You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
This elegantly written and insightful book provides a geographical history of the Indian reserve in British Columbia. Cole Harris analyzes the impact of reserves on Native lives and livelihoods and considers how, in light of this, the Native land question might begin to be resolved. The account begins in the early nineteenth-century British Empire and then follows Native land policy – and Native resistance to it – in British Columbia from the Douglas treaties in the early 1850s to the formal transfer of reserves to the Dominion in 1938.
In this beautifully crafted collection of essays, Cole Harris reflects on the strategies of colonialism in British Columbia during the first 150 years after the arrival of European settlers. The pervasive displacement of indigenous people by the newcomers, the mechanisms by which it was accomplished, and the resulting effects on the landscape, social life, and history of Canada's western-most province are examined through the dual lenses of post-colonial theory and empirical data. By providing a compelling look at the colonial construction of the province, the book revises existing perceptions of the history and geography of British Columbia.
Winner, 2008 K.D. Srivastava Prize for Excellence in Scholarly Publishing, UBC Press The Reluctant Land describes the evolving pattern of settlement and the changing relationships of people and land in Canada from the end of the fifteenth century to the Confederation years of the late 1860s and early 1870s. It shows how a deeply indigenous land was reconstituted in European terms, and, at the same time, how European ways were recalibrated in this non-European space. It also shows how an archipelago of scattered settlement emerged out of an encounter with a parsimonious territory, and suggests how deeply this encounter differed from an American relationship with abundance. The book begins with a description of land and life in northern North America in 1500, and ends by considering the relationship between the pattern of early Canada and the country as we know it today. Intended to illuminate the background of modern Canada, The Reluctant Land is an intelligent discussion of people and place that will be welcomed by scholars and lay readers alike.
Canada is a bounded land – a nation situated between rock and cold to the north and a border to the south. Cole Harris traces how society was reorganized – for Indigenous and non-Indigenous people alike – when Europeans resettled this distinctive land. Through a series of vignettes that focus on people’s experiences on the ground, he exposes the underlying architecture of colonialism, from first contacts, to the immigrant experience in early Canada, to the dispossession of First Nations. In the process, he unearths fresh insights on the influence of Indigenous peoples and argues that Canada’s boundedness is ultimately drawing it toward its Indigenous roots.
In 1888, a prosperous industrial family in Calne, Wiltshire, sent one of its younger sons, a lad judged to have no head for business, to Guelph Agricultural College in Ontario to learn to be a farmer. Joseph Colebrook Harris, the author’s grandfather, didn’t take to Ontario and after visiting a friend on Salt Spring Island, fell in love with BC. Eventually fetching up on the shores of the Slocan Lake, Joe bought 270 acres of hilly land in the Slocan Valley, less than thirty acres of which was really fit for farming, and began clearing the forest to build a ranch. Here is the story of Harris’s life and the next 120 years of the ranch’s, including the discovery of a silver–lead mine ...
None
Written primarily by Daisy Phillips, with a few by her husband Jack, to her family in England, these letters describe the creation of a shortlived English home in the Windermere Valley of southwestern British Columbia. Not given to introspection, Daisy registers her immediate and frank reactions to her new environment and startling new way of life. From her letters we learn of the experiences of the Phillips and their neighbours in settling the newly opened land and of their attempts to grow fruit in an area with limited agricultural potential.
Scholarly depictions of the history of Aboriginal people in Canada have changed dramatically since the 1970s when Arthur J. ("Skip") Ray entered the field. New Histories for Old examines this transformation while extending the scholarship on Canada's Aboriginal history in new directions. This collection combines essays by prominent senior historians, geographers, and anthropologists with contributions by new voices in these fields. The chapters reflect themes including Native struggles for land and resources under colonialism, the fur trade, "Indian" policy and treaties, mobility and migration, disease and well-being, and Native-newcomer relations.
Drawing on extensive archival and library sources, Karsten explores these collisions and arrives at a number of conclusions that will surprise.
Reproduction of the original: Missy by Miriam Cole Harris