Nuanced. - 50. Dr. Keith Carlson: Stó:lō History, Christianity & Canada

Episode Date: April 4, 2022

Keith Thor Carlson is a father, husband, professor of History at the University of the Fraser Valley, Tier One Canada Research Chair in Indigenous and Community-Engaged History, and ethnohistorian. Professor Carlson’s scholarship is designed and conducted in partnership with communities and aspires to answer questions that are of relevance to those communities. His interests include: Indigenous history, Indigenous historical consciousness, and the history of settler colonialism — especially in western Canada and north western USA. The approach he takes is to invert the classic scholarly gaze and to forefront the perspective of Indigenous partners. “So what intrigues me most is not the history of Indigenous people in Canadian or American history, but the history of Canadian and American society within Indigenous histories,” offers Carlson. His focus is on the history of the Coast Salish of British Columbia and Washington and has worked extensively with Hukbalahap veterans in the Philippines.Visit his website: https://www.keiththorcarlson.com/Grab his book: A Stó:lõ Coast Salish Historical AtlasListen on YouTube:https://youtu.be/0WrsxLQsCkASend us a textSupport the shownuancedmedia.ca

This episode is sponsored by the Real Estate Foundation of BC. REFBC is a philanthropic organization that supports sustainable, equitable, and socially just relationships with land and water. Learn more about the foundation's grants and initiatives at REFBC.com. My name's Keith Carlson, and I'm a Canada Research Chair at the University of the Fraser Valley. Prior to that, I was 18 years as a faculty member at the University of Saskatchewan, and part of that I was 10 years as the historian and research coordinator at the Stala Tribal Council. Okay, amazing. I would really like to talk to you, to give you a bit of a background on myself. My mother was a part of the 60 scoop, and so she was raised in White Rock by my non-biological grandmother, Dorothy Kennett.

She is my role model, part of the reason I started this. but one of the challenges I think my mum faces and that I face now is that I understand perhaps Christian belief systems, Catholic belief systems deeper than I understand indigenous belief systems, and I've had the opportunity to sit down with Eddie Gardner, Sonny McKelsey, and I'm trying to perhaps bring the two together, trying to understand them. And I think that it's such a pleasure to sit down with you because you have a background with the Catholic Church. And I think you understand that world. And you've had the opportunity to work for years with Sunny McKelsey. And I think that it would be really interesting to get your perspective on what that relationship has been like for you. What have you seen? What have you experienced?

How did you get started, perhaps, with your faith? Yeah. Good questions. So when I was a kid So my mother is Roman Catholic And my dad was United Church of Canada And so when they got married My dad had to promise to raise us as Catholics

And And so as a little kid I was baptized Catholic And then I went to church with my mom on Sundays Kind of thing I remember as a little kid doing that Then my mom had a falling out with the priest not so much the faith. She still had a rosary, you know, that she'd carry with her.

She still, you know, was very Catholic. But the priest had told her at some point they disagreed about, I think, birth control, but also the fact that my grandmother, my mom's mother, had converted to Protestantism when she married my grandfather, right? And so this was a sin, and the priest told my mom that she wouldn't, my grandmother, go to heaven or something horrible like that. So my mom just sort of wrote that priest off and became sort of a home Catholic. And so as a kid, though, my mom's, my dad's mom, my dad's sister, would pick me up and take me to Sunday school, Protestant Sunday school on Sundays.

And then the kids down the street, there's a family, a big family, 12 kids. It was kind of a poor working class neighborhood. And that family struggled a bit. their dad was an alcoholic and you know um and anyway they went to the salvation army so i thought oh that's cool so i would the bus would come by to pick them up a little mini bus on the on the sunday and i'd jump in with them and go to sunday school the salvation army so and then when i was 13 or so i um i started having you know questions like what is the world i saw that tv show or movie was called um based on that book um uh the gods something you have the idea that there were

aliens who came down from space and and gave people the knowledge to build the pyramids and things. I can't remember now what it was exactly. And I remember thinking, oh, this is sort of like a strict, you know, crazy idea. And my mom suggested that I, well, why don't you go down and talk to the priests? There were new priests in town by then. She still wasn't going to Mass regularly on Sunday or anything.

And I went down and hung out with these priests for a couple you know, Sunday or Saturday afternoon kind of things at the rectory. And they were just really friendly. And I just asked them all these questions I had about faith and what was the world and how did things work. And, and then

I went back and they suggested I invited me to go to catechism. Lots of pretty Italian girls went to catechism, so that seemed like a good idea when I was 13-14. And so, yeah, I went there and sort of got confirmed and then have been sort of off and on practicing Roman Catholic ever since, I guess, yeah. Right. And so did you struggle at all? Like, you've chosen the academic route. And I think that that's something that right now we're in this really interesting time where I feel like people are struggling with the idea of religion, with the idea of going to church, the idea of organized belief systems, yet personally I feel like there's like a back door and reconciliation is sort of becoming the back door. If people are serious about the topic, there are overlaps between indigenous belief systems.

and other belief systems, whether that's the flood story, whether there's the idea of grace and we have salmon ceremonies, there's these kind of overlaps that exist between them. So despite the fact that I've seen people wanting to burn down churches or kind of say, well, this is kind of the nail in the coffin for religion, they seem to have left a door open from my perspective. And I think it leaves the space open for us to try and figure out what can we learn from these ideas. What are the underpinnings that we can get out of it. And one of the ones that Sunny had raised that you had brought to his attention was this idea of communion, of taking in the body and blood of Christ, whereas we have a fire and we give

food to it. Would you mind elaborating or sharing perhaps your perspectives on these ideas? Yeah, okay. Yeah, so, I mean, My sense of the value of religion, spirituality, and faith is sort of twofold. One is it's a way to constantly remind us that we're not ourselves as human beings, like the center of the universe, that there's something big, mystical out there, complicated. Science is one way to get at that. I'm a firm believer in science.

I'm all vaccinated, you know, that kind of thing. but there are questions that science hasn't answered maybe isn't trying to answer because it's not the right questions right bigger truce right in some ways why are sunsets beautiful there's no evolutionary reason for a sunset to be perceived as beautiful right there's something about that idea of beauty

you can say oh physical attraction between men and women or whatever serves a biological purpose right but you know what's a beautiful sunset What, why is, why do we find that beautiful? Why do we like to stare up at the stars at night? So I don't think there's an old man who's God who sits up in the clouds. And I don't think the Bible is a literal text or anything like that.

You know, and this is just me, my personal faith kind of journey. But, but being spiritual, being religious is a way to, I think, keep me humble in some ways, you know, that de-center that sort of human-focused sort of sense of the world. The world is made for humans. The world is all about me. I'm only alive now. Take what I can get now. You know, that kind of thing.

There are other ways to do that. Some people found other ways to do it. I'm not saying that's the only way. But then for me, too, the other part, and this is probably where I, Sonny and I probably are pretty simpatico, is, you know, I think back, you know, my mom was Catholic. She came back to the Catholic faith after, as a young woman when she was teaching in, my mom taught him what were sort of day schools. They weren't just indigenous day schools, but they were day schools, mostly indigenous children,

but also white kids who lived in the area, so Port Hardy, William Slate, or Port Hardy, White Horse, Grand Prairie, Camloops, and places. And that's when she sort of went back to Catholic and found out that her mom had been Catholic until things had changed. And so I've got ancestors to go back and back and back. or Catholic or who were Christian for centuries. I don't, I think they were smart enough to be getting something out of it. They weren't simply being Catholic because an oppressive political or economic or religious system said, you must be Catholic, you must be Christian, go to church on Sundays, believe these things. There's some of that, I think, going on.

But they found some value in it, I think. And so I'd like to connect, what is it that they found the value in? What is it that provided them comfort during times of stress? What is it about the faith that would give them something to hold on to? Why would they pass it on to their children? Why was it important for them to be part of that community? So, you know, and I think the Catholics, when the first Oblate missionaries arrived here, one of the things that the Stalo people liked about the Catholics,

we could talk about that in some detail. There's a lot of things that were good and bad, you know, in terms of those. early relationships were appealing and unappealing. But one of the things that really appealed to the Stala people here was that the Catholics burned incense. They were burning it for communion of the saints, right? They'd burn the incense and that would rise up. And then the Stalo had their own burning ceremonies where they would burn food and clothing for their ancestors. That's a parallel there.

So that idea was a powerful one that made them see similarities, right? So that for me is important. I feel a strong connection to my mother's father, my grandfather. I never met him. He died in 1944. But I've always felt close to him somehow, even though I've never met him. And, you know, so to me, the faith, the communion of saints, the idea that their ancestors are still guiding us in some way is a belief of mine. And that is, there's some synchronicity there with, with the co-sailistolo beliefs.

I really appreciate that because I agree with you. I had at 1314 sort of said religion, organized religion in this way isn't going to work for me. I was living in poverty with a mother with a disability. And their worldview just did not resonate with me in terms of like, live your life in this way. And it's like, you should hang out with the people that I'm stuck hanging out with in downtown. Like, you don't understand my circumstance. And it was, there was a disconnect there that made me sort of leave. But my grandmother, a non-biological grandmother, passed away about a year ago, just a little over.

