British Columbia history

Over the past number of years there has been increased interest in racism and anti-racism amongst geographers. This paper focuses on one type of anti-racism methodology that relates to critically interrogating my own white colonial settler ancestors and particularly the institutions and structures of which they were a part, and using those understandings to resist the contemporary increase in white supremacy and anti-Asian racism. It also seeks to demonstrate the links between anti-racism and decolonization. Particularly, I examine the Native Sons and Daughters of British Columbia, Canada, in the Nanaimo city area, where my great-grandparents from northern England and Scotland settled as working-class miners at the beginning of the 20th century. I examine white working-class settler racism against Asians, especially as practiced against Chinese and Japanese immigrants. While I do not argue that this is the only or even the most important type of anti-racism methodology, this sort of research and associated production of knowledge can be useful in resisting present-day anti-Asian racism, even though I acknowledge that I am still embedded in colonial structures of racism and white privilege.

This book won the Canadian Historical Association's "Best Book in Aboriginal History Prize" in 2011, as well as the Canadian Historical Association's "Clio Prize for Best Book in British Columbia History" in 2011.  It explores the history of identify reformation among the Sto:lo Coast Salish of the lower Fraser River in the nineteenth century.  It pays special attention to the gendered expressions of collective affiliation and how the structures of Salish culture challenged and sometimes accommodated colonial-induced events.

In 1907 and 1908, the governments of four provinces – Manitoba, Ontario, New Brunswick, and British Columbia – introduced policies to encourage the display of flags on public school buildings and grounds. In British Columbia, the question of flag-flying provoked a heated debate, pitting the provincial minister of education, a proponent of the Union Jack, against city school boards that favoured the Canadian Red Ensign. On one level, school flag policies were part of a well-documented patriotic curriculum and suggested the influence of American patriotic practices. The debate in British Columbia underlined the division in Canadian imperialist sentiment between those who favoured a centralized imperial federation and those who saw Canada as an autonomous state within the British Empire. On the other hand, based on a comparative reading of the four provincial policies and the public responses to them, this article contends that the flag-flying controversy, particularly in British Columbia, reflected a process of jurisdictional negotiation as much as a contestation of identity. Drawing upon Alfred Gell's anthropological theory of art, the article suggests that flags draw their power not only from their status as figurative emblems but also from their employment as physical expressions of political agency.

The extraordinary story of the Nahuhulk, a Tlingit/Tsimshian copper artifact of great power, prestige, and value.  This tale narrates the story of the Copper from its forging in a Tlngit village in the 1700s, its acquisition by the chief Wisaiks, and its subsequent dramatic history.

The tlakwa or Copper is a symbol of surplus wealth, cultural nourishment, conspicuous consumption and spiritual power among the Kwakiutl, the Tsimshian, the Tlingit, the Haida, and other indigenous peoples of coastal British Columbia. Names of high ranking people often contained references to copper, such as “Born to be Copper Maker Woman” and “Copper Maker.” Copper was also used as a decorative motif on garments, staffs, and crest carvings, where it represented wealth. The Copper was made of a large flat sheet of beaten metal cut in the shape of a flared shield, with a T shaped ridge beaten onto the lower portion. The shape perhaps reflects the trunk proportions of the human body, or possibly a filleted salmon. The Tsimshian thought it represented the backbone of an ancestor. The size varied in height from six inches to three feet.

This chapter describes evidence of past Secwépemc plant use derived from archaeological investigations conducted in south-central British Columbia (Canada) by Nicholas and colleagues on the Kamloops Indian Reserve between 1991 and 2004. The sites tested represent open-air locations not directly associated with pithouse villages or roasting pit areas, and thus provide new information on past Secwépemc land use derived from limited testing at many sites and from extensive excavation of two terrace sites, EeRb 144 and EeRb 140, and one floodplain site, EeRb 77. Here we summarize the archaeological investigations conducted at these and other sites in the project area, and also discuss various archaeobotanical data recovered. The latter includes a summary of research on the plant remains from EeRb 140 by Michèle Wollstonecroft and Gladys Baptiste (2000; also Chapter 4 of this volume), and the preliminary results of studies on the birch bark recovered at EeRb-144 by Leisl Westfall and at EeRb 140 by Nancy Jules.

