| Reviews / Comptes Rendus | Labour/Le Travail, 53

Reviews / Comptes Rendus

Cole Harris, Making Native Space: Colonialism, Resistance and Reserves in British Columbia (Vancouver: UBC Press 2002).

THIS IS A MAJOR WORK in Canadian history, already acknowledged by its having won the Canadian Historical Association's 2003 Macdonald Prize. The book documents the creation of Indian reserves in the province of British Columbia through various phases from 1852 to 1938, arguing that the lines demarcating "Native space" are the "primal lines" upon which modern British Columbia is based. Although focused on "space" and boundaries, the book deftly links space and labour and so is of importance to the study of labour and Canadian history, generally.

Harris is an exceptional writer and reader. In his last book, The Re-Settlement of British Columbia, he brought an international literature on power and colonialism to bear on Canadian history. Making Native Space is informed by that same post-modern literature but takes a step back, wanting "not to get too fancy with colonialism." Here, he prefers to see how historical events were inscribed onto maps, then onto the landscape which now determines the "haves and have-nots" of British Columbia society. Over 50 maps in the book by cartographer Eric Leinberger leave little doubt about the residual nature of the one third of one percent of British Columbia that is now "Native space."

Labour, it turns out, was central to the shrinkage of Native space. Canada is founded, Harris says, on "the displacement of a people from their land and its repossession by others." (xxiv) This blunt inequality has been papered over, not only to justify it, but to make it seem a positive virtue. The justification drew on notions of ownership provided by the great political economist John Locke. Locke argued that property can only be owned when it is removed, through the investment of labour, "out of a state that nature hath provided."

It is through the ideas of Locke and Swiss jurist Émeric de Vattel that space and work become linked. Aboriginal people did labour, but, in European eyes, they did not invest it appropriately. Hunting and fishing, even slash-and-burn agriculture, did not improve nature, rationalized the agrarian Europeans. As de Vattel argued: "Those who still pursue this idle mode of life [hunting and gathering] ... [have] no reason to complain if other nations ... come and take possession of a part of those lands." Displacement was actually good for Aboriginal people, in a Lockean view, because it introduced them to private property and commerce, to Christianity and law; their losses would be more than compensated by the enhanced value of their labour and any remnants of their land they laboured on.

Harris lays out the debates that swirled around the displacement of indigenous peoples in the 18th and 19th centuries but emphasizes that philosophy was less the cause and more the rationale. The displacement of Native people had more to do with a potent settler land-hunger which overwhelmed the weak paternalistic response by the British Colonial Office, and later the federal government. He describes the weak oversight of the colonies by a thinly staffed Colonial Office, and then follows, with meticulous research, the ebb and flow of Indian policy on the ground from Confederation to World War II.

Labour is also important in that, when the majority of the reserves were laid out in the 1880s, most Aboriginal people worked seasonally as labourers in the capitalist work force. As Harris points out, reserves were placed where Aboriginal people lived and that was where they had access to a wage economy. When the economy changed, and mills or canneries closed, the Native spaces did not. Fixed in a location that was relevant to the 19th century, they became impoverished in the 20th century.

The book offers many conclusions, some of them surprising. It makes a strong case that state paternalism served Aboriginal people better than a settler-dominated responsible government. It clearly demonstrates that from the start and through the changing colonial policies, there has been a consistent assertion by Aboriginal people to ownership of the land they were being pushed off. Harris also demonstrates that colonialism and colonists were complex, often in conflict among themselves, and rarely speaking with one voice. He highlights Indian Commissioner Gilbert Malcolm Sproat, who went against the grain. Sproat reminds us of possibility and urgency of internal dissent when a majority moves unfairly against a minority.

Already 300 pages, the book has made a powerful contribution to understanding how colonialism worked. So it is not so much a critique as an observation that it is really about only one side of a conversation. Although the subtitle is "Colonialism, Resistance and Reserves ...," the focus is on the link between the first and the last. Although he does not ignore resistance (and makes good use of Native testimony before the McKenna McBride Commission), the colonial sources that the book is largely based on do not accord it much prominence. Harris is led to conclude Aboriginal resistance had little effect. Perhaps, but this bears more exploration.

Recent studies on manifestations of colonialism have emphasized the dialogic nature of the process, that it was not one-sided. Scholars of missionary proselytization like John and Jean Comaroff and Michael Harkin point to the interactive aspect of colonialism. With respect to a dialogue around land, understanding Aboriginal notions of space and ownership seem critical to understanding the unfolding encounters of Aboriginal people and Europeans.

Pre-European boundaries between Aboriginal people, cultures, and resources, determined the distribution of Aboriginal people in British Columbia, their wealth, and their willingness to engage the newcomers. The book documents the etching of the primal lines of colonialism, but there are earlier boundaries that underlay the reserve system. These are the real primal boundaries. Aboriginal people in British Columbia were not amalgamated in reserves far from their homelands as in the United States, they were not confined by the pass system as they were in the Prairies, and they were not dissuaded by laws banning their ceremonies, including those that transferred property. The history of colonialism is lopsided if we focus on the colonial archive and the role of Europeans. Aboriginal engagement and resistance with colonialism accounts for what survives as "native space." Colonization has superimposed others on former native spaces. But when modern treaties get signed or Aboriginal rights become more clearly delineated, it will be along, at least in part, the primal boundaries established by Aboriginal peoples.

As a result of the focus, what Harris' notion of Native space does not capture is the mobility through space that has been so much a part of the pre-contact and then work-force experience of Aboriginal people. Aboriginal movement on and off the reserve, their use of crown land, important especially in the sparsely settled north, Native space in urban areas and work sites, like canneries or hop fields, all lie outside its focus. Yet, these have always represented an important aspect of Native space up to today when half the registered Indians in Canada do not live on reserves.

Although the notion of Native space is rather circumscribed, as a study of the colonial side of the creation of the reserve system, the book is superb. It deserves to be read by historians and Canadians interested in the history and resolution of aboriginal claims to just treatment. Harris dedicates his book to an uneasy colonist, Gilbert Malcolm Sproat, who in 1860 pushed Native people off their land at cannon point to build a sawmill, but who, by 1880, was one of the province's few defenders of Aboriginal rights. There is an obvious reflection of the conflicted colonist in Harris, whose family homesteaded Native space in the Kootenays. A self-acknowledged beneficiary (with all non-Aboriginal Canadians) of the appropriation of Aboriginal space and rights, he concludes with an extended chapter dealing with contemporary Aboriginal land issues. Here he proposes "a politics of difference" which acknowledges that settler society is here to stay but includes, on moral and practical grounds, a redistribution of land and wealth to Aboriginal people. After reading this carefully documented book, most non-Aboriginal Canadians will join the Sproats and Harrises in the ranks of uneasy colonists.


John Lutz University of Victoria

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