OTIONS OF DOMESTICITY were central to colonial projects around the globe.They were part of the fray when métropole and colony collided and transformed one another.As Jean and John Comaroff put it, "Colonialism was as much about making the center as it was about making the periphery.The colony was not a mere extension of the modern world.It was part of what made the world modern in the first place.And the dialectic of domesticity was a vital element in the process." 1 The colonial desire to order domestic space had its correlate in broader attempts to impose discipline in the public sphere.2 On the late-nineteenth-century Northwest Coast, this process took shape for Aboriginal people who increasingly lived not only overseas from, but within, the society of the colonizing métropoles.Aboriginal people experienced extreme pressure to bring their lives into conformity with Victorian expectations about private, middle-class, bourgeois domesticity.This pressure came not only from isolated missionaries posted in lonely colonial outposts but also from a broad swath of colonial society.So intense was the interest in Aboriginal domestic arrangements, however, that colonial society brought Aboriginal domestic space into the public domain as never before, even as it urged Aboriginal communities to adopt the Victorian values of the domestic private sphere.While missionaries and government officials pressured * I wish to acknowledge SSHRC, whose support made this research possible.I would also like to thank Kathy Mezei, who encouraged me to present this as a conference paper and then to write it up as
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