Introduction

This book is a historian’s perspective—a historical progress, so to speak—concerning Meares Island and nearby waters of Clayoquot Sound. It is not the report I prepared for the Nuu-Chah-Nulth Tribal Council’s 1985 court case, but something quite different. I like to think of this book as a vertical inquiry, by which I mean that it is a study of a place and its peoples across layered spans of time, from the beginning of the historical record (when written documents about the area began to appear in the 1770s) right through to our present time. The book bears a personal stamp as a record of my own work in disclosing this past.

Although a book on Meares Island and Wickaninnish’s world may seem at first sight like history in miniature, this is far from the case. The history of Meares Island is not the history of Vancouver Island, any more than the history of Vancouver Island is the history of British Columbia, much less western Canada. Perhaps this book could be called an extended essay, a historian’s mediation of matters of the past, bringing into literary form historical data across a wide range of interrelated topics from out of the mists of time. Local becomes global.

In many respects this is a book about the land and waters of renowned sea otter chief Wickaninnish. This famed lord of Clayoquot Sound was powerful and influential. I find him an engaging figure and certainly the most dominant personage in Clayoquot Sound. He must have been a great warrior but, even more, a person of tremendous commercial acumen. In the literature he ranks second to the legendary Maquinna of Yuquot, Nootka Sound, but by the 1830s, as will be shown, their positions had been reversed.

The British trader John Meares, in the late 1780s, was struck by the fact that he encountered a highly structured society. The Clayoquot, Ahousaht and Kelsemaht peoples were autonomous social and political entities, each having lineages, traditions and legends. Members of each group were either lords or commoners, and had slaves, who were chattel. Then as now, hereditary rank and kinship dominated their social system.⁵ The rank into which one was born determined the course of life. As units, as peoples, they were subject to no outside authority. Such was the freedom that they enjoyed. Democracy was an alien concept. They lived in the here and now, yet were highly conscious of tradition, ranking, material possessions, property and rights related to the same. Power and position stemmed from inherited property, real and non-material (songs, dances and names are in the latter category). A house would consist of closely related families. Prestigious ceremonies and conspicuous consumption were social and political demonstrations of power and rank. Traditional privileges, including cultural inheritance and lineage, were prized properties—and were accepted by those who did not have them. These people were, in all ways, masters of possession.

Non-material property could be possessed even into the modern age. But the ownership of physical property could not be sustained under the pressure of changes brought from outside. Thus, these people faced a partial social and political revolution as outsiders came to possess their waters, sea resources, mountains and forests.

Understanding this vibrant era of the maritime, or sea otter, trade is essential to an appreciation of the Meares Island legal case. Particulars will be explained at appropriate places later in the book. But here we note that there are several reasons global attention was drawn to the case. Voyage accounts by mariners of British, American and Spanish nationality tend to prove the existence of Aboriginal rights on Meares Island. They reveal that the First Nations of Clayoquot Sound were an organized society as evidenced by their villages; arts and handicrafts, including the production of clothes, musical instruments, canoes and furniture; their religion; and their government (as ruled by one superior chief, Wickaninnish). They had social and political organization, and they could wage war and make peace. The voyage accounts detail the Native occupation of Meares Island at Opitsat. Descendants live there to this day, a marvellous continuity over centuries. And the accounts also reveal that the First Nations of Clayoquot Sound used the forests in almost every aspect of their lives—for buildings, furniture, clothing, canoes and much else. These accounts, scarce as they are, disclose that First Nations of Clayoquot Sound occupied Meares Island to the exclusion of other organized societies, exhibited exclusive use of their land and, not least, occupied Meares Island before British rights of trade and navigation were asserted (with the signing of the Nootka Convention in about 1790). These travel and voyage accounts allow us to reconstruct local conditions, usefully so by virtue of the absence of archival sources of the age. Certainly, the voyages, and the narratives of these voyages, demonstrate that Aboriginal rights on Meares Island were not extinguished. No voluntary surrender of any land to the British occurred. The Indigenous peoples made treaties just as they pleased, to suit their needs and purposes. Aboriginal rights to Meares Island were not extinguished by the “Kendrick deeds” sale of August 11, 1791, for not only did the Nootka Convention terms apply, but also the First Nations could only voluntarily sell their lands, and thus extinguish their Aboriginal rights, to the British crown.

