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Retelling the history of British Columbia from a diverse and inclusive perspective - Indigenous, Chinese, Japanese, Punjabi, Black, and European stories are woven together for an astute look at the complicated histories that shaped BC.
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00:11British Columbia is truly a very recent experiment. It's really only 150 years old,
00:18whether it was the fur trade or the gold rush. People came here to chase their dreams. It's a
00:24place where you could do that. It was a promised land and to some extent it still is a kind
00:31of
00:31promised land for a lot of people. Families have survived and families have thrived. But on the
00:35other hand it's been home to people of very diverse backgrounds who sometimes have experienced a lot
00:41of prejudice, a lot of alienation. It's important to know that the history is way more nuanced than
00:47what we think we understand about what happened here. When they discovered gold in the Fraser and
00:52that news went out into the world, the world showed up basically overnight. That set up the
00:57foundational dynamic between the settlers and the indigenous people. We're still living in that
01:01dynamic. We're still living in the repercussions of what happened that summer.
01:10You're looking at what many people call British Columbia. This place has had other names and even
01:16today it's called other things by different people. The truth is a name is just an idea.
01:22British Columbia is an idea that is still relatively new. There's a 14,000 year history of people
01:29making art, telling stories and building communities.
01:36Stories have always had the power to shine a light on who we are and all they ask in return
01:41is that we
01:41listen. The stories we're going to tell aren't all the stories you need to know.
01:47Some stories you may have never heard, others you may have never heard this way.
01:53But they help explain why this place is the way it is.
02:08Although indigenous people have been living here for millennia,
02:11if we're going to tell the origin story of what we call British Columbia, we need to go back to
02:16one
02:17event. The Fraser Canyon War. The Fraser Canyon War took place in 1858 when miners to the tens of thousands
02:29were coming up the Fraser Canyon.
02:35One of the first times I heard about the canyon war was comments like, you lost the war. That racist
02:42sort of statement of, well, the natives lost the war. But some of the elders would say, well, the war
02:46that we fought, we didn't lose. It's like, oh, what do you mean? What war did we fight? Like thinking,
02:50like World War II or whatever. But no, when the gold miners came up, we pushed them out.
03:06Gold had been sent to San Francisco. And once it arrived there, in no time, people realized that there
03:15was gold on this Fraser River that was to the north in this obscure territory that they didn't really
03:21know much about. The newspapers were full of it. You could find out how to get there. There were
03:28pamphlets created that talked about what you needed to go there and the great opportunities in this new
03:35El Dorado.
03:38So you have this tiny backwater outpost in the Fraser Canyon.
03:43It suddenly becomes the new sort of global hotspot for gold.
03:46In the spring of 1858, the Commodore, which is a steamer coming up from San Francisco,
03:54loaded with 450 miners stacked in there like firewood. They get off the boat. And in the process,
04:03they double the population of Victoria. It truly was a mania.
04:10Some were in the neighborhood of 30,000 or 35,000 miners came in. But some contemporary accounts
04:17suggested there were as many as 100,000. With the ascension of American numbers,
04:24they ultimately became the predominant force in that region.
04:31There were more Americans in the canyon than there were British in the entire colony.
04:35So there was a real fear that the Americans were basically going to annex the mainland of British
04:41Columbia and the colonial authorities at the time were not doing anything.
04:47British Columbia was not considered a high profile part of the British Empire at that time.
04:54British Columbia and Vancouver Island were a very long way away from Britain. It was expensive to
04:59travel there. And the British Empire did not have a very detailed sense of what these places were like
05:05and who lived here. And so these territories did not command a lot of prestige or interest.
05:13Americans were actually more or less trying to move the 49th parallel north to claim that area as
05:22US territory. Remember for a moment some of the names we still have today in British Columbia along the
05:29Fraser River. Boston bar, Texas bar, New York bar. And those miners who are accustomed to exterminating
05:39indigenous people come into this territory and tensions just exploded.
05:52The California gold rush is one of the few places where most historians agree genocide took place.
06:01So there was a lot of anxiety about this and also anxiety around violence because they're an armed
06:08population, almost entirely men. They're a population that is driven ultimately by the desire for wealth.
06:15And people in the gold rush are coming from vastly different economic backgrounds and there's almost a
06:21sense of both desperation for wealth but also an expectation that you deserve it. And so those two kinds
06:28of ideas really fuel the violence that eventually breaks out.
06:34There was an incident at Spuzzum. Spuzzum is now a tiny little community but back in the day it was
06:40a
06:40larger indigenous community. The story goes that there was these three young women who were bathing in the
06:45river and there was this group of French miners who were there and they came upon those women and they
06:52raped them. So the village went down to where those miners were and slaughtered them, dismembered them,
07:00ate their hearts and threw their dismembered bodies into the river.
07:06Downriver from that point there's this massive eddy at the bottom of the Fraser Canyon. We call it Dead
07:11Man's Eddie now because of this incident. And all of the body parts and bodies began to pool at Dead
07:19Man's Eddie and that sparked the Fraser Canyon War.
