The ties that blind: making fee simple in the British Columbia treaty process

Abstract

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, reentangling 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. The spaces of propertyWhen we assume that our clefts and bunches represent fixed separations and collections in rerum natura, we obstruct rather than aid our transactions with things. (Dewey 1922, 92) The information, practices and views in this article are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the opinion of the Royal Geographical Society (with IBG).

Making Space for Property

“…I resist the idea of property as an independent essence, however, preferring to think of it as a relational effect, performed into being through the alignment of human and nonhuman resources (Mitchell 1991(Mitchell , 2007Blomley 2013). Property is only property to the extent that it is stabilized as such through complex assemblages of land titling, jurisprudence, belief, everyday practice, maps, hedges, fences, and so on.…”

“…Property in land is a means by which we make space and, in so doing, make power. When we deploy property, we draw on, rearrange, or sever relationships-to the collective, to individuals, to things, to ancestors, to the divine, to the past, and to the future (Blomley 2011). Tsawwassen were denied the power to make space through property, as others "mapped" over their territories.…”

The territory of property

“…However, the territories of property, I wish to argue, need to be treated on their own terms. The legal geographies of sovereignty, for example, are not the same as those of title, although the two may bleed into each other in intriguing ways (Blomley, 2014c).…”

Disentangling Law: The Practice of Bracketing

“…Perhaps the very heterogeneity of fee simple allows for compromise between both parties (Law 2009). However, whatever it is, fee simple plus seems to successfully perform a certain fee simple to the extent that it is able to insert itself into a larger network of markets and land registries that treat it as a legible and singular property form (Blomley 2014c).…”

“…Consider, for example, a modern-day treaty process involving indigenous communities and the federal and provincial Crowns in British Columbia, Canada (Blomley 2014c). For the Crown, treaties are all about bracketing: Aboriginal title is seen as messy, fluid, and uncertain.…”