The ties that blind: making fee simple in the British Columbia treaty process
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 property does requires us to attend to the manner in which it is entangled in and constitutive of a multitude of relations (e...
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crwiley:10.1111/tran.12058 2024-09-15T18:06:37+00:00 The ties that blind: making fee simple in the British Columbia treaty process Blomley, Nicholas Social Science and Humanities Research Council 2014 http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/tran.12058 https://api.wiley.com/onlinelibrary/tdm/v1/articles/10.1111%2Ftran.12058 https://rgs-ibg.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1111/tran.12058 en eng Wiley http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/termsAndConditions#vor Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers volume 40, issue 2, page 168-179 ISSN 0020-2754 1475-5661 journal-article 2014 crwiley https://doi.org/10.1111/tran.12058 2024-08-15T04:17:20Z 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 property 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 organise 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 tried to do 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 categorisation 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 recognise the important work that property does in making space. To do so, I theorise property as an effect, performed through multiple technical and categorical enactments. Article in Journal/Newspaper First Nations Wiley Online Library Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 40 2 168 179 |
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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 property 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 organise 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 tried to do 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 categorisation 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 recognise the important work that property does in making space. To do so, I theorise property as an effect, performed through multiple technical and categorical enactments. |
author2 |
Social Science and Humanities Research Council |
format |
Article in Journal/Newspaper |
author |
Blomley, Nicholas |
spellingShingle |
Blomley, Nicholas The ties that blind: making fee simple in the British Columbia treaty process |
author_facet |
Blomley, Nicholas |
author_sort |
Blomley, Nicholas |
title |
The ties that blind: making fee simple in the British Columbia treaty process |
title_short |
The ties that blind: making fee simple in the British Columbia treaty process |
title_full |
The ties that blind: making fee simple in the British Columbia treaty process |
title_fullStr |
The ties that blind: making fee simple in the British Columbia treaty process |
title_full_unstemmed |
The ties that blind: making fee simple in the British Columbia treaty process |
title_sort |
ties that blind: making fee simple in the british columbia treaty process |
publisher |
Wiley |
publishDate |
2014 |
url |
http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/tran.12058 https://api.wiley.com/onlinelibrary/tdm/v1/articles/10.1111%2Ftran.12058 https://rgs-ibg.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1111/tran.12058 |
genre |
First Nations |
genre_facet |
First Nations |
op_source |
Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers volume 40, issue 2, page 168-179 ISSN 0020-2754 1475-5661 |
op_rights |
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/termsAndConditions#vor |
op_doi |
https://doi.org/10.1111/tran.12058 |
container_title |
Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers |
container_volume |
40 |
container_issue |
2 |
container_start_page |
168 |
op_container_end_page |
179 |
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1810444022560325632 |