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Few B.C. authors published in B.C. can boast sales of 20,000 copies for one title.
Robin Fisher's Contact and Conflict is arguably the only academic book to have attained such status by a single author.
In 2017 Fisher learned from his publisher, UBC Press, that sales had eclipsed 20,000 copies since the work first appeared forty years ago--in 1977.
(Only a 58-page guidebook on totem poles for the general public, by Marjorie Halpin, published in 1981, has sold more by a single author--but obviously at a much lower price than a full-fledged academic study.)
Indisputably a B.C. classic, Contact and Conflict: Indian-European Relations in British Columbia, 1774-1890 is rightfully respected as one of first titles to provide in-depth analysis of Indigenous history and problems in British Columbia.
In a nutshell, Fisher reveals that indigenous peoples were able to adjust gradually to changes wrought by the fur trade--wherein they played an important role as partners--but they rapidly lost ground when the fur trade declined and colonization ensued.
"The basic argument," he says, "is that while the fur trade was a mixed blessing for the aboriginal people, they still retained some agency and scope for action.
"The settlement frontier on the other hand, amounted to an assault on First Nations cultures that left them severely depleted."
Not everyone has agreed with all aspects of Fisher's analysis since he first made it, but Fisher believes his argument, first developed as a PhD dissertation in UBC's History Department, holds up. Although Contact and Conflict is not on the grand scale of Jared Diamond's trans-disciplinary Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies, it does provide an overarching argument and context to engender more particular investigations.
As someone who was newly arrived in B.C. from his New Zealand homeland, Fisher had been struck by the fact that, in contrast to New Zealand, where Maori history was a huge part of the literature, in British Columbia what was then called "Indian History" was largely the preserve of anthropologists.
At that time, the best history book pertaining to B.C.'s First Nations was anthropologist Wilson Duff's Indian History British Columbia, Vol. 1: The Impact of the White Man (Provincial Museum 1964, 1969, 1973, 1980; 1992, 1997). Fisher's contact with that book--and the remarkable character of its author, who committed suicide in 1976, prior to Fisher's publication--prompted him to consider what a trained historian might make of the same collective story.
Literally thousands of publications about, for and by B.C.'s Indigenous people have followed in its wake. "I just hope it has contributed something to the understanding of the Province's past," he says, "as we strive to make it a better place for First Nations people and newcomers to live together."
Even though Contact and Conflict includes a thick carpet of footnotes, it has been used extensively as a text in university courses. "Presumably now it's viewed as an historical document," he says, "rather than the latest interpretation."
Robin Fisher was born in New Zealand in 1946. He completed a BA at Massey University and an MA at the University of Auckland. He emigrated to Canada in 1970 to undertake a PhD at the University of British Columbia.
His academic career began in the Department of History at Simon Fraser University where he was appointed Assistant Professor in 1974 and Full Professor in 1983. In 1993, he accepted the position of founding chair of the history program at the University of Northern British Columbia.
He later became Dean, Arts and Science and, in 1997, of a newly-formed College of Arts, Social and Health Sciences. In 2002, he joined the University of Regina as Dean of Arts. He joined Mount Royal University in Calgary as Provost and Vice-President, Academic, in 2005.
His various publications have made him one of B.C.'s most respected historians. Not shy with his opinions, Fisher has been an outspoken advocate of non-elitist perspectives that contribute to society beyond the halls of academe. In 1993, he said, "By turning inwards on themselves rather than writing for the public, historians have been complicit in the decline of intellectual values in our society."
In the 25th anniversary edition of BC Studies (#100), Robin Fisher wrote, "Perhaps there is something to be said for a moratorium on the use of bid D and F words - Derrida and Foucault - by historians, especially those who have not read either one very closely, even in translation. Unless we are careful, the current theoretical fads of discourse, deconstruction, and post-modernism, which are all taking academics in the direction that little is knowable, will end up being the last refuge of a know-nothing generation."
