Sharing the colonial burden: Treaty‐making and reconciliation in Hul’qumi’num territory

This article explores different understandings of reconciliation within the context of modern treaty making in British Columbia, focusing on the role of the BC treaty process in resolving the longstanding dispute between Aboriginal Peoples and the Crown over rights to land. Although the treaty process was created to reconcile competing interests in the land, Crown and Aboriginal negotiators often have contradictory understandings of how this reconciliation is to take place. Drawing on a case study of the Hul’qumi’num Peoples, a group of Coast Salish First Nations, I examine how different understandings and approaches to reconciliation impede progress at the treaty table. I conclude that progress towards treaty and reconciliation in this case will require coming to terms with the Hul’qumi’num territory's colonial history and geography, something that the current treaty process actively avoids, plus the crafting of a treaty agreement that allows for a more equal sharing of the burden that colonialism has created in this place. More particularly, meaningful reconciliation will require a fuller recognition of Aboriginal title and rights across the breadth of the territory and a commitment to meaningful compensation of Hul’qumi’num Peoples for the wrongful taking of their lands.     

TOWARDS SHARED OWNERSHIP: PROPERTY,GEOGRAPHY, AND TREATY MAKING IN BRITISH COLUMBIA

In British Columbia, Canada's westernmost province, unresolved Aboriginal claims to land remain highly contentious. Since the early 1990s, a unique treaty negotiation process has sought to resolve questions about land ownership and establish a new relationship between Aboriginal peoples and the Crown. After almost two decades, the limitations of this treaty process are increasingly evident and answers to the land question remain elusive. This article examines this treaty‐making process through a property lens, focusing on how particular models of property are privileged by and produced through this approach to treaty. I argue that the treaty process, as currently structured, works to entrench dominant Western forms of property across Aboriginal territories in a highly separate and unequal manner, and as such, serves to reinscribe asymmetrical relations of power between Aboriginal peoples and the Crown. To a considerable extent, this asymmetrical approach to property making explains the lack of progress towards treaties. The final part of the article explores alternative approaches to treaty proposed by Aboriginal groups. I argue that these proposals, which reflect Aboriginal understandings of property, offer a new and more promising direction for treaty making. In particular, the emphasis on sharing lands and resources, as well as the wealth generated from these, provides a path to reconcile competing property interests and to build a new and more respectful relationship between the Crown and Aboriginal peoples. I suggest that the difficulties of treaty making in British Columbia reflect broader challenges associated with land restitution and reconciliation in settler colonies.     

Contesting Patriarchies: Nlha7pamux and Stl'atl'imx women and colonialism in nineteenth-century British Columbia

In the second half of the nineteenth century, a number of First Nations (Native) women in the southern interior of British Columbia began to live with and marry white settlers and gold miners. Demographic shifts in both white and Native populations, paired with the precedent of liaisons between fur traders and Native women, contributed to the mobility of Native women. Their departure from indigenous communities was, however, bitterly contested by Native men as well as by white politicians who sought to protect 'racial purity' in the province. Despite opposition, Native women pursued this historically constituted possibility of living within an alternative patriarchy. By the late 1890s, waves of British immigration brought young, single, white women to the province and, in a political climate increasingly hostile to 'miscegenation', male settlers began to marry white wives instead. Thus, ironically, discursive and demographic pressures again closed the window through which Native women had travelled into a different culture. Drawing on colonial records and inferences, this article analyses historical components of agency over several generations of Native women. In the process, it examines ways in which relations of power shifted along the axes of race and gender over 30 years of colonialism in British Columbia.     

Why a British referendum on EU membership will not solve the Europe question

This article scrutinizes the merits of holding a referendum over UK membership of the EU. It queries the assumption that direct democracy can somehow resolve the longstanding Europe question in British politics. To do this, the analysis traces the existence of an exceptionalist approach to the EU within Britain, now associated with re‐negotiating UK membership in the shadow of a referendum. The article argues that the prospects for a radical reconfiguration of the UK's treaty obligations are slim, thereby increasing the risk of a vote to withdraw. Yet withdrawal would be the opposite of a simple solution to the Europe question. Political and economic interests dictate lengthy politicking over a highly complex post‐Brexit settlement revisiting free movement of goods, services, capital and people. Such negotiations undermine any mooted cathartic benefits of a popular vote, while Eurosceptics will remain dissatisfied in the event of a yes, a result likely to further destabilize the Conservative Party. Consequently, the simplicity and decisiveness that a referendum—particularly one that spurns the EU—promises is merely a mirage as relations with the EU necessarily form part of an enduring British political conversation.     

