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This paper explores the biography of a wagon road located in the First Nations (indigenous) territory of the Stl'atl'imx of the lower Lillooet River Valley in southern British Columbia, Canada. While the road is best known as a route to the Fraser Canyon during the Fraser River Gold Rush of 1858, here I investigate its multiple lives. Adopting themes from symmetrical archaeology, I show that the wagon road was not a passive outcome of colonial action but instead shifted in form and meaning as it interacted with the human and non-human world. I draw on archival documents from the Royal Engineers and oral accounts from the Stl'atl'imx of the lower Lillooet River Valley to illustrate how people, places and things were woven into the landscape through bodily engagement with the road. This paper thus highlights the complexity of the colonial encounter and the importance of movement and the materiality of movement (roads) in understanding the diversity of interaction in tensioned landscapes. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

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Colonial legal histories of indigeneity and British- Indian migration have not often been placed in conversation with one another. This article pursues such a project by tracing indigeneity as a spectral presence that emerged with uneven regularity in juridico-political conflicts over British- Indian migration. Specifically, I focus on the 1914 journey of the Komagata Maru, a Japanese steamship carrying 376 Punjabi migrants that sailed from Hong Kong to Shanghai, Moji to Yokohama, and across the Pacific, eventually arriving in Vancouver, Canada. Crisscrossing continents and approaching law in its broadest sense, I explore three struggles over the ship and its passengers: a satirical cartoon published in the Hindi Punch ( Bombay), a legal test case heard by the British Columbia Court of Appeal ( Vancouver), and a public debate on the racial meanings of Imperial subjecthood that ensued among Indian middle-class supporters of the ship and unfolded in English newspapers in various Indian cities. In each moment of struggle, I examine the changing conceptions of indigeneity that were strategically appropriated, never by indigenous peoples themselves or on their own terms, but by the Dominion of Canada and by British Indians, each deploying indigeneity to its own advantage and to achieve particular effects. Ultimately, this article considers the political and legal work that the spectral figure of indigeneity performed, the conceptions of time that underwrote its recurrence, and the temporalities that it sustained and called into question. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]