This is a study of the human conflict over fish in late nineteenth and early twentieth
century British Columbia, and of how that conflict was shaped by law. Law, understood
broadly to include both the legal forms of the Canadian state and those of Native peoples,
defined and in part created both Native and state fisheries. When those fisheries clashed,
one finds conflict between legal systems. When one fishery sought to replace the other, its
laws had to replace the other. Thus, this is a study of law and colonialism, seen through a
close analysis of the conflict over fish.
Native fisheries and the web of regulation surrounding them preceded non-Native
interest in British Columbia's fish. The fishery was not an open-access resource, but
rather a commons, defined by entitlements, prohibitions and sanctions that allowed certain
activity, proscribed others, permitted one group to catch fish at certain times in particular
locations with particular technology, and prohibited others. The Canadian state denied the
legitimacy and even the existence of Native fisheries law in imposing its law on the fishery.
This study, based largely on government records and a secondary anthropological
literature, describes the legal apparatus constructed by the Canadian state to reduce Native
control of the fisheries in British Columbia through the creation, in law, of the "Indian
food fishery". Law became a means of constructing a particular economic and social
order that marginalized Native participation in the fishery and eliminated Native control.
It was a "rhetoric of legitimation" that supported state domination, but also local
resistance. Native peoples and their supporters used law, both Native and state law, to defend their fisheries. The history of the conflict over fish is the history of competing legal
cultures, and the struggle on the Cowichan River and the Babine River over fish weirs
reveals those cultures, constructed in opposition to each other. The study concludes by
integrating the local conflicts over fish into a wider literature on law and colonialism,
reflecting on the role of law in particular colonial settings.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:LACETR/oai:collectionscanada.gc.ca:BVAU.2429/8144 |
| Date | 11 1900 |
| Creators | Harris, Douglas C. |
| Source Sets | Library and Archives Canada ETDs Repository / Centre d'archives des thèses électroniques de Bibliothèque et Archives Canada |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
| Relation | UBC Retrospective Theses Digitization Project [http://www.library.ubc.ca/archives/retro_theses/] |
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