Description:
This article is a historical study of how newspaper editors at Red River and New Westminster dealt with the subject of Aboriginal title across the 1860s. In so doing, the article responds to Bain Attwood’s injunction of how “historians must seek to recover the realpolitik of the frontier, what actually happened in colonial settings and how aboriginal title was shaped by relationships between colonizers, colonized and the imperial and colonial state.” At both Red River and New Westminster, editors commented extensively about how Indigenous property rights had not yet been dealt with, lobbying for local and imperial authorities to take action. But while this support for the recognition of Aboriginal title remained consistent over time in Red River, writers in New Westminster eventually quit their advocacy. Through this analysis, the article also reckons with Stuart Banner’s argument that the recognition or non-recognition of Aboriginal title in British and American sites across the Pacific region was driven primarily by local factors rather than by imperial policy. With this theory in mind, of key importance to this article are the significance of treaty-making precedents and the degree to which editors understood or cared about Indigenous conceptions of land tenure.