There is a deeply held bias in Northwest Coast scholarly literature that suggests pre-contact Indigenous warfare was primarily made up of surprise ‘raids’ and ambushes that lacked strong leadership or organisation. At the time of contact the Coast Tsimshian Nine Allied Tribes were one of the most powerful polities on the northern coast of what is now British Columbia. A thorough investigation into the pre-contact military history of the Nine Tribes using a combination of oral, archaeological and archival sources to explore battlefield maneuvers in sixteen separate battles will show that Nine Tribes’ combat was well organised, had strong leadership, executed complex battlefield maneuvers in coordination with multiple forces, and utilised sophisticated strategies and tactics.

This dissertation concerns making music as a utopian ecological practice, skill, or method of associative communication where participants temporarily move towards idealized relationships between themselves and their environment. Live music making can bring people together in the collective present, creating limited states of unification. We are “taken” by music when utopia is performed and brought to the present. From rehearsal to rehearsal, band to band, year to year, musicking binds entire communities more closely together. I locate strategies for community solidarity like turn-taking, trust-building, gift-exchange, communication, fundraising, partying, education, and conflict resolution as plentiful within musical ensembles in any socially environmentally conscious community.

Based upon 10 months of fieldwork and 40 extended interviews, my theoretical assertions are grounded in immersive ethnographic research on Hornby Island, a 12-square-mile Gulf Island between mainland British Columbia and Vancouver Island, Canada. I describe how roughly 1000 Islanders struggle to achieve environmental resilience in a uniquely biodiverse region where fisheries collapsed, logging declined, and second-generation settler farms were replaced with vacation homes in the 20th century. Today, extreme gentrification complicates housing for the island’s vulnerable populations as more than half of island residents live below the poverty line. With demographics that reflect a median age of 62, young individuals, families, and children are squeezed out of the community, unable to reproduce Hornby’s alternative society.

This dissertation begins with theorization that connects music making to community and environmental thought. I then represent the challenges Islanders set for themselves and the struggles they face, like their desire for food sovereignty, off-grid energy, secure housing, protection of their aquifers, affordability of ferry transportation, ecological waste-cycles, and care for each other’s mental health. I bring attention to unique institutions that Islanders have created to better manage their needs and desires. In response to the island’s social and environmental dynamics of justice, I argue and demonstrate through ethnography that music making is an essential communal process that brings people together to dialogue about their needs and advance their goals to establish a more equitable and environmentally responsible community.

En este apartado, el autor ha compilado cuatro publicaciones lanzadas por la revista de cultura y ciencia D&M en España en el año 2018. Estas entregas corresponden con la historia del noroeste canadiense, sobre todo la provincia de la Columbia Británica. La narrativa es histórica, con soporte bibliográfico y explica el desarrollo humano en esta región en una época en donde la tierra carecía de ley y la naturaleza era a todas sus anchas el amo y señor sobre la voluntad de los hombres. En ese espectro surge la civilización en este último recóndito del mapa americano frío y salvaje. Así, muchas de las actuales urbes canadienses tuvieron un origen poco común, en un medio movido por una economía en donde las pieles eran como el oro, en una tierra que aún carecía de frontera.

This dissertation investigates the ideology of Pacific Spirit Regional Park, an urban forest adjacent to the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada. Using the tools of archaeology and anthropology, I analyse the history, landscape, performance, and discourse of the park to understand Pacific Spirit as a culturally-constructed place that embodies an ideology of imperialism. Central in this dynamic is the carefully crafted illusion of Pacific Spirit as a site of “nature,” placed in opposition to “culture,” which naturalizes the values that created and are communicated through the park and thereby neutralizes their politics. They remain, however, very political. The park as nature erases the history and heritage of the Indigenous peoples of this region, transforming Pacific Spirit into a new terra nullius—a site to be discovered and explored, militaristic themes that consistently underlie park programs and propaganda. These cultural tropes connect to produce a nationalistic settler narrative wherein class ideals of nature and community are evoked in the celebration of Canada’s history of colonialism and capitalist expansion—paradoxically, the very processes that have caused the fragmentation of communities and ecosystems. The park as nature also feeds into the portrayal of this space as having been saved from development and, as such, an environmental triumph. In this context, the park is viewed as escape from the psychological trauma and alienation of city living and is celebrated and revered as a sacred place. This portrayal enables the forgetting of injustice and promotes a collective amnesia through the creation of a fairy-tale version of reality. The result is to disperse emotion and energy that otherwise could be mobilized against capitalism to prevent ongoing global ecological devastation. The ideology of the Pacific Spirit as nature therefore constitutes social violence by rewriting both the past and present of this land and its peoples, thereby hindering recognition of and rebellion against power. Pacific Spirit is thus a hegemonic space that reproduces colonial relationships and naturalizes capitalism. Exposing the park as a cultural place and illuminating the ideology that it perpetuates may be a crucial first step towards disrupting power through the creation of counter-narratives.

