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BC Studies no. 190 Summer 2016
Guest edited by Laura Ishiguro, Histories of Settler Colonialism assesses the possibilities and limitations of new imperial and settler colonial approaches in British Columbia’s history. The articles featured examine histories of colonialism and imperialism in a wide range of ways, and consider how British Columbia’s colonial history might be p/repositioned by using and troubling these frameworks. How do the questions of new imperial history and settler colonial studies open up new analytical pathways in British Columbia?How might we work through, across, between, and beyond these approaches? And how might doing so enable us to understand British Columbia’s history as local, regional, national, imperial, and/or transnational in new ways?
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Book & Film Reviews
book film review
Cold Case Vancouver: The City’s Most Baffling Unsolved Murders
Eve Lazarus’s fascination with Vancouver’s history continues with her latest book, Cold Case Vancouver: The City’s Most Baffling Unsolved Murders. Crime buffs and readers interested in true crime literature or in understanding how police investigate...
Pages 171-173
book film review
The Land We Are: Artists and Writers Unsettle the Politics of Reconciliation
The Land We Are: Artists and Writers Unsettle the Politics of Reconciliation and The Poetics of Land and Identity among British Columbia Indigenous Peoples reflect an iconic theme of recent Canadian writing, academia, and art practice, namely the reconciliation of...
Pages 142-144
book film review
Writing the Okanagan
George Bowering’s new anthology, Writing the Okanagan, is a collection of Bowering’s fiction associated through setting, choice of characters, or autobiographical referents, with the Okanagan, chiefly the South Okanagan, where he grew up. Many of...
Pages 165-166
book film review
Three Athapaskan Ethnographies: Diamond Jenness on the Sekani, Tsuu T’ina and Wet’suwet’en, 1921-1924
Diamond Jenness was a diligent and talented ethnographer, and the years 1921-1924 were particularly productive. In the summer of 1921 he visited the Sarcee (Suuu T’ina) of Alberta and wrote a report based on “field-notes...
Pages 139-141
book film review
Last Dance in Shediac: Memories of Mum, Molly Lamb Bobak
This is a very peculiar book. Although its subject is an artist, the Vancouver-born painter Molly Lamb Bobak, the first female war artist in Canada, there is little about Bobak’s art. Molly Bobak did much more...
Pages 168-169
book film review
Where the Rivers Meet: Pipelines, Participatory Resource Management, and Aboriginal-State Relations in the Northwest Territories
In Where the Rivers Meet, Carly Dokis skillfully examines local responses to the Mackenzie Gas Project — a proposed natural gas pipeline through the Sahtu Region of the Northwest Territories — and how these are...
Pages 141-142
book film review
No Regrets: Counter-culture and Anarchism in Vancouver
Since the 1960s, anarchist activism has played a critical role in shaping the radical political landscape of Vancouver. Nevertheless, there are very few scholarly considerations of this history. Instead, most of the work that has...
Pages 170-171
book film review
Indigenous Women and Work: From Labor to Activism
Indigenous Women and Work, edited by Carol Williams, consists of seventeen essays that examine the history of indigenous women and wage labour in Canada, the United States, Australia, and New Zealand. The object of these...
Pages 146-147
book film review
Aboriginal Populations: Social, Demographic, and Epidemiological Perspectives
This substantial collection brings interdisciplinary approaches to a range of questions on Aboriginal populations. Aiming to bring about a “comprehensive understanding of the social demographic transformation of the Canadian Aboriginal population” (ix), the contributors review...
Pages 147-149
book film review
Rethinking Colonial Pasts through Archaeology
Rethinking Colonial Pasts through Archaeology is an important and well-crafted synthesis by leading scholars, marking a coming of age for the archaeology of Indigenous people in colonial settler societies. To some extent, the title misrepresents...
Pages 133-134
book film review
Uprooted Again: Japanese Canadians Move to Japan After World War II
The history of Japanese Canadians has been told in rich and impactful ways. The events of the 1940s, when Canadians of Japanese ancestry were uprooted, interned, and dispossessed by the federal government, have received particular...
Pages 158-161
book film review
Native Peoples of the Olympic Peninsula: Who We Are (2nd Edition)
Waterways such as the Strait of Juan de Fuca were vital transportation corridors for the First Nations of the coast. People regularly traversed the strait in their large efficient canoes for trading or raiding expeditions...
