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The writing and relations between Syilx women and settler women who lived in the Okanagan and Similkameen is the focus of this presentation called “Okanagan Women’s Voices: Syilx and Settler Writing and Relations, 1870s-1960s.”
A collaborative work, this anthology brings together memoirs, newspaper and other essays, poetry, fiction, letters, and storytelling of Syilx and settler women, much of it discovered in local archives and not previously published. It provides a gender-specific perspective on the contact history of this region. Janet discuss how this compilation speaks to the many changes in the way BC history has been studied in recent decades in its inclusion of diverse voices.
Janet MacArthur is one of three editors and contributors to Okanagan Women’s Voices. She has published on Renaissance poetry, women’s literature, autobiography, postcolonial literature, and trauma narratives. At present, she is working on a book about Princeton settler Susan Allison’s unpublished writing. She is an Associate Professor Emerita of English at UBC Okanagan.
An excerpt from the Fall 2023 edition of British Columbia History.
Major J.S. Matthews. (City of Vancouver Archives, AM54-S4-: Port P567)
Happy 90th anniversary to City of Vancouver Archives. Its collection captures the city’s story through 7.2 million photographs, 6,800 maps, 2,800 audio recordings, documents measured in kilometres and terabytes of digital material.
How did it begin? Major James Skitt Matthews, born in Newtown, Wales, and raised in New Zealand, was appointed the first city archivist in 1933 and brought along his vast personal collection. Matthews had landed in Vancouver as a 20-year-old, in 1898, where he worked for Imperial Oil and, later, operated a tugboat business. Twice wounded during the Great War, he achieved the rank of major, and never gave it up.
Matthews interviewed hundreds of people, including Squamish Chief August Jack Khatsahlano. Fiercely defensive about the collection, Matthews often sparred with mayors and bureaucrats—at one time he took his collection home during a dust-up with the library board. He refused to retire, remaining on the job until age 91. The current archives repository in Vanier Park is named in his honour. BC historian Jean Barman has written: “James Skitt Matthews is arguably the single most important individual in the history of Vancouver. While others generated events, he ensured that a record of their activities would survive.” [1] Visit the City of Vancouver Archives: searcharchives.vancouver.ca.
Community discussions begin on the creation of a South Asian Museum. (Courtesy of South Asian Studies Institute)
There has been movement on an NDP election promise made three years ago to build a South Asian Museum. Lana Popham, Minister of Arts, Culture, Tourism and Sport, hosted a roundtable of community leaders and stakeholders to discuss creation of the first museum of its kind in Canada.
There were 100 South Asians living in British Columbia in 1901. By the 2021 census, that number had grown to 473,970. They faced systemic and overt racism, including restrictions on immigration and voting rights.
The South Asian Studies Institute at the University of the Fraser Valley is part of the working group attempting to develop a collective vision for a museum and commented on the gathering: “The primary focus was for community leaders to share their thoughts on how the Ministry should engage with the community to help establish the next steps in realizing the exciting project of a South Asian Museum.”
Some delegates reject the South Asian label and are concerned it homogenizes distinct ethnic communities. The door is now open to further engagement.
Joanne Plourde welcomes visitors to the Francophone heritage picnic at Portage Park in Langley City. (Mark Forsythe)
Next year will mark 200 years since fur trader James McMillan paddled north from Fort Vancouver (at the mouth of the Columbia River) in search of a new location for a Hudson’s Bay Company fort. The Americans were expanding into Oregon and Washington territory, and the HBC could see the writing on the wall. After reaching Mud Bay, the party followed an Indigenous route along the Nicomekl River, portaged to the Salmon River (across what became Langley Prairie) and landed on the shores of the Fraser River. Fort Langley was built three years later, becoming the first permanent non-Indigenous settlement in coastal British Columbia.
