Theatrical Recycling as Colonial Prequel: The Provocation!, Nootka Sound, and British Columbia’s “First” Play

The 1790 pantomime The Provocation!’s intervention into the Nootka Crisis may signal that what was to crystalize by 1871, when BC entered Canadian Confederation as a settler colony, was already taking shape: the confluence of the development of a series of extractive industries, the establishment of settler colonies, and persistent imperial ambivalence about the territory that would eventually become a Canadian province. Given that the Nootka Sound Crisis is now relatively unknown, this article begins by briefly summarizing the crisis. After describing Nootka Sound and The Provocation!, The Provocation!’s apparent intervention in British diplomacy is discussed. Finally, after outlining how the public appearance of the Cherokee Chiefs was deployed by the press, the article addresses how the two plays built on pre-circulating British understandings of Indigeneity and of the Pacific Northwest, recycling and activating these performative and visual genealogies to lay the groundwork for the settler-colonial structures that followed in the nineteenth century.