2. Letting Go The Bone: The Idea Of Indian Title In British Columbia, 1849–1927

Foster, Hamar

doi:10.3138/9781442657021-005

Cited by 4 publications

(3 citation statements)

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“…Early in the 20th century, they began to create intertribal native rights organizations (Tennant 1990) and, with the help of sympathetic nonnative lawyers, to use the colonizers' law as a site of resistance. A legal case, elaborated in 1908 in a Cowichan petition intended for the judicial committee of the Privy Council in London and in a Nisga'a petition to the same body a few years later, argued that native people had never relinquished their title to the land, which therefore was still legally theirs (Foster 1995). By this time, some native leaders had emerged who spoke English fluently, understood a good deal about the complex of colonial power, and sought ways of bending it to their advantage.…”

Section: Concluding Observationsmentioning

confidence: 99%

How Did Colonialism Dispossess? Comments from an Edge of Empire

Harris

2004

Annals of the Association of American Geographers

296

172

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The emphasis on culture in studies of colonialism tends to obscure other forms of colonial power while making it impossible to contextualize the cultural argument and assess its salience. Rather than focusing on texts, systems of signification, and procedures of knowledge generation, as the colonial discourse literature is wont to do, a fuller understanding of colonial powers is achieved by explaining colonialism's basic geographical dispossessions of the colonized. In so doing, the issue of power is not prejudged and the particular roles of different modes and theories of colonial power come into focus. I explore these propositions by considering the powers underlying the reserve (reservation) system in British Columbia, a system that, by allocating a tiny fraction of the land to native people and opening the rest for development, facilitated the geographical reorganization of the province. My conclusions are these: the initial ability to dispossess rested primarily on physical power and the supporting infrastructure of the state; the momentum to dispossess derived from the interest of capital in profit and of settlers in forging new livelihoods; the legitimation of and moral justification for dispossession lay in a cultural discourse that located civilization and savagery and identified the land uses associated with each; and the management of dispossession rested with a set of disciplinary technologies of which maps, numbers, law, and the geography of resettlement itself were the most important. Although no one body of theory explains colonial power, several theoretical perspectives yield crucial insights.

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Section: Concluding Observationsmentioning

confidence: 99%

How Did Colonialism Dispossess? Comments from an Edge of Empire

Harris

2004

Annals of the Association of American Geographers

296

172

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“…The government ended up signing a lease whose terms were far less favourable to the Musqueam than those originally agreed upon, and compounded the breach of fiduciary duty by refusing – for 15 years – to show the actual lease to band leaders. By the time the Musqueam saw the lease, in the 1970s, the political climate had changed; and just as importantly, by then the provision of the Indian Act that prohibited the collection of funds to sue the government regarding aboriginal rights had been repealed (Foster, 1995).…”

Section: The Honour Of the Crownmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Crown in a Multicultural Age: The Changing Epistemology of (Post)colonial Sovereignty

Valverde

2012

Social & Legal Studies

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In Canada as in other (post)colonial settings, courts have been facing the challenging task of redefining both substantive aboriginal legal rights and evidentiary rules that now look ethnocentric. Recent litigation has shown that while rights claims made by indigenous collectives are difficult to make and sustain in court, the newly revived doctrine of the Crown's inherent 'honour' can work for aboriginal peoples precisely because the Crown's honour is, as it were, self-acting. But the neo-medieval discourse of the Crown coexists, in the text of Canadian courts, with discursive practices that enact a contemporary, pluralistic, socially aware form of judicial anthropology. These two wholly conflicting representations of the Canadian state live happily side by side in current Canadian judicial discourse. This easy eclecticism stands in marked contrast to the difficulties and embarrassments experienced by aboriginal leaders testifying before judges. The close judicial scrutiny of aboriginal claims contrasts with the tolerance of major epistemological contradictions in the state's discourses about itself.

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“…I will begin with examples of alternatives that have actually become the norm after a period of being lost. An excellent illustration of this is the role of history in the modern development of the law relating to aboriginal rights in Canada, 53 and this is an especially good example because as I understand it a similar story could be told about Australia and New Zealand. 54 In a famous statement in 1969 then Canadian Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau announced that there was no such thing as rights for aboriginal people distinct from those held by all other Canadians.…”

Section: Legal History Legal Pluralism and Alternative Visionsmentioning

confidence: 99%