The band of adventurers featured a mix of English, Canadiens, Indigenous guides, Métis and Kanaka peoples (Hawaiians). A Francophone heritage picnic has sprouted in recent years where the McMillan party began its portage from the Nicomekl, directly beside historic Michaud House (home to the first Francophone family in Langley). Joanne Plourde and her group, Voyageurs & Co., dress in period costume, belt out Voyageur songs and welcome storytellers from BC and Washington State. It’s a celebration of fur trade history and of new relationships formed with Indigenous peoples. Plans are in the works for further acknowledgement of the 1824 expedition, including by the Surrey Historical Society.
y̓ilmixʷm ki law na Chief Clarence Louie addresses a gathering beside the Okanagan River. He says his band is short some 4,000 acres of original reserve lands. (Courtesy of Aaron Hemens, IndigiNews)
Hundreds of people gathered beside the Okanagan River as drums and songs honoured the return of a sacred fishing site. The Osoyoos Indian Band says it was denied access when reserve lands were taken back by the provincial and federal governments. The 1913 McKenna-McBride Royal Commission opened the door to reduce the size of reserves. The syilx people had fished here for thousands of years and always regarded the loss of 71 acres as theft; a blockade was launched by syilx Okanagan Nation members back in 1974.
Recently a one-acre parcel came on the market and the Osoyoos Indian Band purchased it. y̓ilmixʷm ki law na Chief Clarence Louie told the gathering, “Land is always more important than money. Always has been and always will be. We don’t like the fact that we have to buy our own land back, but that’s just the way it is.”
Navvy Jack House sits on the West Vancouver waterfront. (Courtesy of West Vancouver Historical Society)
Scheduled to be demolished by the District of West Vancouver, Navvy Jack house has a second lease on life. A grassroots campaign (that included West Vancouver Historical Society) convinced the District to apply brakes to the plan. Built in about 1874 by a Welshman, John Thomas, the pioneer building is the oldest structure in West Vancouver, and was the location of its first post office. Thomas, a.k.a. Navvy Jack, was a true pioneer who hunted for Cariboo gold and who ran the first ferry service from Ambleside to Vancouver and also a successful gravel business. He married a granddaughter of “Old Chief” Kiapilano and is an ancestor to many Squamish, Tsleil-Waututh and Musqueam families.
Vacant since 2017, the house sits just above the tide line on Argyle Avenue. This spring, the district announced it had located a partner to restore the home and turn it into a café where settler and Indigenous history can be shared and celebrated. The district will contribute $1 million and a $1.6-million fundraising campaign continues: information about the history of the house is at Save Navvy Jack House, savenavvyjackhouse.com. •
1 Jean Barman, foreword to The Man Who Saved Vancouver: Major James Skitt Matthews, by Daphne Sleigh (Surrey, BC: Heritage House, 2008)
Mark Forsythe travels through BC and back in time, exploring the unique work of British Columbia Historical Federation members.
The Fall 2023 issue of British Columbia History is guest-edited by Angie Bains, a researcher for the Union of BC Indian Chiefs among other roles. The theme is “This Land.”
Stories inside include:
Plus we have contributions from regulars Mark Forsythe, Terry Arnett, and books editor Aimee Greenaway.
Subscribe or order individual issues with our online store.
In this presentation, Jon Bartlett and Rika Ruebsaat tell the story of a coal miners’ strike in Princeton during the Depression. The winter of 1932-33 saw the small town of Princeton divided. Princeton’s few thousand citizens saw much of the human drama of the Great Depression play out right in their own lives over the course of just a few months.
Bartlett and Ruebsaat are on the board of the Princeton and District Museum and Archives Society and have worked as teachers, authors, and professional signers. Together they have released seven CDs and two books focused on the Similkameen valley where they live.
In this presentation, Jon Bartlett and Rika Ruebsaat tell the story of a coal miners’ strike in Princeton during the Depression. The winter of 1932-33 saw the small town of Princeton divided.
Princeton’s few thousand citizens saw much of the human drama of the Great Depression play out right in their own lives over the course of just a few months.
Anna Irwin, recognition committee chair of the BC Historical Federation, speaks with Deane Harold, brother of the late Shawn Lamb. Shawn was recently recognized for preserving history and heritage though her work at the Nelson Museum and Archives. The award was delivered posthumously.
