Burrard Street Bridge. Vancouver (looking north) 49° 16’ 29’’ N 123° 08’ 22’’W
Kitsilano Beach, Vancouver (looking north) 49° 16’ 25’’ N 123° 09’ 21’’W
Shifting Sands James Douglas, Chief Factor of the Hudson’s Bay Company and later first Governor of the Colony of Vancouver Island was of Scottish-Caribbean descent and his wife was Métis. Fur traders were encouraged by the Hudson’s Bay Company to marry local wives as the only reliable means of establishing stable trading relationships.This on-the-ground reality of reciprocity and rough equality was, with some time and effort, replaced by an appropriate colonial fiction of European superiority.The moral dilemma had been recognised right from the beginning of North American colonisation. On one hand early colonists such as Robert Gray of Virginia felt that the land was the ‘rightful inheritance’ of the ‘savages’ who used it. On the other hand, since they were ‘savages’ they really had no interest in the land ‘because they participate rather of the nature of beasts than men’. This conflation of racism and land-ownership did not appear overnight but represents a strain of Western political and jurisprudential thought that can be traced at least as far back as the sixteenth century, to Thomas More’s Utopia . He held that unused land might be appropriated by someone with a will to cultivate it. In the seventeenth century John Locke thought that agriculturalists were justified in displacing hunters. Half a century after Locke’s death, Emmerich deVattel ( The Law of Nations ) was clear about the duty to cultivate: There are others, who, to avoid labour, choose to live only by hunting, and their flocks. ...Those who still pursue this idle mode of life, usurp more extensive territories than, with a reasonable share of labour, they would have occasion for, and have, therefore, no reason to complain, if other nations, more industrious and too closely confined, come to take possession of a part of those lands. First Nations peoples were primarily hunters and gatherers and had no concept of land ownership per se , only a tradition of use, such as fishing rights at a particular place. For incoming settlers (who were not over-concerned with the discourse of political philosophy) this use of the land –winter villages and summer camps indicating a lack of a permanent settlement– was deemed irrational since it produced no surplus value and, incidentally, took up a lot of space.The ‘lot of space’ was deemed unused land . A further indicator of the inability to use land rationally was found
in the fact that the small indigenous plots which were cultivated were not fenced off.
Although lip service was paid to the idea of involving the First Nations in farming, that would have put them in direct competition with immigrant settlers, so the land assigned to them was not of the best quality.The more ‘modest’ aim was to force them into the settler economy as labourers in farming, the timber industry and canneries.Thus they would not need as much land per head as a white settler who was expected to support his family, selling surplus crops or livestock on the free market. Edward Wakefield, an influential framer of British colonial policy, was convinced that the colonial system could be calibrated so that the colonial entrepreneur would have all the cheap labour he needed and would, in time, become a property owner. Settlers needed security of title making land surveying, as Katherine Gordon says,‘into the oldest European profession in British Columbia’. A Real Estate Accurate surveying requires precise measurement over long distances. Starting from a position that is known, line of sight measurement of angles is made to two other points (mountain tops, mounds, specially build towers).This is repeated at the other points. One of the side of the triangle must be measured on the ground.The combination of all these measurements allows position and distance to be determined by calculation. One of the sides of the previously measured triangle is used as the baseline for the next in what becomes a tessellation of interconnected triangles, a triangulation network. The first surveyors were often soldiers. Matthew Edney, acknowledging the active agency of surveyors and mapmakers in the imperialist scheme of things underway on the other side of the planet—involving the other Indians, as it were—pointed out that ‘triangulation-based surveys are rooted, like all other cartographic practice, in cultural conceptions of space and in the politics of manipulating spatial representations’. In India the
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