07:24Some miners wanted to go out for full retribution which would have been very much in keeping with the
07:29California experience. That is to say kill every indigenous man, woman and child. A massive posse was
07:39raised and they came and attacked Spuzzum. And they wreaked havoc in indigenous communities in the area
07:48from Boston Bar to Lytton, among the in particular. They torched native village there. A total of 36
07:55indigenous peoples were killed, five of whom who were chiefs. And so you had all these refugees from
08:02Spuzzum heading up river and that's what set off the alarms for our people. You had the potential to
08:09really blow up. And if firepower had been used more than it was, the potential was there that the
08:17American military would come in behind. And if that happened, this probably wouldn't become British
08:24Columbia. So by this time the conflict has sort of been this running battle up and down the river.
08:30We sent out runners to our neighbors.
08:49And they responded with groups of warriors. And so there was this massive gathering of warriors just
08:55south of Lytton. And they held a war council. And you have people like Shuk Shuk Al. Shuk Shuk Spach
09:02is
09:02like a grizzly bear. There's accounts of him wearing his war regalia, which is a big grizzly bear robe.
09:09And he was advocating for war. He was really trying to drum up support to go and fight the invaders.
09:17At the time, our chief Sekhpetlum called us a very influential and powerful Kukpi chief. He had a
09:24reputation of being a peacemaker. The women were very concerned. And so they were approaching Sekhpetlum
09:33and saying, look, this is a terrible idea. Maybe we should try to find a way out. And so taking
09:39that
09:39council, he advocated to try to find a peaceful solution. The role of indigenous women in traditional
09:48communities is equally as important as their male counterparts. Women were as much decision makers
09:54as men were. There was an equal distribution of power and authority amongst our people. All people
10:01participated in war, just like any ancient civilization on the planet. The accounts are that there was a
10:08massive debate in council and Sekhpetlum won them over. In the end, they made a verbal oral peace treaty.
10:16And so in that place, in British Columbia history, in the canyon, really in some ways marks the halting
10:25of this huge invasion, really, of tens of thousands of foreign-born gold seekers coming into a country.
10:34There were 30,000 miners at Yale that were wanting to push up and invade and destroy us. And we
10:41held them
10:41back. We shut down the gold rush. We shut down that activity that year. And we wrestled a piece out
10:49of it,
10:49in spite of all of the odds. I think that's remarkable.
10:58Back in London, England, they were receiving these communiques from Governor Douglas, who at that
11:05point, of course, was the governor of the colony of Vancouver Island. And he had asked that a military
11:10force be sent out to keep all foreign miners out of the country. Colonial governors were expected to
11:18communicate with the British colonial office via what were called dispatches. And so, like all colonial
11:24governors, Douglas wrote regular reports on what was going on. And Douglas' dispatches provide us with
11:32windows into how the colonial office in Britain saw both him and the societies he was trying to rule.
11:41And they became interested in British Columbia and Vancouver Island when they saw that Americans were
11:47going to perhaps claim those territories. They wouldn't give them the military force,
11:52but what they did do is quickly form the colony of British Columbia.
12:00The colonial office decides, well, we've got gold. We'll just have another colony. We have a zillion
12:06colonies anyway. What's one more colony? And so British Columbia is made into a British colony.
12:12Actually, because their sign-off required months that he didn't have. Douglas, who was the governor of
12:18Vancouver Island, went and without the approval of the British government, declared it as a British
12:26space. He declared British sovereignty. He engaged in kind of an act of colonial possession over the mainland.
12:35In that moment of uncertainty, he sort of snuck in and declared it as a crown colony in order to
12:41stave off the American invasion. But he doesn't consult actual people who have been there forever,
12:47whose territory that is. He just sort of puts his flag down and says, this is ours. That's the foundation
12:52of this being what we call British Columbia. It's kind of a fraud. But it's important for
13:00indigenous folks to know these stories, to know how strong we are and how resilient we are.
13:07If the Tl'Katmuk people and our allies hadn't pushed those gold miners out that summer and shut down the
13:14gold rush, that could have been a very different outcome. Our territories remain occupied. But to know
13:19how and why that came about, I think is incredibly important.
13:36When they decided they were going to create the mainland into a colony because of the gold rush,
13:41the original name was New Caledonia, because that had been the name of the mainland during the fur trade
13:46years. But they asked the queen, and Victoria said, no, I like the idea of British Columbia.
13:52Because originally, the other thought had been that it was going to be named Columbia. But then
13:56they discovered there was a country in Latin America named Columbia. That was already taken.
14:00When they discovered they couldn't have Columbia, they said, okay, we'll tack British onto it.
14:05Columbia comes from Columbus. And it does take us back to very early ideas that Europeans held
14:12about the right of discovery. And Columbia literally was a kind of goddess figure. She was the
14:18personification of this idea of westward migration, the idea of westward migration as a story of progress.
