8. Possessions and Dispossessions

The original human inhabitants of Clayoquot Sound, like those of Nootka, formed a culture dominated by two concepts: hereditary rank and kinship. Rank was based on possession of rights to inherited property of the land and the sea and the ability to exercise these rights. Ownership of nontangible items—names, legends, dances, histories—was also a matter of bright pride and possession. Much may have changed over the years since John Meares’ visit, but the legacies of culture cannot be swept away.

And so it was that when the linguist Dr. Barbara Efrat went to interview the Hesquiaht for an oral history project of the Provincial Archives of British Columbia in the 1970s, she found that information supplied to her was dominated by matters relating to possession, or possessory rights that had been encroached upon, or trespassed, by non-Natives, governments and corporations. Much attention was given over within the culture to property rights both on land and in the water, but there was also a focus on property rights in their language and dialects. She learned of Native resentment. She found that not long before a Cultural Committee had been established to protect Hesquiaht culture and how it was to be interpreted by outsiders. “The culture has not died out,” she wrote, “despite severe provocation from white institutions, but has changed and adapted to the new conditions introduced by the Europeans.”²⁴⁶

Here, then, is the basis of the persistent claim of rights and privileges to the forest and to the sea that emerged in dramatic fashion and gained prominent public attention in 1984, when Moses Martin declared Meares Island “a garden.” It was the Nuu-chah-nulth version of “They shall not pass.”

Indigenous nations of Clayoquot Sound had been actively protesting for years, but in 1984 their cause became a matter of intense interest, gaining public attention at last, and with it the attention of the media. Logging company MacMillan Bloedel (MacBlo) had made clear its intentions to clear-cut sections of Meares Island, as was the company’s legal right under rules of forestry management regulated by the Province of British Columbia, and the Tla-o-qui-aht were determined to prevent this happening.

On April 21, 1984, at the Meares Island Easter Festival in Tofino’s Wickaninnish School gymnasium, 600 people, including local residents, musicians and members of the media, gathered for an urgent meeting arranged by the Friends of Clayoquot Sound. Vancouver Island artist Godfrey Stevens had carved Weeping Woman Cedar for the event, and the carving became an enduring symbol for conservation. An air of seriousness filled the room. Momentous announcements were about to be made.²⁴⁷

At this meeting Moses Martin, Chief Councillor of the Tla-o-qui-aht, and already introduced as the leading voice championing the Meares Island case for recognition of Aboriginal title and rights, declared Meares Island a Tribal Park. Perhaps a little unusually in the circumstances, this, “Tribal Park,” was the term he used to declare Tla-o-qui-aht territorial rights on Meares.

The formal Declaration, dated that same April 21, 1984, had been signed by two hereditary chiefs, George Frank and Alex Frank Sr., and carried the name of the Clayoquot Band Council. “We would permit access to the island for Recreational purposes,” says the Declaration. It also included the demand that outsiders “Recognize our Land Claims and that there be no resources removed from Meares Island excluding watershed [by which was meant water to supply Tofino and its worried inhabitants].”

The Western Canada Wilderness Committee, headquartered in Vancouver, circulated the Declaration widely, accompanying it with a request for donations to the Committee, tax deductible. In consequence, wider audiences were now being informed of the process, and special interest groups defending landscapes, birdlife, natural wildlife, watersheds, hunting rights and much more came forward in support.

The partnership of Friends of Clayoquot Sound and the Tla-o-qui-aht (formerly Clayoquot) now took action on Meares Island. They laid out a trail from Heelboom (C’is-a-quis) Bay (on the far side of Mount Colnett as seen from Tofino) to “the forest giant,” one of the oldest and biggest trees (measuring a nearly unimaginable nineteen metres in diameter). Others took initiatives of a different sort. Joe and Carl Martin revived tradition and started carving canoes at C’is-a-quis Bay. A nastier turn of events came when eco-warrior militants took independent and unauthorized action. They began driving big metal spikes into trees on Meares—an act of protest with results sure to impede loggers, damage equipment, destroy chainsaws and injure operators.²⁴⁸ Tensions continued to rise.

