Cambios en la familia campesina

European exploration for resources in the New World began in the late 15^th century, and is significantly marked in America by the arrival of Columbus in 1492. Columbus was Italian, but his voyage was funded by Spain and thus he represented the Spanish monarch during his exploration. In British Columbia,

the first encounters between seagoing explorers and local peoples occurred as recently as the eighteenth century. By then the European, in blatant disregard for indigenous populations with distinct cultures, claimed to have ‘discovered’

most of the world, rather than having encountered long-established ways of life.

Among areas lying off established sea routes was the Pacific Northwest, extending from northern California to Alaska. (Barman 2007, 15)

As part of the colonization project, European countries applied their own rites for claiming sovereignty over their so-called discoveries in the New World. In North America, as in many other colonized areas of the world, gaining sovereignty was recognized by the French, Spanish, English, Dutch and Portuguese through a “series of

16 This name was later abandoned due to potential confusion with French colonial island in the Pacific Ocean (Barman 2007).

acts” mutually recognized by European powers (Macklem 2001, 113). These acts ranged from simply planting a flag, reading a manifesto to local Indigenous people, such as the Spanish Requerimiento of 1513 ⁽¹⁷⁾, or occupying an area with settlers (Rivera 1992;

Macklem 2001). The English claiming rites were “almost anitceremonial” whereby they employed “architectural objects and everyday agricultural activity” (Seed 1995, 13).

However these “fences and hedges” were not necessarily recognized as persuasive claiming rites, by say the Spanish, who would read their “Spanish speeches (duly

notarized)” (Seed 1995, 12). Furthermore, “the other European legal systems that would come to the New World – French, Spanish, Portuguese, and Dutch – required either formal permission or written records to acquire title even to apparently unused land”

(Seed 1995, 19). British Columbia and much of Canada was shaped by the colonization of the English and “in English law, neither a ceremony nor a document but the ordinary action of constructing a dwelling place created the right of possession. The continuing presence and habitation of the object – the house – maintained that right” (Seed 1995, 19).

While claiming rites differed between countries, Western European colonizers

eventually developed their own principles governing the distribution of sovereignty.

The established rules of the day included the so-called doctrine of discovery, whereby sovereignty could be acquired in one of three primary instances: when territory was

17 The Spanish colonizers in the New World read a manifesto called El Requerimiento which stated, among other demands, that the local people convert to Christianity or suffer war. The Spanish also used this Requirimiento and associated religious and royal justifications in their wars against the Moors of Granada.

The Requerimiento was read in Spanish to local Indigenous peoples who did not speak Spanish.

considered to be unoccupied (terra nullius), or through cession of occupied territory through war or treaty (Ashe 1997).

The method of declaring sovereignty for a European Crown by deeming land

unoccupied was achieved in one of two ways. First, the concept of terra nullius, land unoccupied by humans or people considered fully human,¹⁸ was developed by Western Europeans to justify settlement in Australia, parts of North America, South America, New Zealand and many other colonized areas of the world. Second, the Western, particularly English, concept of occupied land also required the land to be used by peoples considered civilized and organized, living in villages with fences, agriculture, resource extraction, and development. In the case of the Indigenous peoples of North America, “European powers viewed Aboriginal nations as insufficiently Christian or civilized to justify recognizing them as sovereign over their lands and people”

(Macklem 2001, 114) rather than recognizing that they had met some of the world’s

“most distinctive” Indigenous peoples (Barman 2007, 15). The Indigenous peoples of British Columbia “spoke complex languages, they were economically self-sufficient, and they boasted of cultures that were in many ways more developed than those of any other part of the continent north of Mexico” (Barman 2007, 15).

18 In the early 16^th century, debate ensued in Spain about whether Indigenous peoples of the West Indies and Africa were humans or sub-human and whether they were solely suited for slavery or deserved protection under the law (Bartolome de Las Casas 1552).

The functioning ecosystems managed by Indigenous people were not viewed as occupied by British colonizers. Many colonizers saw these ecosystems as untouched landscapes, rather than the managed systems they were. When Captain George

Vancouver sailed into Burrard Inlet, the area that now bears a city of his name, he said it required “only to be enriched by man to render it the most lovely country that can be imagined” (Penikett 2006, 73). However, Indigenous territory throughout the world, from the Penan people's molonged (nurtured) rattan forest-fields in Western Borneo (Brosius 2001) to the fire-managed landscapes of the North American Garry Oak ecosystems on the west coast (Turner 2005), were seen by European colonizers as wilderness, nature, or “raw land”, lacking and requiring “commodification by imperialism” to acquire value (Forbes 2001, 109).

Furthermore, the Indigenous systems of governance, communal property law, and feasting, to name a few, were not recognized by the administration of the new Colony as acts of control by a sovereign nation over its territory (Forbes 2001, 76). In the late 19^th century, when land title issues were being decided by Western European colonizers in parts of the New World, including British Columbia, Lockean principles of private property were influential (Harris 2002). In essence, the labour theory of property posited by John Locke contended that when one puts his¹⁹ labour into a piece of land, one then has a special right to that land, or in European terms, has ownership of that

19 In late 19^th century Europe, the labour of women was not recognized as contributing to land ownership.

land (see Laslett’s 1988 edited work of Locke’s Two Treatises of Government²⁰). In 1867, Joseph Trutch, chief commissioner of lands and eventual Governor of the Colony that would be British Columbia, stated clearly the common colonial opinion: that First Nations people were not using their lands sufficiently to maintain ownership or title to the lands they claim.²¹

Many First Nations in British Columbia were viewed as lawless because they did not have a system of laws and government that was recognizable to the European

newcomers. In contemporary international law, a new system of law cannot be imposed on another Nation if one already exists. This perceived absence of law in the colonizers’ eyes was another justification the colonizers used to impose their people, culture, and laws on these Indigenous Nations. This attitude prevailed through much of the 20^th century as well, as evidenced by the lower court ruling in Delgamuukw that did not recognize the Gitxsan and Wet’suwet’en First Nation forms of law and

governance (songs, stories, feasting) as legitimate evidence of a legal system of governance.

20 Locke, John. [1690]. 1988. Two Treatises of Government. Ed. Laslett, Peter. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

21 “The Indians have really no right to the lands they claim, nor are they of any actual value or utility to them, and I cannot see why they should either retain these lands to the prejudice of the general interests of the Colony or be allowed to make a market of them either to the Government or to Individuals”

(Trutch quoted in Penikett 2006, 75)