Cole Harris, Making Native Space: Colonialism, Resistance, and Reserves in British Columbia. Vancouver: UBC Press, 2003.

Cole Harris’s Making Native Space examines the geography and history of the reserve system in British Columbia to try and show how the cultural and political hegemony of settler society expanded at the expense, and despite the resistance, of a purportedly helpless Native population.

Harris has written this expansive work in an effort to address present inequity concerning Native land and resource rights in lieu of biased provincial referenda, stalled treaty negotiations, logging permit and fishing license controversies, etc. Viewing the evolution of the colonial project mostly as an inevitable process from the late nineteenth century to today, Harris takes a curious position in his present concerns. Describing present day colonial settler society in British Columbia as a “remarkable creation,” Harris suggests that the “destruction” wrought upon the Native population must be repaired “without unduly weakening the [settler society]” so there is some chance that it would be “politically acceptable” (page 320). A politically pragmatic approach to Native issues at present perhaps, but one that ignores a much broader context in which this “remarkable creation” of a society exists. One might ask why today there is such a high unemployment rate in this province, why the gap between rich and poor has been growing for decades, why social programs and health care are being cut and privatised under both supposedly left- and right-wing provincial governments? When viewed in this light, this “remarkable society” that has been created seems not to be so remarkable.

The working class population of this province, who indeed rightly or wrongly built this province at the expense of its Native population, are today, relatively speaking, worse off than they have ever been before. Native people, for their part, and despite significant cultural and community renewal in the last few decades, continue to struggle at the bottom rung of the socio-economic ladder as they did at the end of the nineteenth century. The reasons behind this inequity, in my mind, lie beyond simple resource allocation. While this is certainly part of the story, the whole notion of development, progress, and modernity (that is never challenged by Harris throughout his work) omits the view that this project could, in and of itself, be inherently flawed and in need of a revolutionary change in direction.

Harris’s sympathetic portrayal of Reserve Commissioner Gilbert Sproat, a settler whose exceptionally “heroic” efforts to defend Native land rights over a three year period in the 1870s, is also indicative of his spurious political commitment to the present (p. xxxi).Sproat was likely restricted by the nature of his job posting into making compromises as Harris suggests throughout his work. He may have also been very much the exception among white men at the time, for his commitment to defending the politics of difference that underlie the fiduciary recognition of Native rights employed by the Canadian government to this day. But by presenting Sproat as an example of “where we have the capacity to go,” Harris creates a dangerous analogy, whereby the actions of a white government official are seen to have had the potential of effecting the necessary radical change to address the inequity caused by colonial dispossession (p. xxxi).

It seems to me that the solution will not lie simply in repeating rhetorical efforts to create a “dialogue” across the Manichean colonial divide, whereby settler society simply listens, and tries pragmatically to address Native concerns by taking symbolic responsibility for the society it has drawn on a map, as Harris infers. What about the notion that Native concerns have the potential to shape our notion of progress and modernity, that these concerns can speak to the systemic inequity that underlies this colonial capitalist (and certainly non-remarkable) settler society?

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