Dr Tanja Hoffmann
Leverhulme Research Fellow

Profile

Biography

For more than two decades Tanja has been privileged to work with and for First Nation communities in what is now called Canada. She holds her hands up in gratitude to the Elders and knowledge holders who continue to gift her their knowledge and support. Most of Tanja’s research is guided by community priorities. As a result, her research interests are located where place-based and Indigenous peoples’ heritages intersect with dynamics of climate change, de-colonization, economic development, and resource management.

Tanja holds a PhD in Resource and Environmental Management (Simon Fraser University) and a Master of Arts in First Nations Studies (University of Northern British Columbia). Dr. Hoffmann’s PhD dissertation, written in collaboration with the q̓ə́yc̓əy [Katzie] First Nation of coastal British Columbia, Canada examined aspects of cultural resilience exhibited by q̓ə́yc̓əy as they in turn resisted and adapted to the construction of a major infrastructure project through the heart of their territory. Her post-doctoral research (Johnson Shoyama Graduate School of Public Policy, University of Saskatchewan) sought to reveal key competencies needed to support effective Indigenous Corporate economic development partnerships. Tanja’s research was conducted in partnership with Indigenous Works, an Indigenous national social enterprise working to improve the lives of First Nations, Métis, and Inuit peoples through business innovation.

Research

Overview

Tanja has experience designing and implementing projects ranging from archaeological excavations to social impact assessments. She has published on topics ranging from the economic, social and environmental dynamics of ancient gardening among the Indigenous peoples of the Northwest Coast, to the importance of maintaining humility when practising research with and for Indigenous communities.

Dr. Hoffmann is a Leverhulme Research Fellow in the Heritage for Global Challenges Research Centre. She is the research lead for Axis 1 where she is investigating the roles heritage plays in the dynamics of cultural, economic, and social inclusions/exclusions in the UK. Her overall aim is to locate and advance solutions-oriented, collaborative research initiatives that look to amplify place-based knowledges in service of local solutions to global ‘wicked’ problems. This includes promoting research that learns from, not just about, place-based knowledges and knowledge holders.

Projects

The following projects are connected to Emma Waterton’s Leverhulme International Professorship and are associated with the Heritage for Global Challenges Research Centre, which revolves around six interrelated and transdisciplinary research ‘axes’.

“Cultural Fields Revisited: Heritage Inclusion/Exclusion in a Post-Brexit UK”
Tanja Hoffmann and Emma Waterton (Axis 1)

This project builds on the results of the 2003-2004 national survey that formed part of the ESRC-funded project Cultural Capital and Social Exclusion: A Critical Investigation (Bennet et al. 2009), which was in turn a primary reference for a national survey undertaken as part of the 2012-2014 ARC-funded project Australian Cultural Fields: National and Transnational Dynamics (Bennett et al. 2020). In the 20 years since the first Cultural Field survey, the United Kingdom has experienced social, political, and economic ruptures that have redrawn boundaries of inclusion and exclusion. Heritage has played a role in each of these seismic changes as the citizenry of the UK look to heritage past and present to reimagine who fits in, and who remains outside of, the past, present, and future of the UK. Two decades on from the original data collection, we look to understand the degree to which cultural tastes and practices have changed in a post-Brexit United Kingdom. Specifically, we seek to understand how different forms of heritage are engaged in, and engage with, respondent perceptions of social, cultural, and economic inclusion or exclusion.

“Heritage Ecosystems Impact Assessment: East West Rail and South Cambridgeshire heritage ecosystems”
Tanja Hoffmann with Dr. Dacia Viejo-Rose, Ben Davenport, and Alisa Santikarn (Cambridge Heritage Research Centre, University of Cambridge) (Axis 1)

The project team is developing a Heritage Ecosystems Impact Assessment (HEIA) methodology that will fill a major gap in UK impact assessment practice. Heritage ecosystems is the term we use to capture the interconnected relationships between people, their environment, and their recent and more distant pasts, and the significance they attach to these relationships. The end product will be a HEIA methodology that can be used by community stakeholders, impact assessors and planners to capture, assess, and provide meaningful ways to mitigate impacts to the intangible heritages that define and sustain heritage ecosystems. The project is conducted in collaboration with residents of several South Cambridgeshire villages that are impacted by the planning phase of the Cambourne to Cambridge stretch of the proposed East West Rail corridor.

