Blog & News

Filmed at Old Hastings Mill Store Museum in Vancouver, author Lisa Anne Smith in conversation with BCHF’s Mark Forsythe, about all things related to Vancouver’s oldest surviving building.

Smith discusses her new book, Hastings Mill: The Historic Times of a Vancouver Community, delving deep into colourful stories of the mill, its eclectic cast of characters, and how an unlikely group of women, the Native Daughters of British Columbia, saved an iconic remnant of Vancouver heritage from demolition. Follow the link HERE.

During our 2022 conference, each session began with a minute-long video consisting of historic moments and pictures from the BCHF’s first century. We’re now posting the videos on Facebook. You can also watch them below.

Content warning: This video relates to Indian Residential Schools. A reminder that the Indian Residential School Survivors Society has a 24 hour Crisis Line available: 1-866-925-4419.

A research team from Williams Lake First Nation spoke to the recent BCHF conference about how accessing residential school records helps to shape to shape commemorations of school sites and the surrounding communities. The panelists are Genevieve Weber (Royal BC Museum), Charlene Belleau (Williams Lake First Nation), and Whitney Spearing (Williams Lake First Nation)

Scott Sheffield’s investigations of the academic literature on the Second World War in BC revealed a surprising dearth of literature explicitly exploring the impact of that global conflict on the communities and residents of this province.

Through some concerted searching he was able to glean a number of references and sometimes thoughtful and concerted coverage of the war years across a diverse range of hundreds of works on BC’s history. On the whole though, the story was fragmentary, disconnected, and relatively meagre.

Only a few stories have been incorporated into the broader narrative of BC’s history: the internment, dispossession and expatriation of the Japanese-Canadian population; the economic and industrial boom; women’s enhanced contributions as a result; and the growth in the strength and legitimacy of organized labour.

Beyond these usual touch stones, relatively little evidence that the war occurred in this province has managed to penetrate the scholarly history, public memory or identity of British Columbians. Yet, as he explains in a recent presentation to the BCHF annual conference, the evidence and historical writing that does exist suggests that the Second World War was fundamentally important to the development of modern British Columbia.

R. Scott Sheffield is an associate professor of history at the University of the Fraser Valley who spent the bulk of his career researching Indigenous military service and he is the author of The Red Man’s on the Warpath: The Image of the ‘Indian’ and the Second World War (UBC Press, 2004), and (with Noah Riseman) Indigenous Peoples and the Second World War: The Politics, Experiences and Legacies of War in the United States, Canada, Australia and New Zealand (Cambridge U Press, 2019), as well as numerous articles and book chapters.  His current research explores British Columbia’s home front during the Second World War, especially the role of community in shaping British Columbians’ experience of total war. 

Objects have a life within a museum’s collection. That life may be short or long. New objects enter collections and others leave collections as part of the professional process of curatorial stewardship. Today as a society we are re-evaluating our many histories. In this recent talk to the BCHF annual conference, Dr. Lorne Hammond presents examples of how that process works with a museum collection and in exhibits, and show how an object’s meaning can completely change over the centuries, as our interpretations of BC history evolve.

Hammond is a curator in the history department at the Royal British Columbia Museum and Archives.

Today Indigenous people are struggling to negotiate treaties with the BC and Canadian governments and in other ways to re-assume meaningful say over their ancestral lands and resources. Likewise, they are seeking to re-establish forms of self-governance that will be recognized and respected within Canada’s federal constitutional traditions.

Indigenous people and non-Indigenous Canadians alike are rightly asking why this process is proving so difficult, and likewise why respectful reconciliatory relations were not established much earlier? The answer to these and related questions require careful historical analysis.

In this recent presentation to the BCHF annual conference Keith Thor Carlson brings ethnohistorical methods and techniques to provide an assessment of settler colonial processes in Canada’s Pacific province. He concludes by outlining the pre-conditions, as he sees them, for building reconciliation between Indigenous people and non-Indigenous Canadian society today.

Thor Carlson is a Tier 1 Canada Research Chair in Indigenous and Community-engaged History at the University of the Fraser Valley. He is also the director of the university’s Peace and Reconciliation Centre.

