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  • The article reviews the book, "Making Native Space: Colonialism, Resistance, and Reserves in British Columbia," by Cole Harris.

  • The history of Aboriginal-settler interactions in Canada continues to haunt the national imagination. Despite billions of dollars spent on the "Indian problem," Aboriginal people remain the poorest in the country. Because the stereotype of the "lazy Indian" is never far from the surface, many Canadians wonder if the problem lay with "Indians" themselves. John Lutz traces Aboriginal people's involvement in the new economy, and their displacement from it, from the first arrival of Europeans to the 1970s. Drawing upon oral histories, manuscripts, newspaper accounts, biographies, and statistical analysis, Lutz shows that Aboriginal people flocked to the workforce and prospered in the late 19th century. The roots of today's wide-spread unemployment and "welfare dependency" date only from the 1950s, when deliberate and inadvertent policy choices--what Lutz terms the "white problem"--drove Aboriginal people out of the capitalist, wage, and subsistence economies, offering them welfare as "compensation." -- Publisher's description. Contents: Introduction: Molasses stick legs -- Pomo Wawa: the other jargon -- Making the lazy Indian -- The Lekwungen -- The Tsilhqot'in -- Outside history: labourers of the aboriginal province -- The white problem -- Prestige to welfare: remaking the moditional economy -- Conclusion: the outer edge of probability, 1970-2007 -- Postscript: subordination without subjugation.

  • The Pacific Northwest underwent rapid economic growth in the late 19th century and cities on both sides of the Canada/US border burgeoned. The building boom was sustained by a large cohort of tradesmen and skilled labourers who lived in modest cabins, tenement blocks, boarding houses, and residential hotels. Most of these urban wageworkers were unmarried. They left few records of their experiences outside the job site or union hall. In this case study of Victoria, British Columbia circa 1891, we deployed a historical geographical information system (HGIS) to reconstitute the urban residential and social space of bout 2,000 otherwise elusive working men. Our research framework combines qualitative methods that are familiar to historians and quantitative methods favoured by geospatial researchers. By integrating both qualitative and quantitative data, we are able to represent the multiple spatial conditions experienced by Victoria's wageworkers in the early 1890s. In the process, we repopulated the city and reconstructed a largely vanished urban landscape. A primary objective of the essay is to demonstrate how GIS can be used as a research tool and new epistemology in the field of labour history.

Last update from database: 4/11/25, 4:10 AM (UTC)

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