14:25There's a very famous print from 1872 called American Progress. And it's a white woman sort of drifting
14:32west across the plains of North America, trailing telegraph wire behind her. Indigenous people are
14:38disappearing into the darkness ahead of her. Around her, you have all the symbols of so-called
14:43civilization. So the wagon train and the plow and miners and the railroad. And then in the light of the
14:48rising sun is the city. And that sort of explains North American history, that indigenous people
14:54disappear and you get modernity in the form of a city. And so the legacy of Columbus is with us
15:00here
15:00on the coast in the name of this province as a personification of settler ambition.
15:08We have to remember that prior to the 49th parallel being drawn in 1846, there was this
15:16fur trade world, which ran from right below the Alaskan panhandle all the way down to what is today's
15:24Oregon-California border. Fort Vancouver, their capital, if you will, was in present-day Washington
15:32state. What occurred there? Well, let's say you're a Hawaiian, or if you have black blood in you,
15:39certainly if you're a mixed-race family of indigenous and non-indigenous, discriminatory
15:45legislation came in which precluded you not only from voting, but if you're involved in a court case,
15:53a mixed-race person could not give testimony in a court of law against a white person. Governor
15:59Douglas, himself a mixed-race Scotch West Indian married to his wife Amelia, who was a mixed-race
16:07Irish Cree woman. Could Douglas technically have given testimony in a court of law? No. So Douglas,
16:14when he finally comes up to Fort Victoria in 1849, you know, they're almost escaping that kind of
16:23discriminatory mindset that comes in with Americans on the Oregon Trail. The rush in that sense was
16:30not just for gold, but for many people, it was a rush for freedom.
16:40James Douglas is a fascinating character in British Columbia history. He was born in British Guiana to a
16:47Scottish father and a mixed-race black mother. His father sent him to Scotland to his school,
16:53and then he joined the fur trade when he was something like age 16. He works his way up until
16:59he's second in command of the whole Hudson's Bay Company operation on the Pacific Northwest.
17:05The Hudson's Bay Company was one of the important chartered companies of the British Empire, but in the
17:11context of Northern North America, it took on additional power in the way that the British
17:17colonial government empowered it with this sort of curious and poorly understood power to govern.
17:23In this period of time, these are parts of the world that are not well understood within Britain,
17:30and part of the reliance on the Hudson's Bay Company reflects that in the sense that the British
17:35government really saw those men and that private enterprise as being able to provide them with
17:42knowledge that they would otherwise lack. So essentially, it's kind of a proto-colonial government,
17:48and certainly the first formal colonial entity is this private company.
17:53Douglas ended up working all over the Northwest.
17:56He marries his boss's daughter. It's always a very strategic move. Then that is Amelia Connolly Douglas,
18:03who was the daughter of a Swampy Cree or Inanoo woman and an Irish-Canadian.
18:10He was married to a woman who was half Indigenous.
18:14When his boss retires, he assumed that role and was put in charge of British presence in the colony
18:19of Vancouver Island in 1849 and eventually becomes the governor of that colony and of British Columbia.
18:24Although he thought British culture was superior to Indigenous culture, he didn't see
18:28white people as superior to Indigenous people. When he became governor, he wanted to bring Indigenous
18:32people into his culture rather than think of them as being below or beneath. And that was quite
18:39different from other settlers who came later who saw Indigenous people through a racist lens.
18:45Certainly, Amelia, his wife, the fact that she was part Indigenous, was very, very much part of the
18:50story and was to some extent used to advantage, I think, in the sense that he had his long-time
18:54link
18:54with Indigenous people with Indigenous people.
18:56Amelia Douglas was a cultural broker, I guess you would say, that kind of was able to negotiate both
19:01of those communities and bring them together. There's a famous moment when one of the House's
19:07Big Company men had been murdered. Douglas went out to find a murderer and punish him with a group of
19:12others.
19:13They found him near the Fort St. James in the house of the local Dachau health chief, the carrier chief,
19:19Qua. Qua was away. They burst into the house and executed the man who they believed had committed
19:26the murder. That enraged Qua. His house had been violated. His control had been violated. His
19:32hospitality had been violated. So he and many of his men broke into the fort and had Douglas basically
19:38within a dagger stroke of death. And the story goes that Amelia steps in and pleads for her husband's
19:45life but also distributes gifts, tobacco and blankets and other things that Qua could accept as a
19:52compensation for the insult that had been done to him and saved James's life. We don't know a lot
19:59about Qua, but what we do know of him is he was an important warrior, important peacemaker for his people.
20:05The carrier people say that Qua had Douglas's life in his hands and decided to spare him.
20:12Chief Qua was my great-great-grandfather. He was very famous. He became a warrior when he had to.
20:21And he became a noble person. And he became a foretrader chief for Northwest Company in Hudson's Bay.
20:31So he learned to adapt to the changes that were coming.
