Islands of Truth

Book excerpt: In Islands of Truth, Daniel Clayton examines a series of encounters with the Native peoples and territory of Vancouver Island in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Although he focuses on a particular region and period, Clayton also meditates on how representations of land and people, and studies of the past, serve and shape specific interests, and how the dawn of Native-Western contact in this part of the world might be studied 200 years later, in the light of ongoing struggles between Natives and non-Natives over land and cultural status. Between the 1770s and 1850s, the Native people of Vancouver Island were engaged by three sets of forces that were of general importance in the history of Western overseas expansion: the West's scientific exploration of the world in the Age of Enlightenment; capitalist practices of exchange; and the geopolitics of nation-state rivalry. Islands of Truth discusses these developments, the geographies they worked through, and the stories about land, identity, and empire stemming from this period that have shaped understanding of British Columbia's past and present. Clayton questions premises underlying much of present B.C. historical writing, arguing that international literature offers more fruitful ways of framing local historical experiences. Islands of Truth is a timely, provocative, and vital contribution to post-colonial studies.