Navy Cannon Ended Chemainus Potlatch

We’re a year into the online Cowichan Chronicles and I have more story ideas to choose from than when I started. Often, because of time and energy considerations, I take the line of least resistance.

For which I thank the Heavens for my vast Archives and the wonders of the internet!

Almost every day, it seems, there’s something in the news that suggests an event or a personality of the past or that has its roots planted firmly in our history.

The latest example is the horrendous news that more than 200 bodies have been located at the former Kamloops Indian Residential School which closed 50 years ago. The ‘chips’ just keep falling in the story of the residential schools and reopen wounds for its surviving victims and their families...

Fortunately, most history is more fascinating than grim and as a professional storyteller and (so-called) historian I try to balance, hopefully successfully, the good, the bad and the ugly.

So, inspired (if that’s the correct word) by the Kamloops tragedy, I’m going to look at another longstanding government policy that trampled First Nations tradition, the potlatch. To quote thecanadianencyclopedia.ca “a potlatch was commonly held on the occasion of important social events, such as marriages, births and funerals [and] might last for several days and would involve feasting, spirit dances, singing and theatrical demonstrations”.

All of which sounds innocuous enough. But the colonial authorities of the day saw it from a different viewpoint: that the cost of holding a potlatch, which they viewed as a pagan practice, invariably impoverished the host (usually a chief) with long-term consequences to himself, his family and his tribe, and therefore must be outlawed for their own good.

All of which set the stage for conflict, some of it violent, and the subject of next week’s Chronicles.

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Photo caption: For years, HMS Forward enforced what was euphemistically termed ‘gunboat justice’ along B.C.’s coast. —Wikipedia