ABSTRACT
This chapter investigates the trajectories of settler colonialism across northwestern North America before 1900. This is a vast area that stretches from the Pacific Ocean to the Canadian Shield, encompasses diverse Indigenous territories and is now claimed as the western Canadian provinces of British Columbia, Alberta, Saskatchewan, and Manitoba. An emerging project of British and Canadian settler colonialism developed across this region through three roughly defined stages before 1900: first, a period between the eighteenth and mid-nineteenth centuries, shaped by relationships between Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples that are generally uncharacteristic of settler colonialism; second, a period between the 1850s and 1885 which was marked by a shift towards settler priorities, although those were often more aspirational than certain; and third, the final fifteen years of the nineteenth century, in which the Canadian settler project consolidated its power and extended its reach across northwestern North America.
