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.
Making Native Space clarifies and informs the
current debate on the Native land question. It presents the most comprehensive
account available of perhaps the most critical mapping of space ever undertaken
in BC - the drawing of the lines that separated the tiny plots of land reserved
for Native people from the rest. Geographers, historians, anthropologists, and
anybody interested in and involved in the politics of treaty negotiation in
British Columbia should read this book.
Written by Cole Harris.
Published by UBC Press, 2002. |
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