Triangulating Difference: Locating Japanese Immigrants and "Indians" as Citizens and Subjects in British Columbia, 1900–40

During the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the United States and Canada used parallel bodies of exclusionary law and policy to relegate both Asian immigrants and Native people to the margins of their developing societies. Both nations used immigration law to restrict the entry of Asian immigrants at their boundaries while they confined Native peoples to reserves, and both called into question the capacity of Asian immigrants and indigenous people alike to exercise the full rights of citizenship. Where the United States denied first generation Japanese immigrants any access to citizenship, however, the issei were permitted to apply for naturalization in Canada. By the same token, Canada treated the indigenous people living within its boundaries as British subjects, although they were afforded far fewer rights and privileges than white settlers.  Canadian officials clearly saw the racialized legal framework applied to both of these marginalized groups as interconnected. That citizenship was required to acquire a fishing license in British Columbia also placed the Canadian nation state at the center of race-based conflicts over access to economic resources in the province. Conversely,  proposed restrictions on Japanese immigrant access to naturalization served the dual purpose of limiting their access to various fisheries along the Pacific coast that were the object of growing competition between whites, Natives, and Japanese. This paper uses a specific conflict between Native, Japanese and white fishermen along the northern coast of British Columbia triggered by passage of the 1914 Fisheries Act, which denied only Japanese fishermen the use of gas engine boats, to explore ways in which Native people and Japanese immigrants sought to locate themselves within the context of this larger debate and, in particular, how they deployed associated categories of subjecthood and citizenship to argue for their own entitlement to a share of those resources.