jean Barman - On the Cusp of Contact ; Gender, Space and Race in the Colonization of British Columbia

Gender, Space and Race inthe Colonization of British Columbia

Essays by Jean Barman

Edited by Margery Fee

Copyright 2020 Jean Barman

Introduction 2020 Margery Fee

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Edited and indexed by Audrey McClellan

Cover and text design by Shed Simas / Ona Design

Map by Roger Handling

Cover image: Detail from Entrance to Howe Sound from Mouth of False Creek (ca. 1887) by Edward Roper, Art Gallery of Greater Victoria

Printed and bound in Canada

Printed on acid-free paper certified by the Forest Stewardship Council

Harbour Publishing acknowledges the support of the Canada Council for the Arts, the Government of Canada, and the Province of British Columbia through the BC Arts Council.

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

Title: On the cusp of contact : gender, space and race in the colonization of British Columbia / essays by Jean Barman ; edited by Margery Fee.

Other titles: Essays. Selections

Names: Barman, Jean, author. | Fee, Margery, 1948- editor.

Description: Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: Canadiana (print) 20190229039 | Canadiana (ebook) 20190229098 | ISBN 9781550178968 (softcover) | ISBN 9781550178975 ( HTML )

Subjects: LCSH : Frontier and pioneer lifeBritish Columbia. | LCSH : British ColumbiaColonization. | LCSH : British ColumbiaRace relations. | LCSH : British ColumbiaSocial conditions.

Classification: LCC FC 3811 . B 34 2020 | DDC 971.1dc23

The past cannot be undone, but it can be redressed. As historians, we do this by adding new layers of understanding, principally through our writing, to the usual measures perceived to have meaning. For me, redress has meant integrating the history of Indigenous education in Canada into the scholarship long before it was fashionable to do so. It has meant, in the essays that follow, changing terms I used to name Canadas first peoples to Indigenous. In writing as I do, I have drawn on insights from politics, education, and librarianship, in which fields I have graduate degrees.

Most importantly, I was privileged to teach in a faculty of education, meaning I was not weighed down by traditional disciplinary measures of worth as to how we conceive and write about the past. Some topics, such as the everyday lives of women and of Indigenous peoples, survive in good part in human memory, and I have had the honour of many descendants sharing their families stories and pictures with me on the understanding I would act responsibly and honestly in my use of them. I would like to think I have done so, and thank you, each and every one, for your generosity of spirit.

I am amazingly grateful to the eminent literary historian Margery Fee, who, without my foreknowledge, decided that essays I had written over the years merited re-publication as a collection, and to Audrey McClellan, Arlene Prunkl, and Rebecca Pruitt MacKenney for insightfully editing and updating the essays. My initial resistance to the project was overcome by my realization on rereading the essays, foregrounded by Margerys astute introductions, that, yes, they do matter. Indeed, the essays may matter more now than when they were first published, given changing perspectives on Indigenous women and Indigenous schooling.

Jean Barman

With Yvonne Hbert and Don McCaskill, Indian Education in Canada: vol. 1, The Legacy and vol. 2, The Challenge (Vancouver: UBC Press, 1986 and 1987); with Marie Battiste, First Nations Education in Canada: The Circle Unfolds (Vancouver: UBC Press, 1995); and with Cheryl Suzack, Jeanne Perreault, and Shari Huhndorf, Indigenous Women and Feminism: Politics, Activism, Culture (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2010).

In volume 13 of Dictionary of Canadian Biography online, early British Columbia settler William Naukana of indigenous Hawaiian descent who had children by two or more Indigenous women; in volume 15, early British Columbia settler William Curran from the United States, who had large families with two Indigenous women in succession; and in volume 16, British Columbia writer Constance Lindsay Skinner, who made her career in New York City, and British Columbian of Indigenous Canadian and Hawaiian descent Maria Mahoi, who had large families in succession with an American whaler and with the son of an establishment Englishman and an Indigenous woman.

See Selected Works by Jean Barman.