The overlapping geographical, legal, and urban conditions of Burrard Inlet, in British Columbia’s Lower Mainland, form part of what might be called the scale of the reserve.

Writing about modernism in colonial contexts, Gwendolyn Wright proposes that “the physical environment became a strategy for enforcing common values while maintaining difference within a conjoint modern world.” In Canada, little else exemplifies this statement so strongly as the century-long experiment known as residential schools.