust: How US Military Engineers Conquered Extreme Environments," by Gretchen Heefner. The cover image is a stylized full moon rising over blue, snow-capped mountains and an orange desert with silhouettes of a cactus and soldier in shadow.
June 9, 2025 at 8:49 PM
tinaadcock.bsky.social
My selfie game is atrocious, so here’s my dog with a copy of my book, which she is clearly dying to read 😂
A chocolate Labrador lies down with a hardcover book between her paws, leaned up against a white railing. In the background, a lush green backyard with pink flowering bushes and some child’s toys scattered across the pavement can be seen.
May 27, 2025 at 8:31 PM
tinaadcock.bsky.social
OHMIGOSH THEY’RE HERE 🤩
A cardboard box with shipping labels sits on a light wood dining table. A vase of red roses and basket with a green stuffed dragon toy sits behind the box. The background is a view of a white deck and trees through Venetian blinds and a sliding set of doors.
May 27, 2025 at 8:29 PM
tinaadcock.bsky.social
✔️ Index reviewed
✔️ Proofs finalized
✔️ Book shortly off to printers!

*A Cold Colonialism* will be out June 1st. Getting excited! 😃https://www.ubcpress.ca/a-cold-colonialism
The title page of my forthcoming book. The name Tina Adcock appears at the top of the page; below it is the book's title, "A Cold Colonialism: Modern Exploration and the Canadian North." The UBC Press colophon appears at the foot of the page.
April 3, 2025 at 3:21 PM
tinaadcock.bsky.social
And the abstract for this talk, in its more or less final form -->
Screenshot of text reading as follows: Exploration has long been pivotal to southern engagements with northern Canada, but it is most often associated with the nineteenth century or earlier. This talk, based on my forthcoming book, sketches out the shape and significance of twentieth-century exploration in this region. This enterprise offered intellectual and emotional solutions to the problem of extending industrial and settler colonialism into the Arctic and Subarctic. It did so by creating what I call an illusion of proximity to the North. Exploration helped individuals normally resident in the South construct specific forms of “northern” knowledge, expertise, authority, and belonging. These then gave southern industries and governments confidence and licence to sideline the voices of Indigenous and non-Indigenous northerners, intervene in northern Indigenous homelands, and plot their development and resettlement. I introduce critical terminology that punctures this illusion of proximity, and that may be useful to scholars of modern colonial settings within and beyond Canada. I conclude with some reflections on exploration’s continued appeal in settler colonial Canada, as well as the potential anticolonial and antiracist value of acknowledging a widespread, but hidden subject position in Canada: that of southerner.
February 19, 2025 at 11:16 PM
tinaadcock.bsky.social
This is really proving one of those books that is effectively clarifying and contextualizing the milieu in which I grew up, in very many helpful ways. And it is raising many questions for me about Ukrainian-Canadians’ particular engagements with and enactments of settler colonialism on the Prairies.
Natalie Kononenko’s book Ukrainian Ritual on the Prairies: Growing a Ukrainian Canadian Identity is depicted atop a brown fuzzy blanket. A hardwood floor and wooden coffee table with slate coasters is in the background.
February 9, 2025 at 3:13 AM
tinaadcock.bsky.social
More food for thought in Kononenko’s book:
—cemetery burial as a Ukrainian-Canadian settler colonial form of possessing land and expressing settler futurity
— cemetery burial as a way to establish ties to a new place/environment #envhum #envhist
Text from Natalie Kononenko’s book Ukrainian Ritual on the Prairies, reading: “Cemetery burial of relatives is especially important to Canadians because interment is a way to underscore the connection between people and places. Thus, among Ukrainian Canadians, as among other immigrants, especially in the past when Ukrainians were first settling the Prairies, funerals were not just about saying goodbye to a person and sending her or him onto a life in the spirit. Funerals were also about establishing a new and different connection: a link between people and the new land in which they buried their deceased. As discussed in the chapter on vernacular religion, by interring one’s ancestors one was staking a claim to the new homeland that would house and nurture future generations. It was a way to plant “seeds” from which new identities and new possibilities might grow. Perhaps because of the need to establish a tie to the land through burial, funerals continue to emphasize place and connection to place. They incorporate many ritual acts that acknowledge the connection between the deceased and his or her Canadian places. Some of these have been lost over time. Others have been revived, and the clergy who come to Canada from Ukraine have reintroduced some of the practices that pay special attention to territory and location because territorial passage and ritual acts connected to it are an important part of the funeral in Ukraine.”
February 9, 2025 at 2:20 AM
tinaadcock.bsky.social
In Edmonton, reading about Ukrainian-Canadians (ie me) and thinking about synergies between ethno/religious history and #envhist. This book tells of Prairie Ukrainians using various religious objects to ward off storms & bad weather: holy water, blessed beeswax candles or pussywillow branches.
A paperback copy of the book Ukrainian Ritual on the Prairies: Growing a Ukrainian Canadian Identity by Natalie Kononenko is shown resting on a red sweatpanted-leg on a couch. A coffee table and a mug and glass are in the background.
February 8, 2025 at 6:55 PM