“Extinction” is a colonial, legal, and administrative construct. The history of the Sinixt (Arrow Lakes) people of what is now called the interior of “British Columbia” and “Washington State” demonstrate this clearly. Drawing on archival records from the Joint Indian Reserve Commission, the Royal Commission on Indian Affairs for the Province of British Columbia, and the Sinixt extinction documents, alongside ethnographic sources, legal materials, and existing scholarship, this study traces how epidemic disease, the imposition of the Canada–United States border, reserve policy, and colonial land administration produced the conditions under which the Canadian state declared the Sinixt “extinct.” Situating this case within broader settler colonial logics of Indigenous elimination, this thesis shows that Sinixt people-maintained continuity on their lands through kinship networks, mobility, and political presence. The Supreme Court of Canada decision in R. v. Desautel exposed the fragility of extinction as a legal category, demonstrating how it is used as a weapon of colonial governance rather than a reflection of reality.
Joaquin Mattick (Thu,) studied this question.