On September 11 of that year, the Tla-o-qui-aht and Ahousaht, backed by other representatives of the recently established Nuu-Chah-Nulth Tribal Council (NTC), staged a protest at the Legislative Buildings in Victoria. A month later, on October 21, a “Save Meares” protest of 1,200 people gathered on the lawn of the Legislative Buildings. Events were moving toward an encounter of forces at Heelboom Bay, where MacBlo had a landing stage, or timber berth.

Sentiment against the company had risen to fever pitch. Here was a case of traditional Native rights and claims to resources advanced against the claims of a corporation. Because the Province held the legal and administrative machinery to grant tree-cutting licences (and this was all above board, so to speak), the Government of British Columbia also became a target of the Indigenous nations. And because the Government of Canada, which had legislative powers over Indian Affairs, owned property on Meares Island, in the form of the two Indian reserves, it, too, was targeted by the Indigenous peoples as a future defendant in a legal case the NTC intended to launch. The only thing missing was an event that would galvanize Native forces and bring in allies to the cause.

Exactly a month after the “Save Meares” protest in Victoria, on November 21, 1984, the loggers, with their chainsaws, plus MacBlo officials, approached Heelboom Bay in the company workboat Kennedy Queen. A flotilla of small boats greeted them, an unarmed Native force of resistance.

A violent encounter was expected, and the RCMP were there in what was regarded as sufficient force, but there was no armed resistance, no worry or intention of violence on the Native side: only a declaration of positions based on rights proclaimed in the Declaration of the Tribal Park. The Ahousaht and Tla-o-qui-aht had no quarrel with the loggers, but they did want to preserve the forests. Moses Martin told the loggers that this was his people’s garden and that they were not to cut trees.

The result of this encounter was a decision by MacBlo not to proceed with a forceful occupation. The NTC had made it known that it would request an injunction against timber cutting on Meares Island, and was prepared to go to the Supreme Court of Canada. Two days after the standoff, on November 23, MacBlo brought forth its own case, an action against Michael Mullin (local head of the Friends of Clayoquot Sound), Moses Martin, eight others and “anyone else” seeking to block access to the timber reserves within the licence. Shortly thereafter, Moses Martin et al. brought forward their claim to seek an injunction against clear-cutting, arguing that Meares Island was Aboriginal territory where their Aboriginal rights existed.

The Tla-o-qui-aht and Ahousaht bands on their own could not wage such a fight against the powerful controllers of the public patrimony in trees. But the NTC’s fast organization and the political will of many of its member nations brought muscle and zeal to the cause; indeed, the NTC had anticipated these events. Rosenberg, Rosenberg and Woodward were handed the file to commence, when ready, the legal proceedings on behalf of the NTC against MacBlo, the Crown in right of British Columbia and the Crown in right of Canada. It was a bold move, with uncertain results. And it was as a consequence of these events that I was brought in as one of the subject experts to prepare the historical report for the NTC.

It is hard to imagine an Elysium less conducive to considering weighty matters than rustic Yellow Point Lodge, near Nanaimo, on the east coast Vancouver Island. Here, perched on a sandstone abutment facing out to Georgia Strait, gazing across to the snow-clad mountains that flank the mainland of the continent, we gathered to make sure we understood “the rules of the game.” Truth to tell, the scenery was distracting at times. Perhaps, I amused myself at a later date, that is why serious seminars at the university are held in what might be best described as windowless cellblocks!

The legal team of Rosenberg, Rosenberg and Woodward had convened our meeting: Jack Woodward, David Rosenberg and Paul Rosenberg had all the facts to hand. All the “specialist subject experts” were in attendance. I was meeting most of them for the first time: John Dewhirst, the famed archaeologist of Yuquot; Barbara and Robert Lane, anthropologists with bullish credits in that line of scholarly work; and Arnoud Stryd, expert in prehistoric archaeology, soils and geology. As said, I had been admitted to this learned circle because of my knowledge of coastal communities during the colonial period of British Columbia’s history. All present knew about my book Gunboat Frontier. We set aside disciplinary rivalries and all points of scholarly disputation. The historian’s epistemology, for example, veers radically away from that of anthropologist. As we sat and talked, getting acquainted for the first time, I realized that this was a top team, each and every one at or near the peak of their game. We were inspired, I recall, by the expansive venue, but we were equally taken and inspired by the professionalism of our legal leaders.