20:38The killing of Douglas would have set that whole community afire in terms of Hudson's Bay
20:42Company retribution. And he didn't do that. And subsequently a peace was made and he and
20:47James Douglas and the Hudson's Bay Company were able to live harmoniously for through the end of the
21:01to our people. Chief Qua was known as a respected person. They looked up to him because he took care
21:09of them. One of his names means dreamer of the salmon. And he was in charge of the weirs at
21:16the mouth of
21:17the Stewart River, which indigenous people managed every year to ensure that they got enough salmon
21:22for their winter supply, but left enough salmon to proceed through the weirs so that they would come back
21:26every year. The old people said that's what he used to dream about. He used to lay on the rock
21:33and watch
21:34for the salmon to come in. And they rejoiced when the first one came in.
21:41He was buried by the weaver where he loved. That's where the fish were all the time.
21:48That was the first time a person was buried like that. She was a very important person.
21:57In 1846, the Oregon Treaty establishes the border between the United States and British North America
22:03at the 49th parallel. And Hudson's Bay Company finds itself in American territory at Fort Vancouver.
22:09That whole world was shattered at that time. So they obviously looked for a secure new center of
22:19fur trade operation. And ultimately, they moved to Fort Victoria in 1849.
22:25So why Victoria? How did that become chosen as the ultimate capital of British Columbia?
22:30It's a secure beachhead, quite frankly, a secure, defensible location surrounded like with a big mud,
22:38the Strait of Wanda Vuka. So James Douglas, as chief factor of the Hudson Bay Company,
22:44decides we should build this fort in this beautiful harbor that was so functional for what they had to do.
22:53Douglas himself came to the southern tip of Vancouver Island. And when he first saw it,
22:59he said one would be forgiven for supposing that the island had dropped from the very clouds to its
23:05present location. My father talked about the waterway that goes in there. They didn't need
23:11anything. They had everything they needed right there. There was five kinds of fish that lived in
23:17that waterway. It goes right into the mouth of that Victoria Harbor, where the parliament building is now.
23:25That's where the village was. When the colony was established in 1849, it was clear to Douglas that
23:32he had to make some arrangement with the local people about land. He was also instructed by his
23:38superiors back in the Hudson's Bay Company in England to do so. There was some indigenous interest
23:43in the land that had to be acknowledged and extinguished, as the phrase goes.
23:57There were 14 of these agreements, and the last one was made in Nanaimo in 1854.
24:03These are remarkable documents because they really are very short little quick claim deeds whereby people
24:15are supposed to sign to acknowledge that they're giving up some title in return for a guarantee to
24:24maintain their fisheries as formerly and to hunt on unoccupied crown land and to get certain consideration
24:30in blankets. Douglas told our people that we could always hunt and fish informally and take care of
24:38our lands the way that we always have. So they didn't see that to be a treaty about land. They
24:43saw it as a
24:44peace treaty to make peace amongst the Spanish people and the people that were building up this fort in
24:49Victoria. There were some people making extras on a paper. They thought it was something like
24:56making that cross sign. So they thought it had something to do with God or something. To be trusting
25:03and that God could see what they're doing. Well, that's the way that our people understood it. Our
25:09people didn't have the concept of selling it. We couldn't sell it. There's no way we could sell it.
25:15It's impossible to sell our land. Our people looked at it like we belong to the land.
25:21They thought they were making an agreement basically to share the land. Let the white folks do what they
25:26want but in return for basically all their rights being guaranteed. Our people were living according
25:33to the way that they had always lived. Hunting and fishing and trapping and gathering medicines and
25:38whatever they needed to gather. I think it was after Douglas was gone and then the next government came in
25:45and things started to get more controlling. Compared to most of his contemporaries, certainly compared to
25:51the governors who succeeded him, Douglas was an enlightened man.
26:01One of the consequences of European arrival in British Columbia was connecting an environment and
26:08a biome to a whole new biosphere which included European biosphere and European diseases.
26:13Measles, typhus, cholera, a great variety of diseases, many of them childhood illnesses,
26:20what Europeans considered childhood illnesses. Indigenous people had no such crowd diseases.
26:25So the indigenous populations up and down the northwest coast and across the plateau experienced a
26:31massive crash in population. But the most devastating epidemic is the 1862 smallpox epidemic.
26:51A smallpox is a very effective killer. It's transmitted person to person in the same way as influenza often. You
26:58have it and you don't know it for two weeks and then you start to show symptoms. But in those
27:02two weeks you're also infectious.
27:05In March of 1862, a couple of men from San Francisco arrived in Victoria on a ship carrying smallpox with
27:11them.
27:12What happened in Victoria is that as it breaks out in the camps, the citizens in Victoria panic and drive
27:18the indigenous people out of town.
27:20There was a lot of people camped along the waterfront there. Many different First Nations that were going there for
27:26trade.
27:28And this trading that was happening, some people got there that were sick.
27:33They wanted to have a celebration for Queen Victoria's birthday. They didn't want all these sick people around them. So
27:40they sent some soldiers down there and burnt down this encampment.
27:43So they went back home to their villages and spread the sickness throughout different nations and places where they're going
27:50home.
27:53As much as a third of the population dies off in the space of one winter, it was a population
27:58catastrophe. And there's no memorial in the province at all to that. It's a huge disaster.
