"Pacific salmon fisheries, owned and managed by Aboriginal peoples, were transformed in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries by commercial and sport fisheries backed by the Canadian state and its law. Through detailed case studies of the conflicts over fish weirs on the Cowichan and Babine rivers, Douglas Harris describes the evolving legal apparatus that dispossessed Aboriginal people of their fisheries. Building upon themes developed in literatures on state law and local custom, and on law and colonialism, he examines the controversial nature of the colonial encounter at the local level. In doing so, Harris reveals the many divisions both within and among government departments, local setter societies, and Aboriginal communities." "Drawing on government records, statute books, case reports, newspapers, missionary papers, and secondary anthropological literature to explore the roots of the continuing conflict over the salmon fishery, Harris has produced a timely legal and historical study of law as contested terrain in the legal capture of Aboriginal salmon fisheries in British Columbia."--Jacket.