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Introduction

One aspect of British Columbia history which has not been examined in much detail is the alienation of aboriginal lands and resources during the colonial period, from 1849, when the Colony of Vancouver Island was established, to 1871 when British Columbia entered the Canadian confederation. The official policy of the imperial and colonial governments regarding aboriginal lands is fairly wellknown, but how this policy was enacted on the ground, particularly in the face of aboriginal opposition, is less familiar.

The Hudson’s Bay Company, in its role as the proprietor of Great Britain’s only colony on the western shores of North America, negotiated fourteen land sale agreements with First Nations on Vancouver Island between 1850 and 1854. These agreements guaranteed to aboriginal people the undisturbed use of their lands and resources in exchange for allowing white settlement within their territories. The ceded lands of 1850–1854 constituted the various districts of the Colony of Vancouver Island, but as the colony sought to expand into adjacent territories of Hul’qumi’num First Nations on the east coast of Vancouver Island and the Gulf Islands there was less willingness by Hwulmuhw (“people of the land”) to negotiate the sale of their lands and resources to the Hwunitum, a Hul’qumi’num word for people of European ancestry, which translates literally as “the people who came out of nowhere.”

Frustrated by this opposition, the colonial government embarked on a policy of illegal surveys and land sales in the Cowichan Valley and an illegal pre-emption system directed at Salt Spring Island and the Chemainus Valley in 1859. This policy provoked militant opposition by young warriors from the villages of Quamichan on the Cowichan River, and Lamalcha and Penelakut on Kuper Island. This book will demonstrate how the first “treaty process” in what is now British Columbia collapsed, not for lack of funds as is often supposed, but through the use of armed force to end Hwulmuhw opposition to the occupation of their lands by Hwunitum.

The Terror of the Coast consists of two parts. The first four chapters describe the arrival of Hwunitum and the erosion of Hwulmuhw sovereignty and jurisdiction after contact. The remainder of the book details the colonial war of 1863 against the Lamalcha and Penelakut warriors of Kuper Island and the subsequent trials and public executions of Hwulmuhw participants.

The Hwunitum point of view has dominated the historic record of the colonial period and this book is a revision of that record based on primary sources intended to place the events leading up to 1863 in their proper context. The period covered by this book is reconstructed using the oral history of Hwulmuhw elders and the Hwunitum written record as preserved in government and police correspondence, the editorials, letters, and articles from four colonial newspapers, and the ship’s logs and “Letters of Proceedings” written by Royal Navy officers. The details of the period from 1849 to 1858 are based largely on government correspondence, particularly that of Governor James Douglas, and Hwulmuhw oral history. From 1858 onward the story is augmented by the colonial print media in Victoria and New Westminster. The questions of land alienation and the war of 1863 were covered by pioneer journalists such as Amor De Cosmos, D.W. Higgins, John Robson and others, who published first and second-hand accounts by Hwunitum and Hwulmuhw informants as well as their own commentary. The voice of the colonial press contains important details often missing from official correspondence, not the least of which was the wide-spread support by Hwunitum for the equitable settlement of Hwulmuhw land claims.

In a similar manner, valuable information is preserved in the writing of various Anglican and Roman Catholic clergy who recorded Hwulmuhw points of view even as they worked to undermine the culture.

Despite the preponderance of Hwunitum primary sources, the bias they contain can sometimes be transcended by the use of what one historian has termed, “embalmed evidence.” Contemporaneous Hwulmuhw perspectives were often recorded in newspapers and official correspondence, even if they were ignored as the dominant interpretation took hold. For example, letters to the editors of colonial newspapers, such as those written during the conflict by William Smithe, a settler in the unceded lands of the Cowichan Valley and future premier of British Columbia, preserve with remarkable clarity Hwulmuhw points of view.

Literature recording Hwulmuhw archaeology, ethnography and the oral history of Hul’qumi’num First Nations can also be drawn upon to augment and balance the Hwunitum record. Valuable in this regard are a series of interviews with Hwulmuhw elders by Beryl Cryer in the 1930s. Cryer’s interviews preserve Hwulmuhw accounts of events leading up to the war and crucial perspectives relating to the conflict itself.

Most important is the oral history preserved among Hul’qumi’num First Nations today.

As much as possible, the primary sources are woven verbatim into the text to document the events of long ago from the perspectives of the participants and to avoid paraphrasing, which all too often clouds what really happened by omitting important details. This approach might be seen as empiricist but it is justifiable in order to establish a chronology of events often overlooked.

The war against the Kuper Island warriors was small compared to those raging elsewhere in North America. While Napoleon III laid waste to Central Mexico, the American Civil War was entering its third year of bloodshed, dominating the Victoria and New Westminster newspapers with descriptions of battlefields piled high with unburied dead. But this short-lived, almost forgotten war, waged by the British colony of Vancouver’s Island against the Lamalcha of Kuper Island, was significant in the history of British Columbia. The war marked the first time that military force was used to eliminate Hwulmuhw opposition to Hwunitum settlement. The defeat of the Lamalcha and Penelakut warriors removed the most strident opposition to Hwunitum expansion and paved the way, without mutual agreement, for the alienation of Hwulmuhw land on eastern Vancouver Island and the Gulf Islands. The assistance of Hwulmuhw allies in bringing the war against the Lamalcha to an early conclusion was quickly forgotten and their lands alienated without agreement.