This paper explores the historiography of Hawaiian mobility in the 19th century, with reference to mobilities that took place through Kānaka Maoli engagements as servants for the Hudson’s Bay Company of London. In recharting Hawaiian mobilities to the Pacific Northwest, it considers how Kānaka Maoli histories were intertwined with trans-Pacific networks of commerce and a broader Pacific world of aspirational mobility, extractive marine-based industries, and ultimately, a land-based fur trade centered initially at Fort Astoria. It discusses how Hawaiian engagements with the HBC in the Pacific Northwest were formative for their eventual incorporation into the colonial settler world of British Columbia, and examines their displacement from Oregon Territory in the wake of the 1846 boundary settlement. It incorporates themes of intimacy, encounter and hierarchy as key sites for locating Hawaiian social histories along the Northwest Coast. Finally, the Hawaiian presence in British Columbia is traced with attention to community formation and land acquisition. Whether or not they fit within a broader category of pioneer-settlers, the “Kanakas” displaced to the Northwest Coast were for a time first positioned along what historian Adele Perry has termed the “ragged margins” of empire.

invisible. About female Collectors and "colonial context"
A survey of ethnographic collections with a “colonial context” shows almost exclusively male collectors' names including a few indigenous collectors. But were women really not involved in contemporary collecting? Using the example of a few selected Indigenous and German female collectors who collected in North and South America in the 19th century, However, mentioning them by name did not seem significant, or that they were simply forgotten. The women mainly collected through their husbands' professional positions, and they had exclusively male clients. But they developed their own criteria and methods of collecting, taking into account ethical reservations and, if necessary, enforced them against husbands and male clients. Even if names of female collectors are rare in the inventories, a higher number of unreported cases can be assumed. Provenance research must therefore also develop an awareness of the need to identify women as collectors and their role in collecting.
With the examples of: Elisabeth von Wrangel (Alaska), Estefánia de Broner (Mexico), Odile Morison (Canada), Cäcilie Sachs (Mexiko),  and Elly von Kuhlmann (Guatemala).

The Columbia River today offers few sites for study of its use by fur traders. For about five decades at the beginning of the nineteenth century, Boat Encampment, at the first big bend of the Columbia, was a key trans-shipment point on the transcontinental route. Submerged today behind one of the river's many hydro dams, it still constellates a host of archival and published sources and modern reflections about it.

This paper is one aspect of a larger research project on crime and legal culture in the Peace River country of British Columbia from 1910 to 1960.  A primary concern of this project is to capture the region's crime history, legal culture and their influence on community identity.  Centered on the two decades from 1930 to 1950 this article draws specific attention to the transitional years during which the region moved from being an outpost of non-native settlement to one very much connected to the emergent streams of North American popular culture and society. It was a process revealing that the image of the Peace as being relatively crime free was neither accurate for that early settlement era and further, that the upset of the Second World War and the construction of the Alaska Highway put to rest and pretense that the region was "crime-free".

The erection of dams for the production of hydroelectricity for the Pacific Northwest and for irrigation projects in the United States and Canada drowned many an indigenous site of food harvesting and social assembly. Sites made famous by the transcontinental fur-trade route of the late eighteenth century and the first half of the nineteenth also met the same fate. This paper aims to bring Boat Encampment back to the surface of historical understanding. It served as the rendezvous point on the upper  Columbia River for eastbound and westbound fur-trade brigades

British Columbia’s Okanagan Valley was neither unique nor isolated in Canadian history, as is sometimes presented in historiography of the region. Two transcontinental railways, the Canadian Pacific Railway (CPR) and Canadian National Railway (CNR), connected Okanagan fruit growers to markets in provinces east of British Columbia. During the Great Depression there was a nation-wide investigation into the debt of the railways (the Duff Commission), which spawned a local investigation in the Okanagan (the Cooperative Committee). In both of these investigations railway executives looked at ways to maximize their profits through forms of cooperation. Railway executives sought measures to cooperate while maintaining the appearance of competing, in order to limit potential negative reactions from the public. While concerns over public reaction discouraged the most extreme form of cooperation, i.e. amalgamation, these concerns did not prevent railway companies from pursuing extensive means to cooperate in the Okanagan.