With photographs by Gary Fiegehen, Fisher's Vancouver's Voyage: Charting the Northwest Coast (1992) explores Captain George Vancouver's journey from 1791 to 1795. "Exploration and discovery have become dirty words for many, given the rich, vibrant cultures which existed for generations before Vancouver and other Europeans arrived," says Fisher. "Yet he participated in mutual discovery with natives, learned much that was new to him and his time and contributed to the revelation of the coast and its people to the world... It's clear Vancouver was only human and had mixed motives, which is why what he did and thought two hundred years ago still speak to us today."
In addition to his biography of B.C. premier Thomas Dufferin Pattullo entitled Duff Pattullo of British Columbia, he has co-edited a book on Captain Cook with Hugh Johnston. "I have a lifetime research project to conduct on-the-ground surveys of the Pacific landing places of Captain James Cook," Fisher says. "One of the most moving moments in my life was to watch the sun rise on the new millennium at Mercury Bay, NZ. More than two hundred years earlier, Cook observed the transit of Mercury."
Fisher co-edited with J.A. Bumsted the diaries of Ensign Alexander Walker on an 1875-86 voyage and he co-edited From Maps to Metaphors: The Pacific World of George Vancouver (1993) with Hugh Johnston. In the Spring 1976 issue of BC Studies, Fisher also wrote a 16-page article entitled Arms and Men on the Northwest Coast to trace the introduction of firearms to Indians.
For many years, Robin Fisher worked on a biography of the pioneering anthropologist, Wilson Duff, now published as Wilson Duff: Coming Back, a Life (Harbour $39.95). Born in Vancouver in 1925, Duff lived through the Depression and WW II before returning to his home province. He worked as the BC Provincial Museum's provincial anthropologist from 1950 to 1965 and then at the University of British Columbia where he helped to shape Canada and British Columbia's understanding of Indigenous cultures. In tracing the story of Wilson Duff, biographer Robin Fisher reveals the evolution of anthropological studies, the history of a time and place—Vancouver during the Great Depression and war years—and the more recent changes taking place in museum and anthropology studies. Fisher was awarded the 2022 Lieutenant Governor’s Medal for Historical Writing for Wilson Duff: Coming Back, a Life.
***
Wilson Duff, Coming Back: A Life
by Robin Fisher (Harbour $39.95)
Review by Trevor Carolan (BCBW 2022)
A meticulously researched biography of one of BC’s most enlightened scholars and museum experts devoted to Northwest Coast Indigenous art, this book is an absolute bull’s-eye achievement.
Working with non-contemporary language and concepts that have since changed, historian Robin Fisher illuminates the depth of Wilson Duff’s contributions to the resurgence of Northwest Coast Indigenous art from 1950 to the mid 1970s. Duff’s lifetime work did no less than provide Canadians unique insights into Northwest Coast Indigenous peoples—even to the extent of changing the practice of Indigenous studies going forward.
Duff was the first anthropologist to be fully employed by the provincial government as its curator of anthropology at the provincial museum in Victoria (from 1950 to 1965). During those 15 years, and later teaching at UBC until his death in 1976, Duff’s career traversed archaeology, ethnography and museum practice. He went straight to the source of his studies through uncountable hours of learning and researching with Indigenous elders and artists, and through decades of field experience studying the structures of Aboriginal cultures and spirituality. Yet he came from an unlikely background for someone now lauded as one of the forebears of BC Indigenous studies.
From a Depression-era working-class family of Ulster stock in south Vancouver, Duff was an introvert achiever and star athlete at Vancouver Tech before joining the RCAF at 18 in WWII. A navigator on bombing raids against the Japanese over Rangoon and Bangkok, Duff survived with a faith in “chants, incantations, charms,” Robin Fisher comments.
Back home after the war, Duff discovered anthropology at UBC. He also married his high school girlfriend, Marion Barber, and following a master’s degree earned at the University of Washington in Seattle, Duff committed himself, Fisher records, to explaining “the colonial predicament of First Nations peoples in BC to an ever-wider audience.” In a research proposal concerning the Nisga’a and Gitxsan, Duff wrote, “They had never signed a treaty, and so still had legal claims to the land…The legal issue is not settled.”
