People were engaged by the topic, and most community members provided feedback corroborating and enriching the findings of the original research – namely that the Indian Act elections were divisive, and that the system of governance sponsored under the Indian Act served to create jealousies and mistrust between families within communities. [...] Writing to Governor James Douglas at the height of the 1858 racial tensions in the Fraser Canyon, the Secretary of State for the Colonies, Edward B. Lytton, clarified that it was the British government’s desire that “attention be given to the best means of diffusing the blessings of the Christian Religion and civilization among the natives.”20 To expedite the Stó:lõ people’s “entrance into the pal [...] They have overlooked the significance of social relationships to the text’s authors.32 The contents, when read with an eye to the consequences the restriction of movement had for the Stó:lõ, suggest that the assigning of particular lands to particular groups of people and the inability of people to take advantage of traditional inter-community opportunities for relocation were at least as much a c [...] Under the Oblates, the British Columbia incarnation of the Reduction Model emphasized a significant degree of local Aboriginal self-governance, economic self-sufficiency, and autonomy from secular state interference, or, as the Oblates themselves described it, “an Indian state ruled by the Indians, for the Indians, with the Indians, under the directive authority of the bishop and the local priests [...] As Elder Patrick Charlie explained in 1950, in the nineteenth century the “priest came, and said each village [was] to boss themselves”53 And for these autonomous colonial jurisdictions to function as tools of acculturation rather than as agents of resistance the priests and Indian Agents desired the creation of a new generation of Native leaders whose authority rested outside of the hereditary in