Looking back to move forward

The Vancouver Island Treaties and the Evolving Principles of Indigenous Title
by Ted Binnema

Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2025
$44.95 / 9781487554095

Reviewed by Robin Fisher

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Amidst all the fluff and puff that makes it to the bestseller lists, comes a book that makes a serious contribution to understanding British Columbia history. Readers of Ted Binnema’s The Vancouver Island Treaties will gain a greater insight into a formative piece of British Columbia history. For this book is history as it should be. Here is how it is done.

First of all, the research is incredibly thorough. Binnema has scoured the archives in British Columbia and far afield. Major primary sources are Hudson’s Bay Company and British Colonial records but he has not limited his search to those.

Archaeology and ethnology inform the descriptions of Indigenous culture. The bibliography cites a vast array of secondary sources. Yet if historical writing involves many steps, then the research is only the first: crucial of course, but just a beginning.

Research provides the evidence and then the evidence has to be evaluated because it is always partial in both senses of the word. Binnema is constantly asking questions of his sources and comparing one with another. This process is particularly necessary as he assesses conflicting views among colonizers about Indigenous rights. He brings the same scrutiny to oral sources or oral sources that were then written down. Chief David Latasse is the source of an account of Treaty making in Victoria that was published in 1934. The authenticity of his account partly depends on the claim that Latasse was present at Treaty meetings with James Douglas which Binnema shows was unlikely. Nor does he push the evidence beyond its credibility. Rather he is inclined to use the word “probably” or write that the evidence “suggests” when it does not permit a definite conclusion. Thorough and thoughtful research is all the more necessary and demanding if you are taking a broad, comparative approach to your subject.

Binnema looks at British Columbia history in wide contexts of time and place. Sometimes the writing of British Columbia history has been very inward looking. What happened in this particular place? But the significance of what happened here becomes clearer if we look around us. So, the particulars of The Vancouver Island Treaties are here set in the contexts of the Indigenous presence for thousands of years on the land that became British Columbia, the early history of colonisation in North America and British colonial ideas about First Nations claims as well as their application on the ground around its empire.

After doing the research and thinking about its implications, then comes the writing and telling the story. This book is written to inform rather than entertain, as complex issues are clearly described. It starts with the early history Hudson’s Bay Company and its views on Indigenous ownership of the land. It describes the cultures of Northwest Coast, especially their coastal environment, living locations and resource use, both before and after contact. It looks at evolving British Colonial policy, particularly on New Zealand, and then covers the Treaty making process on Vancouver Island. Binnema concludes by writing about how the Treaties were remembered after the fact. But once the historian has described what happened the best is yet to come.

Beyond explaining what happened, it is even more important to tell us why things happened and what is their meaning. The historian is often driven by the belief that there is more to know, even on an apparently well covered subject like the so-called Douglas Treaties. Binnema has written this book because he was not satisfied with the existing scholarship and thinks that different interpretations are not only possible but necessary.

He starts with something relatively straightforward. We have always thought that there were fourteen Treaties on Vancouver Island but Binnema has found another one that makes it fifteen. In early 1840, there was a dispute at Fort Rupert between the Kwakwaka’wakw people and Hudson’s Bay employees over the right to cultivate gardens. George Blenkinsop, the first Governor of Vancouver Island, negotiated the “Garden Treaty” to avoid further disturbances. This agreement was negotiated simply for pragmatic reasons so that the Hudson’s Bay Company could continue to mine coal in the area. Binnema sees this agreement as the first on Vancouver Island and it sets the pattern for the rest.

He goes further afield to uncover the New Zealand antecedents of the Vancouver Island Treaties. They were not based on the foundational 1840 Treaty of Waitangi that guaranteed Maori “full exclusive and undisturbed possession” of their lands and so was disavowed by colonial officials almost before the ink was dry. Binnema shows that the Treaties on Vancouver Island were based, almost word for word, on the now lesser-known deed signed eight years later by Henry Kemp and the Ngāi Tahu by which the colonizers acquired a large part of the South Island. The Kemp deed reflected the thinking of many, though not all, British colonial officials that Indigenous people did not have a general claim to all land in their territory but rather a more limited claim to dwelling and resource use sites. This view was shared by the senior management of the Hudson’s Bay Company and they applied it to Vancouver Island. At the same time, it is important to remember that, whatever the views at Hudson’s Bay Headquarters or the Colonial Office in London, the application on the ground in far flung colonies could be rough and ready. In spite of the belief at the centre that there was no general Aboriginal title, both the Kemp Treaty in New Zealand and those on Vancouver Island had Indigenous people surrendering their land “entirely and forever” with some specific exceptions.

