Subsistence and Resistance on the British Columbia Coast: Kingcome Village’s Estuarine Gardens as Contested Space

Abstract

From the earliest arrival of European peoples on the coast of what is now British Columbia, the intricate knowledge systems and traditional resource and landscape management practices of First Nations were generally overlooked. This was true, even as the landscape exhibited many signs of these traditions, such as Indigenous clam gardens, estuarine root gardens, camas prairies and many other anthropogenic sites and plant species they encompassed. As Europeans moved into the region and started acquiring land for settlement and development, many of these carefully tended landscapes were appropriated through various mechanisms, supported by colonial land policy. First Nations, especially along the BC coast, were relegated to small reserves encompassing individual village sites, fishing stations and little else, with the assumption that they did not really need a substantial land base because they were totally dependent on fishing. First Nations lost control of many key resource harvesting areas; without the ability to manage them as before, they experienced both a loss of traditional food sources and a deterioration of places and practices they had formerly been integral to the harvest. Only recently, as a new generation of ethnoecologists, archaeologists, geographers and other scholars has collaborated with Indigenous knowledge holders, has the role of First Nations as highly sophisticated resource managers and purposive modifiers of the land been more widely recognized. Efforts are now underway to document the intricacies of traditional management systems, so that, where possible, some of these might be reinstated as part of an overall movement to recognize Indigenous land rights and food security. And, while First Nations may still lack title to many of the lands once integral to the traditional resource harvest, those lands retain a degree of significance and Indigenous land users still work in both practical and symbolic ways to maintain community ties to these important places.