As provincial anthropologist, Duff’s reserved personality and listening skills helped when detailing descriptions of daily life and traditions in Indigenous communities. He was keen to acquire knowledge of Aboriginal “social organization, shamanism, the acquisition of [spiritual] power, healing with power, and other concepts of the supernatural.” This approach didn’t always
sit comfortably with Duff’s theory-focused academic colleagues, but Duff carried on.
Visits at Alert Bay led to privileged Indigenous associations with the Dan Cranmer family, including scholar- daughter Gloria, and with artist Willie Seaweed and revered pole-carver Mungo Martin. Their tutelage helped Duff produce ground-breaking research in Kwakiutl history and culture that challenged established views. In Victoria, Duff sponsored Martin in building a traditional Kwakiutl house that opened with a three-day potlatch—“the first to be held after the clause banning the ritual was dropped from the Indian Act,” writes Fisher, who asserts later that Duff and Martin “were partners who kept the thread of Northwest Coast art alive when it was very tenuous.”
A retired academic, Fisher provides dense coverage of Duff’s workaholic years at UBC. Although Duff never earned a PhD, he was a magnetic classroom instructor, and at Tom Berger’s recommendation testified as an expert witness in pioneering BC Aboriginal Land Title cases such as the Calder Case and the ensuing Nisga’a land claims.
Importantly, Duff argued for the conservation of old, decaying totem poles from remote coastal sites (for heritage research). With Indigenous elders and artists, notably Bill Reid, and with fellow scholars, he surveyed Haida territory especially. Traditionally, fallen poles decayed and returned to earth, to be replaced by new poles in turn. That replacement no longer happened in Duff’s time. Fisher recounts how many, Bill Reid included, believed the Haida pole-carving art form was already dead. Tirelessly, Duff consulted First Nations councils in tracking family pole ownerships, asking permissions, and in offering compensation for removal and preservation of selected poles. Duff did things right for that time: Provincial Museum and UBC Museum of Anthropology collections attest we are the richer for his toil.
Later, with some residual guilt Duff conserved further Haida totem poles from Ninstints on Anthony Island. They could now be popularly accessed, a fact acknowledged by Bill Reid, Robert Davidson, Roy Henry Vickers and others who understood the significance of studying these globally important monuments up close.
We learn that emotionally constricted and insecure with acclaim, despite his achievements, Duff suffered from depression. While their teenagers looked on, he and his wife, Marion, drifted apart. As the Sixties moved on, Duff moved out. Social behaviours shifted, and Duff had affairs that included students. An insightful poet, he read works from the Human Potential Movement of the period that often paralleled with explorations into psychedelics. Duff’s interpretive interest in the consciousness—which he believed underpinned much of the work by Northwest Coast artists that he admired, the Edenshaws of Haida territory foremost—increased exponentially.
Fisher writes with impressive clarity on the two powerhouse exhibitions of Northwest Coast Indigenous art that cemented Duff’s pre-eminence in evaluating how we now regard this work as fine art, not simply as cultural “artefacts.” Exhibition catalogues such as images stone b.c. for the show at the Provincial Museum (1975) and Arts of the Raven at the Vancouver Art Gallery (1967) were praised internationally. Wilson collaborated with Hilary Stewart and Richard Simmins on the former, and Bill Reid and Bill Holm on ‘Raven.’
But as his personal anxieties increased, and his idiosyncratic concepts of reincarnation and sexuality in Indigenous art became entangled, Duff’s writing powers began failing. Academic views of his ideas dimmed; former students forged careers around him.
