Cole Harris

Cole Harris, Making Native Space. Colonialism, Resistance, and Reserves in British Columbia. UBC Press, 2002.
Historical geographer Cole Harris’s judicious and compelling examination of the history of British Columbian Native land policy uses impeccable methodology in a traditional way to integrate recent post-modern and post-colonial ideas into an analysed body of work. A masterful work of historical geography applied to a land of conflicting cultures, world views and power structures, this study describes and compares treaties and puts their content into context, to demonstrate how European attitudes (in all their diversity and as they were experienced in frontier lands) shaped contacts.
Drawing from careful and extensive use of archival records, Harris reveals that since the mid-nineteenth century British, colonial, provincial, and federal governments failed to allocate land to Aboriginal communities in any fair or effective manner. He also demonstrates that individual bureaucrats, such as Gilbert Sproat, and Aboriginal leaders consistently challenged provincial policy and offered politicians alternative visions for settling the question of Native land.
The author’s nuanced remarks are the basis for a much more forthright conclusion that reveals a very coherent political position. He elaborates a prescription for change – the granting of more land, of more respectful treatment, and of more self-government to native people. More generally, he calls for “the politics of difference” rather than assimilation. In this way, this book is fundamental to our understanding of the Native land question in British Columbia. Its best quality may be the way it employs an understanding of a complex past to craft a sophisticated narrative, that is highly relevant to Canada today and in the future.

Honourable Mention:
Colin Coates and Cecilia Morgan, Heroines and History. Representations of Madeleine de Verchères and Laura Secord. University of Toronto Press, 2002.
Highlighting the textured nature and the fluid role of heroines in the work of historians and in the public mind over time, Colin Coates and Cecilia Morgan assess the shared representational fate of two legendary heroines of Quebec and Canadian lore. They provide a superb analysis of the interconnectedness of memory, commemoration, and gender in their study of Madeleine de Verchères (written by Coates) and Laura Secord (written by Morgan), whom they present as symbols of French-Canadian and English-Canadian identity and nationalism.
The two authors, by sharing the task, succeeded in giving better coverage to the history and the commemoration of these two heroines from a Canadian pantheon meagre in female imagery of this kind. They have produced a polished book that suggests several avenues of reflection. Not only do they linger over the issue of the construction of collective memories by beginning with the thoughts of the heroines in question, but they also concentrate on the accepted thinking formulated by different elite groups including historians of all schools. In addition, they allow themselves an incursion into popular culture.
Coates and Morgan make a strong case for the study of such historical narratives in understanding how Canadians viewed and constructed their history. They show how the images of the two women served different political and ideological purposes over time, how the Verchères and Secord stories deployed and redeployed the signifiers of gender, race and nation, and how public memory scrutinized heroines differently than heroes, according the latter greater recognition and kindness. Well documented (visually as well as textually), in an elegant writing which translates with remarkable finesse all the linguistic subtleties of their sources, Heroines and History makes an important contribution to Canadian cultural and national history.