“The question of the effectiveness of the pre-Confederation enactments to extinguish title has risen again in the aboriginal title cases presently before the courts in British Columbia,” Woodward later wrote in Native Law. This was so, he explained, “especially in the Meares Island case, which, as pleaded, places this as a central legal issue before the court.”²⁴⁹

At the time we were meeting in 1984, the Calder case (1973) had produced inconclusive results on whether Aboriginal title had been extinguished—half the justices in that case had argued there appeared to have been no “clear and plain” intention to extinguish title, which suggested it still existed. By 1980 a test to determine the existence of Aboriginal title in Canada was developed in Baker Lake v. Minister of Indian Affairs and Northern Development, a case involving an Inuit band. According to Justice Mahoney:

"

The elements which the Plaintiffs must prove to establish an Aboriginal title cognizable at common law are:

1. That they and their ancestors were members of an organized society.

2. That the organized society occupied the specific territory over which they assert the aboriginal title.

3. That the occupation was to the exclusion of other organized societies.

4. That the occupation was an established fact at the time sovereignty was asserted by England.

"

In short, proof of Aboriginal title required an organized society, specific territory, exclusive occupancy and occupancy from date of British sovereignty.²⁵⁰

We who were preparing for the Meares case were instructed by counsel to present irrefutable evidence of the highest scholarly standards of verification. We did not want to be pilloried on the witness stand, so we all worked extremely hard to defend the highest goals of accuracy, rigid analysis, thorough research and sober judgments. If nothing else, Meares Island demonstrated the need to have irrefutable reporting of the subject evidence. I had to learn the basics of all the relevant modern litigation. The landscape was shifting quickly, and the results were progressive, beneficial to Native causes and rights. Canada was not entering new territory: this was a well-seasoned business for Ottawa, and before that the Colonial Office and Board of Trade of the United Kingdom. But in Canada, at that time, there were very few cases in which First Nations or Inuit had advanced Aboriginal title through the courts to the point of resolution.

The more I thought about it, the more I saw that British Columbia was an empire by default. The British acquired sovereignty to this great expanse of land out of necessity, not desire. They wanted to keep other nations out. They had laid down a marker against the Russians in Alaska in 1825, establishing a southern boundary to the Czar’s pretentions. They did the same in 1846 to keep the American settlers out of Vancouver Island and the continental mainland north of the forty-ninth parallel. They did all this before gold was found in tributaries of the Fraser and Thompson rivers. Vancouver Island may be seen as a reluctant empire. On reflection, it is a phenomenal development—and its legacy was Canada’s window on the Pacific.

The supreme agent of empire was the Hudson’s Bay Company. The Gentlemen Adventurers of England Trading into Hudson’s Bay had no desire for settlers; they wanted exclusive trade with the Native peoples, which they had by authorization dating to the reign of King Charles II. Here was empire within an empire. The Company flag was a red duster with HBC in the field. Some thought their imperium so strong that they believed HBC stood for “Here Before Christ.” The Company rooted out free traders and kept the Russians and American traders at a distance. They controlled prices and looked after their interests with true corporate zeal. From Fort Vancouver on the Columbia River they had extended their coastal trade, bringing stability and order to the entire region. “Through its rocklike policies of fairness for the natives, discipline for the whites, an end to cutthroat competition in the fur trade, the prohibition of liquor, and the conservation of fur resources, the company became an institutional force for law and order and church and state.”²⁵¹ This is the view of the American commentator Professor Norman H. Clark, and it stands the test of time. He points out that the HBC men worked with the Natives, mingled freely with them, gained their confidence by learning how to appeal to their sense of private property and by teaching them to be of service to themselves and to the Company. He concludes in ringing tones, “Gentlemen and men of the marching brigades took Indian wives and raised families. As a bridge between two very different cultures, the Hudson’s Bay Company was perhaps the most humane and effective ever conceived by Europeans for North America. It was far superior to either slavery or war.” HBC men gave British Columbia and Canada a remarkable inheritance, not least of which was the “Indian Policy” that emerged in Canada and was well rooted in Company practices. We return to this presently.