Fisher sensitively handles Duff’s suicide in 1976. This edition consolidates knowledge of a complex figure central to our evolving understanding of Northwest Coast Indigenous art, and Fisher concludes appropriately in quoting Duff’s long-time friend Roy Henry Vickers: “You know, you will figure out a lot about Wilson, but you will not figure it all out.” 9781550179750
Trevor Carolan’s most recent book is Road Trips: Journeys in the Unspoiled World (Mother Tongue, 2020).
***
Review of the author's work by BC Studies:
Contact and Conflict: Indian-European Relations in British Columbia, 1774-1890
Duff Pattullo of British Columbia
From Maps to Metaphors: The Pacific World of George Vancouver
Vancouver's Voyage: Charting the Northwest Coast, 1791-1795
SELECTED BOOKS:
Fisher, Robin. Contact and Conflict: Indian-European Relations in British Columbia, 1774-1890 (UBC Press, 1977, 1992).
Fisher, Robin & Hugh Johnstone, editors. Captain James Cook and his Times (D&M, 1979).
Fisher, Robin. Duff Pattullo of British Columbia (UTP, 1991)
Fisher, Robin. Vancouver's Voyage: Charting the Northwest Coast (Douglas & McIntyre, 1992). Photographs by Gary Fiegehen.
Fisher, Robin & Hugh Johnstone, editors. From Maps to Metaphors: The Pacific World of George Vancouver (UBC Press, 1993)
Wilson Duff: Coming Back, a Life (Harbour, 2022) $39.95 9781550179750
[BCBW 2022] "Early B.C." "George Vancouver" "First Nations" "Forts and Fur" "Classic"
Robin Fisher's Contact and Conflict is arguably the only academic book to have attained such status by a single author.
In 2017 Fisher learned from his publisher, UBC Press, that sales had eclipsed 20,000 copies since the work first appeared forty years ago--in 1977.
(Only a 58-page guidebook on totem poles for the general public, by Marjorie Halpin, published in 1981, has sold more by a single author--but obviously at a much lower price than a full-fledged academic study.)
Indisputably a B.C. classic, Contact and Conflict: Indian-European Relations in British Columbia, 1774-1890 is rightfully respected as one of first titles to provide in-depth analysis of Indigenous history and problems in British Columbia.
In a nutshell, Fisher reveals that indigenous peoples were able to adjust gradually to changes wrought by the fur trade--wherein they played an important role as partners--but they rapidly lost ground when the fur trade declined and colonization ensued.
"The basic argument," he says, "is that while the fur trade was a mixed blessing for the aboriginal people, they still retained some agency and scope for action.
"The settlement frontier on the other hand, amounted to an assault on First Nations cultures that left them severely depleted."
Not everyone has agreed with all aspects of Fisher's analysis since he first made it, but Fisher believes his argument, first developed as a PhD dissertation in UBC's History Department, holds up. Although Contact and Conflict is not on the grand scale of Jared Diamond's trans-disciplinary Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies, it does provide an overarching argument and context to engender more particular investigations.
As someone who was newly arrived in B.C. from his New Zealand homeland, Fisher had been struck by the fact that, in contrast to New Zealand, where Maori history was a huge part of the literature, in British Columbia what was then called "Indian History" was largely the preserve of anthropologists.
At that time, the best history book pertaining to B.C.'s First Nations was anthropologist Wilson Duff's Indian History British Columbia, Vol. 1: The Impact of the White Man (Provincial Museum 1964, 1969, 1973, 1980; 1992, 1997). Fisher's contact with that book--and the remarkable character of its author, who committed suicide in 1976, prior to Fisher's publication--prompted him to consider what a trained historian might make of the same collective story.
Literally thousands of publications about, for and by B.C.'s Indigenous people have followed in its wake. "I just hope it has contributed something to the understanding of the Province's past," he says, "as we strive to make it a better place for First Nations people and newcomers to live together."
Even though Contact and Conflict includes a thick carpet of footnotes, it has been used extensively as a text in university courses. "Presumably now it's viewed as an historical document," he says, "rather than the latest interpretation."
Robin Fisher was born in New Zealand in 1946. He completed a BA at Massey University and an MA at the University of Auckland. He emigrated to Canada in 1970 to undertake a PhD at the University of British Columbia.
