From the 1940s to the 1970s the communist left in British Columbia used debates and perceptions of environmental change as a means to engage in a critique of capitalist society. In engaging in these debates, communists articulated a Marxist understanding of the connections between capitalism and environmental change. However, these articulations were heavily connected to broader occurrences that situated the communist left alongside a diverse group of social actors. Beginning in the 1940s the communist left situated their critique of provincial forest policy into a wider social debate over the management of forest resources. During the 1950s and 1960s, concerns over environmental change were transformed into debates over the effects of nuclear weapons and industrial pollution. From the late 1960s through to late 1970s elements of the communist left once again engaged with the environmental changes taking place in the forest sector, as renewed concerns developed over the status of the forest economy and the preservation of wilderness areas. To investigate the communist left’s perceptions and politicization of these issues this thesis focuses on the activities of communist controlled unions such as the International Woodworkers of America as well as the B.C. section of the Communist Party of Canada/Labour Progressive Party. In addition to these organizations, this thesis also follows the experiences of Erni Knott. As a woodworker, a founding member of the IWA, a member of the Communist Party, and an active environmentalist, Knott’s experiences highlight the complex way in which communist politics merged and conflicted with perceptions of environmental change.

In 1864 William Henry Lomas preempted land in British Columbia's Cowichan Valley and began a complex relationship with the local Aboriginal people. As missionary, teacher, advocate and, from 1881-1899, Indian Agent, Lomas had allies and enemies among the Hul 'qumi 'num and Snuneymuxw. The latter turned the tables on him and tried three times to drive him from office by appropriating nineteenth century attitudes toward alcohol consumption and therefore highlighting the paradoxical tensions underlying Aboriginal prohibition and institutionalized tutelage. Their actions reveal strategies of resistance that invert Foucault's "panoptical principle" and suggest a retheorizing of dominant-subordinate relations between Aboriginal peoples and agents of the colonial state.

The Delivery of Medicine to the North West Region of British Columbia examines the relationship between medical culture and imperialism, religion and social progress from the arrival of the Hudson's Bay Company to the mid twentieth century. The evolutionary stages examined in this study move through imperialism to colonialism and the arrival of the medical missionaries, to the contract medicine of resourced based industries, to the ascendancy of nurses and the outpost hospitals and finally the emergence of modern state supported medicine. It contends that medicine should not be examined alone but within the context of its cultural and social influences.

Until the mid 1970s, the image of the Irish Diaspora in Canada in the nineteenth century was that of a dichotomous group consisting of Irish Protestants, who worked their way up the economic ladder into mainstream society, and Irish Catholics, who never found their way out of poverty. However, with the emergence of quantitative analysis, this perception of the Irish came to be regarded as simplistic and anachronistic. New research found that the Irish in nineteenth century Canada were more diverse and complex than previously thought. In order to unravel this diversity and complexity, comprehensive analysis needed to be done at a regional level. In the late nineteenth century prior to the coming of the railway, British Columbia was a 'distinct society': a geographically isolated province anchored not by agriculture but rather resource extraction industries that attracted a largely adult male settler population. As such it provided a unique opportunity in which to study the Irish. My quantitative analysis of the Irish in British Columbia through the Canadian Census of 1881 suggests that within this 'distinct' settler society, Irish Catholics were 'ghettoized' in the workplace, in large part due to their religious affiliation.

In 1974, the Insurance Corporation of British Columbia (ICBC) began the exclusive sale of automobile insurance to the motorists of British Columbia. Created by Dave Barrett, Robert Strachan, and the New Democratic Party government of British Columbia, the corporation was controversial and denounced by many as a socialist encroachment into the economy for purely ideological reasons. Previous studies of the ICBC have done little to dispel this notion because they focus on its operations rather than its inception. The ICBC, however, was more than just a product of New Democratic Party ideology. It had its origins in historical precedent that paved the way for greater government intervention in the economy, in questionable insurance industry ethics, in the W.A.C. Bennett government's bumbling over regulating the insurance industry, and in the failure of the industry to organize an efficient resistance to the creation of the ICBC.