The HBC came to Camosack and built Fort Victoria for commercial reasons, to have an agricultural base to supply the northern coastal trade to Alaska. The harbour at Esquimalt took on imperial qualifications as a naval station for the Royal Navy, which, we saw in Part I, also helped with local policing. Otherwise, this area—Vancouver Island and its dependencies, as well as the mainland of New Caledonia—was, comparatively speaking, a wasteland for future development when so many other better places existed, notably in Australia, New Zealand and southern Africa, to say nothing of the Canadas, East and West, and the Maritime colonies. None of these were acquired in a fit of absentmindedness. External pressures invariably existed requiring a British response, a pre-emptive impulse.

The British at home needed places to export the surplus population. But they did not want Vancouver Island to be an open frontier. The colony, and the province that succeeded it, demonstrated similar measures of control—“keep the Yankees out.” If it had been otherwise, and the British had wanted to throw the whole country and its huge resources open, a very different scenario would have followed, with the American pursuit of land and resources possibly overwhelming the British and annexing the colony to the United States. In that case, the Indigenous peoples would not be protected under law by what is known as the fiduciary obligation that Canada, by court ruling, is bound to observe. All Indigenous claims to land would have been fully and irrevocably extinguished. Reserves would be “reservations.” Treaties of extinguishment would have been activated, with the forced removal of Natives from their home territories, and there would have been “Indian wars” as in Puget Sound, Yakima, Oregon and Northern California (and elsewhere).²⁵²

British—that is, HBC—pressures on the Indigenous peoples were benign in comparison to what was happening in adjacent American western frontiers. There, frontier justice, vigilantes, miner’s meetings and courts, whisky traders, horse thieves and other desperadoes formed the commonality. Settlers were encroaching on tribal lands. The reader will find all the troublesome details in classic surveys of Pacific Northwest history by George Fuller and Dorothy Johansen.²⁵³

Compare all this to the British Columbia experience. Governor James Douglas always said that the Natives of Vancouver Island should have what they needed in terms of their reserves. On behalf of the Hudson’s Bay Company, which directed his actions, he arranged the various deeds and sales agreements. They were not treaties but somehow acquired that name, becoming known as “the Douglas Treaties.” These arrangements were only implemented when economic requirements existed—that is, when there was a need to clear away any impediment to local colonial and economic growth, whether for agriculture, mining or forestry. Otherwise the Indigenous peoples were left well enough alone and did not face the harsh removals to lands considered of little value to white men that were common in the adjacent Washington Territory.

But the Natives on Vancouver Island did not prosper. By and large the resource-extractive industries did not favour them, and the newcomers often had better training and tools to do the jobs required for coal mining (at Fort Rupert and Nanaimo) and in the “boom” economy of Vancouver Island in the 1850s and afterwards. The imported industrial economy, too, which was driven by technology and fuelled by capitalism and trained labour, swept into the harbours of Vancouver Island and British Columbia, dramatically changing local economies. This was only the beginning. The coming of the telegraph, railways and steamships, the donkey engines and steam water pumps, tramlines, canals, bridges, roads and enabling rights-of-way was a rapid process. Pre-industrial peoples were disadvantaged in this process. They were further disqualified from entering any colonial executive or legislative assembly that might be instituted. Then again, the “male only” nature of these institutions was a further complication for matrilineal societies.

