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The many local places created by immigrants and their descendants in early Canada developed within one of three characteristic frames: towns, work camps, and countrysides. The towns, the most conservative, largely reproduced the ways of small European towns. Work camps subjected groups of men, abstracted from intricate European social formations, to the conditions of work associated with particular staple trades. Countrysides, where most people lived, were loci of rapid social and cultural change. The availability of land and scarcity of labour provided opportunity for the poor and disincentive for the rich, and compressed European social hierarchies. The convergence of Europeans from different regional backgrounds, coupled with the many influences of new environments, created distinctive rural cultures. In early Canada, these new countrysides were scattered along a northern edge of North American agriculture. Small and bounded, they soon filled, westward Canadian alternatives were inaccessible or occupied, and the surplus young migrated southward into American melting pots. A scattered country that was neither European nor American, and that was inherently diverse, was in the process of formation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article considers the relationship between the increasingly humanized spaces of early Canada and the patches of settlement that, at Confederation, were assembled into a country. It suggests that Harold Innis correctly identified some of the essential spaces of early Canada as, in his American way, did Frederick Jackson Turner. Both, however, offer limited perspectives: Innis because his analysis ill fit the areas of agricultural settlement where most people lived, Turner because of the imprecisions of his analysis and also because, in early Canada, the bounded nature of agricultural settlement severely constricted the westward expansion on which his analysis turned. But Innis was right about staple trades in non-agricultural areas, and Turner was right that areas of recent agricultural settlement were loci of particularly rapid cultural change. Both analyses can be filled in, and that, particularly with regard to Turner, this article attempts to do. In so doing, it considers the extent to which the early rural societies in Canada, the loci of most lives, can be considered to have been ideologically liberal. It also considers the particular patterns of secondary migration in and beyond bounded settlements, and their relationship to the construction and maintenance of social and cultural difference. Overall, the article suggests that the receptacles within which countries develop are important, that the Canadian and American receptacles were strikingly different, and that the spaces of early Canadian life have their continuing legacies in an ongoing engagement with sparsely settled land and with very different ways of being. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The first section of this two-part paper describes my historical geographical career, particularly the topics and issues I have pursued and the changing intellectual environment in which they have been situated. The second section offers a summary interpretation of the emerging human geography of early-modern Canada followed by some reflections on its contemporary implications. This interpretation stresses the extent to which boundaries and discontinuities marked early Canada, and contrasts a pinched Canadian experience with the land with a far more expansive American one. It shows how deeply difference was constructed and ingrained in the Canadian past, and suggests some challenges and opportunities that follow from this inheritance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Discusses the author's book "Making Native Space: Colonialism, Resistance and Reserves in British Columbia". Description of the implementation of the Indian reserve system in British Columbia; Complex process of dispossession and repossession.

Discusses the diversity of the physical environment of British Columbia. Remains of the Noble Five mill at Cody; Description of a lake house in Coldstream Valley; Different settlements and human landscapes.

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

Examines native and non-native evidence for smallpox around the Strait of Georgia and Puget Sound in the late eighteenth century. Devastation of the Salish peoples of the region in the winter of 1781-82; Incidence of smallpox in the lower British Columbia plains in 1780-81; Reluctance of scholars to identify smallpox on the early Northwest Coast; Estimates of immediate pre-smallpox population.

Examines the intricacies of the equation of power resistance that surrounded the land-based fur trade in the Cordillera of British Columbia. Relocation of the fur trade capital from Europe to the North American interior; Set of assumptions and practices; Closely related strategies of Native management.

Editorial. Comments on an article by Boris DeWiel on the development of populism in British Columbia, published in the number 129, Spring 2001 edition of the periodical 'BC Studies.' Colonial context of western populism; Identification of a basic axis of cultural-political tension in the province.

Editorial. Introduces articles in the May 2000 issue of the journal 'BC Studies.' Focus on author Douglas Cole's stature as a scholar in British Columbia; Contributions to the study of culture, landscape and colonialism.