His academic career began in the Department of History at Simon Fraser University where he was appointed Assistant Professor in 1974 and Full Professor in 1983. In 1993, he accepted the position of founding chair of the history program at the University of Northern British Columbia.
He later became Dean, Arts and Science and, in 1997, of a newly-formed College of Arts, Social and Health Sciences. In 2002, he joined the University of Regina as Dean of Arts. He joined Mount Royal University in Calgary as Provost and Vice-President, Academic, in 2005.
His various publications have made him one of B.C.'s most respected historians. Not shy with his opinions, Fisher has been an outspoken advocate of non-elitist perspectives that contribute to society beyond the halls of academe. In 1993, he said, "By turning inwards on themselves rather than writing for the public, historians have been complicit in the decline of intellectual values in our society."
In the 25th anniversary edition of BC Studies (#100), Robin Fisher wrote, "Perhaps there is something to be said for a moratorium on the use of bid D and F words - Derrida and Foucault - by historians, especially those who have not read either one very closely, even in translation. Unless we are careful, the current theoretical fads of discourse, deconstruction, and post-modernism, which are all taking academics in the direction that little is knowable, will end up being the last refuge of a know-nothing generation."
With photographs by Gary Fiegehen, Fisher's Vancouver's Voyage: Charting the Northwest Coast (1992) explores Captain George Vancouver's journey from 1791 to 1795. "Exploration and discovery have become dirty words for many, given the rich, vibrant cultures which existed for generations before Vancouver and other Europeans arrived," says Fisher. "Yet he participated in mutual discovery with natives, learned much that was new to him and his time and contributed to the revelation of the coast and its people to the world... It's clear Vancouver was only human and had mixed motives, which is why what he did and thought two hundred years ago still speak to us today."
In addition to his biography of B.C. premier Thomas Dufferin Pattullo entitled Duff Pattullo of British Columbia, he has co-edited a book on Captain Cook with Hugh Johnston. "I have a lifetime research project to conduct on-the-ground surveys of the Pacific landing places of Captain James Cook," Fisher says. "One of the most moving moments in my life was to watch the sun rise on the new millennium at Mercury Bay, NZ. More than two hundred years earlier, Cook observed the transit of Mercury."
Fisher co-edited with J.A. Bumsted the diaries of Ensign Alexander Walker on an 1875-86 voyage and he co-edited From Maps to Metaphors: The Pacific World of George Vancouver (1993) with Hugh Johnston. In the Spring 1976 issue of BC Studies, Fisher also wrote a 16-page article entitled Arms and Men on the Northwest Coast to trace the introduction of firearms to Indians.
For many years, Robin Fisher worked on a biography of the pioneering anthropologist, Wilson Duff, now published as Wilson Duff: Coming Back, a Life (Harbour $39.95). Born in Vancouver in 1925, Duff lived through the Depression and WW II before returning to his home province. He worked as the BC Provincial Museum's provincial anthropologist from 1950 to 1965 and then at the University of British Columbia where he helped to shape Canada and British Columbia's understanding of Indigenous cultures. In tracing the story of Wilson Duff, biographer Robin Fisher reveals the evolution of anthropological studies, the history of a time and place—Vancouver during the Great Depression and war years—and the more recent changes taking place in museum and anthropology studies. Fisher was awarded the 2022 Lieutenant Governor’s Medal for Historical Writing for Wilson Duff: Coming Back, a Life.
***
Wilson Duff, Coming Back: A Life
by Robin Fisher (Harbour $39.95)
Review by Trevor Carolan (BCBW 2022)
A meticulously researched biography of one of BC’s most enlightened scholars and museum experts devoted to Northwest Coast Indigenous art, this book is an absolute bull’s-eye achievement.