But the First Nations were not swept away; they were not removed far away from their original places of occupation and activity. They diminished in number, mainly because of disease, particularly on the North Coast and on Haida Gwaii. But they did not have to face the US Army or vigilante justice. The influence of the Crown and its agents was not benign—indeed, it could be forceful in the establishing of Indian reserves—but there was no “war against the Indians” in British Columbia. Police actions certainly, but not war. The HBC exhibited a benign policy in regards to criminal law cases, for they could not otherwise police the frontier. James Douglas, I once read, had an “Indian policy” which he described as “giving them a little bread and treacle.” The Company, pure and simple, was in the imperial business of looking after its stockholders. Peace for the purpose of profit was its goal. And from this devolves much Canadian and British Columbia policy-making in the nineteenth century. When Dominion law came, circumstances and practices changed.

Another digression is called for here. As students of history we have always to differentiate between the intentions of policy and the implementation of policy. The former invariably has high and august intentions, and statements to this effect are written by literate people. Sometimes these statements reflect cold realities. Here is an example: reviewing with satisfaction his policies as colonial governor, James Douglas spoke in the Legislative Council of the Colony of British Columbia in 1864: “The Native Tribes are quiet and well-disposed. The plan of forming Reserves on land embracing the village sites, cultivated fields, and favourite places of resort of the several tribes, and thus securing them against the encroachments of the settlers, and forever removing the fertile cause of agrarian disturbance, has been productive of the happiest effects on the minds of the Natives.” Natives could not pre-empt Crown land as other British subjects could. But the plan was that every “Indian family” was to have ten acres of land, and the land was to be communal. Thus, said Douglas: “The areas thus partially defined and set apart in no case exceed the proportion of ten acres for each family concerned, and are to be held as the joint and common property of the several tribes, being intended for their exclusive use and benefit, and especially as a provision for the aged, the helpless, and the infirm.”²⁵⁴

Douglas wanted peace on the frontiers of influence; his natural mindset and long experience favoured just such a policy. I do not think it strikes as benevolent or despotic; it was realistic to the times. As time passed, however, it became clear that these families and tribes had holdings in land that were small indeed in comparison to the lands that settlers and corporations were acquiring and occupying. The decline of coastal Aboriginal populations from various forces—disease, alcohol abuse, inter-tribal warfare, accidents and other factors—weakened or diminished their resistance to the taking away of the lands of occupation. The important matter that needs to be remembered is that the common lands remained accessible to Indigenous peoples, and it is in this regard the various legal fights and court rulings have upheld the interests of the Indigenous peoples (for example, in White and Bob).

British sovereignty, acquired in 1846, meant that the control of lands was vested in the Crown. “Crown lands” are public lands that belong to the Crown in right of Canada or the Crown in right of British Columbia.²⁵⁵ Today, Crown lands make up over 90 percent of the province.

In 1867 the Dominion of Canada came into existence, and in 1871 the Colony of British Columbia agreed to terms of union with the Dominion, becoming Canada’s sixth province. Canadian authority now reached to the Pacific on certain matters pertaining to the “peace, order and good government” of Canada, including under sub-section 24, section 91 of the British North America Act (1867), “Indians, and Lands reserved for the Indians.” In British Columbia, it was specified, Indian Affairs were to be administered in terms as “liberal” as existed during the colonial era. By these measures, Ottawa came to possess various means of control over Clayoquot Sound (and elsewhere in the province), while Victoria continued its control of civil law and the administration of lands, mines and forests, and justice, law and order. In short, two levels of government possessed jurisdiction over Clayoquot Sound.

Let’s turn to Canadian “Indian policy,” with particular reference to land questions. In many matters, Canadian policy differed from British Columbia colonial policy. The Canadian policy was an inheritance from British practice and political theory in regards to Aboriginal peoples in the British Empire. Colonial wars and administrative experience had led to the appreciation of “Indians” as His Majesty’s Allies. Right through to the War of 1812, the Crown and its representatives had courted and secured the alliance of the Native peoples. One of the reasons Canada was able to defend its borders in that war was that the Indians and the Métis backed the British cause. The fur trade, too, relied on Native allies. In Britain, meanwhile, the Aborigines Protection Society worked diligently to pressure the government, and particularly the Colonial Office, to look after Aboriginal interests in Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa and other colonies. We see this as late as July 1870, with the imperial declaration transferring Rupert’s Land—the HBC chartered territory—to the Dominion of Canada. Canada was thereby charged with looking after the interests of the Natives. This was a legacy of the British Empire duly inherited by Canada.

