“An Intricate Maze”: Indigenous Encounters with Trapline Registration in Northern British Columbia, 1930-1940

• In Event: Northern Environments and Indigenous Communities

Abstract

British Columbia’s trapline registration program, implemented in 1925, offered bureaucrats, other settlers, and indigenous peoples opportunities to refashion the relationships between people, land, and game animals in the rural north. Previously scholars have claimed that the state employed this element of conservation policy to legally dispossess indigenous communities of as much as 90 percent of the province’s traplines and to impose new gendered and liberal capitalist conceptions of land tenure upon those communities. These arguments are oversimplifications: during the consolidation of the new program in the provincial north during the 1930s, indigenous people and settlers inside and outside of the state engaged in numerous and multifaceted projects that involved compromises and dialogue over the meaning of the regulation of land and game. Drawing on Gitxsan, Wet’suwet’en, and other petitions and accounts of engagements between these indigenous communities and government agents in the under-researched provincial game warden’s records, my research explores how indigenous trappers – frequently hereditary chiefs or those delegated to act on their behalf – sought to mobilize the power of state organizations to press territorial claims and resolve disputes not just with white trappers, but also with other indigenous trappers. At these intersections between indigenous and colonial law, they endeavoured to draw alarmed state officials into what the latter worriedly described as “an intimate maze” of indigenous kinship and territorial law. In the wake of major judicial rulings like Delgamuukw, trapline registration has emerged not just as a subtopic in the broader history of the Canadian conservation movement but also a matter fraught with political, social, and legal ramifications as indigenous and settler publics, bureaucracies, and the courts weigh the importance for the recognition or denial of land title of a regime initially intended to police “merely” the taking of fur-bearers.

Author

• David Vogt, University of Victoria