Douglas C. Harris, Landing Native Fisheries: Indian Reserves and Fishing Rights in British Columbia, 1849-1925.(Book review)

Douglas C. Harris, Landing Native Fisheries: Indian Reserves and Fishing Rights in British Columbia, 1849-1925 (Vancouver: UBC Press 2008)

HARRIS'S CHIEF objective in writing this book is to lend support to the First Nations in British Columbia who have been negotiating with the BC government to settle land claims and associated rights ever since 1871 when the province joined Confederation. In particular, Harris takes great pains to delineate "reserve geography" through the use of detailed maps that appear throughout the book as well as in an appendix. These maps demarcate the land set aside from 1849 to 1925 as reserves. Well over half of that land was established to create access and rights to important adjacent fisheries. In other words, the principal argument in this very meticulously conducted study is that in the case of the First Nations of British Columbia, the setting aside of often small plots of land for the various bands was expressly done to secure access to important traditional fishing sites. That is, the land base cannot be dissociated from the adjacent water and the resources it contained. Since, apart from a very few treaties, most of the land and resources comprising the province of British Columbia were not "alienated" from the indigenous inhabitants who, for the most part, were not "settled" on a particular piece of land but travelled over territories to use adjacent resources like fish and game, the argument elaborated in this book is very important in emphasizing the "prior claims" of the reserve lands to adjacent fisheries.

Well before BC entered Confederation in 1871, the colonial government had started the process of allocating land, including access to fisheries, to the various bands resident in what would become the new province. In 1849, the Hudson's Bay Company assumed governance of the British colony on Vancouver Island. In the same year another colony was created on the mainland, and in 1866 they were joined together into one colony of the British Empire. The purpose of moving the territory from its status as a series of fur-trading posts to colonial status was to promote settlement as a way of marking the territory as British. There had earlier been American encroachment and the British wanted to reinforce the demarcation of the 49th parallel in the Oregon Treaty of 1846 as the border between American and British territory.

The HBC'S chief trader, James Douglas, was charged with negotiating land treaties with the indigenous peoples as a prelude to increased immigration and settlement. That is, there was nominal recognition that indigenous peoples had some claim to the land and resources that needed to be "extinguished." "Aboriginal title and rights do not rise from Crown grant; nor do they depend on the application of the Royal Proclamation of 1763 to British Columbia. Instead, they arise from the long use and occupation of land and resources by Aboriginal peoples that predate British assertions of sovereignty." (90) However, once the British did assume control of the colony of what became the province of British Columbia, there was inconsistent recognition of the prior claims of the First Nations to the land and resources that were being opened up to immigration, settlement, and industrialization. Harris relies on the legal system as the means to settling Aboriginal claims. However, his book testifies to the extent that these claims were sometimes recognized, often abused or ignored, and even rescinded after being recognized.

What became known as the "Douglas Treaties" included 14 land purchases covering a small portion of Vancouver Island. In addition to two other treaties involving small holdings on the mainland, after 1854 the question of "Native title" remained unresolved. After Douglas, there were a number of attempts to demarcate reserves. Harris argues that over half of the more than 1,500 reserves allotted between 1849 and 1925 were intended to provide indigenous access to fisheries. This is the reason why so much of the "reserve geography" constituted a miniscule land base. Like the resources they captured, Aboriginal people migrated over the course of the seasons to capture the resource (the abundant fisheries constituted a major part of their dietary and trading needs), to trade with one another, and to winter in larger settlements. Fishery sites were an essential component of there migrations. As long as incoming settlers were interested primarily in the gold rush or in permanent settlements based on an agrarian economy, disputes over fishery rights were kept to a minimum. However, once the capitalist economy in the form of salmon canning took hold in the last quarter of the 19th century, there was direct competition for the capture of salmon, especially sockeye salmon.

Harris takes pains to take the reader through the rather convoluted legal apparatus of the British Empire as it affected the common right of public access to capture fish, which varied according to whether the fish were found in tidal or non-tidal waters. What appeared to be relatively unproblematic in England, however, was vastly complicated by the geography of the Pacific Northwest coast. With establishment of the two colonies, Douglas began the arduous task of delineating land, including access to fisheries, for the First Nations. However, his work remained largely unfinished. Upon entry into Confederation in 1871, matters were complicated further when the federal state assumed responsibility for indigenous peoples under the Indian Act and for the fisheries (included in a separate department that produced its own legislation), while land became a provincial responsibility. Throughout the book, Harris takes pains to demonstrate the continuing recalcitrance on the part of both the province and the federal Department of Marine and Fisheries to recognize, much less to negotiate, the pre-existing rights of the First Nations to pursue their traditional fishing practices.

More than this, with the establishment of the salmon canning industry in the last quarter of the 19th century, not only were the pre-existing claims of the First Nations ignored, but their fisheries and important fishing sites were taken over to service the salmon canneries that became established on the major salmon-producing rivers and streams. While Indian agents often proved sympathetic to the rights of the First Nations, salmon canners who organized in a powerful lobby group, the federal fisheries department, and the provincial government not only refused to settle outstanding claims to land and fishery resources but began a process to cut back and rescind allocations made in the previous decades.

One of the most contentious continuing issues is over the "food fisheries," which were recognized by both the fisheries department and Indian Affairs as a right that the First Nations held. But the federal fisheries officers then tried to abolish this right, especially when the fishery sites and fish species were prized by non-Aboriginal fishers and fishing companies. Harris argues that had the First Nations been allowed control over their traditional fishing resources and fishing sites, there was hope that they could integrate into the emerging industrial economy. However, the reality was that they were dispossessed with the argument that they could then provide their labour to the canneries and fishing companies. But even in terms of their labour power, the First Nations suffered racial discrimination on the grounds that they were wards of the federal state under the Indian Act and thus unsuitable as wage workers.

In summary, then, both the strength and the weakness of this work is in its reliance on the legal system with its accompanying and convoluted political apparatuses to settle the largely outstanding and unresolved Aboriginal land claims that include fisheries rights. As Harris shows throughout the book, the provincial state over the course of the time period covered here refused to negotiate or to even recognize Aboriginal rights and title to the land and the federal fisheries department, for the most part, adopted a similar position. Various commissions, federal and provincial, took place with acknowledgement by at least some of the commissioners that the First Nations had rights that needed to be acknowledged and settled. But when these views contravened the various interests of fisheries bureaucrats, the salmon canners, the non-Aboriginal fishers, and provincial politicians, they were simply ignored. So one wonders how the legal and political systems can be used to uphold these centuries-long claims when they have so often in the past been used to thwart them. It seems that the fisheries themselves will long have become extinct through capitalist exploitation before the rights of the First Nations to their fisheries ever become recognized, upheld, and enforced in Canadian federal and provincial law.

ALICIA MUSZYNSKI

University of Waterloo

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