Villain, Vermin, Icon, Kin: Wolves and the Making of Canada

“Rutherford’s broader argument remains compelling: anthropocentric attitudes lie at the heart of modern biopolitical power, and the persistence of wolves in the face of our attempts to exterminate them exposes the fiction that we can control nature itself. It’s an arrogance that brings to mind Margaret Atwood’s poem “Progressive Insanities of a Pioneer,” from 1968, in which the character of the title belittles the wilderness as “the absence of order” rather than recognizing it for what it really is: “an ordered absence.” Villain, Vermin, Icon, Kin highlights the danger of this type of thinking and … makes the case that something must be done to change it, lest we march so far down our current path of environmental destruction that, as one maligned wolf once put it, all of our houses get blown down.” Literary Review of Canada

“Stephanie Rutherford brilliantly maps the fraught, contested geographies of settler-colonial power structuring human-wolf relations in Canada. Rutherford’s wide-ranging archive reframes Canada as a disputed landscape shaped by deadly colonial wills to power, Indigenous resistances to political and epistemic erasure, and complex and surprising forms of wolf agency. With depth, rigor and humor, Villain, Vermin, Icon, Kin is a remarkable interdisciplinary contribution and should compel attention from a broader readership in and outside the academy.” Emotion, Space and Society