#tina loo

Like all stories, the ones that were told about Bute Inlet [massacre] were cultural artifacts that embodied the central suppositions underlying the teller's and the audience's understanding of the world in which they lived and ultimately who they considered themselves to be. For in discussing what happened at Bute Inlet, why it happened, and what they should do about it, European British Columbians revealed as much about who they thought they were as they did of the event and its perpetrators. There was, as sociologist Robert Miles put it, 'a dialectic between Self and Other in which the attributed characteristics of Other refract contrasting characteristic of Self, and vice versa.'

As well, there were probably few in this British colony who could fail to draw parallels, justified or not, between the massacre at Bute Inlet and the Indian Mutiny just seven years before, an event that precipitated a hardening of attitudes toward indigenous peoples throughout the empire and influenced colonial policy for at least a decade afterwards. In both cases a small group of English men and women found themselves in an alien land surrounded and outnumbered by an equally alien and potentially hostile population who did not, curiously enough, seem interested in availing themselves of the opportunity for moral uplift.

Writing is, they imagine, a dread mystery. By it the mighty whites seem to carry on intercourse with unseen powers. When they're writing, there's no telling what they're doing. They may be bidding a pestilence come over the land, or ordering the rain to stay in the west, or giving directions for the salmon to remain in the ocean. Especially is the Indian appalled when he sees his own name put on paper. To him the name is not distinct from the person who owns it. If his name is written down, he is written down. If his name is passed over to the demons which people his hierarchy, he is sure to be bewitched and given as a prey into the teeth of his invisible foes.

While the demands of laissez-faire capitalism for a standardized and secure rule-bound arena in which individuals could pursue their self-interest shaped and were embedded in British Columbia's courts, those institutions also bore the imprint of the colony's geography. For the courts to fulfill the role that British Columbians wanted them to, however, the colonial state had to be both strong and interventionist. This was not quite the contradiction it seems to be, for as economic historians have pointed out, even at the height of laissez-faire in the mid-nineteenth century the 'free market' was the product of self-conscious construction and regulation on the part of the state rather than a natural phenomenon. Markets did not just happen as a result of human interaction -- they had to be created.

While they did not quite become wild animal tamers, the wardens at Banff did install slat licks along the Banff-Windermere road in 1922 so that game would be drawn there in full view of the motoring public. The possibility that they might be luring the animals to their deaths was not, it seems, discussed.

Despite the objectivity conveyed in studies of carrying capacity, with their emphasis on hard numbers, it became a normative concept in the postwar period. The idea that if there 'X' amount of space and resources, there could be 'Y' number of animals was, in the ideological context of the new ecology, transformed into the idea that if there is 'X' amount of space and resources there should be 'Y' number of animals. . . . Human intervention, either by culling excess animals or increasing their production, was necessary in order to avoid over-exploiting or wasting the range. The assumptions about how the natural world should work that were in embedded in the idea of carrying capacity were drawn from the world of capitalist economics. In the mid-twentieth century, nature's economy was one in which resources were the only limits on growth and where growth that reached the limits of available resources was normal and good.