Victoria became John Adams’ adopted city in 1960. As a new kid who was interested in history, he tried to make up for lost time by exploring far and wide and by talking to neighbours and the parents of his friends. His studies and work eventually took him in numerous other directions but when he returned to Victoria in 1979 to work at the Royal BC Museum, he quickly picked up where he had left off and has never stopped searching for hidden corners and arcane information about BC’s capital city.

What was happening in Victoria 100 years ago when the BC Historical Federation’s predecessor held its inaugural meeting here? John has chosen several disparate themes and have woven them together as a series of vignettes in the locations where they took place. This video was presented at the recent BCHF conference.

John Adams is the owner of Discover the Past, a history company in Victoria. He is a researcher, author, speaker and tour leader. He is a former president of the Victoria Historical Society and the Old Cemeteries Society of Victoria. His latest book Chinese Victoria will be released around the time of the conference.

Nowhere is remembrance more evident than in Victorian funerary rituals, where a range of memento mori and markers of death served to maintain the deceased in the minds of the living. As an educator, Nicole Kilburn has found that tangible learning experiences serve a similar purpose in memory-making.

This presentation to the recent BCHF conference explores the intersection of teaching historical content in tangible, material ways to heighten the act of remembrance and presents a recent example of a partnership with the Royal BC Museum. It also highlights how remembering the past, particularly in the context of death, is a powerful tool when contemplating the same concepts in the present.

Kilburn teaches anthropology at Camosun College in Victoria, British Columbia. She has a background in archaeology, but teaches a wide range of courses, increasingly with a focus on applied learning for student success. Her most recent new course, the Anthropology of Death, considers many topics, including memory making and the creation of ancestors across time and space. She has enjoyed learning from, and partnering with the RBCM to create memorable learning opportunities for students while sharing these important concepts with the public.

Due to historical exclusion and colonial record-keeping practices, not many non-Indigenous families from minority groups can trace their family histories back to the gold rush period that began in 1858 in the land we know as British Columbia today.

Two families, one French Canadian and the other Chinese Canadian, however, continue to prosper with rare well-recorded generational continuities from the gold rush era to the present day. The Guichon and the Louie-Seto families have persisted through historic periods of great adversity, including the Great Depression and the Chinese exclusion era, and have built lasting legacies in BC In juxtaposition, their experiences reveal patterns that informed their resilience. Specifically, the families through generations have emphasized education, intercultural community building, and family values of kindness, resonating with our needs during the unsettling time of global pandemic crisis.

This recent presentation to the BCHF conference takes a closer look at the family lessons from these two BC families that sustained them through challenges in BC history. Their demonstrated strength is at the core of shared values for BC’s intercultural community lives.

Dr. Tzu-I Chung is a cultural and social historian, specializing in the study of transnational migration within the context of historical, cultural and economic interactions between North America and Asia-Pacific. As a curator of history at the Royal BC Museum and Archives, she has developed, facilitated, and led cross-sectoral community heritage and legacy projects. Her research has informed numerous exhibitions, curriculum development, and public and academic publications on the topics of anti-racism, cross-cultural community histories, and critical heritage studies. She is currently a member of the Canadian Cultural Property Export Review Board, and a peer reviewer for academic journals and a juror for public history prizes and grants.

As the director of a non-profit museum, president of the Friends of the BC Archives, and an adjunct professor of BC history, Kelly Black has gained a unique perspective on the highs and lows of practicing public history in British Columbia. In his presentation to the recent BCHF conference, Dr. Black highlights some of his adventures in public history work over the last few years and describe the impact that waning government support is having on access, labour, and understanding about the past.

Black is the executive director at Point Ellice House Museum and Gardens in Victoria. Kelly has more than a decade of experience in heritage, museums, and non-profit management and he received his PhD in Canadian Studies from Carleton University in 2018. Kelly is also an adjunct professor in the Department of History at Vancouver Island University and current president of the Friends of the BC Archives. He lives with his wife and son in the Cowichan Valley.