Since the first arrival of the Chinese in North America’s Gold Mountain, the institution of the Chinese laundry has been closely tied to the Chinese community. Not so long ago, the phrase “No Tickee, No Laundry” was a not an uncommon phrase used in daily conversation in BC towns and cities. Curiously, neither the Chinese community, museum community, nor academia has shone a light on this elephant in the room.
Elwin Xie’s presentation to the BCHF conference in Princeton last month draws on material within the public domain as well as from his personal fonds, resulting in a dynamic presentation shared from the inside out. A shadow puppet show, and a reading animate the presentation.
Elwin was raised in his family laundry’s business in Vancouver’s Chinatown and Hogan’s Alley during the 1960s. He is the author of Union Laundry—The Story of Harry and May Yuen published in British Columbia History magazine (Winter 2020). Elwin has worked as a museum interpreter at the Burnaby Village Museum since 2008, and he’s a council member with the British Columbia Historical Federation.
This story, which appeared in the Fall 2022 edition of British Columbia History Magazine, was chosen as the recipient of the Anne and Phillip Yandle Best Article Award.
By Jennifer Iredale, [1] in honour and memory of the late Irene Bjerky [2]
From my mother I inherited a beautiful cedar root basket tray, and because I liked it so much my partner started giving me cedar root baskets for my birthdays. But it was when I was doing research in the museum in Yale that I became really interested in cedar root baskets made by Nlaka’pamux women in that region.
There I found a gift form listing artifacts related to All Hallows in the West School. My excitement was piqued by the list of baskets that named the makers. These objects, donated by Aida Freeman, came from the collection of her mother Kathleen Edith (Pearson) Southwell who had been a student at All Hallows in the West. Kathleen had collected the baskets from makers living in the southern interior of BC, near her home in North Bend. [3] This article looks at the history of basket making at All Hallows in the West and explores why it was included in the school’s curriculum.
Mrs. Rose Skuki and her Lytton basket shop, 1941. Photo: Kamloops Museum KMA 7643
All Hallows in the West was a mission school for Indigenous girls founded in Yale, in 1884 by three nuns who came from the Community of All Hallows, in Ditchingham, Norfolk, England. To fund the school for Indigenous girls, the nuns added a “Canadian school” for white girls (Kathleen Pearson was one of the students) and eventually received funding as a residential school from the Canadian government. [4] Until All Hallows school closed in 1920, the nuns taught a dual curriculum—as historian Jean Barman wrote, a “separate and unequal” curriculum—with the Indigenous girls trained for household and domestic service, and the white girls educated for “their anticipated roles as social leaders.” [5]
For a time, the school curriculum for the Indigenous students included cedar root basket making, [6] an art that the Sisters from England so admired that they they submitted “a collection of Indian baskets, the work of Spuzzum and Yale Indian women,” to the Agricultural and Horticultural Exhibition at Agassiz. The baskets won second prize. [7] The Sisters described the baskets as “water-tight, endurable, and ornamental,” and they published an article on the topic in the winter 1901 issue of their quarterly journal.
“All Hallows Mission,” they wrote, “has for many years interested itself in this particular branch of Industry, among the Indian women, and the Sisters have done a great deal to encourage it, not only by purchasing all the well made baskets brought to them for sale…but by suggesting new patterns, shapes and sizes.” [8]
All Hallows was designed along the same lines as the “mother” school in Norfolk, England, established to teach poor English girls skills such as needlework and housekeeping that would allow them to earn a living—and keep them from becoming prostitutes on the streets of London. [9] At All Hallows, the Sisters included basket making in the curriculum because they recognized this skill could provide a source of income for the basket-makers.
