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