Although well documented in newspapers, government, police and naval correspondence, the colonial war of 1863 and its impact on British Columbia history has been all but ignored by Hwunitum historians who, if they recognize it at all, relegate the incident to that of a “police action” to apprehend “murderers”— a peripheral event outside the public mainstream of colonial history. The manufactured evidence, used in 1863 to incriminate the Lamalcha and to justify the military, or “police,” action against them, is perpetuated. To cover up a bungled military operation (the attack on Lamalcha by HMG Forward) and to pave the way for Hwunitum settlement, the Lamalcha people were vilified as “murderers” and “outlaws.” For over a century, one of the Lamalcha leaders, Acheewun, was characterized in popular histories as “a bloodthirsty villain,” while the efforts of the colonial police and Royal Navy to maintain “law and order” in these matters were championed. Issues surrounding the erosion of Hwulmuhw sovereignty and jurisdiction in the face of ongoing Hwunitum migration are seldom addressed—relegated to a “shadow history.” It is this “shadow history” of the received version, the story of Hwulmuhw resistance, which this book seeks to reveal.

There are other reasons why this story did not make its mark in the history of British Columbia. Although the Royal Navy, one of the most powerful military organizations in the world, figured prominently in the conflict, it produced no glorious victories or naval heroes. In the one pitched battle that did occur, naval forces were defeated by lesser armed opponents and there was little desire to publicize this fact, when elsewhere in the world Britain’s imperial war machine was trampling aboriginal armies. Aristocratic naval officers hoping to carve distinguished careers for themselves in the Pacific Northwest saw little glory or pride in hunting down small bands of fugitives and then flogging them to extract confessions.

Similarly, the war and the trials that followed were not a proud legacy for the aging colonial regime of Governor James Douglas, which was in its final year. The trials and executions of three teenagers and four men in the spring and summer of 1863 were controversial and condemned by many Hwunitum as a “gross injustice.” The active influence of the colonial executive, manifest in the person of James Douglas, over a supposed independent judiciary (the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, David Cameron, was his brother-in-law) insured that there would be no due process of law against Hwulmuhw defendants, particularly those who actively opposed Hwunitum occupation of their lands. Douglas, in his official correspondence with the Colonial Office in London, suppressed information and downplayed Hwulmuhw opposition to colonization. Shortly after the conflict with the Lamalcha warriors broke out, Douglas was informed that he was being eased into retirement by the Colonial Office. Within months he was gone from the political scene, and the events of the final year of his long career as “the father of British Columbia” were forgotten by “mainstream” British Columbians.

Finally, there remains the colonial myth that, contrary to what happened south of the 49th parallel, the British resettlement of British Columbia was benign, bloodless and law-abiding. For their part, the Lamalcha warriors faced the most powerful weaponry ever used against North American indigenous people. Naval warships such as the 185 foot HMS Cameleon with its seventeen breech-loading, rifled cannon, firing thirty-two to forty pound shells of exploding shrapnel, were the nineteenth century equivalent of modern-day naval destroyers and capable of causing mass destruction within seconds. Granted, the “Indian Wars” of British Columbia came nowhere near the wholesale slaughter of aboriginal people that too often characterized the inter-racial conflict in the western United States, but as one historian has observed, “human conflict does not decline in complexity as it does in scale.” Our history books do not record the words of a Hwunitum newspaperman who wrote, at the end of the trial which sent four Lamalcha and Penelakut warriors to the gallows: “We have disgraced our humanity, our religion, our law, and our free constitution by staining our hands with innocent blood.” The trials of 1863, detailed in the pages of this book, will demonstrate how those who could not be killed by the armed forces of the colony were prosecuted and killed by its judiciary.

Hul’qumi’num First Nations have always known that the colonial government made solemn promises to negotiate treaties with them and that these promises were broken. They have not forgotten the time when the Royal Navy bombarded their villages, took hostages and prisoners, tortured and hanged them—and the reason why. As Emily Rice recalls:

Mom was saying they attacked Kuper. Took the ladies away. Killed the men and the kids. They were just trying to get rid of the Indians so they could take their land.

Details are few—eradicated by generations of exposure to the residential school system which separated many young people from their elders and the natural flow of oral history. The colonial war of 1863 was also a “civil war” that pitted family against family, and people can be reluctant to talk about such conflicts for fear of renewing old feuds. “It’s best not to talk about it,” an elder said. “It brings back bad feelings.” Others recall with pride how a lone rifleman “held off the gunboat” at Lamalcha when the Forward attacked the village.

Land claims by First Nations have been an ongoing issue in British Columbia since colonial times but their origins and issues are not well understood by the majority of people in the province. On Salt Spring Island, the largest of the Gulf Islands, there is a belief persistent among the Hwunitum population that the island was only used occasionally by Hul’qumi’num First Nations, as if such limited use diminished their ownership. This myth, invented by the first Hwunitum settlers to justify their own claims to the land, reflected a Hwunitum point of view that hunter-gatherer societies represented an idle, wandering way of life when in fact the exploitation of seasonal resources owned by specific families were essential parts of the Hwulmuhw economy. Permanent settlements fluctuated over time, but there were few parts of Salt Spring Island that were not owned by a Hwulmuhw family, be they from Saanich, Cowichan, Halalt, Lamalcha, Penelakut or Lyacksen. As Roy Edwards explains:

Salt Spring Island was used by many different peoples because it was so full of food there. Ducks, black ducks, plants, oysters, clams. It was quite rich. It had all the food that the Indians wanted.

The land and the resources it provided were extremely valuable, and it was its loss that impoverished the people of the land.