“An Area of Outstanding National Narrative: Rural heritages in the ‘lost’ villages of Scar and Lodge, Nidderdale Valley AONB, North Yorkshire.”
Tanja Hoffmann, Emma Waterton, with Keith Emerick (Historic England) (Axis 1)

Heritage practitioners and scholars are seeking ways to escape the ‘single story’ approach to heritage sites, where dominant narratives effectively forestall the telling of multiple, complex, and layered heritage attachments. In this project researchers from the HGCRC and Historic England will work with Nidd Valley community members to explore the feasibility of co-creating a research project about the ‘lost’ villages of Scar and Lodge. Both villages are little-explored heritage features of the Scar House Reservoir, located in North Yorkshire’s Nidderdale Valley Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty (AONB). By focusing on oft-excluded rural heritage narratives we look to explore the feasibility of co-creating the UK’s first “Area of Outstanding National Narrative” (AONN). In our minds an AONN will achieve two important objectives. First, it places value on the heritage of rural lifeways and experiences, and second it provides opportunity for the visiting public to find beauty in the complexities of place-making.

“The Widgeon Valley, a q̓ə́yc̓əy [Katzie] Cultural Keystone Place”
Tanja Hoffmann, Roma Leon [q̓ə́yc̓əy knowledge holder], Katzie First Nation (Axis 2)

This project weaves together strands of Indigenous sovereignty and rights discourse, specifically those that foreground reconciliation, with Indigenous ontology, resource management policy, and keystone places thinking in a Canadian context. In collaboration with the Katzie First Nation and several Canadian Federal, Provincial, and municipal regulatory bodies, we explore how reimplementation of Indigenous rights-based management of cultural keystone places constitutes the meaningful mobilization of cultural heritage for climate-change response. Specifically, we are investigating how Indigenous place-based management combats climate change on two fronts. First through biodiversity preservation and enhancement, and second through exploration of whether Katzie’s ontologically-based avenues of “attending to” their world have the potential to inspire the kind of broad-based systems change many experts cite as necessary for climate change mitigation and adaptation.

“Katzie Customary Law: Inward Gathering, Outward Sharing”
Tanja Hoffmann, Roma Leon, April Pierre, with support from Katzie First Nation and Justice Canada (Axis 2)

The Katzie Customary Law project focuses on q̓ə́yc̓əy [Katzie] First Nation customary law revitalization and application. It employs de-colonizing methodologies by placing the decision-making authority over specific avenues and approaches to research in the hands of community members. It has three interrelated objectives. 

As a first priority, the project team has begun to develop an understanding of customary law as its contemporary manifestations. Specifically, the team is working with Elders and other Katzie knowledge holders to reveal Indigenous laws through community-led research into the customary protocols embedded in Katzie’s relationship to and management of their territory. The second objective (re)introduces customary protocol on the land most recently through the reestablishment of ceremonial practices that reinforce reciprocal people/place relations. For the final study phase, and in accordance with the third objective, the team will investigate the external application of customary law with respect to the creation of a Katzie territorial management plan which includes economic development components.

“Welcome to Pine Point”: Anthropocene Encounters in the Norwest Territories, Canada”
Tanja Hoffmann, Emma Waterton, Hayley Saul (Axis 4)