Working with non-contemporary language and concepts that have since changed, historian Robin Fisher illuminates the depth of Wilson Duff’s contributions to the resurgence of Northwest Coast Indigenous art from 1950 to the mid 1970s. Duff’s lifetime work did no less than provide Canadians unique insights into Northwest Coast Indigenous peoples—even to the extent of changing the practice of Indigenous studies going forward.
Duff was the first anthropologist to be fully employed by the provincial government as its curator of anthropology at the provincial museum in Victoria (from 1950 to 1965). During those 15 years, and later teaching at UBC until his death in 1976, Duff’s career traversed archaeology, ethnography and museum practice. He went straight to the source of his studies through uncountable hours of learning and researching with Indigenous elders and artists, and through decades of field experience studying the structures of Aboriginal cultures and spirituality. Yet he came from an unlikely background for someone now lauded as one of the forebears of BC Indigenous studies.
From a Depression-era working-class family of Ulster stock in south Vancouver, Duff was an introvert achiever and star athlete at Vancouver Tech before joining the RCAF at 18 in WWII. A navigator on bombing raids against the Japanese over Rangoon and Bangkok, Duff survived with a faith in “chants, incantations, charms,” Robin Fisher comments.
Back home after the war, Duff discovered anthropology at UBC. He also married his high school girlfriend, Marion Barber, and following a master’s degree earned at the University of Washington in Seattle, Duff committed himself, Fisher records, to explaining “the colonial predicament of First Nations peoples in BC to an ever-wider audience.” In a research proposal concerning the Nisga’a and Gitxsan, Duff wrote, “They had never signed a treaty, and so still had legal claims to the land…The legal issue is not settled.”
As provincial anthropologist, Duff’s reserved personality and listening skills helped when detailing descriptions of daily life and traditions in Indigenous communities. He was keen to acquire knowledge of Aboriginal “social organization, shamanism, the acquisition of [spiritual] power, healing with power, and other concepts of the supernatural.” This approach didn’t always
sit comfortably with Duff’s theory-focused academic colleagues, but Duff carried on.
Visits at Alert Bay led to privileged Indigenous associations with the Dan Cranmer family, including scholar- daughter Gloria, and with artist Willie Seaweed and revered pole-carver Mungo Martin. Their tutelage helped Duff produce ground-breaking research in Kwakiutl history and culture that challenged established views. In Victoria, Duff sponsored Martin in building a traditional Kwakiutl house that opened with a three-day potlatch—“the first to be held after the clause banning the ritual was dropped from the Indian Act,” writes Fisher, who asserts later that Duff and Martin “were partners who kept the thread of Northwest Coast art alive when it was very tenuous.”
A retired academic, Fisher provides dense coverage of Duff’s workaholic years at UBC. Although Duff never earned a PhD, he was a magnetic classroom instructor, and at Tom Berger’s recommendation testified as an expert witness in pioneering BC Aboriginal Land Title cases such as the Calder Case and the ensuing Nisga’a land claims.
Importantly, Duff argued for the conservation of old, decaying totem poles from remote coastal sites (for heritage research). With Indigenous elders and artists, notably Bill Reid, and with fellow scholars, he surveyed Haida territory especially. Traditionally, fallen poles decayed and returned to earth, to be replaced by new poles in turn. That replacement no longer happened in Duff’s time. Fisher recounts how many, Bill Reid included, believed the Haida pole-carving art form was already dead. Tirelessly, Duff consulted First Nations councils in tracking family pole ownerships, asking permissions, and in offering compensation for removal and preservation of selected poles. Duff did things right for that time: Provincial Museum and UBC Museum of Anthropology collections attest we are the richer for his toil.
Later, with some residual guilt Duff conserved further Haida totem poles from Ninstints on Anthony Island. They could now be popularly accessed, a fact acknowledged by Bill Reid, Robert Davidson, Roy Henry Vickers and others who understood the significance of studying these globally important monuments up close.
