Landing Native Fisheries : Indian Reserves and Fishing Rights in British Columbia, 1849-1925

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. This book received the 2011 Saywell Prize for Constitutional Legal History from The Osgoode Society for Canadian Legal History as the best new book in Canadian legal history, broadly defined, that makes an important contribution to an understanding of the constitution and/or federalism. It also received Honourable Mention, 2009 Lieutenant-Governor's Medal for Historical Writing, BC Historical Federation