This online project is completed in partial requirement for the UBC Graduate School of Journalism. To reach me, send an email at mhs.stewart AT gmail DOT com.
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In September 2009 I was in the window seat of an airplane, flying west over the Rocky Mountains to the Fraser Valley, looking down at the Columbia, Similkameen, Okanagan and Nicola valleys.
We flew over Vernon where I grew up and where my parents still live. From my airborne point-of-view, I recognized local landmarks and topography. Open in my lap was a copy of Making Native Space by Cole Harris. I flipped through the pages of cartographic illustrations that mapped the very landscape beneath me. The boundaries drawn on the page exposed the parcels of land they represented and the communities that live on and around them.
On this clear day, my own lack of knowledge was put in sharp relief. I stared down at two visions of Okanagan Lake: the first was the curve of familiar shoreline where a trailer park and marshland were separated from million-dollar homes by an expansive and popular park where I swam; the second was the same land, but showing a grey and penciled boundary at the head of the lake, Priest’s Valley Indian Reserve No. 6.
In mapping these plots of land — imagined as postage stamps in both lingua franca and legal rulings — Harris set a premise that I have embraced: For anyone who seeks to understand how colonialism functioned and still resonates in B.C., there is no better place to look than the reserve system.
What we see in B.C. today is a perpetuation of the confinement, segregation and displacement espoused by European colonists more than 150 years ago. Little has changed in law, policy or mindset. And what began as a process of deliberate — hopeful, even, on the part of colonists — amalgamation and enculturation of aboriginal communities on Vancouver Island continued throughout the province as reserves were created as some kind of “temporary haven” on the path to complete assimilation.
If a fence was imagined to exist around the border of the reserve, popular thought held that, eventually, a gate in that fence would open to allow civilization in and indegeneity out.
As one of the first British colonial officers opined, a reserve was established so “Natives should be isolated in the short run and integrated in the long run” with the underlying intention of almost all colonial land policies being the “dispossession, with as little expense and trouble as possible, of Native peoples of most of their land.” The superior entitlement inherent in this objective led to more than two centuries of economic and social injustices of most the cruel and selfish persuasion.
What I came to know thanks to perspective (the bird’s eye view from the plane) and knowledge (a meticulous and dense book on colonialism in B.C.), was that these injustices were by no means relegated to the past. Lines drawn on the map decades ago still inflict trauma on the earth and its inhabitants.
— Megan Stewart
