Innholdsfortegnelse for 56.3 Fall 2023 i British Columbia History

Canada’s West Coast between Cape Beale and Port Renfrew is littered with the remains of over 50 shipwrecks. This story describes the construction of the Dominion Lifesaving Trail in 1907 and its transition to the famous West Coast Trail, in Canada’s Pacific Rim National Park Reserve. I have hiked the trail twice. My first time was a wild adventure with a high school friend. Thirty years later, I returned with my wife and two teenaged sons. The Dominion Lifesaving Trail During the 1880s and 1890s, steamships transported lumber and logs from Bamfield north to Alaska and carried passengers between American and Canadian ports.1 An international telegraph system was built in 1889. The early lighthouses used Morse code to contact ships. In the 1890s and early 1900s, there were over 20…

“I can see what we call the SŁEQȺ, the sacred grasses that grow here…Maybe we will grow together. Maybe we will grow because water brings growth to us and gives us all a good life force. J,SINTEN / Dr. John Elliott, WJOȽEȽP / Tsartlip Elder at the project launch on the site of the future wetland garden. ŚTENIST ȻENTOL EȻSIÁ TĆÁNȻE (shtung,eest cwun-tall ucw-see-ya T-chaneCwu) / Walking Forward With The Past is creating a new wetland ethnobotanical garden and art exhibit celebrating WSÁNEĆ knowledge and culture on SKŦAK / Mayne Island. This project is a collaboration between the Campbell Bay Music Festival Society and WSÁNEĆ partners including Elders, artists, the PEPÁKEN HÁUTW Foundation, and WSÁNEĆ Curator Rose Spahan. Island partners include the Mayne Island Agricultural Society and Mayne Island Conservancy.…

Research into the nineteenth-century history of the BC Interior has always been limited by the lack of source material, as the only available documents are primarily fur trader reports, journals, and diaries. By happenstance, 237 pages of letters written by Italian-born Jesuit priest Father Giovanni Nobili from 1845 to 1847 arrived by email from a friend and author in Williams Lake. These documents, which have yet to be read by most historians in the province, had been in the Vatican vaults until the Tŝilhquot’in Nation was able to acquire them several years ago for the Xeni Gwet’in land claims court case. Their legal team, Woodward and Company, translated the letters from Italian into English. Missions to the Interior Father Nobili (1812–1856) was the second Jesuit missionary to arrive in the…

1 A Dream Marches On Happy 90th anniversary to City of Vancouver Archives. Its collection captures the city’s story through 7.2 million photographs, 6,800 maps, 2,800 audio recordings, documents measured in kilometres and terabytes of digital material. How did it begin? Major James Skitt Matthews, born in Newtown, Wales, and raised in New Zealand, was appointed the first city archivist in 1933 and brought along his vast personal collection. Matthews had landed in Vancouver as a 20-year-old, in 1898, where he worked for Imperial Oil and, later, operated a tugboat business. Twice wounded during the Great War, he achieved the rank of major, and never gave it up. Matthews interviewed hundreds of people, including Squamish Chief August Jack Khatsahlano. Fiercely defensive about the collection, Matthews often sparred with mayors and bureaucrats—at…

RESEARCHER-IN-RESIDENCE Terry has accepted BC History’s invitation to sit as Researcher-in-Residence throughout 2023 as he continues to learn about the story of his great-grandmother and the personal legacies of colonial and federal policies. This is the third of four parts. Who was she? Who was she to me? Few people in history are considered representative of their culture, yet my great-grandmother Mejade’sse is one such individual. She was born between 1871 and 1873, of Kaska Dena-Tahltan-Tlingit ancestry and lived until 1963. Her belongings are held today by the Canadian Museum of History and multiple other museums and private collections used by scholars to glimpse past times and cultural practices in British Columbia’s north. She was more than her belongings, and my work seeks to piece together the documentary evidence of…

The Central Selkirk herd of southern mountain woodland caribou (Rangifer tarandus caribou) is the last herd south of Highway 1, and it is the southernmost herd remaining in Canada. The herd has seen a decrease of 87 percent since the 1990s, from over 200 animals down to 28 animals remaining in 2021. Woodland caribou are a species at risk under federal legislation. Due to a complicated myriad of factors including predation, habitat changes and fragmentation, climate change, and backcountry recreation activities, caribou populations have struggled throughout BC and particularly in southern BC. In 2009, a Government Action Regulation order created approximately 320,000 hectares of protected range for caribou, which was 95 percent of the core winter habitat of the Central Selkirk herd. Fast forward to 2019, when a series of…

Part thriller, part faux-memoir, and part screenplay infused with drawings and historical photos, Chris Bose’s novella N’shayktin is a wild, wonderful, and provocative experience, and we are fortunate to be able to share a hint of its graphics in this issue. N'shaytkin is set in a vibrant landscape, a place that is “barren and bleak in the winter, but in springtime, this place comes back to life. The air is fragrant with sage, and as the trees wake up the smell of pine blows down the mountains, small cactus spring up with orange and yellow flowers. That’s when the land becomes fresh and alive” (52). Bose weaves together multiple perspectives and draws on Indigenous mythology to explore the fictional failure of a mine tailings dam. Giants shake the earth, and…

This article is based on a chapter in On the Trail, an upcoming publication on the history of the Langley Feld Naturalists. From about age four to his death at 75, in 2013, Glenn Ryder explored nature as often as he could, amassing an estimated 1.4 million field notes of plants and animals from excursions throughout BC and into the Yukon. Glenn’s informative notes, often supplemented with detailed sketches, resulted from his patience in watching animals and thoroughly examining the environment in which they were observed. In addition to information on the occurrence and distribution of species, Glenn’s detailed notes provide insight into the lives of animals from observations of environmental minutiae, nests and dens, animal behaviour including competition between and within species, and threats from humans. This set him…