And she was a devout Roman Catholic. She had practiced. She wanted her children to. They chose to not practice anymore. My mother has since stopped practicing. And it was my mindset with Starvation. this was like she's left a legacy whether or not somebody wants to pick it up or not whether or not somebody wants to create the space to understand what that was she's left something behind and it would

be easy for me to underestimate her belief system and go there's no guy in the sky there this doesn't align with science those are all easy outs um to get out of kind of grappling with the information within the book like if you're looking at it as a literal interpretation you that's one level of analysis. You can have a biological approach, a psychological approach. There's different ways to look at the information. Literal is just one level. And I think that we miss out on so much if we decide, oh, if it's not literally true, then why do I need to know it? I think it's a misreading. It's the same when I'm talking to Sunny, and he's describing the bad rock and the medicine man and this person being turned to stone for not acting well. Do I need to believe that this person

was actually turned to stone in order to understand that when you stop collaborating with people, when you stop sharing your gifts with the community, when you start thinking only about yourself that you turned a stone in some way, well, nobody wants to work with you anymore. So you are stagnated in a sense and disconnected from the ability to grow over time. And so it was about, yeah, a year ago, maybe a little bit more where I started trying to take the information more seriously and say, okay, what can I, if there is something to learn, what is there to learn. And that has been an interesting journey because, as I said, the idea of giving thanks for your food at grace, saying a prayer is the same as like a salmon ceremony where people are

bringing everyone from the community together, taking a piece of salmon, and distributing that to everybody, and then sending the bones back to the water and saying a prayer there. It's done perhaps differently, but it's the same concept. We have flood stories. And so I think that when we start to look, and I'd be interested in your thoughts on this, do you think we were looking for the differences? Because that's what I feel like I understand is the differences between indigenous belief systems and perhaps Christian belief systems. That's what's been, from my education, grilled into me is that there was this other belief

system that came in and wrecked all our belief systems. And perhaps on some level you can take that, but I feel like we have not been looking for How were we similar? Where was the overlap? Why? What were those initial days? Because it didn't initially start as a bad relationship from at least my understanding. We had trade with Europeans. Things were going moderately well. The reason that we have Métis people today is because there was such a good relationship there that they actually worked together. And so I get nervous when we have this idea that there was one side and another side and we never kind of got along because perhaps it's a misreading or things happen different. differently. So I'm interested in your thoughts on that. Yeah. I really believe that all of all societies are hybrid in some way. And I know a lot of people today are kind of rejecting that idea and some of the disciplines and scholarship saying, well, you're making it sound like I'm a car. I'm a hybrid car. I'm half electric, half petrol. And, you know, and, you know, I'm neither. But that's not, that that is what a hybrid car is maybe, but that's not what hybridity is in terms of its intellectual kind of origins. hybridity says that we are constantly products of our relationships.

Relationships can be open and respectful. Relationships can be oppressive. And, you know, there's a huge range of what relationships are. They're not all healthy, happy relationships. But every time we're in that relationship, we are changed by the relationship. And so if you're a colonial power taking over a place and imposing your rules and your religion and your worldview on it, you're changing those people. but you're also being changed by that process. It may be not the same degree of change, but change is happening.

So Britain is what it is in part because of the colonial contacts that took place. I don't want to say contact. That makes it sound neutral like it's not, it wasn't oppressive. The colonialism took place in India and Britain and, you know, Burma. That shaped Britain as well. They were being shaped by the process and their encounters with that. And I don't mean simply, oh, you can get good. Indian food in downtown London now or something.

It's the people are changed by that. Now, the Indian people in the subcontinent might have been changed more or more visibly for that period of time because of the colonial relationship, but we're all changed. And all of our identities, every human identity is built in a relationship, right? So you can only be a Protestant if there are Catholics. You're protesting something, right? You can only be Canadian if there are non-Canadians, right? You can only be a father if there are children, right?

So each of those identities is built in a relationship. Every single identity that you can name for yourself makes sense in a relationship. And you can project that and say, here's, I'm a Catholic, here's what Catholic means. And then right away, someone else is going to say, well, wait a minute, I'm a Lutheran, and I know what a Catholic is. And what you're saying is a pretty polished, slick, not full, complete sense of what a Catholic is, right? So these relationships are all about pushing and pulling our identities. So if I'm a university professor and I walk into my class and I say, I'm a professor, you can only be a professor if there are students. If there are no students, there's no such thing as a professor.

So the students, though, aren't powerless. Even though I give them grades, I assign the readings, they have to do all these things I tell them to do. If I start to behave in ways that aren't professorial that are improper from their perspective as students, I cease to be a full professor. It starts to eat away at me. So if I show up late for class, if I give, don't give grades back on assignments

or the grades I give back are seem really out of line with what the students' expectations are, if I make comments that are inappropriate in class or wander way off topic in the class, I cease to be the instructor. I see students, I don't get to define that all by myself. The students push back and say, no, no, no, no, you're not a prof. Look at you.

You're whatever, right? And so that, I think, is what's happening early on. The Oblate Catholic priests are coming in. They're the first missionaries to kind of permanently come into this part of the world. They're meeting with Stalo people. They're coming with preconceived ideas, a certain colonial lens that says, here's what I expect indigenous people to be. And in some ways, that lens makes the indigenous. Indigenous people in their eyes, the expectations are met because you see what you want to see to a certain extent.

But you also see things that you didn't expect, and you acknowledge and recognize those changes. And the same is happening on the Stalo side. I mean, there was a highly influential profit from the Teet tribe upriver, just outside of Skowelk at Ruby Creek. And this happened. The fur trade had already started. There were British people down at Fort Langley, but this was still completely stalled. space, the whole lower mainland Fraser Valley, lower canyon. But the prophet up there, scabicle was his name.

He had a vision. He went up on a mountain. He went for a spirit quest, a traditional coast-sailish spirit quest. And instead, he perceived a vision of Catholicism and the coming of European culture broadly. And he was profoundly influential to stalo people. And he projected what was going to happen in the future. of it comes true. I mean, he could go to Fort Langley.

He could see certain things, too. It wasn't like it was out of the blue. But one of the things that he said is that young women should have the right to also select their marriage partners. This isn't necessarily a European thing. This is because arranged marriages were the norm in the coast sales world, and it was a highly stratified society with elites and commoners and even slaves down below. And so this man's vision included the sense that women should.

get to pick who their partners are. Well, some of the elite men didn't like that because arranged marriages were all about securing access to resources and maintaining peaceful relationships between communities and all sorts of really good historic reasons for these diplomatic economic relationships. But he was plugging into something, agency for women, and sort of a sense that the stratification within that society wasn't embraced and accepted by everybody, right? So when the Catholic priests show up, when the settlers show up, you know, the Stollah are seeing things, and they're not simply seeing, oh, let me read your catechism and understand what your religion is. Oh, it's like I believe in the communion of saints, but I don't believe in the assumption and I believe in, you know, whatever it might be, they're watching and seeing the behaviors and the beliefs and saying, is this useful to us? Is this somehow useful? And early on, a lot of Stalo people found it useful. Some didn't, right? because, and they embraced it, but in embracing it, they also changed it.

It made it their own, right? So I think today, when people say indigenous people, you know, you need to decolonize, and that means break free from Christianity, I can completely understand where that motivation, that sense comes from, and I applaud people who do that. I think everybody should find their own path, right, whether they're spiritual or atheist or whatever it might be. But I do have talked to people who say, well, you know, I'm Christian, I'm Catholic, you know, elders in the community, or some younger people. And it's important to me that faith.

And it was, in fact, the faith of my father and my grandmother and my great-grandmother and great-grandfather dating back to the 1860s. So it's not, those aren't just introduced or imposed colonial ideas, right? People work these out. People have agency. They think through it. They find things that are valuable. and they accept or reject things, you know. Yeah, when you talk about how colonization impacts other cultures or the people

kind of perpetrating it, it's interesting that you say that because I interviewed Geetangely Gill, who is a global development studies professor, and she went to the London School of Economics, and she said that there is a deep feeling of like, we are not going to continue what we've done in the approach that we had because it didn't work. Like our mindset on how we were going, like how Europe thought it was. is going to kind of move out its sphere of influence sort of failed, obviously, like, there's remnants of it in other countries, but they were, the London School of Economics mindset is like, let's go listen to them first, try and figure out where they want to take

this, and then support them in what they think wellness is, because we have a definition of poverty, and then we go in and we say, you're in poverty, and they're like, according to who, we've lived like this for maybe 100 years, 200 years, like this is our, we're more concerned about this problem or that problem or whatever it is. And so she's talked about how the culture within Europe now, or at least like England and London, is different than what it used to be. And so I find that really interesting. And then how you kind of talk about how we negotiate these relationships and how you

view the relationships and how it kind of began is so different than I think our understanding is when I think of our understanding of the. term decolonization or how I feel like I've been explaining the relationship between indigenous people and settlers has been very negative. It's been almost all negative. And of course, like there's no disputing Indian residential schools in the 60s scoop, but those initial days seemed like they were somewhat different. And I didn't even know that these relationships were based on, like, having your partner chosen for you. Could you elaborate on that? I, like, why didn't, I've taken several First Nations courses.

I've done my best to stay informed on these topics. How did I not know about that? Is that not something that's commonly like mentioned? You mean about the arranged marriages? Yeah. Yeah. Well, I mean, it's a well-established part of the traditional culture. The ethnography here is that co-sailish people were a class-based society as opposed to a ranked-based society.

which is farther north on the coast. There's a real difference. Could you tell us about that difference? Yeah, sure. I'll tell you, I've tried to do this. And, you know, the elders I spoke to in the early 90s when I first started talking about this were really clear about all this. And so were elders earlier who spoke to anthropologists and others whose voices are recorded in either on recordings or in field notes and things like that. But the Coast Salish had a class-based society.

