Entwined Existences

While traditional views of British Columbian history, articulated by historians such as Robin Fisher, have seen white settlement as a force fundamentally at odds with Indigenous prosperity, a closer examination of rural settler communities in nineteenth-century Coast Salish British Columbia reveals a highly hybridized social and economic landscape. Drawing on a range of sources, this paper demonstrates that early settler agricultural communities were precarious and largely dependant on their Indigenous neighbours for labour and resources. Conversely, the Coast Salish peoples in whose territories these settlements were established integrated settlers into their traditional economies, leveraging their skills and abilities for financial gain and utilizing this nascent settler presence as a resource within their traditional territories. This arrangement largely favoured the Coast Salish people, whose prosperity would eventually be curtailed by the legislative agendas of late nineteenth-century federal, provincial, and municipal governments.