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.