Similarly, Orchard had tremendous respect for Aboriginal oral tradition and believed the cultural stories passed down from generation to generation were the property of the nations from which they came. As a result, he did not focus on these stories. Most of Orchard’s interviews with Native peoples fall within the realm of oral history, which is to say their personal recollections about what everyday life was actually like as British Columbia went from a settlement with a hundred or so non-Native people in January 1858, before two gold rushes and Confederation, to almost 400,000 by 1911. As conveyed in the Orchard Collection and in this book, the province’s past is the story of newcomers settling the frontier in western Canada; it is a story of people accommodating to and building infrastructure in B.C.’s vast landscape in the nineteenth and first part of the twentieth century.
An audiotape copying setup used by the B.C. Archives’ aural history program, 1975. Photo: I-67663/Janet Cauthers
Voices of British Columbia, the book and the accompanying audio recordings, are intended to immerse you in the history of British Columbia: read the introduction to each story, listen to the speakers narrate their own experiences while you follow along in the text and look at the various photos and map. Discover a sense of place and meet the personalities who shaped the province, including Orchard himself who speaks with and prompts his interviewees. Through these audio recordings, Orchard has provided a window into the remembered past, allowing British Columbia’s pioneers to speak for themselves. As he said to Derek Reimer in 1978: “My contribution was to get people to see that… the sound of a person’s voice is an historical thing in itself. And the feeling that’s in that voice, as voice, not what comes on the page afterwards, is historically important.” I am hopeful that these samples from the collection, both audio and visual, will encourage you to look for details about B.C. history in general or even about your own specific family histories amid the material at the B.C. Archives or your local archives.
Aboriginal people near Lytton, ca. 1870. Photo: HP000676/Frederick Dally
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Original
Voices
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BRITISH COLUMBIA’S First Nations are steeped in a rich oral tradition that communicates much about their diverse cultures and about the history they created before Europeans came to this land. Although these stories—the legends and traditional narratives—are the property of the individual nations from which they come, they are a fascinating and invaluable part of the province’s historical record. However, to respect the sacred nature of these stories when talking to Aboriginals, Imbert Orchard focussed on people’s individual memories rather than on their broader cultural reminiscences.
In the following two stories, Native speakers discuss the interaction between Native and non-Native people at and before the first gold rush of 1858, which brought the largest wave of immigration to British Columbia.
When this photo was taken in 1896, Bob, a Yu-Ka-guse medicine man, was 104 years old. He was one of the few elders who remembered seeing Simon Fraser in 1808. Photo: HP016181/W.H. Barraclough
Put Your Knife Down
LIZETTE HALL
on the Meeting of James Douglas and Chief Kwah
(RECORDED SEPTEMBER 19, 1966)
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LIZETTE THERESE HALL was a member of the Dakelh (Carrier) First Nation, an indigenous people who are part of the Athapaskan language group that occupies a huge area from the upper Fraser River up to Anahim Lake in the Chilcoten region and that also has a strong presence in the Nechako River area. Hall’s father was Chief Louis Billy Prince, born in 1864. Hall’s great-grandfather was Chief Kwah, born in 1755, who was chief of what is now the Nak’azdli Indian Band.
Hall’s story begins with a discussion of first contact between the first Europeans and the Native people in her area, in 1806. Chief Kwah lived near Fort St. James and was instrumental in preventing Simon Fraser’s men from starving when they were camped at Stuart Lake. A natural leader, Chief Kwah saw to it that the thirty to forty thousand salmon needed to feed Fraser’s men annually were secured. As one of the traders commented in Jean Barman’s book The West beyond the West, Kwah “is the only Indian who can and will give fish, and on whom we must depend in great measure. It behooves us to endeavour to keep friends with him.” Chief Kwah was greatly respected by both the Native and non-Native communities at the time of the following anecdote about
Sir James Douglas in 1828.
Often credited as “The Father of British Columbia,” Sir James Douglas (1803–1877) was a British colonial governor at the time and was of central importance during this phase of the province’s history. Schooled in Britain, he had come to Canada at the age of sixteen to enter the fur trade for the North West Company, an outfit that eventually merged with the Hudson’s Bay Company (HBC). In 1828 he married Amelia Connelly, daughter of William Connelly, the Chief Factor of the fur-trading district of New Caledonia, and a Cree woman (Hall mentions that Douglas’s wife is “a half-breed”). In 1840, Douglas became Chief Factor of the HBC, the highest possible rank for field service in the company, then in 1851 he became the second Governor of Vancouver Island. The following anecdote involves Douglas while he was a clerk at Fort St. James on Stuart Lake, working for the Hudson’s Bay Company.
HALL: Well, my father was, he was the chief, until his retirement in the ’40s, I think, he retired. They had hereditary chiefs, you know, in the old days and he was born in 1864, according to the register.
ORCHARD: Are there any memories handed down of the first white men coming, and what was the impression of them?
HALL: Yes, the people were living up here at Sowchea. They had, there was a reserve still there yet. But that’s where they were living in the summertime when these saw these canoes around the point and they were singing, the canoeists were singing. And they saw these canoes and they all went on the shore to see who it was. They were singing in a strange language, something they hadn’t heard before. So they were all there when they landed, and they were white men. I guess that would be Simon Fraser—when they first came.
And they all crowded on the shore to see. They were very curious, of course. They hadn’t seen any white men before and they started, I suppose, they talked in sign language. They couldn’t understand one another, you know.
And they showed them different things that they had, you know, like a knife and soap. They didn’t start to eat, according to all these stories that you hear, that they started to eat the soap. My father said they didn’t start to eat the soap. He said they didn’t know—they didn’t give them any soap in the first place to begin with, but they showed them a knife and then they showed them a—they showed them a gun and they fired the gun. When they fired the gun, well, they all took for the bush, you know. They got scared. They had never heard anything like it. They did all their hunting by these homemade things like spears, and, well, they did their hunting by spears and snares and traps, these wooden traps.
The first two came from McLeod’s Lake. They arrived where the Hudson Bay is. Yes, there were two white men. Yes, two years before he [Simon Fraser] came. No, a year