BOOKS
COVER
Metis
Artist An Old Soul
BIOGRAPHY
Gino
Odjick Looks To Golf As A New Career
BOOKS
Native
Teen Coming-of-Age Tale
Historical
Pictorial Shows Effects of Commerce on Nation
BUSINESS
Business
and First Nations Team up for Green Energy
Nisga'a
Nation Manages Salmon With Tradition and Technology
Joint
Ventures Key to Haisla Plan for the Future
Westbank
Building Self-Government and Strong Relations
CRIME
Cree Family Accuses Judge of Racism
EDUCATION
UWO
Native Studies Centre hosts Ward Churchill
HUMOUR
Bee
in the Bonnet: Aren't You Special
POLITICS
Robert
Nault Will Not Seek Re-Election
Songhees
Pictorial: A history of the Songhees People as seen by Outsiders, 1790-1912
By Grant Keddie
Reviewed by Chiara
Snow
Almost 200 images, many published for the first time, comprise this beautiful book that documents the history of the Songhees people since their first contact with Europeans.
Through watercolour paintings and panoramic photographs, the Songhees Reserve and its people, a prominent community in the heart of Victoria, British Columbia in the latter half of the 19th century, the reader is taken on a journey that illustrates how commerce changed the coastal First Nation.
Dedicated to the children of the Lekwungen and to the memory of Chief John Albany, who strongly believed that young people should learn about their past, Grant Keddie, curator of archaeology at the Royal BC Museum, compiled this book by gathering information together from many sources including newspaper accounts, personal diaries, government and church records, aboriginal oral accounts, and the archeological record. He did so to give a voice to the Songhees people that "tells a very different story" compared to previous stories with a "limited colonial perspective."
Through chapters that document each major change in the lives of the Songhees people including Wage Economy and Warfare, Trouble in the Camps, and Potlatches and Winter Dances, the images and accompanying text show how a dominant society became a disenfranchised minority.
As the reserve was adapted to a foreign way of life, the book explains the prosperity and the conflict, the disease and cultural changes that fell on the Songhees people. For example, the sealing industry, a major industry in Victoria during the late 1800s, employed approximately 8500 Natives; and, according to the book, brought an average of $750,000 into the city's economy. Although the First Nations prospered, two voyages resulted in tragedies that ravaged many families.
The last chapter, The Final Arrangements of 1911, describes the
formal ceremony that marked the transfer of reserve lands to the government.
Forty three heads of families received compensation for the sale of the
reserve.
In January, 1912, homeless people, aboriginal and non-aboriginal, squatted
in houses on the vacant reserve. Later that year the provincial government
gave the reserve lands to the Canadian Northern Pacific Railway and the
Island Division of the Canadian Pacific Railway.