Landing Native Fisheries reveals the contradictions and consequences of an Indian land policy premised on access to fish, on one hand, and a program of fisheries management intended to open the resource to newcomers, on the other. Beginning with the first treaties signed on Vancouver Island between 1850 and 1854, Douglas Harris maps the connections between the colonial land policy and the law governing the fisheries. In so doing, Harris rewrites the history of colonial dispossession in British Columbia, offering a new and nuanced examination of the role of law in the consolidation of power within the colonial state.

Douglas C. Harris (PhD) is the Nathan T. Nemetz Chair in Legal History and the Associate Dean Graduate Studies & Research in the Faculty of Law at the University of British Columbia. He writes and teaches in the areas of property law, legal history, fisheries law, and Aboriginal law. Professor Harris is the author of Fish, Law, and Colonialism: The Legal Capture of Salmon in British Columbia (University of Toronto Press, 2001) and Land ing Native Fisheries: Indian Reserves and Fishing Rights in British Columbia, 1849-1925 (University of British Columbia Press, 2008), which received the John T. Saywell Prize for Canadian Constitutional Legal History in 2011. He is also a co-author of the leading property law casebook in Canada, A Property Law Reader: Cases, Questions, Commentary (Carswell, 2012), now in its third edition.

Douglas C. Harris' profile page

• Winner, John T. Saywell Prize for Canadian Constitutional Legal History
• Commended, Lieutenant-Governor’s Medal for Historical Writing, British Columbia Historical Federation

In this thorough and well-documented account, Harris demonstrates the importance of historical factors to the social and political geography of British Columbia.

The Canadian Geographer, 55, no 2 (2011)

Landing Native Fisheries: Indian Reserves and Fishing Rights in British Columbia, 1849–1925