Contact and Conflict: Indian-European Relations in British Columbia, 1774-1890. 2nd ed.

J.R. Miller is a history professor at the University of Saskatchewan and
author of Skyscrapers Hide in the Heavens: A History of Indian-White
Relations in Canada.

When this book first appeared, in 1977, it was to well-deserved acclaim.
Robin Fisher’s study of Native/non-Native interactions in British
Columbia between the arrival of the Spanish and the domination of
settler society in the second half of the 19th century was part of the
leading edge of a new wave in historical interpretation that would
transform Canadian history in the 1980s. Fisher’s account surveyed the
period of commercial interaction between the 1770s and 1850s in the fur
trade—at first in its maritime phase and then in land-based
settings—and argued powerfully that this initial era was a
co-operative period of mutual benefit to both newcomer and Native. The
work then traced the breakdown in relations as the harmonious fur-trade
era was succeeded by the disruptive mining frontier, the arrival of
Christian missionaries, and, finally, settler society and attendant
government administrators. Contact and Conflict’s nuanced survey and
interpretation of this complex relationship between Native peoples and
newcomers to the Pacific helped both to popularize Native studies among
historians and to give that research specialty a particular cast.

In the 15 years between first appearance and second edition, much has
changed in the historical literature on Native/non-Native relations.
Fisher examines most of the challenges that other historians,
anthropologists, and political scientists have thrown at his
interpretation in a new preface that constitutes a good summary of the
most important work in the field since the late 1970s. Because the
author finds the arguments that most of his critics have advanced to be
wanting, he has issued this second edition with the text unchanged. He
concedes that if he were to revise his study he would depict the Native
people as more resistant during the settlement period than he portrayed
them in 1977, and he points to his chapter on the missionaries as “the
one I would revise the most.”

Even unrevised and unrepentant, Fisher’s influential study is welcome
in reissue. With a striking new cover featuring a Northwest Coast mask,
it is as handsome as it will be useful to more generations of students
in the 1990s. With any luck, it will be less than another 15 years
before a thorough revision of Contact and Conflict is prepared for
publication, preferably by Fisher himself.