Overview

The Vancouver Island Treaties and the Evolving Principles of Indigenous Title illuminates the history of the enigmatic Vancouver Island treaties of the 1850s, offering new interpretations based on a fresh, exhaustive, and multidisciplinary critical analysis of relevant evidence. To understand as fully as possible the motivations, intentions, and understandings of the Indigenous and non-Indigenous signatories to the treaties, Ted Binnema places the treaties within the context of thousands of years of Vancouver Island history and hundreds of years of land-purchase agreements involving Indigenous peoples. The book explores the evolving concepts and principles of Indigenous title from the first Dutch and English treaties with Indigenous North Americans in the 1620s to the increasingly detailed articulations fuelled by debates and crises in Australia and New Zealand in the 1830s and 1840s. Binnema explains that Indigenous people themselves played important roles in the formation and elaboration of the principles of Indigenous title in the British World. Drawing on previously neglected archival documents and multidisciplinary evidence in linguistics, archaeology, anthropology, fisheries biology and biological sciences, and oral historiography, the book provides a new model for the study of the idea of Indigenous title and Indigenous land-purchase treaties worldwide.

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9781487554071

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Reviews

“The Vancouver Island Treaties and the Evolving Principles of Indigenous Title is a superbly researched and masterful account of colonial treaty-making. This rich interdisciplinary study breaks new ground and is sure to deepen our understanding of the evolution of native title throughout the anglophone world. A remarkable achievement.” -- Bain Attwood, author of <em>Empire and the Making of Native Title: Sovereignty, Property and Indigenous People</em> “In this study, Binnema reminds us that in addition to the recent and ongoing enquiries into discerning Indigenous understandings of the Vancouver Island treaties, work is still needed to accurately distil the original colonial motivations for, and priorities behind, these agreements. In particular, Binnema challenges us to recognize that it was economic interests, and not legal principles and precedents, that motivated treaty agreements. The Vancouver Island treaties, in Binnema’s assessment, were less legal agreements to create space for settlers than they were expedient and pragmatic efforts to secure access to fossil fuels such as coal. If Binnema teaches us anything, it’s that the debates over early treaty making and colonial policy towards Indigenous people are far from resolved.” -- Keith Carlson, Professor of History, University of the Fraser Valley

Author Information

Ted Binnema is an emeritus professor of history at the University of Northern British Columbia.

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