Resettling Musqueam Park

Abstract

Musqueam Park, an affluent residential subdivision located on an Indian reserve in Vancouver, British Columbia, became the site of an intense five‐year struggle when the Musqueam Indian Band tried to collect higher land rents from its nonindigenous tenants. In late 2000, the Supreme Court of Canada ruled that Indian land was significantly less valuable than other privately held forms of property and discounted leasehold rents owed to the Band by 50 percent. In this article, I examine Musqueam Park's historical emergence as a desirable area for nonindigenous homeowners and its shifting boundaries and inscriptions in light of the Musqueam attempt to collect higher rents. I argue that embedded in this political and legal dispute are a series of factors that landscape Musqueam Park. These include (1) how settler anxieties about shifting power dynamics between indigenous and settler societies, including concerns about changing structures of governance, access to land, and resource allocation, shape the discursive content of the dispute; (2) how the historical underdevelopment of reserves in general, and the Musqueam reserve in particular, sets the stage for contemporary battles over valuable residential property; and (3) how colonial relations, especially in terms of property, continue to shape public and legal discourses in British Columbia.