28:11Once the smallpox hit the nation, our medicine people and spiritual people looked for every type of cure that was
28:19known to them.
28:21And when they weren't able to come up with anything, all the clans were asked to separate and all the
28:27clans headed into the mountains individually.
28:30And there was no contact that was supposed to happen between the clans for a period of one full year.
28:37That was the only way they beat smallpox. Otherwise, the whole nation may have gotten, may have been wiped out.
28:44And the colony of British Columbia tried to establish a highway from Victoria to the goldfields north of Quenelle and
28:52that meant going right directly through Chilcotin territory.
28:57They were very spiritual people. We were close to the environment and we were open to adopt anyone to come
29:06into that would accept our values and our ways, but they had to meet the terms and conditions of the
29:12Chilcotin.
29:14The road building crew had never encountered such a demand from First Nation people. So the road building crew said
29:22they would bring back smallpox.
29:28There's controversy about who made the threat. One account suggests it was the foreman of the road crew, but whoever
29:35made it, it was a terrible thing to say to people who'd just been through what they'd been through.
29:43Ninety percent of our population was wiped out before that. Family at ten, now it's like nine of the family
29:48members being wiped out. So very serious threat.
29:53And being a warlike society, we are here to defend and defend our land, defend our women, our children, our
30:01elders, defend our way of life.
30:03And as a result, a party of warriors killed 19 settlers, colonists.
30:12And so the governor, Frederick Seymour, then sent posses of a sort up to deal with it. And that's really
30:19what they call the Chilcotin War.
30:33To conclude the Chilcotin War, they were asked to come into Hudson's Bay Camp and have peace accord talks.
30:43The Chilcotin War is the head war chief agreed to come in.
30:49The Chilcotin War was the war party leader. Not a lot is known about him.
30:54I think his name even translates as we don't know him or we don't know his name.
31:00There was much debate amongst our warriors.
31:03Didn't trust the colonial government.
31:06But he said, you know, we have to try to form peace and understanding.
31:13And when him and his warriors walked into camp,
31:16where they laid their weapons down, they were jump shackled and took the canal, tried as murderers.
31:23Judge Begbie was the only judge at that time in British Columbia.
31:28And when the six chiefs were charged in 1864, he decided over the trial.
31:36Five of the six were convicted by the jury.
31:39He didn't make the conviction because it was a jury trial.
31:43And when five were convicted of murder, the death penalty was mandatory.
31:50So Begbie imposed the mandatory penalty.
31:58I don't consider that to be much of a trial.
32:01I don't think they had much representation in a legal way even for that time.
32:06One of the tragic elements in all this is that you had two competing legal systems.
32:10You had the British colonial authorities believing they declared sovereignty over all of British Columbia,
32:16and therefore the Chilcotin were obliged to obey their laws.
32:19And you had the Chilcotin feeling that, well, no one has taken away our way of life.
32:24No one has made a treaty with us. This has always been our land.
32:27And attacking the road party was the sort of thing that they were entitled to do.
32:32Lhasa Hussain was our head war chief.
32:35His last statement was, this was war, not murder.
32:38In war, that's what you do. You kill people.
32:41You're fighting soldiers, soldier to soldier. That's not murder.
32:44So as Chilcotin people, that still lingers.
32:48The first thing we as Chilcotin learn as kids growing up is betrayal that happened.
32:59Begbie was a colorful character who came to B.C. in 1858, just after the gold rush had started.
33:08He became known as the hanging judge.
33:11But he was also, to a certain extent, a true friend of indigenous people.
33:16He learned a couple of indigenous languages.
33:20One of the very first, if not the first, cases under the Potlatch law came before Begbie.
33:24And a man had pleaded guilty under the law.
33:28Begbie said the law was way too vague, and he overturned the guilty plea and set the man free.
33:36He thought that everyone was equal before the law.
33:42He was regularly criticized in the press for his high opinion of the Chinese population of British Columbia.
33:50And in virtually every case that came before him where the province or the city of Victoria had passed laws
33:56to try to prevent the Chinese from running pawn shops or laundries.
34:01In every one, he found a way to equip the individual.
34:05His bad reputation really comes from the fact that he happened to be the judge that presided over the Chilcotin
34:10War.
34:11Which now we view as a miscarriage of justice.
34:14Not a man without faults, believe me.
34:17But an interesting man.
34:19If you go to the Ross Bay Cemetery in Victoria, you can see the result.
34:22He asked that the only words on his tombstone be,
34:26Lord be merciful to me, a sinner.
34:29Not many people would ask for that on their tombstone today, I think.
34:39The gold rush left the Fraser Canyon, and it eventually moved further north up into Barkerville.
34:45There was a second gold rush that starts in about 1862, 1863.
34:50And so you have another whole rush of men coming there.
34:52And once again, Douglas was genuinely concerned there will be an attempt by the Americans to take over.
34:58Douglas wants an all British route into the interiors so that they can get supplies and miners more easily up
35:08into the actual gold fields.
35:11He gets what are called the Royal Engineers, which is part of the British military establishment, who are expert in
35:19building roads.