We learn that emotionally constricted and insecure with acclaim, despite his achievements, Duff suffered from depression. While their teenagers looked on, he and his wife, Marion, drifted apart. As the Sixties moved on, Duff moved out. Social behaviours shifted, and Duff had affairs that included students. An insightful poet, he read works from the Human Potential Movement of the period that often paralleled with explorations into psychedelics. Duff’s interpretive interest in the consciousness—which he believed underpinned much of the work by Northwest Coast artists that he admired, the Edenshaws of Haida territory foremost—increased exponentially.
Fisher writes with impressive clarity on the two powerhouse exhibitions of Northwest Coast Indigenous art that cemented Duff’s pre-eminence in evaluating how we now regard this work as fine art, not simply as cultural “artefacts.” Exhibition catalogues such as images stone b.c. for the show at the Provincial Museum (1975) and Arts of the Raven at the Vancouver Art Gallery (1967) were praised internationally. Wilson collaborated with Hilary Stewart and Richard Simmins on the former, and Bill Reid and Bill Holm on ‘Raven.’
But as his personal anxieties increased, and his idiosyncratic concepts of reincarnation and sexuality in Indigenous art became entangled, Duff’s writing powers began failing. Academic views of his ideas dimmed; former students forged careers around him.
Fisher sensitively handles Duff’s suicide in 1976. This edition consolidates knowledge of a complex figure central to our evolving understanding of Northwest Coast Indigenous art, and Fisher concludes appropriately in quoting Duff’s long-time friend Roy Henry Vickers: “You know, you will figure out a lot about Wilson, but you will not figure it all out.” 9781550179750
Trevor Carolan’s most recent book is Road Trips: Journeys in the Unspoiled World (Mother Tongue, 2020).
***
Review of the author's work by BC Studies:
Contact and Conflict: Indian-European Relations in British Columbia, 1774-1890
Duff Pattullo of British Columbia
From Maps to Metaphors: The Pacific World of George Vancouver
Vancouver's Voyage: Charting the Northwest Coast, 1791-1795
SELECTED BOOKS:
Fisher, Robin. Contact and Conflict: Indian-European Relations in British Columbia, 1774-1890 (UBC Press, 1977, 1992).
Fisher, Robin & Hugh Johnstone, editors. Captain James Cook and his Times (D&M, 1979).
Fisher, Robin. Duff Pattullo of British Columbia (UTP, 1991)
Fisher, Robin. Vancouver's Voyage: Charting the Northwest Coast (Douglas & McIntyre, 1992). Photographs by Gary Fiegehen.
Fisher, Robin & Hugh Johnstone, editors. From Maps to Metaphors: The Pacific World of George Vancouver (UBC Press, 1993)
Wilson Duff: Coming Back, a Life (Harbour, 2022) $39.95 9781550179750
[BCBW 2022] "Early B.C." "George Vancouver" "First Nations" "Forts and Fur" "Classic"
Articles: 1 Article for this author
Topselling titles from UBC Press
List (2017)
As of 2017, here is a list -- in order -- of top-selling BC-authored titles, based on lifetime sales, from UBC Press.
9780774801416, HALPIN, MARJORIE, TOTEM POLES
9780774802642, JENSEN, DOREEN AND POLLY SARGENT, ROBES OF POWER
9780774804004, FISHER, ROBIN, CONTACT AND CONFLICT
9780774805179, BATTISTE, MARIE AND JEAN BARMAN, FIRST NATIONS EDUCATION IN CANADA
9780774805414, PULLEYBLANK, EDWIN, OUTLINE OF CLASSICAL CHINESE GRAMMAR
9780774803694, TENNANT, PAUL, ABORIGINAL PEOPLES AND POLITICS
9780774802284, GERSON, CAROL, VANCOUVER SHORT STORIES
9780774810494, BOYD, DAVID, UNNATURAL LAW
9780774803595, GROOT, CORNELIS AND RUTH A. MARGOLIS, PACIFIC SALMON LIFE HISTORIES
9780774805513, GUEST, DENNIS T., EMERGENCE OF SOCIAL SECURITY IN CANADA, THIRD EDITION
