Year: 2010
Type: article
Abstract: What "post-colonial" certainly is not is one of those periodisations based on epochal "stages," when everything is reversed at the same moment, all the old relations disappear for ever and entirely new ones come to replace them.Clearly the disengagement from the colonizing process has been a long, drawn-out and differentiated affair.(Hall 1996, 247) S PEAKING BEFORE THE PEARSE COMMISSION IN 1975, SimonLucas, then chair of the West Coast District Council of Indian Chiefs, outlined his people's frustrations: "We feel more isolated from the resources to which we have claim than at any time in the past," to which he added simply, "this is becoming more so." 1 This poignant statement articulated the experience of many Natives during and after the rapid expansion and consolidation of British Columbia's coastal forest industry in the 1950s and 1960s.In the twenty years preceding the commission, traditional "Nootka" territories on the west coast of Vancouver Island had been rationalized within the regional and global space-economies of industrial capitalism and in the interests of investors and forestry-based communities far removed from their villages.Segregated on reserves and surrounded by forests of immeasurable value, the Nootka increasingly found that they had almost no access to the resource wealth of their lands (except on the shifting margins of the White 1 Pearse Commission public hearings, Victoria, 30 October 1975.Until the 1980s, anthropologists referred to the indigenous peoples of the west side of Vancouver Island as the "Nootka," an appellation commonly attributed to Captain Cook.The West Coast District Council of Indian Chiefs is now known as the Nuu-chah-nulth Tribal Council and consists of representatives of the council's fourteen member tribes from the west coast of Vancouver Island.
Author: Willems-Braun, Bruce
Language: English
Subfield: Anthropology
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: bronze
OpenAlex ID: W1879408499