Cowichan War Chief Tzouhalem: Legend Re-born

Cowichan’s legendary Tzouhalem is in the news again. Not the Quamichan war chief himself—he’s been dead for well over a century—but the fact that he's going to be the subject of a movie.

Reporter Robert Barron recently reported in the Cowichan Valley Citizen that documentary filmmaker Harold C. Joe, a member of Cowichan Tribes, and a film crew are making a television documentary that will “examine the near-mythic figure of Chief Tzouhalem through interviews and creative re-enactments".

The operative word here is “creative” as the only existing written records that refer to Tzouhalem are the hand-me-downs of non-Indigenous (i.e. white) contemporaries (some of them in positions of authority and therefore adversarial).

Meaning that Tzouhalem is seen today through a racially and colonially tinted lens—the very lens that’s now under critical scrutiny across Canada.

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