The article in the All Hallows in the West Journal noted that “small [baskets] for waste paper, flowers, letters, work etc., range in price from 25 cents to $2 or $3,” [approximately $6 to $75 in 2022] and that “large ones suitable for linen baskets, provisions, wood, etc. are sold for prices varying from $7.50 to $15” [approximately $190 to $380 in 2022]. [10] It then added, “A single large basket very often represents a whole winter’s steady work. When we realize this, the prices asked for them will not appear so very exorbitant.” [11]
Indigenous students in the West School. Photo: Community of All Hallows
Rose Charlie at All Hallows, circa 1886. Photo: Boehm Collection, Community of All Hallows
The article described how the roots were gathered—“dug up with difficulty out of the ground”—and then soaked before being “scraped and split” to make pliable for working. The coiling technique was described: “[E]ach ‘stitch’ so to speak, is laboriously made by drawing the fibre through a hole which has been pierced by a sharp pointed bone instrument, in the preceding row.” The white designs were worked in “a white reedy grass, which only grows near the mouth of the river, and is very costly for the Indians to obtain,” while red patterns were worked “with strips of the inner bark of the wild cherry.” Dark designs were made using naturally dyed wild cherry bark. [12]
Many of these tools and techniques are still in use by basket makers today. I became very curious about the makers of these fine baskets. Which of the All Hallows girls learned this complicated skill? Had any of the women named on the museum’s gift form attended the school? What was their story?
A chance encounter at the Yale First Nation Band office led me to a meeting with researcher and genealogist Irene Bjerky, a descendent of Clara Clare (Kesutetkwu) [13] who had been one of the students at All Hallows School. To get Irene’s attention when I met her one summer afternoon almost twenty years ago, I helped her can dozens of fresh-caught salmon. After the canning was done and the guts and fish scales cleaned up, Irene took me upstairs, where she spread out the longest, largest family tree I have ever seen. She showed me where the names listed on the Yale museum gift form fit in the genealogicaly. The family tree was a “map” of Nlaka’pamux families in the Canyon dating back to pre-contact days.
Irene knew a lot about basketry—her great-grandmother, Clara (Kesutetkwu) had passed down a beautiful collection to her granddaughter, Irene’s mother, Clare, and they both deeply treasured that collection. Irene published her research in First Nations Baskets at the Langley Museum. [14] She also wrote up biographies of three basket makers whose names were on the Yale museum gift form: Rose Charlie, [15] Emma Florence “Kolchasta,” [16] and Annie Campbell. [17] Only Rose Charlie attended All Hallows. Irene’s research identified other basket makers who were also students there.
Susan Paul “Kalalshe” and Chief Paul Xixneʡ of Spuzzum sent their daughters—Mali (Mali McInnes), [18] Annie (Marion Dodd), [19] Rosalie (Rosalie Gutterriez Paul Charlie), [20] Maria, and Sarah—to All Hallows School. The girls had learned basket making from their mother [21] and might also have studied basketry at the school. Their mother, Kalalshe, [22] provided extensive and detailed information on cedar root basketry to anthropologist James Teit who wrote of her: “Mrs. Paul…[is] particularly well informed about her craft and likewise a very excellent technician. Much of the information about the practices of the basket maker was obtained from her.” [23]
A fine basket in the All Hallows archives in England has designs very similar to those found on Susan Paul baskets now at the Canadian Museum of History in Ottawa. [24]
Top three: baskets created by Anastasia Chapman. Bottom three: baskets created by Annie Charlie. Images courtesy of the Royal BC Museum and Archives (top down: 12785, 13083, 13085; bottom down: 12788, 12789, 12791 A, B.)
The school’s master basket maker and basketry teacher, called Katlea, [25] was described in a 1901 article in the All Hallows Journal as making half a dozen fine baskets each year, “beautifully made, firm, even and of silvery whiteness.” [26] The nuns were so impressed with Katlea’s baskets that when the Duke and Duchess of Cornwall and York stopped in Yale in 1901, they gave “an Indian basket made of cedar fibre,” to the visiting royalty. [27] Katlea, understandably, had high standards: She once complained to the nuns that her students were too impatient, to which a Sister replied,
“Some allowance must be made, dear Dame Keatlea [sic], for young, inexperienced hands whose finger tips, not yet hardened by the work, get sore and tired, and then fibres are not drawn firmly, and looseness and unevenness are the result.” [28]
In the Langley Centennial Museum is a basket attributed to either All Hallows student Rose Oppenheim (1879–1976) 29 or to her mother, Nukwa, an Nlaka’pamux woman. She was also known as Hannah. At the age of fourteen, she married immigrant Louis Oppenheim and moved from her traditional home in Spuzzum to the colonial town of Yale.