There were a large elite. It's sort of an inversion of the European. pyramid where you have a tiny elite with a huge peasantry at the bottom, and a smaller middle class, it's sort of, imagine that upside down, you have a large elite, a smaller sort of common era group, and then a smaller slave group. Slave is in actual slave? Yeah, yeah, full-on chattel slavery. These people had no, back in the day, they didn't have the ability to own property, they

didn't have the ability to go on spirit quests. They were, you know, their life could be taken by their owner. They could be sold. And this was pre-colonization? Yeah, pre-colonization. Wow. Yeah. You know, every, Sonny will tell you about this.

He's researched this a lot. Every society has, you know, things that you look back on and you say, yeah, that wasn't, that wasn't right, because, you know, society's changed. Not always necessarily always getting better or something. but they change and you look back, right? That's just a weird thing, though, with like, right now we're having these conversations about colonization and what took place. We don't seem to want to talk about the wars that took place.

I've talked to Robert Jago, who's working on the Co-Saelish Indigenous Project. I think I have that correct. He's from Quatlin. He's interested in looking at the wars that had taken place prior to colonization. And there does not seem to be that we seem to like our indigenous people that were sort of the idea that we were just all together and community and just peacefully sitting, and then all of a sudden we were attacked. Like, that seems like what my understanding has been.

So please continue. I just, it's interesting that these are true. And, like, I agree that, like, all societies have their goods and they're bad. It just feels like I perhaps didn't know about some aspects. Well, and I can understand why it doesn't get talked about a lot because indigenous communities have been hurt a lot by colonization. So, you know, to point out. things in those societies that were perhaps seen, would be deemed negative today, is sort of

an extra slap in the face to people who have been horribly oppressed and colonized by outsiders who, and the amount of damage done to indigenous communities by the outsiders, the colonizers, the who will eat them, right, the hungry people, you know, is massive. So why go back and pick at a scab, you know, internally? although there are times where this is important to talk about. So in the past, all of the Coast Salish communities, no one tribe had all the food resources they needed all the time in their territory, right? They didn't.

They had stuff that was more available at certain seasons, things that were more available in certain multi-year cycles like salmon returning in four-year cycles. And so there were always people who wanted stuff in your territory, and you always wanted stuff in other people's territory. So you could go steal it, and some people did, and that was the beginnings of raids and counter raids and warfare, and that was going on, and or you could find a sort of peaceful ways to provide access. So one of the key cultural traits among the Coast Salish elite was, generosity. So if you, if someone came to your territory showed up and you said, you're welcome, come eat with us, come feast with us. You know, that was showing that you were elite, like the ability to be generous, to have enough resources to share was, was what

the definition of a CM, like the wealthy, the, that you know your history. The word Smilath are worthy people, Etnabob from Seabre, originally from Seylus, one of the first elders I interviewed in 1992, said, you know, the word for Smalath means worthy people. And when I asked her, what does worthy mean? She said, oh, people who know their history. I said, oh, what do you mean by that? She said, well, they know where they're allowed to hunt, where they're allowed to fish, where they're allowed to gather, right? They know through their genealogy the places in the landscape that they have connections to.

And then the word for Stachem, that lower class people, is worthless people. And I asked her again, well, what does worthless mean? And she said, people who have lost or forgotten their history, they don't know where they can go hunting or fishing or pick things. So they're dependent upon others to kind of provide through large access to those sites, right? And then there's a squeath, a smaller group at the bottom who were slaves. People at the bottom were slaves. And I heard the same definition from Rosaline George.

The same definition was from West Sam. Other elders, all smallath, stackum, squeath, right? and what it means worthy, you know your history. You can access, you know where to go on the land. You know your fishing sites. You know how you got them. So each of these tribal communities would form alliances. The elite would show generosity to another tribe by saying, let's marry our children to each other.

So that you can come and visit and you'll have a priority access to the resources in our territory. And I, in exchange, will have access my family to the resources in your territory. So when those, you know, in the season when you can harvest shellfish down at muskwium, that would be a great thing. We'll come down to visit you and we'll get to eat some of the shellfish. In exchange, you come up here and you visit, you're married into, say, the teat tribe. We've got a lot of mountain goats with wool and that's really prized for making blankets. You know, no mountains in Musquium territory. So that's a positive.

So these two communities form these alliances so that you can exchange wealth, right? But there's always someone who's going to come along and say, say, ah, we could do that, or I could just take it, I could steal it, right? And so you had these sort of groups of young men, typically, who would go out and raid and take things. And then the elite, the CMs, you know, men and women both would have to mitigate those crises by, you know, hosting a potlatch that would, you know, make amends and arranging a marriage and things like this. And, of course, some young men and women from elite family said, yeah, but I kind of fell in love with so-and-so. and I kind of want to marry them you know I want to live here

I don't want to relocate and live there or something like that I guess and so this prophet's skeptical one of the things he was saying is that yeah young women should have the right to pick who their partners are yeah and so was this before colonization

like you said prophet and that doesn't sound perhaps indigenous yeah there's a hell comey on the word for what it was that's the prophet is the English gloss a term. I'm actually blanking right now on the word for Celia, I think. I'm not sure.

No problem. But no, it was sometime in the 1830s, so after Fort Langley had been established, but before the gold rush, before the movement, right? But, you know, getting back to your earlier question about what is colonization, what is oppression, you know,

the Hudson Bay Company came in, and they adapted, they had to adapt, but they were also trying to exploit, right? They were trying to get wealth. The way to get wealth was to extract, through indigenous labor, extract as many valuable resources as they could from the land, and then export them for a profit. So they tried to do that with furs.

The stall didn't want to trade furs to any great extent, but they were happy to trade salmon. And so after three years, Hudson Bay Company was going to close Fort Langley. It wasn't profitable. And the chief trader there said, well, wait a minute, before you shut us down, I mean, we worked really hard, we built the palisades, we built these buildings. before you send us all home

the stall will might not be bringing in a lot of beaver and Martin pelts but they bring in a lot of salmon and they could bring us more and so Fort Langley got permission to retool and they became a salmon trade place. They exported salmon these barreled salted salmon

and they sold it to Hawaii down to California later like it was a major exporter of salmon but it was all procured by stollo people and then sent overseas. In fact you know the If you're a husband-bay employee in the 1830s, 40s, and 50s, the plum posting was Fort Oahu. They had a fort in Hawaii, right, where they resold Fraser River Salmon.

Wow. Yeah. So then suddenly, you know, but that's not settler colonialism. That's a different thing. There was no plan to move huge numbers of people here. There was no plan to control indigenous, take away indigenous self-governance and control that. there was no plan to control and export, control and exploit the land and the trees and the minerals on the land, right? It was, hey, could we motivate you to use your labor as indigenous

people to bring us stuff, furs or fish, that we could then repurpose, send overseas and at a markup price and make profit from, right? And all that changes with the 1858 gold rush. And so what you have in 1858 is suddenly 33,000 or so men all. men, right, move into the Fraser Valley, upper Fraser Valley and the lower Fraser Canyon. And, A, they're not looking to stay here either. They're not, so they're not settler colonists yet. These are exploitation, conquest exploitation colonists. They're, and that's a certain type of colonization.

They move in, they want gold. Indigenous people are in the way. They might want to exploit indigenous labor like, hey, can you paddle our canoe up? Can you guide us to these place? Can you provide us with food while we're, you know, panning for gold? But it was secondary kind of thing, right? Indigenous people were in the way. In fact, they embarked on what one of the miners at the time called a war of extermination through the Fraser Canyon.

And so you have to remember that these miners are the same people who had 10 years earlier been the California Gold Rush. And in California, they exterminated indigenous people. You go around Sacramento, the Sacramento River Valley, all of Central California, there are no indigenous people left because they were literally exterminated. And, you know, there were, this is well documented down there. There's books on this and things you can read, peer-reviewed, good work. The indigenous people in California, miners were being paid by other miners, little communes of miners, little villages that were set up, $8, $10, $12 a scalp to go kill indigenous people.

You could make more money killing indigenous people than you could, looking for gold in California. And those guys brought that same attitude. they were the same people who came up here into the Fraser Canyon and they wanted indigenous people out of the way and a war breaks out in the canyon and it's the Nekatmuk leader Spintlam and the Stalo leader Likwitam from Yale and from Lytton

who go in and they negotiate peace treaties with the American miners, some of the more level-headed miners and bring about sort of a peaceful resolution to this and say, hey look, you guys are here We're going to stop shooting at you, but you can't do this stuff to us, and they work this thing out. But the miners were like, yeah, fine, whatever, because we're only going to be here for a year or two, and then we're gone. We're moving on, right? So those miners, they exploit the land.

They don't care about the indigenous rights to the land. They exploit indigenous women. They're indigenous young girls and women who are being raped. You know, and the Stalo and the cat milk are pushing back against this. And then those guys move on, right? They're here from 1858, 59, 60. And then now, suddenly, the gold rush shifts up to the caribou. Like, they're moving to the next place, to the next place, to the next place.

And then in the wake comes the settlers. And this is what the British government then. This is where they shift from, you know, the earlier fur trade economy to the settler colonial economy. The British want permanent settlers. They want loyal British farmers in this area. And so to make that successful, you need to push the indigenous people off the land. move them on to small, isolated, marginal Indian reserves, right, and open up the land. And that's settler colonialism.