Life in the Anthropocene is characterised by encounters with ubiquitous manifestations of human presences. This project looks to engage with Pine Point, a forcibly abandoned mining town on the south shore of Tu Nedhe ( 'Big Lake' in Dene Soline), or 'Tucho,' ('big water' in the language of the Dehcho Dene), also Great Slave Lake (in colonial nomenclature) in the territories of the Deninu Kué and K’atl’odeeche First Nations and homeland of the Fort Resolution and Hay River Métis Councils. Established in 1964, the town of Pine Point was planned and built by Cominco Mines Ltd. to house workers for the nearby lead and zinc open pit mining operation. At its peak, Pine Point was home to a population of 2000 people consisting primarily of mine workers and their families. In 1989 Cominco closed the mine and the town along with it.  The project is part multispecies ethnography and part autoethnography since one of the Centre researchers (Tanja Hoffmann) was born and raised in Pine Point until her family left in 1983. Despite the forced dislocation from the townsite, there remains a thriving online and occasionally on-site Pine Point community where heritages of memory, identity, and erasure intersect in a unique Anthropocene landscape. This project aims to engage with the active Pine Point community, and the Anthropocene landscape of Pine Point itself, to explore questions of nested Anthropocene pasts, presents, and futures.

“Naturalizing to Place in the UK: Indigenous thinking on UK farming heritages”
Tanja Hoffmann, Hayley Saul, Emma Waterton (Axis 6)

This research project looks to understand the heritage residing at the intersections of farmers and farming, agroecology and regenerative farming initiatives, and farming knowledge and climate change action, through application of Indigenous theoretical models and methodologies. Indigenous scholarship advances theoretical contributions and methodological approaches that ask different kinds of questions about human relationships with places in which we dwell. Far from a call to ‘become Indigenous’, Indigenous scholars are demanding instead that non-Indigenous peoples find solutions to climate change and other ‘wicked problems’ based on their own place-based knowledges. Potawatami ecologist Robin Wall Kimmerer suggests that through (re)acquisition of place-based knowings, it is possible to “naturalise to place”. “Being naturalised to place”, says Kimmerer “means to live as if this is the land that feeds you… to take care of the land as if our lives and the lives of all our relatives depend on it. Because they do.”  We are working with new entrant farmers and multi-generation farming families in the UK in hopes of better understanding how the perspectives of people who work most intimately with the land that quite literally feeds us might contribute to a more fulsome understanding of what is required to naturalise to place in the UK.

“Tree People: Mountains, Forests, Savannas”
Tanja Hoffmann, Hayley Saul, Emma Waterton with Malambo Grassroots (Antonia Banyard, Jocelyn Banyard, and Rabson Kambwali)

What heritages are encountered and mobilised by entanglements with trees? This central question drives our partnership with several communities and organzations who are working with trees to create innovative responses to challenges of food and water security in both urban and rural landscapes. Specifically, we wish to engage with heritage knowledges and practices that guide human/tree relationships taking as a starting point the beginning and end of tree life. We hope that by working with people who are actively involved in planting and caretaking their tree relations, we can look to inform more nuanced actions that can be taken in support of the tree. To begin our inquiry, we have launched a new partnership with Malambo Grassroots, a community-based charity working in Monze, Zambia. Over the past several years, Malambo Grassroots has funded the provision, and with the assistance of community-based distribution networks, the planting of over 5000 trees. The published goals of the tree planting include river bank stabilisation, water preservation, and food security. We look to work with Malambo Grassroots, and the communities they partner with, to learn from people/tree encounters. Some of the questions we are interested in exploring include: How does planting trees interact with existing traditional knowledge of trees? How do the people of Monze work to establish reciprocal relations with young trees knowing their direct benefit (especially fruit trees) might not be felt for several years? What indirect benefits do the trees give the people, and the people the trees?

Collaborators

Katzie First Nation

Cambridge Heritage Research Centre

Historic England

Malambo Grassroots

Available PhD research projects

Tanja welcomes applications from PhD candidates in the following areas:

• Heritage and social justice
• Indigenous / heritage encounters
• Anti-colonial and decolonial heritage
• Heritage of and in the Anthropocene
• Heritage, place, identity
• Cultural landscapes
• Agricultural heritage
• More-than-human heritage

Supervision

Current PhD Students:

Fran Mahone, 'Imperial florae: York's sedimented colonial elsewhere. (co-supervision with Hayley Saul)

Melissa Thomas, At the Sea’s Edge: Inclusion and Exclusion through Fisherfolk Heritage (co-supervision with Emma Waterton)