278 THE ADVOCATE
VOL. 80 PART 2 MARCH 2022
limited to non-contiguous patches of land bounded by the border in the
south and by the rock and cold of the sparsely populated north. “For all the
penetration of the outside world and the territorial claims of the Canadian
state, the land beyond the boundaries of immigrant settlement has
remained substantially Indigenous.”4
These are the main themes of this collection of writings on settler colonialism.
“Put most starkly, they address the immigrant experience in early
Canada, the organization of immigrant space, and the contraction of Indigenous
space.”5
The book is organized in five parts:
• Part 1: Three short pieces describe the initial contact between
Indigenous peoples and Europeans, European conceptions of land
and the spread of infectious Old World diseases in southwestern
British Columbia.
• Part 2: Three local examples are given of immigrants or their
descendants settling the land in what became eastern Canada.
• Part 3: This part “looks more generally at the structure – the architecture
– of settler colonialism”.6 It describes social changes in settler
colonies overseas, what they took from their homelands and
how it was adapted to local circumstances.
• Part 4 shifts the focus to British Columbia and “to the ways that an
incoming settler society imposed itself on Indigenous peoples and
lands”.7 It covers the Lower Mainland during the early settler colonial
years and the spread of an introduced regime of property and
reserves. This is followed by a discussion of the power of systems
of transportation and communication to open up land for capital
and settlers and to confine Indigenous peoples. Another selection
shows how the assault on Indigenous custom in British Columbia
had deep antecedents in Britain where local customary rights
were overturned by the rights of private property and market
economies.
• Part 5 also deals with British Columbia. In one essay, Harris seeks
“to establish the main contours of the immigrant society that had
come to dominate British Columbia. What had come from afar,
what had been left behind, and how was society being recomposed?”
8 Another essay shows how colonialism in British Columbia
dispossessed the Indigenous peoples; how it was based on physical
violence, the imperial state, colonial culture and self-interest; and
how it used maps, numbers, the common law and new geographies