Another legacy of empire is the paperwork of administration, and British Columbia’s Land Act, I have learned on close study, is perhaps the most tightly configured piece of rules and regulations known to mankind. When you run an empire, you establish the rules—rules about resource development, rules about transportation rights-of-way, rules about settlement, rules about who then could pre-empt land (British subjects, naturally), and rules about keeping Indian reserves to what were regarded by outsiders as suitable areas or size. I always thought that land policy in the Colony of Vancouver Island was run on tight lines; now I realize this was only preliminary to what comes down to us today. Meares Island entered the land title deeds files in the third quarter of the nineteenth century. There were three, and only three, distinct developments regarding Meares since then. We will discuss two, Indian reserves and an Indian residential school, in the balance of this chapter. The third, a timber lease, is the subject of Chapter 8.

The first development established Indian reserves. As of 1877, when the dispute between the Province of British Columbia and the Dominion Government was at last resolved so that lands could be designated for such reserves, it was agreed that “where land cannot be had in the immediate vicinity of Indian Settlements, the Reserve Commissioner shall be at liberty to select lands for the Indians elsewhere and in as close proximity to their settlement as possible.”²⁵⁶ The Indian Reserve Commissioner at the time was Peter O’Reilly, king of all he surveyed in this line of work.

O’Reilly arrived in Clayoquot Sound in 1889 to determine the reserves for the Clayoquot, Ahousaht and other Nuu-chah-nulth peoples. On April 26, 1890, he sent the respective minutes of decision for Reserves of the Clayoquot Sound Indians—there were twenty-nine reserves in all—to the British Columbia Chief Commissioner of Lands. It fell to the latter official to record the deeds for these separations of lands from the Crown in right of British Columbia’s ownership. Indian reserves constituted less than 0.5 percent of the total territory of Clayoquot Sound.²⁵⁷ The Crown continued to hold title (as it still does), but the reserve lands now fell firmly under the control of the Crown in right of Canada according to the terms of the British North America Act. By 1894, after the field surveyors had done their measurements and put down their pins and markers, the survey for two Indian reserves on Meares Island was completed, and they were designated Indian Reserve 1, Opitsat, and Indian Reserve 2, Cloolthpich.²⁵⁸ I.R. 1, Opitsat, measured 73 hectares.

The second distinct development was the issue of a Certificate of Pre-emption, dated April 1899, to Father A.J. Brabant, OMI, to 175 acres of land on Meares Island, fronting on Deception Channel. This was subsequently surveyed and designated Lot 642, Clayoquot District. On February 25, 1905, a Certificate of Purchase to the same was issued to Father Brabant. This records the only case of purchased land on Meares Island, and the only “private” purchase or fee simple property there. The property was bought on behalf of the diocese of the Roman Catholic Church, headquartered in Victoria, for the clearing of land and the building of what was known as Christie Indian Industrial School, opened in 1900. The Province also issued a water use record for domestic and agricultural uses at the Christie Industrial School.²⁵⁹

We now retrace the history of this portion of Meares Island, a remarkable chapter in the history of Aboriginal lands, and the paperwork that is the web of legal authority in regards to lands and resources in the province.

