The Vancouver Island Treaties and the Evolving Principles of Indigenous Title

The Vancouver Island Treaties and the Evolving Principles of Indigenous Title illuminates the history of the enigmatic Vancouver Island treaties of the 1850s, offering new interpretations based on a fresh, exhaustive, and multidisciplinary critical analysis of relevant evidence.

To understand as fully as possible the motivations, intentions, and understandings of the Indigenous and non-Indigenous signatories to the treaties, Ted Binnema places the treaties within the context of thousands of years of Vancouver Island history and hundreds of years of land-purchase agreements involving Indigenous peoples. The book explores the evolving concepts and principles of Indigenous title from the first Dutch and English treaties with Indigenous North Americans in the 1620s to the increasingly detailed articulations fuelled by debates and crises in Australia and New Zealand in the 1830s and 1840s.

Binnema explains that Indigenous people themselves played important roles in the formation and elaboration of the principles of Indigenous title in the British World. Drawing on previously neglected archival documents and multidisciplinary evidence in linguistics, archaeology, anthropology, fisheries biology and biological sciences, and oral historiography, the book provides a new model for the study of the idea of Indigenous title and Indigenous land-purchase treaties worldwide.

Ted Binnema is a professor of history at the University of Northern British Columbia.