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From the mid 1850s through the early 1900s, the white middle and upper class inhabitants of British Columbia persevered in their attempts to solve the ‘servant problem’ and to re-create the British domestic sphere in a new land. Some families emigrated with their British servants in tow. There were repeated efforts to import English girls and women en masse. And many employers were obliged to tolerate ‘strangers’ (Aboriginal and Chinese servants) in their homes. British Columbia’s peculiar ‘servant problem’ ensured that the Imperial vision of employer-servant relations and domestic order could not be exactly reconstructed.

The three centennial celebrations sponsored by the W.A.C. Bennett Social Credit government in 1958, 1966/67 and 1971 were part of a process of self-definition and province building. Post-war state development in British Columbia certainly included expanding and nationalizing transportation, building ambitious mega projects, and encouraging resource extraction in the hinterlands. The previously unstudied centennials were no less important to defining post-war British Columbia by creating the infrastructure on which cultural and hegemonic province building could take place. Using the methodologies and theories of Cultural Studies this study attends to both the discursive and material elements of these occasions. It uses the voluminous records of the three Centennial Committees, newspaper articles, government reports, and documents from community archives to reveal that that these elaborate and costly centenaries served the government’s desire to build an industry-oriented consensus in BC’s populace. The government - and its Centennial Committees - sought to overcome regional disparities and invite mass participation by making the celebrations truly provincial in nature. Each community, no matter its size, had a local centennial committee, was funded for local commemorative projects, was encouraged to write its history, and enjoyed traveling centenary entertainments. All communities benefited from cultural amenities, the province’s capital assets grew, the province started to undertake heritage conservation and residents gained a new appreciation for their history. Invented traditions - limited and constructed historical re-creations and motifs – helped overcome regional differences. British Columbians were presented with images and narratives of explorers, gold-seekers, and pioneer-entrepreneurs who opened up the interior with ingenuity and bravery, as well as a mythic, popular “old west” narrative that all citizens, no matter region, could rally around. A trade fair and tourism promotion reinforced the tradition of industry especially for manufacturers and small business. By and large, British Columbians in 1958 – particularly white males who found an anti-modern release in centennial events – accepted and legitimized this industry-oriented consensus. In the two later centennials new counter-hegemonies challenged this consensus. First Nations had opposed the colonial narrative in 1958, but by 1966/67 and 1971 they were more vocal and politically active. Other British Columbians opposed the development agenda of the centenaries; youth, environmentalists and labour argued that the celebrations were a waste of time, money, and energy when more pressing issues of environmental degradation and unemployment were present. The government’s static Centennial Committee was ill equipped to address these challenges. It offered superficial amends, such as creating Indian Participation and Youth Subcommittees, but ultimately could not repudiate the hegemony on which it, and Social Credit, was based.

This thesis examines the 20th century settlement and migration history of the Kwakwaka'wakw people of Alert Bay, British Columbia. Through an examination of three key shifts in settlement and migratory patterns, it traces how Aboriginal space and movement has been reconfigured in response to changing social, economic, and cultural landscapes. Each of these three shifts—village relocations, the decline of involvement in the capitalist and traditional food economies, and growing urban migration—reveals how Kwakwaka'wakw settlements and notions of community have changed in recent times. These shifts also indicate how innovative forms of migration have developed in, around, and between aboriginal communities. In addition to documenting some of the most profound changes in Aboriginal demographics since the early catastrophic disease epidemics, this thesis is also interested in continuity and the role local culture plays in shaping settlement and migratory behaviour. Drawing on Michel De Certeau's notion of "combinatory operations," I suggest that Aboriginal people have interpreted and responded to different types of displacement through operational systems shaped by contemporary reproductions of socio-cultural traditions. The thesis argues that the people of this community have responded to displacement with behaviour reflective of both innovation and cultural continuity. Until now, most research on aboriginal people has been either community- or urban-based. However, this focus on the terminal "beginning" or "end" of migration has tended to overshadow the role migration itself has played within Aboriginal society and culture. Rather than a process of suspension occurring between two points of settlement, migration itself is a socio-cultural phenomenon, itself no less important than the settlements upon which the process is anchored and defined.