Britain and the Convention on the Future of Europe

If the reaction from the British Conservative Party and the right-wing press were to be believed, it would be easy to think that the constitutional treaty produced by the European Convention represented a failure for Britain. This article takes issues with such claims. It illustrates, by tracing British involvement within the Convention from its inception to the finalization of the draft treaty, that the British Government succeeded remarkably well in ensuring that the document reflected its major policy preferences.     

Ethnohistorical geography and aboriginal rights litigation in Canada: memoir of an expert witness

Since the early 1950s, evidence from ethnohistorical geography has played an important role in aboriginal rights claims and litigation in North America. I became involved in Canadian aboriginal and treaty rights litigation over 35 years ago. My participation has included several landmark cases: Regina v. Horseman (treaty rights), Delgamuukw v. Regina (Comprehensive title claim), and Regina v. Powley (Métis rights). Most of the evidence that I have presented over the years has dealt with various aspects of the changing spatial economies of First Nations and Métis communities from Ontario to British Columbia. The Hudson's Bay Company's vast archive has been the primary source for this data.     

退出印度前夕的英国殖民者与印度王公的消失

殖民地印度时期,在南亚次大陆上分布着560多个土邦。二战后英国工党政府背弃了以往保守党的土邦政策,采取了理论上继续支持王公、现实中则背弃王公的两面性政策。代表英王的副王和政治部支持王公拥有成立自治领的权力,试图以此为筹码为王公的未来争取更多的利益,而其真实态度则是鼓励宗主国从土邦撤离,要求王公加入未来的新政府。在印巴分治的前夜,英属印度政府成立土邦部,出台《加入协定》,采取了威逼利诱的两手策略。宗主国的政策转变、政策的两面性、对土邦态度的暖昧性和土邦策略的两手性使王公被迫加入了新成立的自治领,致使印度王公消失。     

Brexit: initial reflections

Even though the opinion polling before the British referendum on membership of the European Union showed a narrow gap between the two sides, the actual result—a vote to leave—on the morning of 24 June 2016 came as a surprise to many. Yet in truth both the referendum and its outcome had deep roots in British politics. In this article we cast an eye over the history of Britain's relationship with the EU, which has long been marked by a mixture of awkwardness and successful influence. We trace the origins of the referendum in long‐run tensions between, and within, the political parties, and in the lukewarm public support for European integration. We also examine more contingent, short‐term factors relating to the referendum campaign itself. We conclude by commenting on the divisions exposed by the vote along lines of geography, education, class and wealth, and suggest that reconciling these with the continuing tensions in the party landscape make a clean and speedy exit from the EU unlikely.     

The Inspector General's Last Prize: The Chinese Native Customs Service, 1901–31

The roles of the Chinese Maritime Customs Service (CMCS), particularly the role of the inspector general (IG) have most frequently been discussed in the context of Sino-foreign relations. The relationship between the CMCS and the Chinese Native Customs establishment has seldom been studied. It is worth noting how, after the Boxer Uprising, the CMCS, dominated by the British, successfully, and much more quietly, extended its power to the Chinese domestic arena through its assumption of control over the Native Customs Service. The thirty-year period during which the CMCS controlled the Native Customs before the latter was abolished in 1931 actually tells us a great deal about the nature of the CMCS and the limits it faced to the exercise of its power. This paper's case study of the Native Customs provides a wider opportunity to re-examine the structure of the Chinese Maritime Customs Service on the ground, in localities away from Shanghai and the more visible world of the treaty ports.     

Pastoral Power, Governmentality and Cultures of Order in Nineteenth-Century British Columbia

I deploy Michel Foucault's concepts of pastoral power and governmentality to investigate the material consequences of two very different visions of the governance of Native people in nineteenth-century British Columbia. This entails a consideration of these modalities of power, and of the usefulness of relocating them in a colonial context. But I also argue that the conceptions of order embedded within these two modalities of power bear the stamp of, and demonstrate, very distinctive cultural geographies.     

