The other newcomers : aboriginal interactions with people from the Pacific

Abstract

Since the 1970s, historians of British Columbia representing various ideological schools and methodological approaches have debated the role of race in the province’s history. Many of the earlier works discussed whether race or class was the primary determinant in social relations while more recent works have argued that factors such as race, class, and gender combined in different ways and in different situations to inform group interactions. However, the application of these terms in describing aspects of the thoughts and actions of non-Western peoples can be problematic. This thesis attempts to approach the question of “race” and its role in British Columbia’s past from the perspective of the Indigenous population of the Lower Fraser River watershed from 1828 (the establishment of the first Hudson’s Bay Company post on the Fraser River) to the 1920s, examining shifting notions of the way Aboriginal epistemologies have conceived of otherness through contact between Stó:lõ people and Euro-Canadian and -American, Hawaiian, Chinese, and Japanese immigrants. The main contention is that, contrary to the historiography’s depictions of unified and static interactions with newcomers, Stó:lõ people held complex and dynamic notions of otherness when newcomers arrived with the fur trade, and that such concepts informed interactions with people from throughout the Pacific. Numerous factors informed the ways in which Stó:lõ people approached and engaged in relationships with newcomers, but the strongest ones originated in Stó:lõ cultural and historical understanding of others rather than in the racial ideas of Euro-Canadians. Following a discussion of the historiography of race relations and Native-Newcomer interactions in British Columbia, this thesis examines relationships during the fur trade between Hawaiian men employed at Fort Langley and Kwantlen people; the ways in which Stó:lõ people grouped the miners who came to the Fraser Canyon in 1858; Stó:lõ people’s interactions with Chinese immigrants from the 1860s through the 1880s; and the ways in which the presence of Japanese and Chinese Canadians influenced how Stó:lõ leaders articulated their claims to rights and title in the first decades of the twentieth century. It concludes that Aboriginal relations with non-Europeans took a different path than relations with Europeans. Several factors contributed to the branching of paths, including pre-contact views of “ outsiders,” kinship ties in the fur trade, economic competition, and the unsettled “Indian Land Question.” Moreover, the different relationships must be seen as affecting the other, making understanding the nature of Aboriginal associations with non-Europeans an important part of making sense of aspects of Aboriginal relations with Europeans.