Landing Native Fisheries

Reveals the contradictions and the consequences of an Indian land policy premised on access to fish and a program of fisheries management intended to open the resource to newcomers. Presenting first treaties signed on Vancouver Island between 1850 and 1854, this book maps the connections between colonial land policy and fisheries law and policy.

---

Landing Native Fisheries reveals the contradictions and consequences of an Indian land policy premised on access to fish, on one hand, and a program of fisheries management intended to open the resource to newcomers, on the other. Beginning with the first treaties signed on Vancouver Island between 1850 and 1854, Douglas Harris maps the connections between the colonial land policy and the law governing the fisheries. In so doing, Harris rewrites the history of colonial dispossession in British Columbia, offering a new and nuanced examination of the role of law in the consolidation of power within the colonial state.