The Ties that Blind: Making Fee Simple in the British Columbia Treaty Process

Abstract

Property is a crucial means by which space is made, and remade. This is powerfully evident in settler societies, such as British Columbia, Canada. To understand the work that it does requires us to attend to the manner in which it is entangled in and constitutive of a multitude of relations (ethical, practical, historical, semantic and so on). Yet for property to function, some of these relationships must be bracketed. That which is designated as inside a boundary must be partly disentangled from that identified as outside. Property practice and theory helps organize these exclusions. Yet this is not disinterested: Property’s frames, therefore, can become political battle lines. Drawing from a modern-day treaty process involving indigenous communities and the federal and provincial governments in British Columbia, Canada, I trace the ways in which the state has sought to disentangle property from its recently re-emergent colonial entanglements. One of the ways in which it has done this is to insist that First Nations hold their treaty settlement lands as a form of fee simple, this being bracketed as a clear and certain entitlement, replacing a messier ‘Aboriginal title’. First Nations negotiators, however, have pushed back, re-entangling fee simple in culture, politics and place. I explore the performative use of categorization on the part of the Crown in their attempt at re-framing fee simple as ‘simple’. Apart from documenting this understudied postcolonial moment, I also encourage geographers to recognize the important work that property does in making space. To do so, I theorize property as an effect, performed through multiple technical and categorical enactments.