Making Native Space: Colonialism, Resistance, and Reserves in British Columbia clarifies and informs the current debate on First Nations land rights. 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 First Nations people from the rest. Cole Harris analyzes the impact of reserves on First Nations lives and livelihoods and considers how, in light of this, the land question might begin to be resolved. The account begins in the early nineteenth-century British Empire and then follows First Nations land policy, First Nations 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. Geographers, historians, anthropologists, and anybody interested in and involved in the politics of treaty negotiation in British Columbia should read this book. Cole Harris was a member of the Department of Geography at the University of British Columbia.
