To British Columbia's 19th-century Oblate missionaries, aboriginal people were unsaved souls. To American gold miners in the Fraser canyon, they were target practice. To Gov. James Douglas, they were loyal British subjects. To Joseph Trutch, British Columbia's first land commissioner, they were no better than "the he-panther or the she-bear".

Savages gave way to Indians. Tribes became First Nations. But of all the ways that B.C.'s aboriginal people have been imagined, represented, described, and understood, the one characterization that has persisted is the idea that they just weren't the sort of people who transformed landscapes the way Europeans did. They didn't cultivate plants or tend crops.

At one end of the ideological spectrum, this perception confirmed the notion that to be aboriginal was to be incapable of "ownership" in any meaningful sense of the term. At the other end, the heirs and successors of Jean Jacques Rousseau entertained themselves with ideas of egalitarian cooperatives of brown-skinned neolithic hippies in loincloths, picking berries and conjuring venison and otherwise leaving no mark on Mother Earth.

Out of all this, a scholarly consensus emerged: in the distinctiveness of the Northwest Coast culture area, one would find complex and highly stratified societies, distinguished by a rich material culture, established in densely populated fishing communities. But at the end of the day, precontact peoples were still considered "hunter-gatherers".

That last and most persistent misapprehension was already entrenched as a tenet of academic faith in the earliest days of Northwest Coast anthropology but is only now being thoroughly reconsidered, thanks largely to Nancy J. Turner, a UVic ethnobotanist of boundless energy and curiosity. For her efforts, Turner is beloved among dozens of British Columbia's aboriginal communities.

In The Earth's Blanket: Traditional Teachings for Sustainable Living, Turner presents an affectionate and lyrical portrait of aboriginal people who persist in resource-management practices that have been sadly overlooked. It is a "book of ideas", as it claims, but it is also a book of stories and philosophy and an encounter with people, life ways, folklore, resource-use intelligence, and that overworked term wisdom. It's all in aid of presenting aboriginal concepts of stewardship and sustainable resource management in case-study, anecdotal, and narrative form.

With Keeping It Living: Traditions of Plant Use and Cultivation on the Northwest Coast of North America, Turner and co-editor Douglas Deur of the University of Washington have mustered a broad body of evidence that is a full-on assault upon the hunter-gatherer orthodoxy. Joined by a dozen other academics whose contributions enliven this book, Turner and Deur present a picture of aboriginal life that is utterly different from the sort found in the conventional literature.

It involves little things, like Cowichan people returning from the lower Fraser with potatolike wapato roots for transplanting in the Gulf Islands. It involves big things, like the vast and carefully tended wapato fields at the mouth of the Columbia River, where in 1806 the American explorers Meriwether Lewis and William Clark found aboriginal people to be as numerous as white people "in any part of the United States".

Kwagewlth people maintained elaborate rock-walled gardens of Pacific silverweed and springbank clover at the mouth of the Nimpkish River. Sto:lo people engaged in routine, carefully managed burning to maintain berry grounds in the mountains above the Fraser canyon. Straits Salish used fire to create and nurture the Garry-oak savannas of southern Vancouver Island that so astonished early Europeans. As far north as the Tlingit territory, in what is now Alaska, people were busy weeding, tilling, pruning, and fertilizing plots and patches, gardens and fields.

Some gardens were privately owned and some landscapes were collectively managed, but the cultivators were everywhere. They raised cranberries, gooseberries, salmonberries, thimbleberries, rice root, wild onions, strawberries, cow parsnip, "wild carrot", crab apples, blueberries, black currants, and dozens more plants. This wasn't a matter of trudging around in the undergrowth and bringing home little baskets of nuts to share around a campfire. It was sophisticated, agricultural-scale husbandry, horticulture, and crop management.

How could we have missed all this? Sometimes, the newcomers simply refused to believe the evidence of their own eyes. As early as 1789, when shipman William Douglas found fenced tobacco gardens adjacent to Haida villages, he concluded that the Haida must have been taught the practice by some visiting mariner. In 1792, Capt. George Vancouver sailed in plain sight of camas prairies on the shores of Puget Sound, their bulb gatherers obliterated by smallpox. He reported: "I could not possibly believe any uncultivated country had ever been discovered exhibiting so rich a picture."

Part of the problem in comprehending the nature of precontact aboriginal economies is that so many coastal societies had collapsed from epidemic diseases before outsiders came to know them, and the old ways were quickly forgotten.

Sometimes, it was simply because postcolonial land surveyors didn't want to include "managed" lands within reserve boundaries. During the McKenna-McBride Royal Commission of 1913-16, which conducted hearings throughout B.C. to confirm reserve allocations, it was not uncommon for aboriginal leaders to petition for garden plots to be set aside. But unless the plots contained cultivars-such as potatoes-recognized by the commission, the lands were not considered eligible for reserve allocation.

A lot of it has to do with the long shadow of the great Franz Boas, the founding father of Northwest Coast anthropology. Boas was passionately committed to showing that "hunter-gatherers" could be every bit as cosmopolitan as agriculturalists. The Northwest Coast was his proving ground. Consequently, those vast camas prairies behind the villages tended to be conveniently overlooked by Boasian anthropologists, no matter how obvious it was that what was going on all around was just a tad more complicated than blackberry-picking.

It just goes to show that when it comes to understanding strangers, having a university degree doesn't guarantee that you will be a smarty-pants, which is a premise that partly informs Leslie A. Robertson's Imagining Difference: Legend, Curse and Spectacle in a Canadian Mining Town.

Robertson is an ethnographer and a specialist in "urban anthropology" with a storytelling talent exceptional among the theory-riddled academics who tend to infest her field. She's just mindful enough of the intellectual blinders that so preoccupy deconstructionist academics that she glides rather gracefully through the hash and gets to the beating heart of her chosen subject: a curse.

There are several versions, but the way it's told, more or less, is that a Capt. William Fernie duped an "Indian princess" into marrying him, just to learn the location of the precious black stones that made up her necklace. Once jilted, the woman cursed the coal-rich Elk Valley, and down through the years, with varying degrees of conviction, the good people of Fernie, consisting mainly of solid European working-class stock, have attributed their ill luck to the curse.

In 1902, 128 miners died in an explosion; 1904, a fire destroyed downtown; four years later, three miners died and a further 10 people perished in a fire that left 6,000 homeless. Over the next half-century, one horrible tragedy lead to another until two Ktunaxa elders lifted the curse in 1964. To this day, every afternoon, a creepy "ghostrider" shadow appears on rock face of Mount Hosmer, overlooking the town.

Robinson spent three years in Fernie, visiting old Italian ladies and such, talking about curses, hanging out with the locals, taking notes. The result is brilliant. The lay reader will be obliged to wade through a bit of the usual postmodernist self-criticism, but only hip deep, and it's well worth the effort.

The Earth's Blanket
By Nancy J. Turner
Douglas & McIntyre, 298 pp, $35, hardcover

Keeping It Living
Edited by Nancy J. Turner and Douglas Deur
UBC Press, 404 pp, $47.95, hardcover

Imagining Difference
By Leslie A. Robertson
UBC Press. 300 pp, $29.95, softcover