Unstable Properties
Aboriginal Title and the Claim of British Columbia
By Patricia Burke Wood and David Rossiter
The so-called land question dominates political discourse in British Columbia. Unstable Properties reverses the usual approach – investigating Aboriginal claims to Crown land – to reframe the issue as a history of Crown attempts to solidify claims to Indigenous territory.
The political and intellectual leadership of First Nations has exposed the fragility of BC’s political and civil property regimes, insisting that the province grapple with diverse interpretations of sovereignty, governance, territory, and property. From the historical-geographic processes through which the BC polity became entrenched in its present territory to key events of the twenty-first century, the authors of this clear-eyed study highlight the unstable ideological foundation of land and title arrangements. Divergent historical geographies – land as sovereignty, land at the disposal of the state, land as a site to invest capital – have been used to secure citizenship for some and undermine it for others.
In 2015, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission emphasized the need to educate Canadians about the history of settler colonialism. Unstable Properties puts critical human geography at the service of this goal by demonstrating that understanding different conceptualizations of land and territorialization is a key element of meaningful reconciliation.
This work will appeal to scholars and students not only of geography but also of history, law, political science, and Indigenous studies. It will be a useful resource for legal practitioners and plaintiffs concerned with Aboriginal title and Indigenous sovereignty in Canada, and with settler-colonial contexts more broadly.