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The emphasis on culture in studies of colonialism tends to obscure other forms of colonial power while making it impossible to contextualize the cultural argument and assess its salience. Rather than focusing on texts, systems of signification, and procedures of knowledge generation, as the colonial discourse literature is wont to do, a fuller understanding of colonial powers is achieved by explaining colonialism's basic geographical dispossessions of the colonized. In so doing, the issue of power is not prejudged and the particular roles of different modes and theories of colonial power come into focus. I explore these propositions by considering the powers underlying the reserve (reservation) system in British Columbia, a system that, by allocating a tiny fraction of the land to native people and opening the rest for development, facilitated the geographical reorganization of the province. My conclusions are these: the initial ability to dispossess rested primarily on physical power and the supporting infrastructure of the state; the momentum to dispossess derived from the interest of capital in profit and of settlers in forging new livelihoods; the legitimation of and moral justification for dispossession lay in a cultural discourse that located civilization and savagery and identified the land uses associated with each; and the management of dispossession rested with a set of disciplinary technologies of which maps, numbers, law, and the geography of resettlement itself were the most important. Although no one body of theory explains colonial power, several theoretical perspectives yield crucial insights. Key Words: colonialism, colonial discourse theory, deterritorialization, colonial land policies, governmentality, reservations, British Columbia.

DR. HARRIS is a professor of geography at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver, British Columbia v6T 1Z2, Canada., ********** There are geographers who do not enjoy fieldwork. One of my colleagues in the late 1960s, an eminent spatial theorist, could not abide the world as it presented itself [...]

D.W. Meinig's latest volume of 'The Shaping of America: A Geographic Perspective on 500 Years of History' is an outstanding work of scholarship. Like the two volumes that preceded it, volume three, 'Transcontinental America, 1850-1915,' discerns pattern and order in the grand sweep of history that it covers. Written in the best tradition of critically independent but humanistic scholarship, Meinig's book is easily one of the best works on economic geography written to date.

Espace et Culture, an international conference held in late-September, 1994 at Lac Beauport, Quebec City concluded that the concepts of space and culture has weakened the discipline of historical geography. The historians revealed the necessity to be competent with spatial disciplines.Fernando Lambert's paper depicted the spatial aspect of post-colonial West African novels. In favorable situations geography's status is found to be expansionistic; in adverse conditions it is a measure of institutional susceptibility.

European commercial capital was drawn to the North American interior due to the fur trade, and there it integrated with management of native peoples. Thus started the discourse of the fur trade in Cordillera inclusive of commercial geography and closely associated strategies toward Natives. The foundation of those strategies was a politics of terror, a power struggle and complex connection of Native and white concerns. Though native and white agency were reinforcing, the balance of power favored whites establishing the fur trade as a nascent colonial presence.

Analysis of nominal census of British Columbia for 1851 reveals the population structure and distribution in the province. The white, Chinese and Indian populations lived in separate areas and did not identify common class interests. The period was marked by the whites' reconceptualization that fixed on their whiteness and abstracted from their ethnicity. The patterns resemble those found in the American west coast, New Zealand and Australia.

In the changed intellectual climate since historical geography emerged as a substantial geographical subfield, issues of power and modernity have come much to the fore. For Michel Foucault, power is less a property than a strategy and is widely distributed in cultural discourses and their settings. For Jurgen Habermas, modernity imposes a distinctive context of communications that undermines the stability of traditional lifeworlds and holds out a largely unfulfilled promise of rationality. For Anthony Giddens, the agency and settings of power cannot be conceptualized separately, nor can the emergence of modernity be understood apart from the changing reach and geographical configuration of power. For Michael Mann, a history of social power turns necessarily on an analysis of power's networks, logistics, and spatial contours. Such ideas about power and modernity emphasize the importance of a historical geography that is both immersed in data and sensitive to general literatures. A growing conversation between historical geography and parts of social theory would enrich both, while drawing historical geography into much closer association with the rest of human geography. Key Words: historical geography, power, modernity, social theory, discourse, lifeworld, structuration.

Harold Innis's works relate to the geographic, social and economic structures of Canada and present his theories on societies. However, these theories are not entirely accurate, being based on too narrow as sample of society. Innis felt that societies and colonies are closely interrelated. This is established by the recreation of European societies in Canada and the American continents. His work provides an important beginning for modern scholars in the study of the interrelated fields of geography, economics and society.

The way in which the native people of British Columbia got located in small reserves of useless land during the 1930's which the government found non-productive and assumed that this would force the natives to learn the habits of industry, thrift and materialism is described. Irrespective of all odds the native people have stood out and lived a life of their own, sometimes adjusting to the changes and other times voicing their opinion against the system is also discussed.

Canada is an evolving human geography that has nurtured difference and made a unitary state impossible. In this short essay I allude to the historical-geographical construction of Canada and the type of confederation it encouraged. I show how deeply different identities are ingrained in the fabric of this country. As the state cannot provide equally for all these identities, I consider the special claims of Native peoples and French speakers, particularly in relation to those of multiculturalism, and argue that the country has a particular responsibility to those societies that were here before the Canadian state, and found it super-imposed upon them. Overall, I try to show that Canadian patriotism, based less on an overriding meta-narrative (which the country had never found) than on an appreciation of difference and the responsibilities of citizenship, provides a welcome alternative to either an exclusionary ethnic nationalism or a borderless electronic postmodernity. Keywords: identity, nationalism, federalism, multiculturalism, archipelago, Aboriginal people, ethnicity, citizenship

Examines the historical-geographical construction of Canada. Issues on multiculturalism; Discussion on confederation; Elaboration on patriotism.

Focuses on archival fieldwork in geography. Details in conducting archival fieldwork; Rules and methodologies; Types of archives.