35:19And they're going to build the roads.
35:21They're going to do all of the stuff that you need in order to create this huge wilderness into a
35:26British colony.
35:28The Caribou Wagon Road was the first mega project.
35:32And it was part of Douglas's vision that it would eventually link to the rest of Canada.
35:38For its time, the Caribou Wagon Road was considered the eighth wonder of the world.
35:43The amount of blasting of rock to create a ledge that would actually accommodate wagons and horses and men.
35:54Just drive through the Fraser Canyon and look at what they did.
36:01The assumption initially is that because Britain is sending out the Royal Engineers, that they're paying for the cost.
36:08But very quickly, the cost is downloaded onto British Columbia.
36:13But they can't be paid because they don't have the tax collecting facilities that you would need in order to
36:18pay off this debt.
36:19So Douglas goes into disrepute because he can't pay off this debt.
36:22Once the gold rush had passed, there wasn't enough money coming back to pay for this.
36:30And eventually, it was so bad that the two colonies, Vancouver Island and the mainland colony of British Columbia, had
36:37to join together to reduce some of those costs.
36:42And so in 1866, the two colonies are joined. And Douglas is replaced in both places.
36:48And then it does lead to confederation, really, with Canada in 1871, because the province was pretty much broke at
36:55that point.
36:56The new Dominion of Canada, which was only three years old at the time, said, OK, we'll fund a railway
37:01across Canada.
37:03Everybody thought a railway was a really good deal. They're going to be the solution for our economic ills and
37:08everything else.
37:09And so essentially, they're bribed with a railway. And so that's why British Columbia ends up joining Canada.
37:14That was the deal that we made to join confederation.
37:20The new governor arrives, Governor Seymour. And Seymour had little interest in Indian affairs, unlike James Douglas.
37:26So Joseph Trutch was appointed chief commissioner of Indian affairs.
37:37Joseph Trutch is one of the less attractive figures in the colonial world of BC. He was a surveyor, a
37:45very successful businessman.
37:47And he became basically the chief commissioner of land and works just as Douglas was retired.
37:53Under Governor James Douglas, colony had designated somewhat adequate reserves that included village sites, graveyards, cultivated fields, but also resource
38:05producing areas like hunting, fishing grounds.
38:09Then under the subsequent government, the size of those reserves was greatly reduced. And some, in fact, were entirely scratched
38:19off the map.
38:19Joseph Trutch traveled through southern British Columbia saying these reserves are way too large for the indigenous population and shrinks
38:26them by about 90%.
38:28From there, Trutch continues to meddle in indigenous affairs and kind of goes down in history as one of the
38:36people who did more harm to indigenous people than most of the other settlers.
38:41In 1909, Ottawa hired a lawyer to find out what the heck was going on with BC's Indian policy.
38:48And the lawyer wrote a hundred page report concluding that there was an extinguished title in BC and the federal
38:55government had better do something about it.
38:57And the person he singled out was Trutch.
39:00And he just describes Trutch in the most critical terms as the man who, where it all began going sideways
39:06because of his lack of respect for native land rights.
39:10That's 1909.
39:13His view was that the province owned all of the land and the reserves were being held at their discretion.
39:19So he had the authority as the provincial representative to cut these lands off as he saw fit, to open
39:26them up and make them accessible to provincial and industrial interests at the time.
39:31What changed also in the two decades following those initial reserve allocations was that more settlers came into the land
39:41and were writing to the superintendent of Indian affairs that the Indians weren't really using the land.
39:50And thus, why don't you make it available to me to add it to my preemption.
39:57And in a large number of cases, that is what went on.
40:06So it was unilateral.
40:07There was no negotiation.
40:09Of course, native people weren't happy with this and they wanted to have their rights recognized.
40:14They had people talking to them about treaties.
40:18So the federal government drafted this fairly comprehensive piece of legislation that we know now today as the Indian Act,
40:25which gives the federal government authority over Indians and lands reserved for Indians.
40:47The impact of the Indian Act on the day-to-day life of indigenous peoples was severe.
40:53The Indian Act would be relied on to control indigenous peoples, to advance an assimilation agenda.
41:00It was relied on to make it illegal for indigenous peoples to promote their land claims in court.
41:06It was relied on to force indigenous peoples to give their children up to a residential school system.
41:11The residential school system required that indigenous children be taken from their communities and put somewhere else.
41:19The idea of Indian residential schools goes back to the 1840s, but it was voluntary.
41:27When that still didn't yield the results they hoped for, they made it actually a criminal offense for parents not
41:33to send their children.
41:37My grandmother, every time she would put us on the bus to go back to the residential school, she never
41:44failed to tell us,
41:45I sure hate to send you kids there, but if I don't, they will put me in jail.
41:51And jail was not an idle threat.
41:55There were parents around that were put in jail for not surrendering their children.
42:02I don't remember the day that I arrived.
42:05I remember the morning after.
42:09I remember waking up and the nun clapping really loudly.