Pages 135-137
book film review
Allied Power: Mobilizing Hydro-electricity during Canada’s Second World War
In Allied Power, Matthew Evenden expertly demonstrates how private and public power commissions and corporations throughout Canada expanded hydro-electric capacity in response to the ballooning demands for power and production during the Second World War....
Pages 161-162
book film review
The Voyage of the Komagata Maru: The Sikh Challenge to Canada’s Colour Bar
It was with great anticipation that those of us who study South Asian migration to Canada have awaited the expanded and revised version of Hugh Johnston’s The Voyage of the Komagata Maru. Johnston’s original monograph...
Pages 156-157
book film review
The De Cosmos Enigma
On a grey day in November of 1868, lawyer Alexander “Aleck” Rocke Robertson met with journalist and politician Amor De Cosmos. Both men had been born in Eastern Canada and, while pursuing different careers —...
Pages 153-155
book film review
Made in British Columbia: Eight Ways of Making Culture
At first glance, I was sceptical of Made in British Columbia. What more could possibly be written about painter Emily Carr or architects Francis Rattenbury and Arthur Erickson? But Maria Tippett’s carefully crafted biographies of...
Pages 164-165
book film review
Live at the Commodore: The Story of Vancouver’s Historic Commodore Ballroom
From the beginning, Aaron Chapman is clear about his intentions for Live at the Commodore: The Story of Vancouver’s Historical Commodore Ballroom. The renowned Granville Street concert venue is a place where “The history of...
Pages 169-170
book film review
Carlo Gentile, Gold Rush Photographer, 1863-1866
Like most colonial-era Victoria photographers, Carlo Gentile arrived and departed with little notice. Born in Italy, he eventually found his way to California around 1860. Having reached Victoria from San Francisco in 1862, he was...
Pages 152-153
book film review
The Writings of David Thompson, Volume 1: The Travels, 1850 Version
At age 14, a well-educated Londoner of Welsh parentage entered the service of the Hudson’s Bay Company (HBC) as an apprentice clerk. He would have preferred to enter the Royal Navy. He was strangely unsettled...
Pages 149-152
book film review
Okanagan Artists in their Studios
It is often said that the images that come to mind when thinking or writing about the cultural history of British Columbia are the province’s varied landscape and the art of the First Nations people....
Pages 166-167
book film review
Truth & Indignation: Canada’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission on Indian Residential Schools
The struggle to articulate Canada’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) has seen varying degrees of success since the Commission was established in the 2006 Indian Residential School Settlement Agreement. In 2008, the Aboriginal Healing Foundation...
Pages 144-146
book film review
The West Coast Modern House: Vancouver Residential Architecture
West Coast Modernism describes a particular brand of mid-twentieth-century architecture that developed in the Vancouver region, a style much talked about but not widely published. The firms most closely associated with the manner include Thompson,...
Pages 167-168
book film review
The Grand Hall: First Peoples of Canada’s Northwest Coast
These two volumes present an impressive view of Canadian museology as it has evolved over the past thirty years. Leslie Tepper’s The Grand Hall, an updated and revised version of Andrea Laforet’s The Book of...
Pages 137-139
book film review
The Chinchaga Firestorm: When the Moon and Sun Turned Blue
Some fires are justly renowned. Some are celebrities — known for being known. A few are famous for being unknown. The 1871 Peshtigo fire in the US has long marketed itself as America’s Forgotten Fire....
Pages 162-163
book film review
Patrician Liberal: The Public and Private Life of Sir Henri-Gustave Joly de Lotbinière, 1829-1908
At first glance, a review of the biography of a nineteenth century Quebec politician seems out of place in BC Studies. Born in France in 1829 to a wealthy French Protestant father and his...
Pages 155-156
Bibliography of BC
Contributors
Contributors
Tony Ballantyne is a Professor of History, Director of the Centre for Research on Colonial Culture and the Pro-Vice-Chancellor Humanities at the University of Otago. He has published widely on the cultural history of the British Empire and the relationships between imperial and global histories. His most recent sole-authored book is Entanglements of Empire: Missionaries, Maori and the Question of the Body (Duke and Auckland University presses, 2014).
