Native Lands and Livelihoods in British Columbia

The allocation of Indian reserves in British Columbia defined two primal spaces, one for native people and the other for virtually everyone else. By the 1930s, the space set aside for native people comprised more than 1,500 small, scattered reserves, totaling one-third of 1 percent of the land of the province—a reserve geography with no close North American equivalent. Fundamentally, this geography was the product of the pervasive settler assumptions, backed by the colonial state, that most of the land they encountered in British Columbia was waste, waiting to be put to productive use; or, where native people obviously were using the land, that their uses were inefficient and therefore should be replaced. Such assumptions, coupled with settlers’ self-interest and a huge imbalance of power, were sufficient to dispossess native people of most of their land. The native people of British Columbia were located in many small reserves rather than a few large ones (as many had advocated) for a variety of reasons. The provincial government argued that small reserves would force native people into the workplace to learn the habits of industry, thrift, and materialism, thus becoming civilized, and (less often stated), to provide cheap seasonal labor for burgeoning industries—arguments that depended on both colonial self-interest and altruism. In the early years of colonial resettlement there was concern that concentrations of native people could pose a military threat to settlers. Moreover, government officials soon found that native people were intensely attached to their habitual places and that there was not the military and bureaucratic power at hand to move them or to make the moves stick. Given that reserves would be located within traditional territories, there was some attempt, more at some times than at others, to allocate the places that were most precious to native people, such as their villages, gravesites, cultivated fields, and fishing sites—none of which required much space. Native people identified such places to the reserve commissioners charged with allocating reserve lands. They never convinced the provincial government to allocate larger reserves that could accommodate traditional resource procurement, commercial logging or, for that matter, to allocate much agricultural land. Nor was the dominion—the legal custodian of native rights but also a partner in the Canadian confederation—ever quite prepared to take the prov-

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