And settler colonialism is that special type of colonialism where the people who arrive within a generation or two don't see themselves as conquering and colonizing a space, but rather see themselves as inheriting a space, right, from the previous generation of settler colonists. And they see indigenous people simply as in the way. They're a problem. You displace them. You push them out of the way. And conveniently, demographics for indigenous people at that time were declining smallpox, tuberculosis, influenza, measles, all of these diseases, which indigenous people had no ancestral immunity to because they were introduced here.

They all come from the domestication of animals in Europe, Asia, Africa. The people here domesticated the dog, but they didn't domesticate cattle, geese, pigs, all those kind of things. So those diseases that mutate from those animals didn't exist here. Indigenous population was declining rapidly through disease in the 19th century. And shrewd and cruel settlers, settlers who moved in, people like Colonel Moody, who was a scumball, Moody, you know, Port Moody in that. Yeah, he was a horrible guy. Joseph Tretch, who took over after Moody, another horrible guy.

So my understanding is Trutch was the one who downsized from, I want to get this right. Governor, why can I remember his name? James Douglas. James Douglas. So are you saying that it was Moody first, or was Moody doing something else? Yeah, Moody is a – Moody's just a sleazeball land speculator with a massive ego. And James Douglas is trying – James Douglas isn't a hero. I'm not saying he's a saint or anything like that.

But, you know, he spoke with indigenous people. He saw a future that included indigenous people. He thought they should become Western-style farmers and ranchers. he thought they should become Christians, but he didn't see them not being here, right? And he thought they had a right to be here, and they had a right to lands and resources. That's clear.

And so he starts to say, you've got to set aside Indian reserves, reserves for Indian people, so that as these towns are being created and white settlers are moving in, there has to be space set aside for indigenous people. And not just their little village and potato patch and burial ground.

he defined them as anticipatory reserves. That's been a lot of historians at the past have not understood. They've just glossed over this really quickly. What he meant by anticipatory reserve, and this is absolutely crystal clear, is lands that would anticipate indigenous people's future needs. It's anticipatory in that sense. Some people said, oh, they're anticipatory because they were built by or set aside by indigenous people who would put stakes in the ground in anticipation of them being,

assessed later to become real or not real Indian reserves, right, by surveyors. That's not what Douglas meant. He meant to anticipate their needs. So if they weren't farming and if they weren't ranching yet, he thought they would have to. And for them to be successful, self-sufficient people in this rapidly changing world economy, they needed land set aside for them. So Colonel Moody, everybody calls him Colonel Moody, but he was lieutenant governor, Moody. He was also Chief Commissioner of Land and Works. And that's his real job, Chief Commissioner of Land and Works.

He is doing everything he can to insert caveats into James Douglas' directions and instructions so that these reserves are not being made. They're actually being, he's ignoring. He's not passing on the instructions to have these reserve created. When he does, he reduces them himself before they're actually laid out. And then he's land speculating. I'm working on a project right now where we're documenting just how much land Colonel Moody owns. And at one point, if I'm, you know, I'm preliminary still. But it appears that he at one point owns three times as much land in the Fraser Valley lower mainland than all the Indian reserves combined when he goes out of the office because he's speculating.

And it's illegal for him to speculate. He's told by James Douglas on the people, you cannot do this. So then he sets up shell companies. People go out and speculate in their name, but it's his money and his property. Right? He's just a sleaze ball. And so he does that to keep the reserves as tiny as possible. So who is the higher up?

It sounds like Douglas was higher up? Douglas is the governor. Okay. But he felt like he should be the governor. He didn't like Douglas. He was racist. Douglas's wife was indigenous. Douglas himself was part African American. He hated them constantly stabbing them in the back and stuff like this about how they were not suited to be in charge. But he was also Chief Commissioner of Landon Works, which meant he was the one who controlled all the surveys that were taking place, right? And what he was doing was setting up surveys and having the Royal Engineers create roads and things that were all going to turn the properties that he was speculating into into really valuable properties that he could then flip and sell for profit, which he does. He makes gobs of money doing this, right? And it's all illegal. It's illegal.

And Douglas tries to stop him. And then he tries to hide things with these shell companies. It's a sleazy thing. And then just before Douglas retires, because there's a lot of pressure, people don't, Moody and his friends don't want Douglas in charge anymore. He keeps standing up for indigenous rights. He keeps talking to indigenous people. He keeps making promises to indigenous people. And, you know, this guy, we've got to get rid of him.

And so they start pressuring the Colonial Office back in London to get rid of Douglas. There's a smear campaign against him. And finally, the Colonial Office says to Douglas, it's about time he retired now, right? And, you know, you've done a good job, Pat on the back, but you've got to move on. And so Douglas, his retirement is announced. And Stallow leaders all over, oh, my God, what's going to happen? now. And they travel down to New Westminster to meet with Douglas. This is just a few months literally before his office, his term in office ends. And they say, we don't have the reserves

that we thought we were going to get. We don't have the reserves that you promised us. There are places where you visit us physically on the land and you promised us land to be set aside for us. That hasn't happened yet, right? And Douglas was aware. He was always being sort of made more aware, like, oh my God, even after I did this last month, you're still not doing it to Colonel Moody, right? Right. So Douglas then, in front of the Stahl leaders, calls out William McCall, a surveyor, and says right in front of them, I'm sending this man up to the Fraser Valley to mark out your reserves for you. You mark them out as you see fit. And then he tells McCall, and if they don't ask for enough land, anticipatory land, that's

going to keep them economically viable, self-sufficient in the future. Give them more land, right? They might not understand what ranching is in some of their communities, because they may not have seen a ranch. They might not, you know, if they don't understand that yet, give them the benefit of the out, give them bigger land. And so McCall sets out these large reserves in 1864. And it's literally the month that Douglas is retired. Like he's in the field as Douglas leaves office and Seymour comes in. And as Moody leaves and Joseph Trutch comes in. And so what happens is those reserves are mapped out. They're large. And then for three years, the Joseph Trutch and Seymour and Birch and a few other

these sort of colonial sleaze balls they sit and they don't operationalize the reserves. They don't go back and confirm them.

They don't give maps, individual maps to the indigenous people. They know where the stakes are on the ground because they walk the perimeters with Sergeant McCall.

And then they decide like how do we get rid of these reserves? This is what Trutch and Birch and Seymour are trying to figure out because this is valuable

land and we're trying to encourage settlers to come and we were speculators. These guys are all speculators, Trutch is a big land speculator. Can you say what a speculator is for people who might not know? Yeah, sure.

So under the preemption laws at that time, you could come in and you could claim 160 acres, right? And then you had, I can't remember it's three or four years now to improve those lands. You had to clear the land, start to plant crops on it. And if you did all that, you could get that land signed over to you as fee simple, right? And then you can actually acquire additional lands beside it, but you had to prove that you were going to be a good British settler who was going to turn this into an agricultural colony. So what Trutch and Moody did, they're the ones who actually said

where the surveyors went. They're the ones who mapped out where the townships would be built. So they knew all of this in advance. They're the ones in charge of that. What they would do is say, ah, we're going to create the town of hope. Okay, I'm going to go up first and I'm going to speculate. I'm going to claim land in my name. Right? And then they would send in the surveyors and say, now township's going to be built here. And then suddenly that land is worth a lot of money. Right.

Right? But they haven't had to pay anything for it because they're preempting it. So they've got four years to prove up to make it valuable, right, to prove that and then it would become theirs. But what they can do is say, hey, I've owned it for six months. Do you, John Doe, want to buy this from me? You know this is going to be worth a lot of money in a few years' time because it's already going skyrocket. So you give me $100. You give me $200. And you can have this land.

So they're using their insider knowledge to access and find lands. create them in their own name, not having to pay anything for it because they can preempt it, which is illegal, and then flip it before there's any investigation into that process. So they're doing this. And so reserves that Douglas promised to the stall of leaders with Sergeant McCall, physically present to hear them verbally and get the written instructions, Trutch and Birch, these guys simply disavow that process. They say these reserves never existed.

That first they say, well, should we pay them for it? Should we compensate them and take the reserve away? Oh, no, if we do that, these, you know, we're opening Pandora's box. We have to compensate them for all these things we've been screwing them over for, right? So it's like, no, but just pretend it never happened. We'll say that McCall, he didn't know what his instructions were. He misunderstood James Douglas. These reserves were never meant to be marked out.

And then they sent people out to unilaterally reduce those reserves. And they were reduced by 92%. So when that happens, is that illegal? like when we look back in history and define what took place there or do the people reading that give Trutch the benefit of the doubt how do we because these reserves are still set up the way that they were like set up by Truch and so what recourse is being taken what what's the analysis because I know that one thing I heard and maybe you can correct me is that they had Stolo leaders come out and try and map out what their land was and it was kind of tricky because

they had all them come out, and then they all kind of circled similar areas, and then they're like, how are we supposed to figure out who owned which land? I remember learning that I think it stole a nation at one point, that they just had them kind of like draw out where your map is, of where your land is, and there was overlap, and since there was overlap, they kind of went, well, how are we supposed to know? Not quite, no, no. No, it didn't quite work that way.

It was, Colonel Moody, Joseph Trutch, these guys were so convinced that indigenous people were dying off because of the diseases that they could get away with scamming the system, making money, and then not happen to worry about it because the indigenous people wouldn't be here in a generation or two. They were so convinced the demographics were going in that direction. So this is where they say, we're doing you a favor, right? we're not giving you a lot of land because that would stop the economic progress of the province. We want that to go to, you know, settlers moving in. We're going to give you small little bits of land, though, because you're fishermen. This is what Trutch, and those guys said, you don't need big farmlands because you guys aren't farmers. Traditionally, you weren't farmers.

