Notice of the Final Oral Examination
of GORDON LYALL
MA (University of Victoria, 2013) BA (University of Victoria, 2011)
“Turning the Tide: Clams and Colonialism in the Salish Sea, 1925-1994”
Department of History
Tuesday, April 12, 2022 10:00 A.M.
Clearihue Building Room B017
Supervisory Committee:
Dr. Jason Colby, Department of History, University of Victoria (Supervisor) Dr. John Lutz, Department of History, UVic (Member) Dr. Reuben Rose-Redwood, Department of Geography, UVic (Outside Member) External Examiner: Dr. Joshua Reid, Department of History, University of Washington Chair of Oral Examination: Dr. Patrick O’Hara, Department of Geography, UVic Dr. Robin G. Hicks, Dean, Faculty of Graduate Studies
Abstract
Featuring an ethnohistory of two Coast Salish communities— the Suquamish Tribe in Washington State and the W̱SÁNEĆ Nation in British Columbia— this dissertation is a transborder study of Indigenous shellfish harvesting and foreshore rights in the Salish Sea across the twentieth century. It explores the history of the interface between land and sea within the context of treaty rights to resources and Indigenous sovereignty over marine habitats. This study also turns the ethnographic lens on the settler population. Using tools offered by recent scholarship on settler colonialism, it helps explain why the general public has resisted treaty and Aboriginal rights to fisheries and other resources. Utilising Karl Jacoby’s concept of a “moral ecology,” this study argues that by ignoring Indigenous Knowledge regarding marine resource management, and by creating an overly complex regulatory scheme guided by principles of capitalism, settler officials on both sides of the border missed opportunities to avoid some of the greatest challenges to marine health and resource survival in the Salish Sea.
This dissertation also reveals Coast Salish responses to settler encroachment of their foreshores and state disruption of their management of the marine environment throughout the twentieth century and offers two community studies to illustrate Indigenous action that have re-shaped relationships between Indigenous peoples and settlers on the Salish Sea. The first study examines Suquamish’s right to shellfish under the Point Elliott Treaty and affirmed by the 1994 Rafeedie decision, as well as the interrelated 1980s tidelands case for ownership of the beaches attached to the Port Madison Reservation. The second examines W̱SÁNEĆ’s defense of Saanichton Bay from a marina development, when the SȾÁ,UTW̱ (Tsawout) community wielded its Douglas Treaty rights in Claxton v. Saanichton Marina, 1987.
This dissertation also reveals Coast Salish responses to settler encroachment of their foreshores and state disruption of their management of the marine environment throughout the twentieth century and offers two community studies to illustrate Indigenous action that have re-shaped relationships between Indigenous peoples and settlers on the Salish Sea. The first study examines Suquamish’s right to shellfish under the Point Elliott Treaty and affirmed by the 1994 Rafeedie decision, as well as the interrelated 1980s tidelands case for ownership of the beaches attached to the Port Madison Reservation. The second examines W̱SÁNEĆ’s defense of Saanichton Bay from a marina development, when the SȾÁ,UTW̱ (Tsawout) community wielded its Douglas Treaty rights in Claxton v. Saanichton Marina, 1987.