A Vast Inland Empire and the Last Great West: remaking society, space and environment in early British Columbia

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a new order was imposed on the land and inhabitants of present-day interior British Columbia. From one perspective this was a story of human progress and improvement – the advance of colonizing Europeans into lands that they considered underutilized and unproductive and that they sought, often successfully, to bring within the growing orbit of global trade and world capitalism. Yet for many people and creatures the story of resettlement was far from a story of progress. In relatively short order – less than a century – the grasslands of interior British Columbia were swept and transformed by many of the most powerful currents of western modernity. The results of this transformation were uneven and often deeply inequitable. By the late nineteenth century native peoples had been dispossessed and struggled to survive on small resource-poor Indian Reserves; a few corporate and family-owned cattle ranches controlled the best range leaving small-scale immigrant ranchers with more or less marginal land; and many types of grassland had been heavily overgrazed. This paper explores these darker sides of European resettlement in present-day interior British Columbia by emphasizing the role of ranching in colonial resettlement, by describing the stratified rural society that ranching, in part, produced, and by revealing the different ways that cattle and ranches interacted with natural and economic processes to remake an environment.     

Betwixt and Between: Trauma,Survival and the Aboriginal Troopers of the Queensland Native Mounted Police

ABSTRACT

Much has been written about the history of the Queensland Native Mounted Police, mostly focussing on its development, its white officers, how much the Colonial Government genuinely knew about the actions of the Force, and how many people were killed during the frontier wars. Far less attention has been given to the Aboriginal men of the force, the nature of their recruitment, and the long-term traumatic impacts on Aboriginal peoples’ and communities’ psyches rather than broadscale changes to Aboriginal culture per se. This article examines the historical and ongoing psychological impacts of dispossession and frontier violence on Aboriginal people. Specifically, we argue that massacres, frontier violence, displacement, and the ultimate dispossession of land and destruction of traditional cultural practices resulted in both individual and collective inter-generational trauma for Aboriginal peoples. We posit that, despite the Australian frontier wars taking place over a century ago, their impacts continue to reverberate today in a range of different ways, many of which are as yet only partially understood.     

The politics of Antarctic minerals: The Greening of white Australia

On 22 May 1989 the Australian Government announced that it would not sign the Antarctic Minerals Convention that had been concluded in June 1988. Australia had been a strong supporter of the minerals treaty approach to regulating Antarctic mineral development. This case study in Australian foreign policy examines four well known approaches to foreign policy making in order to explain Australia's volte face on the minerals treaty. It is concluded that domestic politics best explains Australia's decision and that students of Australian foreign policy need to pay more attention to the domestic determinants of the policy making process.     

Stumbling towards Empire: The Shanghai Local Post Office,the Transnational British Community and Informal Empire in China, 1863–97

In the second half of nineteenth century, a small transnational British and foreign community grew up in the treaty ports scattered along China’s coast, a community literally caught between the great inner Asian empire of the Manchu Qing and British-dominated informal empire in Asia. Although scholars often contend that few major developments occurred in the foreign sector of the treaty port world until the very end of the nineteenth century, this article joins recent revisionist scholarship seeking to better understand the growth of this transnational treaty port community through a study of the Shanghai Municipal Council’s local post office in the context of informal empire prior to the rise of muscular Chinese nationalism in the early twentieth century.

As an institutional history of the virtually unknown local post office, this article is a study of the decades-long process by which the foreign settler community of Shanghai slowly built up the administrative capacity, trading networks and communications infrastructure of informal empire and semi-colonial order in the nineteenth-century treaty ports. The history of the local post office is largely unknown not because of its insignificance, but because we have not paid enough attention to the institutions that facilitated the emergence of transnational expatriate and settler communities throughout the world of British informal empire and the global and local influences that shaped them.     

Respondent Understanding of the 1999 Referendum Question on a Reform of the New Zealand Justice System

A referendum question at the 1999 New Zealand general election resulted in a 92% 'Yes' vote in favour of reform of the New Zealand justice system. However, even supporters of the referendum conceded the question was poorly designed and open to different interpretations. To examine these interpretations, we deconstructed the referendum question into five constituent questions and tested these on a sample of potential voters. Support for the constituent questions ranged from 70% to 95%, and subsequent probing revealed that respondents' understanding and interpretation of the key concepts varied considerably. These findings emphasise that survey professionals need to be involved in designing referendum questions and that proposed questions need cognitive pre-testing to ensure they convey their intended meaning and can be understood by voters. A poorly designed question reduces the credibility of the referendum process and threatens the outcome of specific policy initiatives.     