The hIstorical debate aver Aboriginal resource use has occurred primarily wIthin a judicial system where Native people are compelled to try and define their Aboriginal rights against government policies whIch all too often reflected agendas set by vested economIc commercial interests. In the recent Van der Peel v, Regina case (August 1996) the courts determined that a Sto:lo woman, Dorothy Van der Peet, had not demonstrated that in selling salmon she was exercising an Aboriginal right. This paper argues that such a decision says more about the inadequacies of the courts as a theatre for recreating Aboriginal history than it does about the actual events in the Sto:lo people's past.  By applying linguistic analysis within an ethnohistorical model of social/spatial distance the author hopes to rekindle debate outside the court system over the antiquity of Aboriginal market economies.

Abstract: In   this   article   I   revisit   and   expand   upon   George   Smith’s   (1990)   landmark  article,  “Political  Activist  as  Ethnographer.”  Political  activist  ethnography   (PAE)   is   a   specialized   form   of   institutional   ethnography   (IE)   that   has   not   received  nearly  enough  attention  in  the  twenty  years  since  the  original  publication   of  Smith’s  article.  In  an  effort  to  revisit  and  bolster  this  research  approach,  I  provide  an  overview  of  IE/PAE,  critically  engage  with  three  recent  commentaries  on   PAE,  and  offer  a  new  interpretation  of  this  approach  as  well  as  an  example  of  its   application  from  my  ongoing  research  on  fair  trade.

Die Sammlungsbestände des Ethnologischen Museums bilden in mehrfacher Hinsicht einen Spiegel interkultureller Phänomene des Zusammenwachsens unserer Welt. Dem Aspekt des Wechsels der Erzählperspektive und der Vielfalt der Stimmen kommt in der wissenschaftlichen Arbeit und Ausstellungspraxis des Museums daher eine zentrale Rolle zu. Zur Erforschung komplexer »Geschichten« eignen sich in ganz besonderem Maße die umfangreichen Sammlungen von der Nordwestküste Amerikas, da sie bereits im letzten Drittel des 19. Jahrhunderts in größerem Umfang nach Berlin gebracht wurden, um hier einen Überblick über die angeblich "vom Auslöschen bedrohten Völker" zu bezeugen. Diese Sammlungen bieten darüber hinaus Voraussetzungen für die kooperative Entwicklung neuer Präsentationsformen mit Künstlern, Künstlerinitiativen sowie den so genannten source communities dieser Region, da auf aktive lokale Netzwerke zurückgegriffen werden kann. Sie stehen im Zentrum des Forschungsprojekts »Eine Geschichte – Zwei Perspektiven«, das im Rahmen der Erarbeitung eines Gesamtkonzepts des Ethnologischen Museums zur Präsentation seiner Sammlungen im Humboldt-Forum angeregt und von 2009 bis 2012 gemeinsam mit dem John-F.Kennedy-Institut für Nordamerikastudien der Freien Universität Berlin durchgeführt wurde.

Introduced as a federal-provincial cost-sharing program in the 1960s, Canadian Medicare arose in the context of competing provincial models implemented by Saskatchewan, Alberta, and British Columbia. This article examines Bennettcare in British Columbia which, unlike the Saskatchewan and Alberta models, has never been analysed historically. Named after Premier W. A. C. Bennett, Bennettcare initially attempted to balance public support for a government-sponsored health insurance program with the free enterprise ideology
espoused by the followers of Social Credit, the insurance industry, and the British Columbia Medical Association. However, in order to receive cost-sharing dollars from the federal government, Bennett was eventually compelled to change the design features in order to comply with the federal government’s requirements of universality and public administration, morphing Bennettcare into Saskatchewan-style Medicare.

Above the entrance to the Finnish Labour Temple, in what was once Port Arthur in northern Ontario, is the motto labor omnia vincit – “hard work conquers all.” Since 1910, these words have reflected the dedication of the Finnish community in Canada.

