Making Native Space: Colonialism, Resistance, and Reserves in British Columbia

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.