A Bounded Land: Reflections on Settler Colonialism in Canada

Abstract

Divided into five sections, A Bounded Land is a career-spanning collection of essays, journal articles, and book chapters by historical geographer Cole Harris, all related in one way or another to settler colonialism. Most of this material was previously published, some as far back as the early 1970s, and, while portions are edited for length and clarity, the book holds together well, exploring a set of connected themes over four centuries and across a broad set of spaces in northern North America.Over his career, Harris made several critical contributions to the history of what is now Canada, including his editorial work on the Historical Atlas of Canada, his essential study of the formation of reserves in British Columbia (Making Native Space), and his excellent historical geographical synthesis of early Canada (The Reluctant Land). This collection demonstrates the depth of his thinking and the breadth of his interest. Ranging from Acadia, to the seigneuries of Lower Canada (Quebec) and the early townships of Upper Canada (Ontario), and finally to the contested Indigenous and settler spaces of British Columbia, A Bounded Land is breathtaking in its scale and ambition, all while being eminently approachable for a wide audience.Harris wrote much of the material in the book well before settler colonialism’s rise to scholarly prominence. He includes the concept here as a means of both signaling the themes he treats and, more importantly, demonstrating how a commitment to the specificity of place, space, society, population, and period are necessary for histories of colonial dispossession and settlement. Even in those pieces written before he had the term, Harris focuses squarely on “that form of colonialism associated with immigrants who became the dominant population in the territories they occupied, and, in so doing, displaced the Indigenous peoples who previously lived there” (3). This bare-bones definition coupled with a commitment to empirical historical research makes the book a valuable contribution to the literature on settler colonialism and its limitations. The book’s introduction and postscript succinctly and effectively tie its many pieces together while also inserting Harris’s writing into the larger literature, both explaining those works that influenced him (some of which are no longer widely read) and underlining scholarship that, while appearing after A Bounded Land’s individual chapters were first published, resonates with the book’s themes.As he moves through the book, Harris raises several powerful phenomena that he sees reproduced, though always in slightly different ways depending on place and time, across northern North America. Several of these will be of interest to readers of Ethnohistory. Harris returns frequently to conservative migrations, as rural residents threatened with displacement in industrializing and urbanizing Europe sought to maintain their status as independent producers elsewhere. He also focuses on the limits settler migration encountered where climate and soil—the “bounded land”—made the family farm impossible or its poverty a foregone conclusion. Harris ascribes Indigenous peoples’ differing historical experience in part to whether they lived within or beyond this “bounded land” (in Canada, he writes, “settler colonialism . . . has been a bounded project” [10]). Harris also focuses on the different human geography, population, and relative value of land and labor that made settler societies distinct from the European cultures and social structures from which they, in conversation and contestation with Indigenous societies and lands, emerged.While Harris concentrates on Indigenous experience in several chapters, A Bounded Land is primarily concerned with analyzing settlers, their claims to space, and their social and cultural adaptation to their new surroundings. This is critical since, as he rightly highlights in several distinct historical and geographical contexts, settler societies were not simple transplants from Europe but were shaped by the land to which they had moved and, in doing so, the peoples they worked to dispossess.