Reflections on Resistance: Agency, Identity and Being Indigenous in Colonial British Columbia Jef Oliver Introduction his chapter sets out to briely trace some of the more salient contours of archaeological research into the consequences of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century colonialism. Recent work on indigenous cultural entanglements within expanding networks of European inluence has clocked a signiicant theoretical shift. Early research took its cues from colonialist forms of thought, which assumed that native exposure to the outside world would inevitably result in the acculturation of European value systems. A more recent position, this time framed by developments in postcolonial theory, sees colonialism feeding the creation of hybridized, fragmented and shifting realities, but ultimately realities characterized by a healthy dose of indigenous resistance. A sizeable literature on resistance has provided our accounts with an important degree of ambiguity; namely it has encouraged an awareness of native agency in the contact zone. However, a narrow emphasis on the confrontational aspects of indigenous inhabitation, particularly where it implies a defence of certain cultural imperatives in the face of colonial ‘progress’, can blunt our understanding of what were incredibly complicated reactions. Because this period witnessed dramatic but asymmetric social, political and economic changes, the consequences of colonialism are far too varied, across time and space, to be neatly framed within the inherent antagonism of the colonizer/colonized coupling. By looking at how native people became entwined in the colonial landscape and participated in consuming its ‘culture’, I argue that questions of identity and agency can only be really appreciated by understanding how diferent lines of tension played out in diferent social arenas and at diferent scales of analysis. It is not my intention to pursue this concept across the world of former European colonies. hat task would be more daunting. Rather, I shall limit my comments largely to that part of the world I know best: the northwest coast of North America. I therefore intend to do three things: irst, to outline the historiographical shift that has occurred in our thinking on the consequences of indigenous interactions with colonial cultures; 8