The nineteenth-century history of the Roman Catholic Church and its missions on Vancouver Island’s west coast is told elsewhere, notably in Brabant’s memoir and in biographies.²⁶⁰ But the essentials need to be summarized here. In those far-off days, commerce and Christianity marched hand in hand. In remote quarters of the world, Christian religious organizations established missionary stations, put up churches and rectories, established schools, founded brass bands and set about the business of possessing souls regarded as heathen. They came “at heaven’s command,” and so it was at Clayoquot Sound and notably Opitsat, Meares Island. Governor Douglas had discouraged the formation of missionary stations among the Indigenous peoples, except within limits of the colonial settlements, and had discouraged missionaries from venturing into locations away from settlements without adequate means of personal protection. His reasoning was clear: experience had shown that when difficulties arose away from the settlements, rescue efforts had to be mounted.²⁶¹ For example, in May 1852 the zealous Father Lempfrit found himself in danger in Cowichan. Depredations had been committed on his property by some parties of the Cowichan tribe. Douglas sent a canoe that brought the priest back safely to Victoria.²⁶²

It is noteworthy that the Roman Catholics, persistent and disregarding advice, were first in the field as missionaries to the Indigenous peoples of Vancouver Island. Their stated intent was to bring salvation to Indigenous peoples, a process that involved building churches at various places where future converts could be found, including Hesquiat.

Winter was hardly over in April 1874 when Bishop Seghers and Father Brabant cleared Victoria harbour in the hired schooner Surprise, 28 tons, bound for the west coast. The captain was addicted to drink, but the mate, a Swede named Peterson, and the crew were stout sailors. One of the sailors was Nomukos, a Kyuquot, who was cook, sailor and boatswain. Another of the sailors was Chegchiepe, a Mowachaht. Steady progress was made but only after the initial setback of contrary winds, tides and currents obliged the vessel to return to Victoria before making a second attempt. On April 21 they reached Clayoquot Sound, and Sitakanim of Ahousat came out in a canoe with the customary welcome to visitors. Here the strangers were entertained. The ecclesiastical reconnaissance continued as far north as Kyuquot, the largest village. Hesquiat appeared to be the best location for the missionary station.

Father Brabant received instructions to establish the mission the following year, in March 1875. He came to evangelize among the Nuu-chah-nulth and made clear that he wanted to isolate the local population from deleterious circumstances and influences (including white man’s drunkenness and depravity). He saw himself as a guardian. And he was fearful of British intervention and retaliatory measures carried out by British gunboats.²⁶³ All the same, he was dependent on the same naval force for his personal protection. Taking “the wings of the morning,” he arrived in the uttermost parts of the sea in an attempt to possess the souls of the Indigenous peoples, bringing them salvation under the symbol of the lamb and the cross.

He tells how Nuu-chah-nulth shamans resisted, declaring him Chinga, the devil. The older persons put up the greatest resistance. They blamed him for the absence of food. They laughed at the doctrine he taught. A chief, believing Brabant responsible for smallpox he had contracted, shot him twice with a shotgun, wounding him in the back and damaging one of his hands. Undaunted, Brabant continued in his calling. Incidentally, he worked hard to make sure that his charges did not come under the damaging influences of “the sects”—that is, the Protestant churches, notably Presbyterian (at Ahousat) and Methodist (at Tofino and, alarmingly for the priest, at Opitsat, where they established a day school). There was much ill feeling. Reading the account of religious rivalries at Clayoquot Sound, as examined by Horsfield and Kennedy, we can see how these “turf wars” reverberated through the nations and villages, accentuating internecine rivalries and causing distrust.²⁶⁴

As the cash economy had replaced barter, Brabant encouraged adult males to sign up to work on the sealing schooners that called at Clayoquot Sound in search of mariners for the summer’s hunting in the breeding rookeries of the Pribilov Islands, Bering Sea. The pelagic seal hunt lasted until 1911, when it was shut down by an international treaty signed by Britain (for Canada), Russia, Japan and the United States. When the hunt closed, the Nuu-chah-nulth were deprived of an important source of income. They also lost the right to hunt seals for food except when using traditional methods, in other words abandoning the gun and returning to the spear.²⁶⁵

In 1895, Brabant, a modernist and a believer in the European education that had given him his own foundation of knowledge and worldview, began to advocate building a residential school in Clayoquot Sound, bringing Native children in from scattered villages as far away as Squamish. He was supported in this by Harry Guillod, Indian agent for the West Coast Agency, who opened Ottawa’s doors on the project. The education of children had not become a general principle of governments until the 1840s, and in some cases later. But public school acts had passed in British Columbia for primary and elementary schooling, and later for high schools, if an entry examination were passed.