I mean, they actually did modify the landscape. They had controlled burns. They did grow tubers and things through what would be considered agriculture today. But they didn't have Western-style market economy agriculture, right? So you don't need these big reserves. So would this avowed that they ever existed? Pretend they never existed. Sell it all off at a profit to other people.

And you can keep these small little villages that are along the edge of the river because you're fisher people. That's your main thing. Remember, you were selling all that fish with Hudson Bay Company. Keep doing that. Good luck. Where you go, right? But then within 10 years of those reserves being created, they said, oh, these indigenous fishermen are so efficient. You know, not just the stall, but the ones out on the coast and everything.

They're so efficient. You know, we can't compete with that. as settlers come in who want to fish. And so the technology is you start using Western technology to gill net between boats out in the mouth of the Fraser River. And then those nets get bigger and bigger and bigger. And you move further and further away from the river to catch the fish earlier and earlier and earlier. And then you move to sains, sane nets, and you're moving way away, right, as the technology changes. And the canneries are built, big industrial canneries in the 1870s, 1880s and 1890s down at what's now Steveston and Richmond.

And so indigenous people, they said, well, let's keep them as laborers. They can work for us to catch the fish and work for us to process the fish. But we don't want them up in the river catching fish and bring them down to us, which was far more ecologically sound. You could selectively take the fish. You couldn't sure enough got to the spawning grounds. We'll just ban the In River fishery and we'll ban the Aboriginal right to a commercial fishery. And so that way we control it.

And so indigenous people suddenly found themselves. lost their land. They couldn't become commercial farmers and ranchers. And now they lost the right to catch and sell fish for a profit. So they found themselves impoverished. Right? This is just, but by 1884, they're impoverished people. Their access to land off the reserve is being rigidly controlled by emerging conservation laws, by the growth of urban farm sprawl and things. They're no longer allowed to catch and sell fish. They're only allowed to have a food fishery, so you can eat enough to keep yourself from starving. You can catch it for yourself, but don't you try to sell a fish, right? That's illegal. Meanwhile, there's gigantic commercial

interests who are catching and selling and processing fish down at Steven. And then that same year, 1884, 1886, so as well, to do the chronology, the big reserves are mapped out here in 1864, right? After Moody had tried for so long to stall that process, finally Douglass says, go out, map out the reserves the way you want them. And if you don't want big enough land, I'm giving you even more because the surveyor, McCall knows it. He leaves, he retires from office, Douglas, his successor, and Moody, successor, Tretsch and Seymour, they reduced that. So in 1869, 67, all those reserves are reduced by 92%. And then the Stala are struggling along, but they can still fish and sell fish commercially.

And then in 1884, the government bans the potlatch and bans the commercial fishery. Right? So suddenly the stall now are faced, they're living on reserve. All they can do is work as seasonal laborers for, you know, farmers who need them. You know, they're not in control. They're just seasonal laborers. They can't sell fish for a profit, but they can work for the cannery for peanuts, right? Down there at the cannery and the profits all go to somebody else. And then the government bans the potlatch that same year. And what that does, people often think, oh, they ban the potlatch. They banned a cultural activity. Well, it's true. It was a cultural activity. But what it really was, was a system of self-governance. So the potlatch is that place where, when we talked earlier about their arranged marriages. So, you know, you would say, I'm getting to be an old man now, and my fishing site up in the canyon is super valuable,

and it's important that the next generation has someone who's going to take care of that fishing spot, who's going to remember the obligations we have to relatives from other tribes who have access to that because we arranged all those intertribal marriages, right, so that they'll have that. And so I'm passing on my hereditary name, to my nephew or my son or my grandson or whoever might be for a fishing site,

who then will inherit the obligation to care for that site, to recognize all the existing obligations that go with that site, right? But when the government bans the potlatch, you can't do that in public anymore. Suddenly you're not allowed to have those big gatherings. So you might say, geez, I'm getting old, and I want to make sure that the site gets taken care of, and all the obligations in the past are carried on. So you tell your nephew when he visits you that I'm giving you my name,

You could take care of that site. But your other nephew from the other side of the family, he remembers you always patting him on the back and saying he was a great guy and he was a good fisherman. So he thinks, no, really grandpa wanted me to have that site, right? So suddenly now the families start fighting over who has the hereditary name and who controls that fishing site and who controls that Wapitow site and who controls that cranberry bog. At the same time, they're fighting amongst themselves because the potlatch has created this confusion within families. Settlers are preempting more and more land.

And so suddenly now that Wapitow site, that cranberry bog, is now in the middle of a farmer's field, and he won't let you access it. And that fishing site you had up in the Fraser Canyon that was so valuable, that was so important that you shared access to for people from downriver at the Matsqui community, at the Katsi community. Suddenly now the railroads come through there, and they've had to build railroad trestles and backfill. And so they've dug out and dumped a bunch of gravel and riprap into that bay, and it's no longer a viable fishing site. So Stalo people are left in this situation where they become, for the first time, what they referred to back then as poor and destitute Indians who had been the living on government welfare handouts at that time. This all happens in just a decade and a half, right? This all, wham, they're just nailed. And then the anti-pot latch law also bans the winter dance, the Tamanoas dance, is the Shunuch jargon name for the Smeetla, the winter dance.

And so that means that their spirituality, a big act. aspect of their spirituality becomes illegal, right? So they're looking, there's Roman Catholic missionaries. There's a few Methodist missionaries here now. They have a spirituality. It's endorsed by the government. They can see some value in it. They can see some sincerity in it. So they embrace aspects of the Christianity because parts of their own spiritual traditions have now been made illegal. But there are, no one's sort of, at that point, you know, colonizing them in a forceful way at that point to become Christians. At that point, the residential schools that were set up were set up as, without government funding. And so the St. Mary's, for

example, for the first few decades, operated as a place for mostly orphans and illegitimate children, right? A lot of white men were coming in. They were having sexual relationships with all the women, and then abandoning them. And then that girl would have a child with no father, there was no arranged marriage. The extended family was like, what's going on, right? We wanted you to marry so-and-so down there from that other community to forge our marriage alliances to cement our intertribal relationships. And so that child would often get dropped off at St. Mary's, where it would be raised by the

nuns and the priests. And that was sort of what the residential school was mostly for the first few decades. With the additional, that many of the elite families, those CMs, would send one or two of their children to St. Mary's to learn Western-style reading and writing and numbers so they could bring that back as a skill that they could use in those communities as they dealt with colonial oppression, right? But not whole families. It wasn't until later that the government passes laws that make residential school mandatory. And the churches embrace that because it's a way to get money from the government and it's a way to facilitate conversions, which they see as

like the biggest, most important thing for them, right? To be saved. It's not enough just to be similar to have, you know, a belief in respect in ancestral spirits, to have, you know, respect for God, the creator. You have to be saved. You have to be baptized. You have to be a follower of Jesus Christ, right? And so the Protestants and the Catholics all want those kids to come to their schools because that fits their goal. And they so then embrace the idea of being participants, happy participants in a process of cultural genocide that takes place at that time. Wow. Okay, going a little bit back to potlatches, because I just had Dr. Dara Kelly on. She works at the business school, SFU, BD school, and we talk about potlatches.

And what I found interesting was it sounds like potlatches also act as a form of creating contracts because it was in front of so many different people that you kind of had verification like the way today we have a witness sign of form we have everybody in the room so you can double check and say oh do you remember it happening this way and you would have symbols of like bringing in a paddle

and saying I'm passing on to you my fishing spot and then they can refer to the paddle to determine whether or not that was the case it was also and this is where I get a little bit confused it's also a form of like the more you gift is a sign of your social stature. If you give more, your looked on as more wealthy.

And that kind of goes back to your idea of like, if you're able to bring someone in for dinner or if you're able to work with another community and gift something to them, that's a sign of your wealth. That seems to be something. I'm always looking for those opportunities where we can talk about. I really don't know always what people mean when they say decolonization.

It's one of those words that's used a lot. And then it's tough to figure out what people's intention with that word looks like. And so the way I try and approach it is like what can Western society, Canadian culture, learn from indigenous culture that would be a value. The thing that we seem to be struggling with right now is this idea of wealth inequality, income inequality. And so when I think of individuals being able to give to charity as a sign of like their wealth,

of their comfort, it's that overlap. But would you be able to explain perhaps what? the potlatch acted as in terms of that. And also, what was the government's logic in removing it? Did they know the significance of it when they decided to ban it? Did they have a plan in place? Like, this is going to wreck them. And this is why.

What was the kind of mentality behind that? Yeah. The main objection that the government and the missionaries had to the potlatch was that rather than accumulating wealth in a capitalist way, that you could then leverage. You could then use it to get loans. I have all this wealth I've accumulated. Now I can borrow against it, get more wealth, right? This is what the priests and the government wanted indigenous people to do.