Three of Nukwa’s daughters, including Rose, attended All Hallows, but it’s not known if they studied basketry there or learned it from their mother. [30] We do know the basket at Langley is a very fine coiled cedar root “burden” basket with a bold design imbricated in black and red cherry bark, “well made slowly in the Spuzzum way.” [31] It would have been made for use rather than for tourists to buy. [32]
Clara Clare (known as Clara Dominic at the school) was known as Kesutetkwu in the Nɬeʔkepmxcín language of her people. She is remembered as a fine needleworker and basket maker. When she was eight, her Spuzzum family sent her to All Hallows. She remained there until she was 21, when she left to marry William Frank Clare. [33]
Annie Charlie and Anastasia Chapman in front of Hudson’s Bay Store in Yale, 1883. Photo: City of Vancouver Archives AM54-S4-OUT P836
Clara’s granddaughter, Clare Chrane recalled: “My grandmother was a basketmaker and I remember her sitting with a pail of water with cut roots and her deer bone awl making holes [in the coiled cedar root bundles], then pushing cut roots through the row above. I had many questions but did not ask who taught her. Just imagined it was her mom.” At least one of Clara’s baskets is still in the family. [34]
Rose Skuki was an All Hallows student who later became very well-known as a basket maker. She owned the Lytton Basket Shop. Born about 1878, Rose’s father was settler George Ward, and her mother, Mary of Nohomeen, was Nlaka’pamux. [35] Rose later recalled that, “The priest comes and picks the kids and send them to school. I was 10 when I went to All Hallows School. I liked it. They treat us all right. It’s good.”
Rose was a student in the early years at All Hallows, between about 1888 and 1891. She was sent home after being injured (we don’t know the exact injury she suffered). Rose recalled classmates Clara Clare and “Ruby from Spuzzum and Mali, too, and Annie and Zlita and Eta from Thompson [River] side.” [36]
Rose married Arthur Skuki, who was related to the Nlaka’pamux community in North Bend. In 1911 she and other basket makers travelled to Australia to teach and demonstrate coiled basketry. [37] Again, it is not known if she learned her basketry skills at school or at home, though given the short time she attended All Hallows, the latter seems most likely.
Yet another All Hallows student who became a fine basket maker was Annie Chapman, daughter of notable basket maker Anastasia Chapman. Annie’s granddaughter Marion Dixon told me that Annie was sent to All Hallows in 1902 from her home in Spuzzum and that she had a “wonderful time” in the four years she attended All Hallows. “[A]ll those people, all those girls, the Sisters were so good to us.” [38]
Though Annie may have studied basketry at the school, it is more likely that it was her mother, Anastasia, who taught her. Annie passed on traditional Nlaka’pamux skills, including coiled cedar root basket making to Marion.
“My grandmother had a place in her log house for making baskets. I was six years old when she started teaching me to make baskets.” Marion recalled her grandmother would begin coiling the roots to create the bottom of the basket, then hand her a deer bone awl and the “start” and “we would do it til I got it right.”
Marion said that Annie would uncoil bad work and have her granddaughter begin again if it wasn’t right. [39]
In 1909 the All Hallows Journal published an article called “Making Baskets,” written in the first person but unattributed. It seems to have been written by one of the Indigenous students.