42:16The nuns were very strict and some of them very mean, and they always let us know that we were
42:24less than.
42:25And that was why we were at the school and why we couldn't be raised in our home communities.
42:30It was a daily brainwashing, a continuous humiliation of the teachers talking about your language as heathen, beset by the
42:42devil, primitive, not worthy.
42:46When they dared to speak their indigenous language in the schools, they were whipped, smacked, or beaten with a stick.
42:53You just did what you're told without question. You were programmed.
42:57We were like little robots. Yes, sister. No, sister. Yes, father. No, father.
43:05I experienced mental abuse. I experienced physical abuse.
43:10I even experienced sexual abuse.
43:14Kids tried to escape all the time.
43:17I mean, it's just like the prison, you know, where you hear prisoners planning an escape.
43:23The kids that tried to run away were always punished severely.
43:28Boys were made to wear dresses, which was a real shame for them.
43:34The girls would have their heads shaved, and they would be given the strap in front of everyone in the
43:40dining room, and it was a message to all of us.
43:43This is what will happen to you if you try to run away.
43:48As a result, for many of the young children or adolescents in Indian residential schools to protect themselves, they often
43:56would form groups, gangs, to look out after one another.
44:00There was one time when I got beat up really bad because I wasn't part of a gang yet.
44:06So I ended up joining a gang of three other girls, and we protected each other.
44:11That saved us from being beat up.
44:14The nuns and others encouraged it.
44:17There was no teaching of any kind of social skills or human rights or anything like that.
44:24The only feeling that was really acceptable was anger.
44:29I mean, if people look at a prison, it's exactly the same thing.
44:35I think the most violent harms of the Indian residential schools was obviously the physical and sexual violence that children
44:46and adolescents suffered.
44:49But in addition to that, it was the erasure of language, culture, ceremony, knowledge, all of those things.
45:01There was a time when the parents in the first generation had returned from residential schools, and there were no
45:08children in the village because they were all in school.
45:11And it produced a way of living where the adults were grieving over what had happened to them, and they
45:19had no children to keep company and to raise.
45:23That was a terrible blow to the fabric of communities.
45:28I'm 64.
45:30Anybody who would be maybe 55 and older in my community went to the schools, so everybody was suffering from
45:38the same thing.
45:42I talk about the children after they left the mission being time bombs waiting to explode.
45:51Friends that I had over the years either committed suicide or died slow deaths from alcohol or overdosed or something
46:01like that.
46:02There aren't too many of us left from the mission.
46:11And they say that the indigenous people have a lot of healing to do, and I tell them, yes, they
46:17do.
46:17But so does society in general, because we wouldn't have the social problems that we do if this had not
46:25been allowed to happen.
46:26It's a Sikh society that tries to, you know, takes children and tries to turn them into something that they're
46:33not in very destructive ways.
46:38So this is a human problem. It's not an indigenous problem.
46:46Many of our old people could see a correlation between spirituality and religion, and many of them did take part
46:55in the Anglican and Roman Catholic Church practices.
46:59But even though the federal government outlawed the Potlatch officially under the Indian Act in 1867, our people continued to
47:08Potlatch.
47:21Potlatch is a really sophisticated and complex system.
47:25These ceremonies are basically our legal system, our governance system, and our system for putting everything on record.
47:38When people were doing something significant in their lives, when they were given a name, when they passed on, when
47:44they became a chief,
47:45that was honored and acknowledged through the Potlatch. It had to be witnessed.
47:51It wasn't true, it wasn't accepted by the community, unless it had been potlatched.
47:59As a child growing up, I went and I saw the dances and I saw the singing and I heard
48:03the speeches, but I didn't necessarily understand the significance of that.
48:08And it wasn't until much later that I realized that this was the way that we held our knowledge. This
48:14is the way that we shared our knowledge.
48:19According to official records, the intent of the Potlatch ban was to stop what they determined was a frivolous system
48:28that they regarded as Indians worshipping totem poles.
48:39Our people were not allowed to practice our culture. We were not allowed to sing and dance.
48:46Our dancing and our singing were sort of these visible reminders that we were not being colonized quickly enough or
48:53assimilated into the European ways.
48:55And so the Potlatch is something very clear and tangible that they chose to attack for the purpose of having
49:05Indigenous people become more colonized.
49:09So that time in our history when our people were not allowed to practice our culture was a dark time.
49:16That's what our old people call it, the dark time when the Potlatch ban was in place.
49:22And it was in place until 1951. But our culture never stopped. Our people never stopped singing and dancing. They
49:29did it in secret, away from where they would be found out easily.
49:35So in December of 1921, my grandfather, Polna Kolawakias, Dan Cranmer, had a Potlatch in Village Island. The reason for
49:44the Potlatch being in Village Island is that's where his wife's family was from. But it was also away from
49:49the Indian agent and the police.
49:51That was a very conscious choice because it was difficult for the authorities to get there. When it was wintry
49:56especially and the waters were rough and nobody could get through, they could continue dancing because they weren't afraid of
50:04being prosecuted.