You have to be assimilated, right? And instead, they saw these chiefs holding potlatches and giving away all their wealth, like everything they had. And then other people became indebted to them. And at the next potlatch, people would give them a whole bunch of wealth, would come back to them again. And so largesse and generosity were fundamental to the potlatch system, but it was pragmatic at the same time. You, you know, the potlatch was all about transferring names across generations, and those names carried with them rights to places on the landscape fishing sites, Wapitow sites, cranberry bogs, those kind of things. And so you hunted as many people as possible to witness it, so they would all. say, oh yeah, I remember that. Yeah, that's where, you know, Bill gave his nephew that, that, that name. And with that name goes that resource site. So you wanted people to witness it. One way to show that you really were worthy of having the site in the first place was to show all the wealth, because wealth comes from those sites, right? Food is wealth in those days. So by having a big potlatch and giving away a lot of wealth, canoes, paddles, blankets, dried salmon, you were showing that you were worthy of having that site and therefore legitimately could pass on.

the rights to it through that name to others. So that was the system of governance and economics tied together. And the government didn't like people giving away wealth. I mean, sometimes the Stala would say, we're so wealthy, you know, this family. We have such a great fishing site and we're giving away, we're passing this name on to our grandson. We're so wealthy, though, at the end here, we still have more wealth. We've given away all this wealth to all these people visiting us. We still have more.

So we're going to throw, here's a sewing machine, like literally a singer sewing machine, toss it into the Fraser River. And here's another one. Toss it into the Fraser. We're so wealthy that we don't even need those, right? And the missionaries and government would see that and say, oh, my God, they're throwing away modern technology. They're wasting wealth.

They're throwing away money, essentially, right? And for the Stalo people who are watching it, they'd say, that's amazing. These people have already shared their food, their wealth, they provided access to this. We all see how legitimate they are. And they still had extra leftover wealth. That's how worthy they are. That's how noble they are, right? So these gestures were perceived differently by different people, and that becomes a rationale for colonizing.

And the colonization is all about land and resources, right? Like indigenous people aren't colonized because of the color of their skin. It's not racism. Racism is a handmaiden to settler colonialism. Racism is a way to help legitimize and rationalize the colonization of people. But the indigenous people here could have been purple or white. A, they would still have indigenous rights because they were here first, Aboriginal rights under British common law.

But the point was they were in the way, right? They were a problem to the settler colonists who wanted the land and the resources, the forests, the meadows for farming, the minerals, the trees. That's what the settlers wanted. And so you push the indigenous people out of the way. So if they have a potlatch system that controls and regulates the land and resources, then that's a problem for the settlers. So you get rid of that, right?

You take away their right to sell the fish. Let them eat enough so that they don't cost the taxpayers money so they can have their own food fishery, but don't let them have any commercial basis for anything below that, right? So this whole process is about displacing people from the land, delegitimizing their culture, their economics, their spirituality, in their own eyes, right, to make them all feel that that's inadequate,

not compatible, not helping them in this contemporary changing, rapidly changing colonial world, and then to reintegrate them at the bottom rung of the economic and social ladder in that society. So you create the myth that you're actually benevolent colonizers. You're going to create tuition-free schools for all the indigenous people. And those kids get taken away, put in residential schools. You're not even charging them tuition. Look how benevolent we are, right? And the goal of those residential schools is very, very clear.

The goal is to take, from the government's perspective, from settler society, because it's a settler society elected Democratic government, the goal is to take young Aboriginal rights and title holders and to turn them into just another economic, just another ethnic, oh, let me say it again. So the goal is to take young Aboriginal rights and title holders and turn them into just another ethnic minority within Canada. That's the goal. So they'll just be like the Japanese or the Chinese. They'll just, they'll be here, right? Well, they can do the bottom jobs, the labor jobs, the unskilled jobs. They won't have any real power or economics. There'll be racism to keep them in place, but they won't be blocking our access to land and resources.

That's what the government, settler, colony, idea was for residential schools. From the missionary's perspective, residential schools were a way to get money for them because the government would fund after 1893, the government funds residential schools. So every kid that they get into the school, they get federal money for, right? And then that gives them a way to then convert them to save their soul so they can then write back to the Pope and to the head of the Oblate missions and back to the Methodist and the Anglican Church and say, we've saved this many souls. We are doing this work, which is at the core of the civilization of the world. And so that process of Christian conversion is tied directly to the economic exploitation and displacement of indigenous people. and those two groups come together don't necessarily have all parallel motivations and interests, but they overlap enough that the two use each other,

and indigenous people get caught and squeeze in the middle and exploited. Yeah, that is where things get even darker. It sounds like 18, 70s, 80s, 90s, it's getting bad, and then Indian residential schools come in and make things a whole heck of a lot worse. That's right. Um, I'm interested to know, because you talked about how Indian, or residential schools didn't just exist here. You've done research on where they exist. Um, I believe in Mexico as well. Yeah. Um, so I'm interested to know when did things go really south in these schools. Was it, was it, was it, um, I'm interested to know the kind of the, the journey that they go through and what your thoughts are on, uh, the bad actors in. Um, was it, um, I'm interested to know the kind of the, the journey that they go through. Um, and what your thoughts are on, uh, the bad actors. in this because that is something that's, I think, important for someone like yourself to help us square, because that's where we're at right now. It feels like for some, this is the nail

in the coffin for religion, evidence that these are despicable people, despicable viewpoints, and these viewpoints have always and will always lead to terrible outcomes. I had the opportunity to interview Chief Andrew Victor, who is also a pastor at a native Pentecostal Church. And he sees the value in these belief systems. And as you said, other people do as well. And I think that we can absolutely always say that there were terrible actors throughout history. Whether or not they represent what they say they were. Like, we even today, we have people who say that they're religious.

They go to church on Sundays. And then they don't live out the tenets of that belief system the rest of the six days. So when we're talking about the schools and who was acting in these schools, I'm hesitant to accuse the whole church or the whole belief system of being X just because these people were terrible. Like, you can say that perhaps Trutch was a terrible governmental leader. That doesn't mean all governmental leaders are Trutch. And so I'm interested to know kind of how these Indian residential schools developed from your perspective. And where did things go wrong?

And does this, what are your perspectives on the religious element of this? Yeah, okay, big questions and really emotionally charged questions. You know, people have been hurt by residential schools, physically, emotionally, sexually, you know, these are just bad. Residential schools were bad. No indigenous people asked for residential schools. Some indigenous people did send their kids to residential school because they saw it as acquiring some necessary skills, Western-style skills that would be needed for the next generation. But nobody said, hey, set up a resident school. school, take our kids away, right? Nobody did that. Indigenous people were looking for Western

style education in a rapidly changing world. The ability to read and write English was an important skill to have to help protect your land, to help secure labor contracts, to help ensure a whole bunch of things. So Indigenous people were anxious about that. A lot of Indigenous people heard the teachings of Christ and said, hey, wow, blessed are the meek, blessed or the poor. These are some pretty cool teachings. We kind of can relate to this, right? Because we're kind of poor right now. Look what's happened to us, right? You know, love your enemy. Geez, we've been having conflicts with those Lequiltock people up the coast for so long. We've been, you know, there's been these raids back and forth and they've been violent and harmful. If we could love our enemy and they could

love us, maybe this would be a, right? So these are kind of interesting ideas that a lot of indigenous people accept or embrace. They have their own traditions that they're still using and embracing too. They're looking for synergies. They're looking for things that say, oh, this is something that provides amplitude to amplify an aspect of our culture and religion that we want to really emphasize now because we can see value in it, right? And we'll also hold on to our traditional teachings.

So the residential schools, you know, they're designed to take. rights and title holders and turn them into an ethnic minority. That's what they're meant to do. And it's a sellout by the churches who are like, hey, we can get kids away from their parents and we can convert them to our philosophy, our theology, without the interference of their parents for multiple months of the year. And then we can feel good that we've saved these souls. They're now converts to our faith, and we get money from it, right?

We get paid tuition. We can encourage more. young men and women to go into the priesthood and to the convent, and if you're Protestant, become reverends and ministers. You know, it's a corrupt, it was a corrupt thing. And who does it attract into those schools? Who's the, who's the, you know, the young, non-Indigenous man who in, you know, 100 years ago, 50 years ago, says, I want to devote my life to a career where I'm working at, you know,

low wages at a remote school with a whole bunch of young children where these children don't have any parental oversight. You know, so maybe that's attracting some people who are just kind, benevolent people. Let's just say maybe, right? I can imagine some other people who are being attracted to that, right? And that's not pretty, right? If you're a pedophile, if you're, like, you know, and pedophiles from my understanding, and I'm not a slight, but talking to psychologists, these people who have these warped sexualities will do long-term detailed planning to get access to little kids, right? It's not just circumstance. I mean, maybe they do that too, but these are creeps, right, who do long-term planning. So, yeah, if you want, if that's your inclination, if you really want to sexually abuse children, where better than to, set yourself up and get a job at a residential school, right?

Right. And that makes my stomach turn, right? And so, and I'm not saying that every priest, every nun, every minister was a pedophile. But if you were a pedophile, that would be someplace that you would be attracted to in terms of a place where you could get access to kids without their parents being around to protect them. Yeah. Yeah, that is one of the darkest parts, I think, of this conversation and of indigenous people's history is, the sense of vulnerability and I find it

really interesting to see the disconnect between Canadian culture and indigenous communities because if you watch even like a movie or you read the book The Indian Horse, you see the very the first 20 minutes of the movie is families trying to get their

children up north away from danger and protect them the best they can and so when I hear people today go I had no idea was this that there were children passing away. It's like, that's really unfortunate to hear because this was taking place not just over five years, 10 years, 20 years.

This was, this happened over like a hundred year span of these abuses beginning and taking place and the indigenous people knowing that this is not the place for my kid to be. This is not a safe, peaceful, high quality education. Like, not many people were thinking that. And so having that disconnect, I think really strongly reflect. the cultural differences that take place on reserve versus off reserve. I still see those today, that there are certain etiquettes that are allowed on reserve that don't fly in our court system.

