When Victoria was home

Page 5

Book Review

Songhees Pictorial: A history of the Songhees People as seen by Outsiders 1790-1912

By Grant Keddie

Royal BC Museum edition 2003

sc 176 pages, 200 illustrations

This book gives an interesting glimpse of the history of a First Nations group of people who once called Victoria home.

The Songees people, who are Coast Salish, lived in this area for centuries before Europeans built a fort to trade with them and changed their lives forever. Author Grant Keddie uses materials from a number of resources to allow the reader to experience Aboriginal people's lives from 1790 to the present.

A collage of photos that Keddie acquired from the provincial archives and the Royal British Columbia Museum's anthropology audio-visual collections, and also information from such people as former governor James Douglas and the Colonist newspaper in 1800s Victoria are combined to show how non-Aboriginal people acquired Indian land and how they viewed the original inhabitants then.

Keddie, through oral, archaeological and historical accounts, pieces together who the Songees people were and the role they played in the province's history, and gives the reader an understanding of how Europeans changed their lives through assimilation, misunderstanding and fear.

The people who share a dialect of the northern straits Salish language called Lekwungen now live on a reserve called Esquimalt, situated on the western outskirts of Victoria.

Grant Keddie shares many interesting facts, such as the Aboriginal name Ku-sing-ay-las for the community before the area was renamed Fort Victoria on June 10, 1843 by the Hudson's Bay Company.

The name meant 'the place for the strong fibre,' and refers to the strong inner bark of willows that grew there. The people called the trading post Camosun, which referred to the reversing falls in the area.

Today visitors can see cobblestone steps, horse-drawn carriages and commercial retail outlets that spread throughout the capital dating back to the late 1700s and early 1800s, as depicted in one of the drawings. Camosun was considered a fishing and trading area for thousands of Aboriginal people from Alaska in the north to San Francisco, Calif. in the south.

Throughout the 17 chapters about the Songhees-covering their life in centuries past, warfare, the first attempts to remove them from their land, economy, employment, recreation, education and potlatches-I was riveted and felt a deep sadness for this nation whose territory once extended to northern Washington and Kansas. The book covers how the Songhees' lands were distributed, the creation of their reserves, and the roles Britain and the Hudson's Bay Company played as the original people were deprived of their traditional way of life. The book says that in the Victoria area treaties of 1850 and 1852, Europeans appeased the Aboriginal people by distributing blankets to them.

The book is well written. The photographs could be valuable to someone searching for ancestors or interested in how Victoria came to be and how the reserves were set up when the first non-Aboriginal people came to the area.