Daniel Clayton is Senior Lecturer in Geography at the University of St. Andrews. He is co-editor of the Scottish Geographical Journal and on the editorial board of BC Studies. He is the author of Islands of Truth: The Imperial Fashioning of Vancouver Island (ubc Press, 2000), has published widely on the relations between geography and empire (and most recently decolonization), and is currently completing a book entitled Colonialism’s Geographies (Routledge)
Heather Devine is a historian and heritage professional whose pub- lications, research, and teaching specialties include Canadian Native history (with a particular focus on Métis ethnohistory), museum and heritage studies, and western Canadian ethnic history. She has worked in consulting and curatorial capacities with the Archaeological Survey of Alberta, the Royal Alberta Museum, the Nickle Arts Museum, and the Canadian Museum of History. She is author of The People Who Own Themselves: Aboriginal Ethnogenesis in a Canadian Family, 1660-1900 (University of Calgary Press, 2004), winner of the Harold Adams Innis Prize for 2004-05.
Fae Dussart is the co-author, with Alan Lester, of Colonization and the Origins of Humanitarian Governance. Protecting Aborigines across the Nineteenth Century British Empire, published by Cambridge University Press in 2014. The meaning and constitution of British, imperial and colonial identity, and the intersection of these with the formation of spaces and places, are major themes of Fae Dussart’s teaching and research. These have focused on domestic service in nineteenth century India and Britain, and on humanitarianism and colonialism in the British Empire.
Laura Ishiguro is Assistant Professor in the Department of History at the University of British Columbia. Her research examines the history of British Columbia and the British Empire, with a particular focus on the relationship between settler colonialism, affect, and the everyday. She is currently completing a book on trans-imperial British families and the foundations of settler colonial British Columbia in the “long” nineteenth-century.
Madeline Rose Knickerbocker is a white settler scholar and PhD candidate in the Department of History at Simon Fraser University. She is currently completing her community-engaged dissertation, which examines connections between cultural heritage curation and sovereignty activism in Stó:lō communities during the twentieth century. Madeline researches and teaches Indigenous and Canadian histories focusing on: politics and activism; feminism, gender, and sexuality; material culture, heritage, and commemoration; and oral history and community-engaged research methods.
Sarah Nickel is a Tk’emlupsemc (Kamloops Secwépemc) Assistant Professor in the Department of Indigenous Studies at the University of Saskatchewan. Her areas of research include twentieth-century Indigenous politics and activism, Indigenous women’s politics, Indigenous feminisms, community-engaged research, oral history/ ethnohistory, and direct action/protest/resistance. Sarah is currently working on her manuscript, Negotiating Unity: Indigenous Politics and the Union of BC Indian Chiefs, 1969-1983 to be published with ubc Press. Sarah’s next project, Indigenous Women and Politics in the West will look at Indigenous women’s politics and activism in British Columbia and Saskatchewan during the late twentieth century and will use an Indigenous feminist lens.
Adele Perry is Professor of History and Senior Fellow at St. John’s College, University of Manitoba. She is the author of a range of work on western Canadian, comparative colonial, and gender history. Perry’s most recent book is Aqueduct: Colonialism, Resources, and the Histories We Remember (Winnipeg: arp, 2016) and she is working on a study of fur trade governance and the nineteenth-century British Empire.
Sabina Trimble is a second-year MA student in the Department of History at the University of Victoria. For her SSHRC-funded thesis project, she is building a digital, ethnohistorical map of The’wá:lí’s reserve and traditional lands. The project is an ongoing collaboration with members of the community that began as a course project on 2013 Ethnohistory Field School among the Stó:lō (jointly coordinated by the universities of Victoria and Saskatchewan). A map of the Stó:lō community of The’wá:lí’s will be made publicly available online in autumn 2016.
Graeme Wynn is a professor of historical geography at the University of British Columbia and editor of BC Studies. This is his last issue. He has taught and written extensively on environmental history. Dr. Wynn has researched the development of New World societies and the environmental impacts of European expansion around the world, including in early Canada and colonial New Zealand. He is general editor of the Nature/History/Society series at UBC Press, and was for six years co-editor of the Journal of Historical Geography (published by Elsevier), He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, and was the Brenda and David McLean Chair of Canadian Studies at the University of British Columbia between 2011 and 2013.