As a native court worker, I had the opportunity to kind of see those differences. And what was taking place, though, in Mexico? Was there some sort of overlap there? Yeah, no. So the Spanish claimed the entire Pacific coast from Mexico all the way to the edge of Alaska. The Spanish claimed that Vancouver Island, B.C. of Washington, Oregon, right? But that claim was challenged by the British. And that's what in 1792, the reason George Vancouver sailed out to the West Coast was to sit down and negotiate with Quadra, the Spanish representative

over whose land this was going to be. Who had the right to colonize it, right? Never talked about who are the indigenous people. The Spanish, though, had a pretty sophisticated system of colonization that they'd worked out all through Central and South America, and they realized that if they wanted to convert people and have them become passive under their colonization, the best way to do it would be to have indigenous leaders that they would work through. So the Spanish at Nutca Sound,

when they traveled around from Nutca, west coast of Vancouver Island down into the Straits of Wanda Fuca and then up into the Gulf of Georgia, the Salish Sea area, they picked up little kids, little boys. and little girls and they took them back to Acapocco and the idea was that they would be put in well not the idea

they were put into a residential school there and the with the goal of them being raised as Catholics who would then become religious figures themselves like friars, priests, nuns who would then come back and be at the forefront of the colonization

of this area that was the goal so the very first people from what we now consider Western Canada, to go to a residential school, were taken to a residential school in Acapocco. But after, so they were being collected, literally collected and brought down there. And I don't know how many.

This is a part of a research project I've been working on for a while and I haven't finished it yet. I've got to get my act together and do that. But it's an ongoing research project. But, you know, dozens, I would say, of young children were taken to Acapoco, who were New Chelneth and Co-Sailish. And then when Vancouver and Quadra finished their negotiations, and the British, the Spanish no longer claimed this part of the world, those kids were forgotten.

They were abandoned down there. So what happened to them? I don't know. I'd like to find out. I'd like to, you know, do any of them, are there any people down there who carry oral histories about having originally come from far north on the coast? You know, I don't know what happened to them. But that was the first taking of children by Europeans, those kids in that residential school,

that were taken down to Acapocco and then abandoned. because the British took over this part of the world. Wow. And you also wrote a bit about a woman who started her own school. Yeah, amazing, yes. Can you, I think that that's in this very dark part of the conversation, sort of a light in it. So could you tell us about that?

Sure, sure. So some indigenous people embrace Christianity, and one of them was Alexis from the Huchiam, the Chiom First Nation. just upriver from Chilliwack here by the Agassi Bridge. And he was just a remarkable man. He saw the damage that was happening. During the gold rush, a lot of whiskey peddlers were coming in from the United States and selling alcohol to indigenous people, creating problems like just had never existed before, right?

You introduce alcohol to a community that is being oppressed, and they have no experience with alcohol. This is a deadly thing. And so Chief Alexis worked with. the Catholic priest to get rid of the whiskey peddlers from the Chiam community. He was a very smart guy and influential man and charismatic. And so when the Oblate set up St. Mary's School down at St. Mary's in those early years, he sent his daughter down there. Now, I was speaking to Denise Douglas recently because I didn't know the daughter's name.

And Denise said that the daughter was Philomena, I believe, what she said. So this girl went down and spent a year or two Learned to read and write English, learn Western numbers, arithmetic. And then she brought that back. Her father with her came back and she set up a school at Chiang. And this is the very first indigenous run indigenous school, like Western-style school that I'm aware of anywhere in British Columbia, perhaps more broadly. But did the Oblates support this?

Did they come and say, hey, great, way to go. We're going to help fund this. We're going to help provide you with textbooks and resources. I don't see any evidence that they did that, right? Did the colonial government at the time say, hey, way to go. Congratulations. We're going to provide you with building materials to build the physical school with textbooks. No, nothing like that.

They just strangled that out through neglect and bad mouthing it. So the kids ended up continuing having to go to St. Mary's and later to Cocholica and then later to All Hallows, the Catholic Methodists and Anglican schools that existed in Stoll the Territory. So this young woman, Kilimina, I guess, Alexis, was a remarkable. She was the first schoolteacher, indigenous school teacher here. And by all accounts, was just an absolutely remarkable woman who dedicated her life to assisting her community.

And also was a huge assistance to her father on the political sphere because in the following two decades, she would write the petitions that he would organize other stalel leaders to come to Chiang and they would send a petition to the government complaining about something or demanding something and it was this daughter, Philomena, who would write the petitions for them. Wow. Can you tell us about the Indian residential schools that existed here in the Fraser Valley? Because I think that part of us knows that this history is taking place,

but for some they don't realize how close to home, how just around the corner down the block these locations were. Sure. So there were three different denominations had residential schools in Stalo-Tamuk, the territory of the Stala people. The first one was set up in 1862 at what is now mission. It was a mission and a residential school. So principally a mission, a place to try to convert adults, everybody kind of thing. And then a residential school that was originally down right on the waterfront. But when the railroad was built in 1885, they moved it up. to what is now Heritage Park, if you admission. And then from there, it moved in 1960 over to a site adjacent to that,

which is the, there's still buildings and structures there for that. But that was the Catholic resident school run by the Oblates of Mary Immaculate for the boys and run by the sisters of St. Anne for the girls. And then here in Chilliwack, the Methodists established first a little day school called Kokelice. primarily serving the Skao Kale community, but also Squayala and Suwali. Those were the three communities that tended to have a lot of people who affiliated with the Methodist Church. And then they built that into an industrial residential school in the 1890s when the federal government started funding residential schools. So it became profitable for Catholic and Protestants to expand their residential school system.

So they built the coquitza residential school. And then the Anglicans built a residential school up at Yale, and it was called All Hallows. And that one, I believe, was only for girls, though. And I believe it's also the only residential school, at least the only one I'm aware of, that had indigenous girls and white settler girls. So some of the white British Anglican families, even from Victoria, sent their daughters. to Yale to attend the school. But it wasn't, at first when I heard that, I thought, oh, maybe this was a place where the young girls from the two cultures

could kind of get to know each other, become friends, become allies, get to respect each other. But it sounds more like the young white girls were taught reading, writing, arithmetic, and the young indigenous girls were taught a little bit of that. But mostly they cooked and cleaned and stuff for the young white girls. Oh, my gosh. So what was, when did things get bad? the Indian residential schools.

Was that from the very beginning, or do you think that it got worse and worse and worse over time? And then we started having news kind of tell us about what was taking place here. What was that kind of development? I mean, I think they're bad from the beginning in the sense that they were about... The intent was terrible. Yeah, to acculturate, to assimilate, to take away people's belief systems, right? the, you know, the Catholics at St. Mary's back in the 1870s would have an annual event at the end of the school year where they would take the kids on a field trip to a mountain that they called Devil's Mountain because of the Hellcamillen words. There was a bad spirit of Slolokum that lived on that mountain.

So they would, and they knew the kids knew this. They knew that the mountain was forbidden by the kids' parents and extended families. So they would take the kids on a family picket. up onto that mountain itself and to say like, hey, look, see there, your parents' beliefs you got here and you're not being hurt or injured, right? No, no bad things are happening to you. And then they would take the children's names. They would take a piece of paper and write the children's names on the paper and then cut the bark on a cedar tree, pull back the bark and tuck the paper into the tree so that their name was left in the cedar tree on Devil's Mountain. So if you think what that meant to the those children or to their families, A, they're going to a place that they've been told to avoid by their parents. They have no choice in this. They're being taken there by the authorities from the school.

When they get there, there's a sacred tree, their sacred tree, the cedar tree, which is the generous man who was always giving and then was transformed by chelz into crape, the cedar tree. You probably heard that legend before, that shu-chum. And then they would take that kid's name and write it on a piece of paper and tuck it into the tree, so it stayed on the mountain, even after they left. I mean, that's a pretty emotionally scarring event for those children, I would imagine, right? And confusing event for them, having these authority figures tell them one thing and their parents and aunts and uncles telling them another thing.

Yeah, just like degrading, like, the cross with, like, if you were to light that on fire or do something terrible to that, people would have elicit some sort of feeling of discomfort towards that. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And, you know, all three of those Christian denominations all fought with each other all through this area. They all both went around, all three of them went around telling people who had affiliated with them who had converted to, say, Catholicism or to Methodism or to Anglinism, that if their families or friends converted to one of the other denominations, that that was horrible. That was worse than anything that they were going to go to hell. That terrible bad things would happen to Protestants if you were a Catholic. Terrible things would happen to a Catholic if you were a Protestant.

So they went around smearing each other. I mean, the interesting thing, all of those denominations could tolerate people who remain traditionalists, but they couldn't tolerate someone converting to one of the other Christian denominations. That was just beyond the pale. And they would go out of their way to fight and bad mouth the other denominations. So here's this faith, Christian. Faith tradition that's saying, love your enemy, right? Love your neighbor. And they're just fighting and attacking each other and, you know, yeah, horrible stuff. And then setting up

schools where they are taking away people's languages and cultures and things, you know, and their mind, they think they're doing that for the right reason, they, you know, they buy into conveniently, buy into the notion that indigenous people are all going to disappear because of diseases. And indigenous demographics were declining. So that was not, an unreasonable assumption, but it certainly wasn't a certainty, and, you know, and if white people stop spreading the diseases and helping to, indigenous people to better understand these new diseases so they could deal with them, that wouldn't have been the same problem, right? But so they could conveniently tell themselves, we're actually saving the kids,

because if they stayed traditional, they would all die within a generation or two, and we're helping them to accommodate themselves to this new emerging economy. There'll be cobblers, they'll be home, you know, chambermaids, there'll be farm laborers, all these people at the bottom of the kind of social ladder. And we're doing this without charging their parents' tuition. Look how kind we are. We're doing this at the taxpayer's expense. Like, look how great Canada is, right?

