Trapline Registration and Constructing Land Use: A Spatial History of Kaska Land Use in the Early to Mid-Twentieth Century

• In Event: Northern Environments and Indigenous Communities

Abstract

In 1925, the British Columbian government issued an Order-in-Council requiring that trapline holders register their traplines with the government. Through the 1930s and 1940s, Fish and Wildlife Branch officers in conjunction with Indian Affairs officials in northern BC endeavoured to register traplines and sort out various trapline disputes. Two-and-a-half decades later, in 1950, the Yukon government similarly enacted legislation requiring trapline registration. This requirement affected the land use of the Kaska, an Athapaskan-speaking group whose territory was bifurcated by the BC-Yukon border. Trapline registration resulted in the production of numerous documents which help elucidate land use in Kaska traditional territory from the early to mid-twentieth century – as understood by the respective governments involved. Among these documents are a myriad of trapline maps which established individual and group trapline boundaries and helped settle land disputes. Combined, the trapline correspondences and accompanying maps served to render the environment and its users legible to territorial, provincial, and federal governments. In this paper I propose to use GIS mapping techniques to elucidate how trapline registration served to circumscribe Kaska territories relative to neighbouring indigenous groups by providing rigid boundaries to individual and group traplines. I will also evaluate the extent to which the Kaska were alienated of their traditional territories through the registration of traplines to non-Kaska individuals, as Historical GIS can be used to test the extent to which trapline registration both protected and alienated indigenous peoples of their traditional territories. Finally, I will consider how government discourse (provincial, territorial, and federal) around indigenous peoples and land use factored into both ethnogenesis and the allocation of traplines. This will include discussions concerning the extent to which indigenous groups required land that might otherwise be allotted to non-indigenous trappers as well as debates surrounding the abilities of indigenous peoples to conserve wildlife.

Author

• Glenn Iceton, University of Saskatchewan