Contesting Rural Space: Land Policy and Practices of Resettlement on Saltspring Island, 1859-1891

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McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP, 2005 - Business & Economics - 324 pages
An intriguing mix of African-American, First Nation, Hawaiian, and European, the early residents of Saltspring Island were neither successful farmers nor full-time waged workers, neither squatters nor bona-fide landowners. Contesting Rural Space explores how these early settlers created and sustained a distinctive society, culture, and economy. In the late nineteenth century, residents claiming land on Saltspring Island walked a careful line between following mandatory homestead policies and manipulating these policies for their own purposes. The residents favoured security over risk and modest sufficiency over accumulation of wealth. Government land policies, however, were based on an idea of rural settlement as commercially successful family farms run by sober and respectable men. Settlers on Saltspring Island, deterred by the poor quality of farmland but encouraged by the variety of part-time, off-farm remunerative occupations, the temperate climate, First Nations cultural and economic practices, and the natural abundance of the Gulf Island environment, made their own choices about the appropriate uses of rural lands. R.W. Sandwell shows how the emerging culture differed from both urban society and ideals of rural society.
 

Contents

Reading the Rural with a Microhistorical Eye
3
Land Policies and the Agricultural Vision in British Columbia
15
Settling Up the Wild Lands
40
Rocks and poor soil characterized much of Saltspring Island
93
Clark Whims
102
Cordwood stacked at Beaver Point awaiting shipment
112
Political Economy and Household Structure
122
Road crew is working on a bridge across Cusheon Creek
130
Violence Racism
159
Mural on the wall of an island pub celebrating the life and work
167
The murder scene
175
Melvin Estes son of William Estes
184
Cohesion and Fracture in Saltspring Island Society
193
The Bittancourt family on the porch of their large house
199
Log schoolhouse at Central Settlement near Ganges
219
Sylvia Stark
227

The Stevens and their lodgers
145
A Canadian trope
154

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About the author (2005)

R.W. Sandwell is professor of history at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education and in the Department of History at the University of Toronto.

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