And so, you know, they talk themselves into making this all seem like a wonderful, benevolent, kind thing that they were doing. But it was all about moving indigenous people off the land and getting them out of the way so that there'd be no impediments to the settler colonial expansion on the land. Yeah, and it was really discouraging because you see that Helclamalam is considered an endangered language. You see sort of the developments today in what's going on in communities, and it seems like there's a subsection that's working to rebuild, revitalize, but a lot of the challenges that were created over these years. still exist today. I'm interested to know what your experience has been to kind of learn about the beauties of both cultures. You talked about the generous man being turned into a cedar tree. The idea that Jesus, whether you believe he was a literal person or not, but that that person is like the ultimate role model, the role model of all role models, to set an example for other

people on how to live a good life, not to judge, to follow the tenets of the belief system. And in the idea of the generous man, to me that there are beautiful overlaps between the two. Have you enjoyed learning about the two different worlds and being able to see through two different lenses, I guess, two different belief systems? Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I'm non-Indigenous. I'm close with a lot of stalo people and families and I've learned a great deal from them

about their culture and tradition which helps give me insights into my own culture and traditions. So yeah, absolutely. I think there are parallels. So if there is a God, you know, he or she or they are not going to just reveal themselves to one little people in, you know, in Israel, Palestine, right? And so everybody

around the world has been working for millennia to try to interpret the world, interpret the, you know, the ontology and the epistemology of what things are. And I think all cultures can provide insights. I think, you know, we've, in the 19, in the 20th century, you know, when in North America, when Christianity becomes the suburban expectation, right? You know, everybody goes to church on Sundays and up until the 50s, right? This is what you do. This is expected. This is what it is to be a good, middle class, working class family.

This is how you show everybody that you're good. But the people weren't necessarily reflecting on the theology or, you know, they would go through the motions and they'd hear the basic stories. And they would defer to the priests and the ministers and others to, you know, provide interpretation. So as the pressures, as the benefits of being a member of those church communities, those faith communities in the 1950s and 60s diminished, right? People quickly left because, you know, what's the getting out of it anyway just disrupts my weekend? It takes away time and the stories are, you know, Pavlam. They're so simple to understand. Yeah, okay, be a good person, treat your neighbor nicely. And yet, you know, there's no, I live in a world where clearly

capitalist exploitation and racism and all these things are everywhere, you can see exactly why people fall away from that and find it, take a cynical view of it and things. So, you know, I respect people who, you know, Jewish people, Christian people, indigenous faith traditions who think deeply and try to connect deeply with who they are in this world in a metaphysical sense that is around complicated questions and making tough decisions. It's not just, you know, there's some, I think some people have sort of in this world that they've kind of taken an easy way out, quick, you know, fast food faith and spirituality kind of thing.

I just do my own thing. I'm my own spiritual person kind of thing. Yeah, okay, that's fine. Some people are just dogmatic followers of the Catholic. church or something. Yeah, I like to sit down and have long and sustained conversations with people about not just their faith, but about them and their faith is a part of that that I, you know, can learn from and respect. Yeah, I think you set an amazing example, having the opportunity to ask Sonny about you and about your work. he could not have given a more positive review of what it's been like to build a relationship

with you, the work that you've been involved in, the long-term connections, and that's what was inspiring to me to want to sit down with you is because to me, I see a lot of people picking those sides or saying that they're done with belief systems or, again, they do their own thing, which is often they don't do anything. And it really feels like, Right now, I feel like we're lost as a culture a little bit. And I've asked people like Scott Sheffield, who's done work on indigenous people's involvement in World War II, and he's a military historian on ideas like other cultures have, like, and I know they have a reason for this, but other areas have like the draft still.

We in indigenous culture, although it's not as much done, is vision quests or spirit quests. these ideas that you develop yourself and you have to sit with your own thoughts. We have like meditation, which seems like, again, like the fast food version of really reflecting on what you believe and what your values are. And we have the idea of being vegetarian and vegan. And while I support the sentiments that are often behind those, which is I don't want anything to die for me to live, it seems like, again, Christian belief systems have grace as a way of coping with that responsibility.

if you're going to take a life, you need to give thanks for it. You need to appreciate it. With indigenous communities, we have ceremonies where we give thanks. And we understand now that we've killed this salmon or this animal, we have a responsibility now to make sure that we are stewards for the environment and the ecosystem. And these are not obvious thoughts. These are things that you have to think about and wonder, how did we get there? Like, this is a really good idea. And it didn't just happen first day. It took time for people to develop these understandings. I I look forward to talking to you in the future because I want to go through the Stolo Co-Sela Shatlas, the book you wrote on building relationships and long-sustained

conversations because I think that this work needs to be highlighted and I hope that the idea of podcasting to oral traditions is something that indigenous people take on more. I think that this medium creates the space for people on their drive, cleaning the house, to think about these topics and start to go, well, what can I learn? And with the idea of reconciliation being so paramount in our culture right now, I think that individuals like yourself, individuals like Sunny, are the people we need to hear from. It's not just what I think. It's important to highlight individuals like yourself who understand, because I look forward to talking to you in the future about you've seen the history of what's taken place. You have a good understanding of like the governmental structures. So are we moving in a right direction?

and I think that these are, when you see what's gone on with Tuosin First Nation and their choice to develop, what you see, I think Stahelaus just signed an agreement with BC and the federal government to get lands returned. Are these in line with what's going on in other communities? Is this what looks good historically? Does this meet kind of the dreams or expectations of individuals like James Douglas? And I think that through that future conversation, I think we'll have a deeper understanding of where we can go in the future. But would you be able to tell people just for now what books you've written and where they can find those and then they can look forward to perhaps conversation too? Yeah, sure.

Yeah, so I've written or co-authored quite a few things if you want, if you have a children, like Sonny and I co-authored a children's book back in, end the day end. It's called I Am Stalo, Catherine Explores Her Heritage. And so if you're talking about a seven or eight-year-old child, that might be an excellent book. It's very, it was really difficult to write because we were trying to take complicated ideas and package it for a young audience. I wrote the book, The Power of Place, the Problem of Time, Aboriginal Identity and Historical Consciousness in the Cauldron of Colonialism, long title. And that's basically a history of the Stalo people and the relationships with the Holitum, the hungry people, here from smallpox, 1782, up until 1906, when the delegation led by Joe Capulano goes to meet with King Edward and it sort of launches the pan-Indian modern indigenous rights movement that we see today. I've authored or co-authored a lot of articles and or chapters in books, and sometimes those can be a little bit more difficult to access. You can get all the citations on, I have a personal website, just keithorcarlson.com, and you can kind of get them there.

I've got to figure out whether I'm allowed to actually just post PDF files there for people to download. I think probably I could, but in the past someone said I couldn't do that for copyright. I can't remember exactly how that works now, but I'll check into that. but those are probably the And then the Stolo Atlas as well Yeah, and the Stolo Atlas was a collaborative project You know, myself and Sonny McKelsey and Dave Sheppey

And a lot of the staff and And community members and the Stolo worked on Back in year 2000, 2001 when that came out And it was It was really different There's nothing else at the time There's nothing else like that in terms of an indigenous Atlas that wasn't just a matter of saying here's the past, right? It's saying here's our

relationship with the land. Here's the process of our nation building in the sense of building a nation today that is not just the Indian Act bands that are out there, but not necessarily the pre-contact extended family networks across tribal communities. It's like here's what we're trying to do in this contemporary situation we find ourselves and our ongoing relationship to the land and resources of this world. Yeah, so that was a real treat to work on that with those people. And Kat Penyer, Grand Chief Clarence Penner, was our boss at the time. I worked in the Average Rights and Title Department, and he gave us the thumbs up when we proposed that project. And so all credit goes to him for letting us carve out a little bit of our day each day

over 18 months to kind of get that book pulled together. Wow. I am so grateful to have had the opportunity to sit down with you. I find you inspirational. I find Sonny inspirational because this is hard work. A lot of it, I'm sure, is sitting at a computer or sitting down with people, constantly returning. It sounds like with elders to try and understand deeper, ask better questions. Again, Sunny has said that you are incredibly thoughtful in the questions that you ask. So it's clear that it comes from an honest intent of learning and growing through understanding these topics more and sharing that with people. And that's really what this podcast is all about is people have dedicated themselves to something and we should take the time to learn about it. And so it is such a pleasure to sit down with individuals like yourself who have a deep understanding that aren't looking at notes. They don't have to refer to things constantly in order to be able to talk about a topic. It's you've integrated this into your understanding of the world. And I think that we're just incredibly lucky and it's

humbling to sit down with individuals like yourself who have worked to understand these issues and share your understanding. So I really appreciate you being willing to share your time with us and share such important information. Well, thank you for inviting me. And thank you to Sonny for all those kind words. He said he's a wonderful man, my best friend. So yeah. Yes. There's lots to learn from both of these individuals. So please go grab your book and I guess look forward to episode two. Okay. Thanks very much. Thank you.