Explaining accommodation and resistance to demands for independence referendums in the UK and Spain

This article examines why the UK Government accepted the 2014 Scottish independence referendum while the Spanish Government opposes a similar referendum in Catalonia. Adopting a most similar research design, we argue that the variation is best explained by perceived political opportunities by the two ruling parties. These are embedded in different conceptions of the state and constitutional designs, mostly mononational in Spain and mostly plurinational in the UK but multiple and contested in both cases. In Spain, vote‐seeking calculations incentivise the Popular Party to oppose a referendum, while its mononational conception of the state and the Spanish constitutional design provide a further constraint and a discursive justification for their position. In the UK, David Cameron's accommodating position was based on the view that the Scottish referendum was low risk – as support for independence was minimal – with a high reward: the annihilation of the independence demand. The Conservatives have recently adopted a more restrictive position because seeming political advantage has changed. The findings suggest that independence referendums will continue to be rare events.     

To be or not to be in Europe: is that the question? Britain's European question and an in/out referendum

The idea of holding an in/out referendum on Britain's membership of the European Union has increasingly become a norm of British politics, an act seen as a necessary step for the country to answer what David Cameron described as the ‘European question in British politics’. A referendum, it is hoped, will cleanse British politics of a poisonous debate about Europe and democratically sanction a new stable UK–EU relationship, whether the UK stays in or leaves. Such hopes expect more of a referendum than it can provide. The European question is a multifaceted one and whatever the result of a referendum it is unlikely to address underlying questions that will continue to cause problems for UK–EU relations and Britain's European debate. A referendum can be a step forward in better managing the relationship and debate, but it is only that: a single step, after which further steps will be needed. Coming to terms with the European question and bringing stability to Britain's relations with the EU—whether in or outside the EU—will require comprehensive, longer‐term changes which a referendum can help trigger but in no way guarantee.     

Inconsistent,downplayed, and pathologized: How mining's gendered impacts are considered in BC environmental assessment

To what extent do mining environmental assessments in British Columbia (BC) consider gendered impacts? How are they considered? And how are these considerations shaped during the environmental assessment process? To answer these questions we undertook a systematic review of all completed BC mining environmental assessments between 1995 and 2019 (n = 37). Through a careful reading of documentation archived in the BC Environmental Assessment Office registry, we found that 60% of projects did not consider the gendered impacts of mining development; the remaining 40% of projects inconsistently assessed gendered impacts. While noting an increase in gender considerations in environmental assessments since 1995, also quantified in our results is what has not changed. Even where gender is considered, the assessments often collapse this concern into one of “women's issues,” obscuring intersectional impacts and downplaying violence along racialized and gender diverse lines, including those experienced by Indigenous women, children, two-spirit, trans, queer and non-binary people. Environmental assessment is a regulatory tool designed to adjudicate the impacts of mining projects, yet our results lead us to conclude that it is also a tool of environmental injustice, compounding and further sedimenting heteropatriarchal and racialized patterns produced through generations of settler colonial resource extraction in BC.     

Alice through the looking glass: emotion,personal connection,and reading colonial archives along the grain

This is a paper about Alice Ravenhill, an under-scrutinized early twentieth-century colonial settler in British Columbia, Canada. It is also a paper about the relationship and deep connections that I developed with her through archival research, a relationship and set of connections that I suggest open new spaces to (re)consider present-day colonial power in British Columbia. Specifically, I propose that ‘against the grain’ archival readings of BC’s past, with an emphasis on finding evidence of resistance to colonial power, can serve to distance the present from the past, thus positioning both contemporary geographies and researchers at work in the province today as existing in a different time and place than those of Alice Ravenhill and other colonial subjects. If, by reading ‘along the archival grain’ as I attempt to do in this paper, we (particularly those of us who live and work in BC today) instead understand ourselves as deeply and emotionally connected to colonial settlers like Alice Ravenhill, and if we understand their lives and work as similar to our own, there is a chance we might avoid some of their more egregious undertakings.     

Unstable properties: British Columbia,aboriginal title,and the “new relationship”

In the span of a few years, Premier Gordon Campbell transformed himself from a strong political critic of Aboriginal peoples in British Columbia to their apparent champion within a “new relationship.” The subsequent sudden collapse of Campbell's alliance with First Nations is a window into federal‐provincial relations, constitutional change, Aboriginal political organization, and the consequences of decisions made more than a century ago. Drawing on Nietzsche, we argue that Campbell's intentions, either to control or support Aboriginal peoples, were almost irrelevant; our focus should be on the “will to power” and efforts to stabilize power through territory. As a result of the collision of Aboriginal political mobilization, the expansion of natural resource development, and a series of court decisions, the unresolved nature of Canada's territorial claim to most of the land that is now British Columbia has finally reached a point where it can no longer be ignored, either politically or legally. However, the province lacks the legal authority to recognize or deny Aboriginal title, leaving the provincial government and indigenous peoples in British Columbia equally held hostage by the federal government.