Brabant selected a location called Kakawis at the foot of Lone Cone on Meares Island. Here, at low tide, a beach of hard sand would afford a place for football, baseball, races and other games. A level site on land was needed for the school building and its facilities. Supply barges could land at low tide and the students would form a line and pass the goods up to the school. As always, legal records document the school’s progress. Under the British Columbia Land Act, 175 acres (Lot 642, Clayoquot District) were registered in the name of Augustin Joseph Brabant.²⁶⁶ The Dominion of Canada provided the essential student per-capita sum, and Bishop Alexander Christie of Victoria, Brabant’s superior, guided the project through critical hours. But the work was Brabant’s and those, including the Rev. Charles Moser, who followed him.

Christie Indian Industrial School took in its first students in 1900, and by December 1925 the 167th boy and the 154th girl had enrolled. “It was hard to get children,” writes Father Moser. “The parents did not like to part with them. It needed a lot of coaxing and persuading.”²⁶⁷

When in 1922 the federal Indian School Act made school attendance mandatory, what is now sometimes stated as the genocide of the Indigenous peoples had been sanctioned.²⁶⁸ After becoming mandatory, the residential school was often overcrowded and six children died of tubercular meningitis between 1939 and 1941. In total, twenty-three students are confirmed to have died at the school.²⁶⁹

Christie School had a chapel, the usual classrooms and dormitories, a bell marking the progress of the school day, and a new brass band, typical of Indian schools in British Columbia. Father Moser gives this account, as of 1926: “In this school they get a thorough instruction in their religion, they are taught also the secular branches of reading, writing, arithmetic, etc., as thoroughly as in other schools. They are, moreover, taught to work. [Manual and sewing arts were taught.] Each child goes to school daily half a day—the other half is for work, recreation excepted. The girls in the kitchen, sewing room and laundry; the boys in the barns, gardens and carpenter and shoe shops.”²⁷⁰

The school functioned until 1971, when residential schools were closing all over Canada and local day schools being developed, and the pupils were integrated into public schools. A detailed photographic archive of Christie School survives and can be viewed online.²⁷¹ In the mid-1980s a fire consumed the main building, leaving only some outbuildings.

In 1991 the Missionary Oblates of Mary Immaculate issued a formal apology to the First Nations of Canada, including a specific apology “for the existence of the schools themselves, recognizing that the biggest abuse was not what happened in the schools but that the schools themselves happened . . . that the primal bond inherent within families was violated as a matter of policy.”²⁷²

The more recent history of Kakawis (or Ka Ka Wis) speaks to regeneration and rebirth. From 1974 to 1994, Indigenous people claimed it back, imagining it as a place of rebirth and renewal. They camped and walked on property owned by others, though they claimed it as their own. For a time Kakawis was an addiction treatment (or healing) centre until those services were moved to Port Alberni. In 2012 the Ahousaht First Nation acquired the property. Commerce was in the air, and in 2015 the location became a campground under the management of Maaqutusiis Hahoulthee Stewardship Society (MHSS) and the Ahous Business Corporation (ABC), with the Nuu-chah-nulth Economic Development Corporation holding a mortgage as of 2013. Today the project is advertised as the Lone Cone Hostel and Campground, and its brand connects the site with Sasquatch or Bigfoot sightings. In retrospect, the acquisition of Kakawis was “an incredible milestone,” as was said at the time of purchase, and the Ahousaht First Nation has worked to cleanse the place of its dark past.²⁷³ At another level the development was an example of a form of decolonization, an opportunity for Indigenous commercial enterprise as well as extended stewardship of this corner of Meares Island’s extensive real estate. Lying beneath the brow of Lone Cone, it is a symbol of a return to Native control of a small portion of eminent domain.