50:09Our old people knew that it was against the law, that they would go to jail. But because of our
50:15own belief and our own ways, we call that Kwa'i'i Lailas. Our own ways is the things that
50:21we do to continue who we are.
50:27When they've grown up all that time, and then someone comes along and says, no, you can't do that anymore.
50:33You have to do this.
50:35I think my grandfather needed to do what he had to do. And Canadian government isn't going to stop him.
50:42Many people gathered in Village Island for that Potlatch and many dances and names and songs were shared.
50:50It's estimated that he gave away well over $20,000 and said that that was the biggest Potlatch they had
50:59here.
51:01So what happened after that is they come home and then people start getting arrested.
51:07The deal was made that if our people gave up their regalia and their coppers, stop doing the Potlatch, then
51:15they wouldn't have to go to jail.
51:18And our chiefs agreed to sign this agreement to stop potlatching, give up their masks and all the things that
51:27were used in the Potlatch ceremonies.
51:30And there's pictures of all that regalia that was handed over so people wouldn't have to go to jail.
51:38The Indian agent here in Alert Bay convinced his superiors in Ottawa that he, as an Indian agent, could sit
51:46as a judge.
51:46So he not only arrested our people, but he sat there as a judge.
51:53I believe 40 or 46 people were charged. A few were held for appeal and ultimately 20 or 22 went
52:03to Ocala.
52:06My father, he felt very responsible. He agreed to stop potlatching so that more people would not be sent to
52:17prison.
52:18It didn't make him feel happy that all those chiefs went to jail.
52:21And I think it really weighed on his heart that because they helped him do his business in Village Island,
52:28they got sent down.
52:31They took them out of here on the boat that came in and then they loaded them all up on
52:35some truck.
52:37You know, they were these honorable people and they were so mistreated.
52:42They were treated like criminals for being who they are.
52:48Some people came home and they just were never the same again.
52:53Well, the Indian agent at the time, he was the law, along with, of course, the church.
53:01And they seemed to go hand in hand doing the type of work that they were doing.
53:06The church participated in convincing entire families and entire villages that if they didn't burn or dispose somehow of their
53:15pieces, that they would burn in hell.
53:21So many of the works of art that came out of these potlatches were forcibly confiscated by the Indian agent.
53:28The Indian agent was supposed to send it all to Ottawa, but in the meantime, he sold some masks to
53:37a collector from the Museum of the American Indian.
53:42So that part of the collection went to New York.
53:48Collectors began increasing their prices and trading them with other collectors, trading them with museums or selling them to museums.
53:59So it's really ironic that the same people who threatened our people with going to hell for having these pieces
54:07then turned around and made a whole lot of money off of them.
54:10And all that old money is really what created the institutions that to this day exist.
54:18To our old people, it wasn't a piece of art.
54:21It was a piece of their story that connects them right up to where we all believe we come from.
54:27It wasn't, you know, how they talk about our culture. That's not what it was for us.
54:34Over the years, I've heard so many people from outside of our communities talk about how we never had a
54:40written language.
54:41Well, the art is our written language.
54:45I think it's absolute genius that you can tell an entire story of a family right back to its beginning
54:52through a totem pole, for instance.
54:55The regalia that's made to also go with that pole and the regalia that have the right to do that
55:00dance and sing that song.
55:02So it's very complex.
55:06In the 70s, when that whole section of the Indian Act was dropped, and we were again allowed to practice
55:13our culture, our people were told that if you build a place to house these pieces of art, then we'll
55:21give them back to you.
55:22Like, that's so nervy. Like, we'll give your stuff back to you if you create the proper, I'm like, wow.
55:32And by 1978, the cultural center started being built.
55:37Since the opening of the Umista Cultural Center in 1980, we've pretty well got all of the pieces back.
55:46Maybe a half dozen or more have to come back, but we know where they all are.
55:54When I visit the collection, I think of all the bad things government did to our people and makes me
56:00angry.
56:01But I also have a very special feeling just sitting there with the pieces.
56:07It gives me strength.
56:12You know when we opened the cultural center on November 1, 1980?
56:17My granny, Agnes Kramer's brother, Tommy Hunt, he is so happy to be there to open those doors, and so
56:25they asked him to give a speech.
56:26And you know, he started, and then he got all emotional, and he couldn't finish because, you know, we're finally,
56:34it's their home, and it really, you can feel his heart, right?
56:38It's something, something to think about how they could finally talk about it.
56:44It was an amazing day, amazing day, and you know, my Auntie Chloe says she wishes that all those old
56:49people could be here to see what her hard work and other stuff had done.
56:55So that our young people can know, you know, we have our ways, and somehow we have to find the
57:02balance between what we do today in this world and what our ancestors saved for us.
57:08Yeah.
57:15They're his hope in our stories.
57:17Hope that the stories that were not told will be.
57:20And hope that these stories will live long past all of us.
57:25How are we?
57:38So—
57:39How are we?
57:54I want the things that we do today in this world where people hold, um, all theosies, just kind of
57:54phishing.
57:54Oh, my God.
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