This thesis explores contemporary Crown - First Nations relationships in British Columbia through a comparative analysis of the Tsawwassen First Nation Final Agreement and the court decision in Tsilhqot’in Nation v. British Columbia. The comparative analysis considers First Nations’ claims to land, rights and jurisdiction entering the processes of treaty and litigation with respect to how the claims are modified as a result. The reduction of land and limitations placed on claims through treaty and trial are indicative of the quality of the relationships the provincial Crown pursues with First Nations. Given the historic injustices of denying Aboriginal rights and title in BC, the province’s history of colonization requires a new relationship to be just and equitable. The Crown’s pursuit of economic certainty overwhelms the potential for justice to be achieved, which are both fundamental aspects requiring balance for a healthy relationship to be established. The outcome of the analysis reveals the Crown’s ongoing colonization of First Nations in British Columbia. As a result, this thesis attempts to offer a decolonized view of these relationships and some solutions for moving forward by placing the onus of responsibility squarely on the people of British Columbia to demand change from our provincial government. / Graduate

Students of colonialism know well that the stories we tell have the capacity to make, maintain, or transform our relationships as well as our material futures. As earlier work has shown, Indigenous and settler peoples encountered and apprehended one another through story at first contact and in all subsequent contact moments, reaching right up to present-day mechanisms for negotiating conflicts over rights, resources, sovereignty, and historical injustice. In this dissertation, I explore in depth the role of story as a social practice in Indigenous-state relations, examining a series of key encounters over the last 150 years in which Indigenous peoples challenged and contested the state’s possession of their lands in what would become British Columbia. Informed by archival and community-based research with two Indigenous nations – the Stó:lō and the Haida – this study offers a history of Indigenous tactics in pursuit of the larger objective of decolonization, especially since the 1960s. Each of the four main chapters explores how Indigenous peoples have engaged distinct state-sanctioned mechanisms for addressing the state’s dispossession of their lands. The first chapter examines the dynamics of orality and literacy in a series of Stó:lō petitions from the late nineteenth century, a time when reserves were being reduced in order to accommodate a rapid influx of settlers seeking agricultural lands. Chapter 2 looks at Stó:lō experiences of treaty negotiation in the early twenty-first century, and how they are attempting to re-write the master narrative of Stó:lō -state relations. Chapter 3 focuses on the Haida blockade of logging in the mid-1980s, examining how the Haida acted into being what would become an iconic story of Haida nationhood. Finally, chapter 5 explores story and belief through a close study of the narrative dynamics of Haida participation in the Joint Review of the Enbridge Northern Gateway Project between 2012-2014. In each of these encounters, Stó:lō and Haida people exceed the limited narrative spaces they are assigned for communicating who they are and how they relate to their territories and to the state, while attempting to shift the established narrative. Recent scholarship on Indigenous-state relations has focused on how liberal settler states continue to exclude Indigenous peoples even through their gestures at including them into the body politic. While such work on the state is critical, I suggest that it is equally important to understand Indigenous peoples’ demonstrated capacity for collective cultural endurance, and how it exists in tension with the forces acting to assimilate and subsume Indigenous difference within the normative structures of settler society. This study attempts to grasp the nature of this endurance, and demonstrates how narrative is as central to Indigenous peoples’ repossessions of their land as it was to the state’s original dispossession of it. / Graduate / 2018-08-08

In this Master’s thesis, I document my experience working with members of the W̱SÁNEĆ Nation in their efforts to revitalize the reef net fishery. As part of this research project, I interviewed W̱SÁNEĆ community members, and I created a digital map of reef net fishing locations (SWELSWÁLET). In each of these interviews, different W̱SÁNEĆ community members chose to frame reef net fishing differently, and they highlighted specific and unique “alternative political approaches” toward W̱SÁNEĆ cultural resurgence (Kew & Miller 1999:58-59). Despite these differences, each W̱SÁNEĆ community member that I interviewed believed that reef net fishing is something that “needs to be shared” (XA’LATE, pers. comm., June 14, 2016). In Chapter 1, I explore the variations in what specific W̱SÁNEĆ community members want shared. In Chapters 2 and 3, however, I examine the delicate cultural, political, and legal contexts that have made sharing a complicated process. In Chapter 2, I analyze how the BC Treaty Process (BCTP) has exacerbated conflicts among First Nations in British Columbia. Further, I discuss the impact that these conflicts have had on how the W̱SÁNEĆ Nation shares information with their intranational and international neighbours. In Chapter 3, I explore how my misaligned expectations of knowledge sharing in collaborative community-based research—as a white settler man—clashed with “the values and beliefs, practices and customs of [the W̱SÁNEĆ Nation]” (L. Smith 2012:15-16; Lassiter 2005). I also make recommendations for how settler researchers in the future should proceed with research projects in these contexts. / Graduate / 2019-12-06

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This thesis examines Tse Keh Nay (Sekani) ethnic identity over three periods of Aboriginal-European relations: the fur trade period, the missionary period, and the treaty and reserve period. It examines the affects these three periods have had on the Tse Keh Nay as an ethnic group in four chapters, the first two dealing with the fur trade and missionary periods, and the last two with the treaty and reserve aspects of the treaty and reserve period. In it I argue that during the first two periods wider Tse Keh Nay ethnic identity was reinforced, while during the latter period local Tse Keh Nay identities were reinforced through government policies that dealt with Tse Keh Nay subgroups on a regional and localized basis. Despite this shift in emphasis, wider Tse Keh Nay ethnic identity has remained, proving that Tse Keh Nay ethnic identity is both situational and dynamic. / History