[Written to Ecojustice the day after Canada's 1st Truth & Reconciliation day]
Subject: Appeal to back Old-Growth forest defenders in legislating a transition out of destructive deforestation & into protection of BC forests
How a smallpox epidemic forged modern British Columbia
Article by Joshua Ostroff August 1, 2017 (excerpt)
On Mar. 12, 1862, the San Francisco steamer Brother Jonathan pulled into the colony of Vancouver Island, a former Hudson’s Bay Company fur trading post that had exploded in population after a mainland gold rush.
Along with merchandise and mules, the ship carried 350 passengers to Victoria — home to 4,000 to 5,000 colonists, with slightly more Indigenous people from various nations camped nearby for trade and work. Most of the passengers were heading to a new strike on the Salmon River...
But along with his pickaxe and gold pan, one of these miners brought another piece of unexpected cargo: smallpox.
The man was quarantined. But the British Colonist noted that, without preventive measures, “we fear that a serious evil will be entailed on the country.” And the measures the colonial government chose —limited vaccination efforts, and declining to try a general quarantine, which would have kept the crisis localized— wound up leading to an epidemic when police emptied the camps at gunpoint, burned them down, and towed canoes filled with smallpox-infected Indigenous people up the coast...
Over the next year, at least 30,000 Indigenous people died, representing about 60 per cent of the population — a crisis that left mass graves, deserted villages, traumatized survivors and societal collapse and, in a real way, created the conditions for modern-day British Columbia. Less than a decade before BC became Canada’s sixth province, the colonial response to this crisis formed the basis for the fraught relationship between First Nations and government...
“The smallpox epidemic […] changes everything in British Columbia,” says John Lutz, the head of the University of Victoria’s history department and an Indigenous-settler relations specialist. “The citizens of Victoria, one could say, panicked. Or, one could say, with a less charitable view, that they deliberately drove the Indigenous people out of town, and that spread the disease back to their home communities up and down the coast.”
It was a betrayal that hasn’t been forgotten by many Indigenous people. “The sad thought is, if they had contained those people who contracted smallpox within the Victoria area, the Indigenous population would be far, far higher today,” says Marianne Nicholson, a Victoria-based 1st Nations artist and anthropology Ph.D. “The colonial authorities […] knew that would spread smallpox throughout British Columbia,” she says. “That was an act of genocide against Indigenous people.. At that point the [government] wanted to be able to claim those lands without having to compensate or recognize Indigenous title."
That thinking —that the colonial response was part of an active land grab as opposed to a tragedy they made much worse and took advantage of— is pervasive. And while there is no concrete evidence of it, historian Robert Boyd did argue in his landmark book The Coming of the Spirit of Pestilence that “the Whites knew” the epidemic was avoidable, and that it “paved the way for the colonization of their lands by peoples of European descent.”
The Colonist even reported at the time that First Nations were worried Governor James Douglas “was about to send the small pox among them for the purpose of killing off the tribe and getting their land.” (Douglas dismissed this at the time as a hoax)
Taken together, the smallpox response, the creation of the residential school system and a ban on the potlatch —a tradition that helps pass on oral histories— have been seen by Indigenous people as efforts to force them to “accept the colonial grand narrative that British Columbia acquired Indigenous lands fairly and in a legal manner,” says Nicholson. “The significance of the 1862-1863 crisis lies in the presence of a rapidly expanding white population due to the Gold Rush... newcomer numbers surged as Indigenous populations fell by as much as 90 per cent in some areas."
Whether or not smallpox began as a colonial conspiracy, settlers started occupying the flat, fertile land that was left seemingly abandoned as devastated Indigenous communities consolidated with hopes of later returning home, says Lutz. “A lot of First Nations village sites were lost to that.”
A belief in terra nullius, or the settlement of “empty land,” spurred land commissioner Joseph Trutch in 1864 to refuse recognition of Indigenous title, kiboshing treaty-making and reducing reserves mapped out pre-epidemic by 92 per cent. “The Indians have really no rights to the lands they claim,” he argued, doling it out instead to settlers, miners and loggers.
That’s why, unlike the rest of Canada, the bulk of B.C. is built on disputed, unceded land; there are almost no treaties establishing rights.
One Indigenous nation, though, did fight back in defence of its land. In 1864, the Tsilhqot’in declared war after being threatened with smallpox by the foreman of a road being built through their territory. This battle, the Chilcotin War, ended with the hanging of six chiefs, an act that then-premier Christy Clark apologized for in a 2014 speech that acknowledged that “there is an indication [smallpox] was spread intentionally.”
“If one applies generally the principles of the Tsilhqot’in title case, British Columbia is a province unlike the rest in that it owns comparatively little of its natural resources,” says Tom Swanky, a Quesnel, B.C. author of books that allege that the epidemic was a “war of extermination” for land. Without smallpox, B.C. would look like the numbered treaty provinces, Swanky believes. “The Crown eventually would have purchased native title, little by little or territory by territory, as needed and, under the Canadian system, the province now would have had some more understandable claim to resources.”
While Indigenous consent is an issue across Canada —the Supreme Court recently ruled on the Crown’s duty to consult Indigenous people on development projects— few First Nations have as much leverage today to address environmental and economic concerns as those in B.C. because treaty-less land is in legal limbo; governments can still overrule opposition, but now must prove “development is pressing, substantial and meets the Crown’s fiduciary duty."
[END ARTICLE EXCERPT]
Surely, current forestry/logging practices cannot be proven as fiduciary nor pressing -- although they are substantial enough to jeopardize our thriving future..
Since Ecojustice was instrumental in the groundbreaking Tsilquotin Nation treaty process, it makes perfect sense to support the Fairy Creek forest defenders in their (/OUR) efforts to save our precious biodiversity & old-growth forests from disastrous DEFORESTATION by logging operations.. Unless that'd require a separate process of which I'm unaware?
I leave you with one last link, to an excellent article which shows BC Forestry is NEITHER economical NOR sustainable:
https://www.focusonvictoria.ca/issue-analysis/35/
Selective, sustainable harvest - i.e. what NO BC forestry co. has EVER done, nor been required to do by our Govt. - apparently hasn't been proposed by ONE of the logging giants operating in BC: clearly they intend to keep on honing the status quo, which is most accurately described as SYSTEMATIC WIPING-OUT OF OUR RARE & VALUABLE 1,000-YEAR-OLD GROWTH FORESTS ALONG WITH EVERY DEPENDENT LIFEFORM IN A DESIGNATED CUT-BLOCK. One thing is clear: if we don't stop this unconscionable rape of our only protections against cont'd degradation --> extinction, it won't be long b4 the forestry industry will bring that eventuality by their stubborn refusal to upgrade their activities to align with required climate action (incl. emissions reductions)
Thanks so much for considering! I look forward to hearing your response..
SINCERELY,
SC.