As a UBC History professor Dianne Newell wrote Tangled Webs of History: Indians and the Law in Canada's Pacific Coast Fisheries (University of Toronto Press, 1993). She concluded the governments of Canada and British Columbia had historically regarded the aboriginal fishery narrowly and unjustly as a privilege, not a right, and had resisted changes that might place Indians into competition with non-Indians. She traces how the economies of Pacific Coast Indians were based on fishing for centuries. In the wake of a Supreme Court victory for B.C. Indians in Regina v. Sparrow (1990), Newell's book is an important documentation and analysis in favour of aboriginal fishing rights in British Columbia.

Born in 1943, Diane Newell turned her Ph.D. thesis -- on technological change in a new and developing country -- into a full-length book, Technology on the Frontier: Mining in Old Ontario (1986). She edited The Development of the Pacific Salmon Canning Industry: A Grown Man's Game and With Rosemary E. Ommer she also edited Fishing Places, Fishing People: Traditions and Issues in Canadian Small-Scale Fisheries (UTP, 1999)

[BCBW 2003] "Fishing" "First Nations"

Review of the author's work by BC Studies:
The Development of the Pacific Salmon-Canning Industry: A Grown Man's Game
Tangled Webs of History: Indians and the Law in Canada's Pacific Coast Fisheries