Hard Work Conquers All is a social history of Finnish immigration and community building in Canada during the twentieth century. The first Finns to arrive ranged from conservative churchgoers to radical socialists, reflecting the ideologies that divided their homeland. After the First World War, left-wing Finns fled persecution; following the Second World War, Finns sought the economic security that Canada offered. Each new wave of immigration imbued the relationship between people, homeland, and host country with the politics, ideologies, and cultural expressions of its time.

The story of Finns in Canada dovetails with the larger literature on immigration and enriches the history of socialism and ethnic repression in this country. The insightful essays in Hard Work Conquers All explore the nuanced cultural identities of Finnish Canadians, their continued ties to Finland, intergenerational cultural transfer, and the community’s connections with socialism and labour movements. This is a fresh interpretation of the successive waves of Finnish immigration and their influence on Canadian politics and society.

Hard Work Conquers All will appeal to scholars and students of the history of immigration to Canada and of Finnish history, and, within that context, particularly to those interested in the history of workers, youth, and women, military history, and sport history. Anyone wanting to understand the Finnish experience in Canada will find this study illuminating.

Gives an overview of the scholarly debates that took place in Canada on issues concerning the strategies of development to be pursued by the Native Indian Self-governments for the development of Native Canadian Indians.  Published in Indian Journal of Canadian Studies, Vol. XIV, 2011, pp. 781-790

Seaweeds of Vancouver Island are abundant and have long been tended, fertilized and harvested by First Nations. As an ecosystem, kelp forests are considered one of the most productive ecosystems on the planet. They offer high species diversity and structural complexity, influencing local oceanography and offering numerous supportive ecosystem services. Despite their abundance within British Columbia, current statistics show macroalgal species to be one of the province‘s most underutilized marine products. Marine plant licences were among the fewest aquaculture licences—nine in total—granted by the BC Government in 2010. (A close second was licensing for shellfish hatcheries.) Research on carbon-catching microalgae was chosen in2011 as one of four Canadian flagship projects—each worth $1 billion (Munro 2011). Interest in algae—both micro and macro—is clearly on the rise.

This paper will explore the propagation and harvest of Vancouver Island species in a growing seaweed industry. Value-focused thinking will be directed particularly toward biofuel applications of macroalgal species.

During the Second World War Howard Charles Green (Progressive Conservative MP for Vancouver-South) advocated the evacuation, as well as subsequent repatriation of Japanese Canadians and continued to support restrictionist immigration policies well after the war’s completion. In 2007 the Canadian Federal Government named a new tower at 401 Burrard St. in Vancouver for Green, only to rename it following public opposition alleging Green’s “relentless hatred” of Japanese Canadians. This article challenges this characterisation by demonstrating that Green’s peacetime antipathy to Japanese Canadians was soon eclipsed by security concerns. Although these concerns continued after Japan’s defeat, Green’s beliefs did moderate. Labelling Green a racist fails to capture this complexity and change.

I wish to formally acknowledge that the city of Vancouver is on the unceded traditional territory of the Coast Salish speaking peoples and thank them for the guardianship of this place. Beginning in the 1960s Vancouver's hyper active media art scene was a hotbed of experimentation, collaboration, technical play and radical engagement, with a proliferation of organizations engaged with media art. Rather than proposing a holistic understanding of the forces that shaped and articulated the Vancouver media scene of the 1960s through the early 1990s I have chosen antecedents to personal points of engagement and some eleven moments of disruption with which I am familiar. These include radicalizations, institutional partnerships, autonomous/semi-autonomous artists' formations; campaigns for mass media inclusion; feminist media impulses; Lotus-Land sociality; leadership inside and outside the academy; internationalism and race consciousness; indigenous self-government; interdisciplinarity; anti-censorship activism. I will attempt to summon the flavors of the times through text and image.

"Into that Country to Work" builds on research conducted during my MA thesis at UNBC. Barkerville lies within Dakelh territory, yet little scholarly research exists on First Nations people living there during the famous Cariboo Gold Rush that turned the region in British Columbia's economic center. My work in the Barkerville archives demonstrates that a Dakelh population lived at nearby Bowron Lake, and was severely affected by smallpox epidemics in the mid-nineteenth century. After the rush began, this original Dakelh population was largely replaced by First Nations migrants from all over British Columbia. Indigenous British Columbians came to Barkerville to pick berries, pack miners' goods, fish, hunt, trade furs, and mine for gold among many other occupations indicating opportunistic involvement in the gold rush economy.