WHERE THE BULL DOZES takes as its starting point Pauline Oliveros’s Some Sound Observations, in which she tells a story about a bulldozer crashing into her home while she is eating lunch. Later, she wonders about “the sound of a bull dozing.” While Scott Smallwood’s soundscape does not include that particular sound, it does contain many field recordings collected in Wood Buffalo National Park in the northern boreal forest of Alberta, Canada, which is one of the last places on Earth where wild bison roam, along with many other endangered mammals and birds.
When the ‘largest industrial project’ winds down, what will replace the sound of the bull dozing?
Wood Buffalo is also an important site for Indigenous peoples, who have inhabited the region for more than 8000 years, and as such the park continues to support Cree, Chipewyan, and Metis communities. As a national park close to the Alberta oil sands, however, it also hosts and supports a number of non-Indigenous communities. Though Wood Buffalo’s park status protects it in many ways, its waters are under constant threat from the bulldozers and other machinery of Canadian oil sands mining operations. Where the Bull Dozes is therefore dedicated to Pauline, who reminded us that “natural sound is healing sound.”
