Making Native Space

Reviews / Votes

As the first comprehensive account of the reserve system in British Columbia, the book is an important contribution to regional history, the history of aboriginal-white relations, and colonialism. Perhaps most unexpectedly, because it puts aboriginal-white relations in the context of the federal-provincial wrangling that has shaped the Canadian political landscape since 1867, it also manages to breathe new life into an old historical chestnut. - Tina Loo (American Historical Review, April 2003) This is a wonderful, timely, thoughtful, and gracefully written book. It makes a highly significant contribution, both to scholarship and to public policy. - Hamar Foster, Faculty of Law, University of Victoria, author of English Law, British Columbia: Establishing Legal Institutions West of the Rockies and The White Man's Law in the Far West: Establishing Legal Institutions in British Columbia Cole Harris has written the definitive history of the Aboriginal struggle for recognition and justice in British Columbia. Future generations of British Columbians, Aboriginal and otherwise, will thank him for this remarkable story. - Neil J. Sterritt, Gitksan Nation, co-author of Tribal Boundaries in the Nass Watershed Along with its encyclopaedic account of the white geographies and mentalities that dominated British Columbia through the 1800s and 1900s, Making Native Space is also a compelling saga of Aboriginal management and resistance. - Robert Menzies (Canadian Journal of Law and Society, Vol. 18, No. 1) Cole Harris's latest book is a well crafted, handsomely produced historical geography ... It is rich in terms of its colonial discourse analysis, its comparative insight and its engagement with the politics of postcolonialism. - Alan Lester, University of Sussex (Area, Vol. 35, Issue 3, September 2003) This is an important book for historians, geographers, lawyers, government officials, and scholars of Aboriginal studies. But it deserves to reach a wider audience because it speaks to fundamental issues of Canada's founding, namely, the dispossession of the original peoples living here ... Harris has given us a remarkable book, a genealogy, in the Foucauldian sense, of reserve policy and the land question in BC today. - Jean-Paul Restoule (University of Toronto Quarterly, Winter 2004/05) Outstanding ... invites us to rethink, and remap, literally and figuratively, the boundaries and paths that can guide us to a brighter future. - Karl Preuss, University of Victoria (American Indian Quarterly, Summer & Fall 2005, Vol. 29, Nos. 3 and 4)