Mapping them 'out': Euro-Canadian cartography and the appropriation of First Nations' territories in British Columbia, 1793-1916

In this thesis I use a 'materialist hermeneutic' to interpret and understand the way in which maps made by European discoverers, explorers, and colonizers during the imperial and (post)colonial periods helped actualize the territorial dispossession of the (Ab)original inhabitants of what is now British Columbia. Beginning with the charts of George Vancouver and Alexander Mackenzie, and finishing with the reserve plans of the 1916 Royal Commission, I illustrate this thesis by tracing the cartographic encirclement of the the First Nations of the northwest coast between 1793 and 1916. There are three essential themes: (a) the 'positioning' of the map artefact in an ideological power network; (b) the subjective emplacement of the objective 'Other' in the geographical perspective authorized by the network; and (c) the representational discourses on the 'surface' of the map that comprise the rules under which that emplacement is achieved and maintained. Our entry (and exit) point is the 1991 B.C. Supreme Court case Delgamuukw vs. A.G., in which maps were used as evidence by both the Gitksan and Wet'suwet'en Nations (the plaintiffs) and the Crown (the defence). Given the manner in which the Court interpreted this evidence, the thesis has implications not only for our understanding the social function of maps in historical or contemporary land claims, but also for the way in which we establish, sustain, and defend our own territorial legitimacy at the expense of another. (Abstract shortened by UMI.).