The University of Arizona Press
January 7, 2025
This month, we’re highlighting a few of our open access books on our Open Arizona platform. These books are available to read for free!
In its earliest iteration funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, titles published in Open Arizona explored the histories and experiences of Indigenous and Latino groups in the southwestern United States, foundational areas of the Press’s long publishing history. In June 2022, thanks to a grant from the NEH, the Press was able to expand offerings in Open Arizona by adding twenty backlist titles in archaeology to the platform. These titles expand our understandings of the ancient Southwest and demonstrate the University of Arizona Press’s long-standing excellence in the field of archaeology. In Spring 2023, the Press published its first simultaneous print and open-access frontlist title.
The Fraser Valley in British Columbia has been viewed historically as a typical setting of Indigenous-white interaction. In Landscapes and Social Transformations on the Northwest Coast, author Jeff Oliver now reexamines the social history of this region from pre-contact to the violent upheavals of nineteenth and early twentieth century colonialism to argue that the dominant discourses of progress and colonialism often mask the real social and physical process of change that occurred here—change that can be more meaningfully tied to transformations in the land. Read an excerpt from the book’s introduction below.
From the window of the plane, the Fraser Valley appears as a great funnel enclosed by mountains. In the east at Hope it begins, a narrow sliver of green farmland on either side of the river, in places only one or two kilometers wide. Flying west past the town of Chilliwack, one sees the valley expand into a quilt of mixed land use—arable, pasture, and sprawling urban development, all set within a geometric grid that spans the space between the mountains. At Abbotsford the valley widens to perhaps fifteen or sixteen kilometers; the mountains on its southern flank fall away, and the ramrod-straight ditch that is the American border hems in the patchwork of intensive agriculture.
The tiny cars racing to Vancouver along the straight and narrow Trans-Canada Highway and much else that I see from the plane reminds me of a motto for our times: you can’t stop progress. Having lived away from the valley for over nine years in Britain, I am from my vantage point in the sky introduced to an uninterrupted view of the valley’s most recent transformations. New shopping malls mushroom in former green fields around the city of Langley, and new industrial parks and bypasses have apparently eaten their way into places where hobby farms and stands of deciduous forest once thrived. As we approach the Vancouver International Airport on the estuary of the Fraser River, the scale of change takes sharper focus. To the south the neighborhoods and shopping centers covering the slopes of the Semiahmoo Peninsula, my childhood home, have spread downward from their hilltop perch, absorbing the agricultural land reserves of the Nicomekel Valley; suburb begets suburb.
Suspending this bird’s-eye view for just a moment and thinking back in my mind’s eye, I can recall another view of the valley that belies this sense of prominent development and that resonates more strongly with a different temporality. In parts of the glacial uplands, one can still find original frame-built farmhouses surrounded by groves of weary fruit trees, slouching barns, and fence lines in desperate need of a coat of stain. And near the river’s mouth, the keen observer will make out the disintegrating skeletons of former salmon canneries whose wooden pilings still haunt the riverbank. There are other reminders as well. Perhaps the most poignant examples are the place names of the land’s first inhabitants. Toponyms like Semiahmoo and Nicomekel, although current words, still hint at an earlier Native geography echoed in the names of the many Indian reservations that dot the land. These relics evoke images of a time very different from today, the “time of the longhouses” (Wells 1987) when, it has been said, the land’s first people lived in harmonious equilibrium with nature, before the violent transformations brought about by the white man.
These images of the past lie in some tension to the view from my aerial platform. They have a fleeting quality: fading memories of an almost forgotten, distant summer displaced by the immediate tangible realities of concrete, asphalt, and glass. If there is a perception that is dominant and that seeks to envelop this place, then it is surely the sweeping and uncompromised view sustained from my window in the sky. Ushering aside questions of nostalgia, it boldly speaks of the triumph of humanity over nature, and the triumph of progress over the past, symbolized by the march of the strip malls and the urban tendril across the landscape. The disjuncture produced by these competing views of the Fraser Valley, which are caricatures to be sure, may seem to be overly simplistic, yet it still encapsulates an important premise about the history of this place, as well as providing considerable supporting foundation for this book.
