Writing British Columbia History, 1784–1958 by Chad Reimer (review)

In Writing British Columbia History, 1784–1958, Chad Reimer traces the development of historical writings on British Columbia from the publication of the records of Captain James Cook’s 1779 visit to the Northwest Coast to Margaret Ormsby’s British Columbia: A History, which was published to commemorate the centennial of British Columbia’s designation as a Crown colony in 1958. Reimer considers the efforts of historical writers to develop a usable past for the region’s developing settler society in three broad, successive categories. Promotional history, penned first by those with little first-hand knowledge of the region and later by sojourners able to draw on experience on the Northwest Coast, promoted empire, civilization, and the rich promise of the region’s resources. Pioneer history includes early historical writings by missionaries, officials, and amateurs, and also the development of communities of ‘historically minded people’ in the province, and establishment of institutions such as the Provincial Archives and the BC Historical Association. Professional history considers the comparatively late development of professional historical training and practice in British Columbia, centred on the University of British Columbia and the production of locally trained professional historians in the province. Throughout, Reimer engages the relationship between identity and history and the efforts of historical writers, in the 200 years since the Nuu-chah-nulth (Nootka) first encountered Cook’s sailors, to legitimate the developing settler society in British Columbia by creating histories that ‘place[d] it within the realm of modern civilization … [and showed] human agency taming geography.’

Reimer’s main contention is that ‘the writing of history was an essential tool in the construction of a neo-European society – and, more particularly, an Anglo- or British-derived society – on the Northwest Coast of North America.’ Reimer explicitly closes his study before the significant historiographical shifts in the second half of the twentieth century (particularly in the realm of Indigenous-settler histories) in order to ‘focus on the role played by historical writers in the process of colonization.’ Writing British Columbia History’s postcolonial approach is evidenced through concern with dynamics of power, uneven imperatives, impacts of colonialism, and erasure and marginalization of Indigenous peoples and exogenous/racialized others. Reimer works to identify the ways historical writers ignored and excluded Indigenous peoples and agency, effectively revealing the effort, spanning two centuries, to develop a usable past that would root settler society in British Columbia and deliberately displace Indigenous peoples and histories. However, noticeably absent from Reimer’s study is consideration of historical writings originating with Indigenous peoples. The transcripts of testimony made before the McKenna McBride Royal Commission (1912–16) or memorials and petitions, such as that presented to Wilfrid Laurier by the Secwepemc, Okanagan, and Nlaka’pamux (1910), represent valuable moments in which Indigenous peoples worked to communicate their recent histories to settler society. The critical attention accorded to non-Indigenous historical writers is both refreshing and analytically sharp, yet the active contributions of Indigenous peoples to historical research in the period under consideration has disappeared.

Writing British Columbia History will undoubtedly appeal to scholars and students of British Columbia’s past: in addition to familiar figures and themes, less-well-known primary sources and contributors to BC’s historiography abound (see the extensive ‘Bibliography of Primary Sources’). Such readers will appreciate Reimer’s effective contextualization – with respect to regional, national, and international tensions and intellectual shifts – of the creation of historical texts and collections. Writing British Columbia History delivers a rich regional perspective on the professionalization of history in Canada and the roots of the discipline so many enjoy and practise today.

As an accessible example, British Columbia has often appealed to scholars of colonialism. Here, the relatively recent arrival of Euro-Americans served to collapse the timescale of colonization. As Reimer notes, in British Columbia ‘the modern and the premodern … collided … with unusual abruptness and clarity.’ For this reason, scholars will find Writing British Columbia History invaluable to understanding the concomitant intellectual projects of colonialism (establishing...