The Vancouver Island Treaties and the Evolving Principles of Indigenous Title illuminates the history of the enigmatic Vancouver Island treaties of the 1850s, offering new interpretations based on a fresh, exhaustive, and multidisciplinary critical analysis of relevant evidence.

To understand as fully as possible the motivations, intentions, and understandings of the Indigenous and non-Indigenous signatories to the treaties, Ted Binnema places the treaties within the context of thousands of years of Vancouver Island history and hundreds of years of land-purchase agreements involving Indigenous peoples. The book explores the evolving concepts and principles of Indigenous title from the first Dutch and English treaties with Indigenous North Americans in the 1620s to the increasingly detailed articulations fuelled by debates and crises in Australia and New Zealand in the 1830s and 1840s.

Binnema explains that Indigenous people themselves played important roles in the formation and elaboration of the principles of Indigenous title in the British World. Drawing on previously neglected archival documents and multidisciplinary evidence in linguistics, archaeology, anthropology, fisheries biology and biological sciences, and oral historiography, the book provides a new model for the study of the idea of Indigenous title and Indigenous land-purchase treaties worldwide.

Dr. Binnema entered the historical profession after teaching high school English and social studies for several years. He has been teaching at UNBC since 2000, where he now teaches in the fields of Canadian and United States history, aboriginal history, and environmental history. He has written several books that examine various aspects of environmental history, aboriginal history, and the history of science. Common and Contested Ground (2001) examines the human and environmental history of the northwestern plains of North America from AD 200 to 1806. With Gerhard Ens of the University of Alberta, he published The Hudson's Bay Company Edmonton House Journals, Correspondence, and Reports: 1806-1821 (2012). That book consists of primary documents and a long essay offering a new interpretation of the history of the northern plains and Athabasca region between 1806 and 1821. "Enlightened Zeal": The Hudson's Bay Company and Scientific Networks, 1670 to 1870" (2013), is the first book to examine the relationship between science and a major chartered monopoly over its entire lifetime. Dr. Binnema also co-edited two collections of original articles, New Histories for Old: Changing Perspectives on Canada's Native Pasts (2007) and From Rupert's Land to Canada (2001). He has also published many scholarly articles including articles in Environmental History, The Canadian Historical Review, Journal of the Early Republic, Western Historical Quarterly, and The Journal of Canadian Studies.

Ted Binnema's profile page