Landing Native Fisheries: Indian Reserves & Fishing Rights in British Columbia, 1849–1925 (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Landing Native Fisheries: Indian Reserves & Fishing Rights in British Columbia, 1849–1925 Daniel Marshall and Michael Blackwell Landing Native Fisheries: Indian Reserves & Fishing Rights in British Columbia, 1849–1925. Douglas C. Harris. Vancouver: UBC Press, 2008. Pp. 256, $85.00 cloth, $34.95 paper In Landing Native Fisheries: Indian Reserves & Fishing Rights in British Columbia, 1849–1925, Douglas C. Harris provides a substantial and much-needed contribution to the historical literature concerning the alienation of Aboriginal rights and title. Having previously explored the legal-historical context behind the regulation of Native fishing rights (Fish, Law and Colonialism: The Legal Capture of Salmon in British Columbia, [2001]), Harris now turns his attention to the importance of Native fisheries during the strategic allotment of Indian reservations. When placed together, these two studies demonstrate how European notions of land ownership alienated Aboriginal title while the common law doctrine of the public right to fish detached Native people from [End Page 773] their Aboriginal right to harvest bc's rivers, their main source of both culture and subsistence. In 1876–8, the Joint Indian Reserve Commission attempted to establish a reservation system that confirmed exclusive access to Native fisheries, the keystone of earlier colonial reservation policy prior to the province's Confederation with Canada. Subsequently, in response to the rapid expansion of the Pacific salmon canning industry, the federal Department of Fisheries began to take an increased role in regulating the resource, rejecting Commissioner Peter O'Reilly's allotment of 'exclusive fisheries' for Indigenous peoples, and thus further marginalizing their traditional rights to 'fish as formerly.' Department officials argued that the reservation policy violated the common law doctrine of the public right to fish. Theoretically, this common law right applied only to tidal waters, and there appeared to be no substantiated precedent for the department's opposition to exclusive riparian rights in non-navigable rivers and streams. Nevertheless, what evolved was a regulatory-legal regime that marginalized Native fishing to a subsistence food-fishery, thus abolishing the Native right to sell fish. By 1910, this food-fishery was further restricted, applying only to those incapable of participating in the wage labour market. The result was that Aboriginal rights – particularly access to fisheries – devolved from an exclusive right into an uncertain privilege. Critics have argued that, despite a limited Indian food-fishery, Indigenous peoples were able to fish on a status equal to the non-Native population through commercial licences. However, Harris persuasively demonstrates that the Fisheries Department ultimately privileged non-Native fishers when granting exclusive-access licences, in addition to the restriction of seine-netting along the Pacific coast. The department's discriminatory policy became evident during the McKenna-McBride Royal Commission, 1913–16, which recommended a separate inquiry into 'the fish question' in response to wide-scale Native protest and discontent. Further to this argument, as both a defence and a criticism of Harris, should be added the role of mining, logging, and railway construction in the dispossession of Aboriginal rights. The Fraser River gold rush of 1858 took place on the same sites where Natives customarily harvested salmon, while mining dregs destroyed spawning grounds. Further, the threat to the Indian food-fishery was compounded by dams constructed on rivers throughout the province to aid log transportation. This included a dam built on Adams River in 1908 that nearly destroyed what is today one of the largest salmon runs in the world. When logging dams failed to block the salmon, [End Page 774] rock slides at Hell's Gate from 1913 to 1914 – the consequence of railway construction – decimated the resource. Taking into account a second factor – the cultural importance of salmon – could have strengthened the book by demonstrating the broader implications of fisheries regulations, as opposed to simply analyzing their legal and economic impact. Native fisheries were profoundly distinct and fundamental to the complex relationship between inter-tribal trade, warfare, and social organization. The inclusion of such factors would have provided a legal-cultural argument capable of conveying to the broader public the sheer importance of salmon to the ceremonial and traditional life-ways of Indigenous populations. At the same time, Harris should be congratulated for this informative and fundamental...