When we want to make a basket, we find a cedar tree, then we dig for the roots. We don’t dig the roots from the very bottom of the tree, because they are very tough, but we go quite far from the tree and then start to dig, and the roots will be nice and soft. Then we go down to the brook and put them in water, then we scrape the skin off, and split them in half. We make some wide pieces and some skinny ones. When we get the stuff to make the patterns on our baskets, we get it off the wild chokecherry [40] tree. We cut it around and around the branch, and we pull it off, and scrape it with a knife and then it is red and shiny, and if we want it black, we put them in tea leaves, or sometimes we get an old rusty tin and put it in and it gets black. Then we go into the field and get some dry grass, and they are green at the first, and you hang it up to get dry, and when it gets dry it gets white. Then we get a bone out of the deer’s leg, and we sharpen it with an axe for a while, then we take a sharp knife and sharpen it sharp at the end. [41]
Further references to basketry in the journal include a record in the accounts for 1905 for “Sale of Baskets: $10” [approximately $250 in 2022] and an expenditure of $37.20 for the “Basket Industry” [approximately $1,000 in 2022]. [42]
The same year, a student called Agnes won first prize for basket making and another, called “Canada” (a Theresa Canada was registered at the school) won second prize. In addition, there is mention of an “inspection by visitors of the children’s work in basketry.” [43] One of the Sisters wrote that, “Industries of various sorts, flourished gaily even during the severest weather, and though our first baskets were not so even as we hope our later ones may be…yet we hope to do good work some day.” [44]
The establishment of schools like Crofton House in Vancouver led to declining enrollment of settler’s daughters, and that part of All Hallows closed in 1915. The mission school closed in September 1917, and 33 pupils were sent to St. George’s Residential School in Lytton. In 1920, the Sisters returned to England. [45] The school, as well as the Aida Freeman collection of cedar root baskets, is commemorated through artifacts exhibited at the Yale Historic Site. [46]
The Sisters greatly admired Nlaka’pamux basketry and included basket making in the curriculum at All Hallows in the West. Nevertheless, many Indigenous students who later became proficient basket makers [47] learned their skills and designs from their mothers and families. It is chiefly because the coiled cedar root basket making tradition of the Nlaka’pamux people is so notable, even recognized by the National Historic Sites and Monuments Board of Canada (2018), [48] that it is worth documenting the history of the tradition at All Hallows in the West. •
Jennifer Iredale is a passionate historian with a Mayne Island connection dating to 1958. A graduate of UBC (History) and Columbia University (Heritage Preservation) she was curator for BC’s Provincial Heritage Properties beginning her career at Barkerville Provincial and National Historic Site in the 1970s. She has previously published in the BC Historical News and BC Studies and is editor/author of Enduring Threads: Ecclesiastical Textiles of St. John the Divine Church, Yale, British Columbia (Fraser Heritage Society, 2004). She curated numerous websites on BC history (http://bcheritage.ca/). In 2015 she received a Distinguished Service Award from the BC Museums Association. Thanks and acknowledgement for the information in this article goes to Marie Elliott and her wonderful histories of Mayne Island and to Joanna Weeks, booking agent and self-proclaimed “Hall Hag” and past president of the Mayne Island Agricultural Society.
Maurice Guibord
The British Columbia Historical Federation is pleased to announce Vancouver’s Maurice Guibord is a recipient of a Certificate of Appreciation.
Certificates of Appreciation are awarded by the BCHF to individuals who have given exceptional service for a specific project or long service in the preservation of BC’s history.
Guibord is being recognized for his decade of service to the BCHF board, including as second and first vice-president and convener (and outstanding emcee) of the annual historical writing awards, a role he has held since 2014 but is now stepping down from.
The award was presented at the BCHF’s conference in Princeton on July 22.
“We are grateful for all the time and energy Maurice has given to the BCHF over the past 10 years,” president Rosa Flinton-Brown said. “We will miss his optimism, positivity and camaraderie at the board level. However, to our good fortune, Maurice has promised to stay in close contact with the BCHF and attend our future conferences.”
Outside the BCHF, Guibord is director of the Société historique francophone de la Colombie-Britannique and has been recognized for his invaluable contribution to the research and dissemination of BC’s francophone history and heritage.
He was also a founding director of the Heritage Vancouver Society, has been active with the Vancouver Heritage Foundation, and hosts historical walking tours of Lower Mainland neighbourhoods in both French and English.
Whether you attended the BCHF conference last month or not, you can relive the event through our Flickr stream, below. Included are shots from our tours of Granite Creek and Coalmont, the grist mill and gardens at Keremeos, the Hedley museum, the wine and cheese at the Princeton Museum, the gala awards ceremony, presentations by our various speakers, and fun on the porch of conference organizers Jon Bartlett and Rika Ruebsaat.
British Columbia Historical FederationPO Box 448, Fort Langley, BC, Canada, V1M 2R7Information: info@bchistory.ca
The Secretariat of the BCHF is located on the unceded territories of the Coast Salish speaking Peoples.
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