Failure on the Frontier: An Exploration of Settler-Colonial Failure on Tsek’ehne Lands

• In Event: The Far Off Omineca and Beyond: Reconsidering the Finlay-Parsnip Watershed of Northern British Columbia, 1860-1956

Abstract

Throughout the late-19th and early-20th centuries, North American settlers flocked to various imagined wild frontiers seeking to discover and extract ‘their’ fortune, including the traditional territories of the Tsek’ehne in Northern British Columbia, Canada. Unlike local Indigenous peoples, who already occupied these territories as their homelands, settlers had little knowledge of these lands or experience negotiating life on them. Prospectors and settlers were backed by settler legal regimes that supported the appropriation of Indigenous lands. However, settler visions were rarely realized on Tsek’ehne territories. Although large numbers of settlers preempted land and established mining claims on Tsek’ehne lands, they subsequently abandoned or sold these properties upon realizing their economic infeasibility. This paper interrogates failed settlement endeavors scattered across the Tsek’ehne lands in the Finlay and Parsnip watersheds. Specifically, it argues that settler extractive and speculative activities often failed within the Tsek’ehne territory due to colonial overconfidence in ease of appropriating and extracting the monetary value of resources, poor understanding of the harsh environment, and lack of transportation infrastructure. Thus, despite the privileging of White settlement and colonial mineral extractivism through governmental policies such as preemption and mineral claims, settler dreams of remaking Tsek’ehne lands failed. Rather than imagined settler notions of land valuation, Tsek’ehne understandings of how to make livelihood on their territories remained dominant. Studying the history of failed early extractivist and settlement schemes on Tsek’ehne lands highlights that colonialism is not inevitable but uncertain and fragile, liable to fail on lands it fundamentally does not know.

Author

• Charles Campbell, Florida State University