That contradiction notwithstanding, Binnema argues that, even for those negotiating these Treaties, there was no strong moral or legal commitment to Indigenous ownership of territory. Rather the land surrender language was a means of avoiding future disputes and disturbances. When treaties were made with First Nations People they were usually for pragmatic reasons, either to establish a claim against other colonial powers or to foster economic interest, rather than a moral or legal commitment to Indigenous ownership of territory. Thus, villages and cultivated sites were protected along with hunting and fishing rights and the rest of the land was thrown open to newcomer interests.

The Vancouver Island Treaties are often referred to in the literature as the Douglas Treaties whereas Binnema downplays Douglas’ role in the Treaty making process and suggests that the Chief Factor and Governor of the Colony did not attribute much significance to them after the fact. That interpretation then leads to another question. Why does Douglas stop making Treaties after the last one in Nanaimo in 1854? Binnema’s answer is that Douglas backs off, not as I and others have argued because neither local Legislature nor the British Government would not provide the money for land purchases, but because he was not all that committed to treaty making in the first place. Readers should not be too surprised if I suggest that line of interpretation about Douglas could do with some more examination. For to raise further questions, as Binnema attests, is another function of good historical writing. And that is a question that needs to be asked of the evidence from the past because it matters today.

If Binnema’s interpretation, that the Vancouver Island Treaties were not that important to James Douglas and not particularly about extinguishing Aboriginal title, is valid, then the Treaties have been significantly reinterpreted by the courts starting with White and Bob in 1964. The arguments in that case overturned one hundred years of dismissing Aboriginal title in British Columbia, confirmed the legality of the Douglas Treaties and raised the need to acknowledge First Nations traditional ownership of the land. To now contemplate which of these interpretations is more accurate will really set a cat among the pigeons.

If there was some confusion among the colonizers about the nature and function of these Treaties then is it fair to say that the Indigenous signers did not have much chance of knowing what was going on? This book begins with the intent of trying to understand “how the Indigenous people of Vancouver Island might have understood the treaties in the 1850s.” The question is reiterated on the last page. “Did the Indigenous people understand the implications of the treaties? The answer: “certainly not.” As a consequence, the Vancouver Island Treaties left us with more issues than they resolved. And it took a long time for the settler community and their governments to realise that. First Nations people understood the problems much more quickly as well they might. It was their land after all.

History as it should be. Grounded in prodigious research, Binemma’s judgements are based on the evidence from the past rather than current opinion.  He considers British Columbia history in its widest context including thousands of years of First Nations presence on their land and the means by which colonizers diminished that presence. He reinterprets earlier work on the subject and yet admits, right from the start, that important pieces of the puzzle will still be missing when his contribution is complete. He does not pretend for one minute that his will be the last word.

Binnema’s first sentence on The Vancouver Island Treaties is: “Historians should be humble.” If you do not feel some humility upon reading this book, then you don’t get it.

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Robin Fisher taught and wrote history as a faculty member at Simon Fraser University before he moved into university administration and contributed to the establishment of two new universities: the University of Northern British Columbia in Prince George and Mount Royal University in Calgary. His books include Contact and Conflict: Indian-European Relations in British Columbia, 1774-1890 (UBC Press, 1977; second edition, 1992) and Duff Pattullo of British Columbia (University of Toronto Press, 1991). He was the recipient of the 2022 Lieutenant Governor’s Medal for Historical Writing for Wilson Duff: Coming Back, A Life. [Editor’s note: Robin Fisher has reviewed books by Jim Reynolds, Daniel Marshall, Margaret Horsfield & Ian Kennedy, Gordon Miller, Art Downs, Richard Boyer for The British Columbia Review, and contributed two popular essays, The Way We Were: Two Friends, Two Historians and “The Noise of Time” and the Removal of History? ]

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The British Columbia Review

Interim Editors, 2023-26: Trevor Marc Hughes (non-fiction), Brett Josef Grubisic (fiction)
Publisher: Richard Mackie

Formerly The Ormsby Review, The British Columbia Review is an on-line book review and journal service for BC writers and readers. The Advisory Board now consists of Jean Barman, Wade Davis, Robin Fisher, Barry Gough, Hugh Johnston, Kathy Mezei, Patricia Roy, and Graeme Wynn. Provincial Government Patron (since September 2018): Creative BC. Honorary Patron: Yosef Wosk. Scholarly Patron: SFU Graduate Liberal Studies. The British Columbia Review was founded in 2016 by Richard Mackie and Alan Twigg.

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