I like to think that this book exhibits the “living presence,” so to speak—a great continuity going back to the time of what anthropologists like to call “contact.” In fact, this living presence goes back deeper than that: the present comes out of the mists of time, though we have no archival record of this, only archaeological records and the people’s oral history. Here, then, is living history known, comprehended and remembered by a living society.

The Northwest Coast Native culture that flourished into the modern era, when travellers, agents, and missionaries arrived to take note of its features for the first time, had been stimulated by the early phases of its people’s contact with European mariners and traders. This was a time of vigorous trade and of cultural changes, including the development and elaboration of the potlatch. The Northwest Coast nations were fishing peoples, un-agrarian in their ways of existence. They lived communally on their jungle-fringed beaches, with their backs to the mountains, facing out into the channels, sounds and passages that led to Vancouver Island’s outer coast, its coastal routes and the broad Pacific. Sea lions, sea otter, whales, porpoise, seals and river otter were creatures of the sea, and bear and wolf of the land. Shellfish were in profusion.

The saw and the axe had replaced bone and stone tools, and the monarchs of the forest, the great Douglas fir and cedar, the carver’s favourite, now lay at the mercy of the industrial age and the rapacious forest industries. But still the posts and supporting timbers held the stories of the village and allied kin. The carvings, writes Bill Reid, “told the people of the completeness of their culture, the continuing lineages of the great families, their closeness to the magic world of myth and legend.” Reid goes even farther in his elegiac description Out of the Silence: “Perhaps they told more, a story of little people, few in scattered numbers, in a huge dark world of enormous forests and absurdly large trees, and stormy coasts and wild waters beyond, where brief cool summers gave way forever to long black winters, and families round their fires, no matter how long their lineages, needed much assurance of their greatness.”⁶

We leave the discussion of these things now, marvelling at their complexity, yet understanding that artistic creation and linguistic uniqueness gave identity, provided unity, accorded pride and rendered reassurance.

I have not attempted a social history of the Nuu-chah-nulth peoples over two centuries. This is a book about property and possession. Here again, travel and voyage accounts allow us to reconstruct local conditions in the absence of archival sources. Charles Edward Barrett-Lennard, George Henry Richards and Father A.J. Brabant left graphic observations of a world in flux and one entering furious changes. Naturally the writers’ cultural references, understandings and biases inform the texts they produce about new people, practices, and places. How could it be otherwise?

For me, only yesterday the world was young. For First Nations, this is far from the case. There is little written testimony on the First Nations’ side, and I have combed through Native accounts of Nuu-chah-nulth ethnography looking for hard evidence. Time and again I have wished for more Native historical evidence, but it is not there in the documents, which are what I relied on. Nothing more clearly distinguishes the original inhabitants from those who came to live among them in the modern period than the difference in recording history. First Nations did not write down their stories or histories. Furthermore, they had concepts of history that differ radically from professional historical epistemology and practice. I accept this limitation and I ask readers to understand the matter. Given what presents itself in the written record, there is no shortage of documentation upon which to build up a history of Meares Island and the Meares Island case.

And another matter: in my research efforts I found so much material on late eighteenth-century history (and so much descriptive material available to the historian about the pre-1871 period) that it towers over the records of Clayoquot Sound history since that time. Surely, the reader will say, it must have been the other way around, with less data for the earlier period. This is not the case: the late eighteenth century holds many insights into the life and trade of Clayoquot Sound, a richness I could not deny and, indeed, wanted to bring to the fore. This explains why I have devoted a good deal more attention to the earlier period, “The Empire of Fortune,” than I have to the later period, “War for the Woods.”

Gathering the whole together and composing it into an understandable narrative is the greatest task facing the historian. One of my model historians, Arthur Marder, liked to talk about Ariadne’s thread and how that golden thread wove almost magically in and out of his themes. Working historians often pull their hair trying to find such a thread. But try they must so as to make sense out of a vast amount of information—hard facts, usually—and to arrange them as they occurred in time: you can’t play fast and loose with the order of developments.

By contrast, a chronicler faces the easier task of simply listing events as they happened, with no connections, no cause and effect. But that is not strictly history and is not the historian’s craft. Following the thread and arranging the facts is only the beginning, for it is the testing of the evidence, and the looking at it from various viewpoints, that is so essential to a reliable narrative. Time and again in the writing of this book I have faced these challenges and wondered at the possibilities of a sensible final result, one comprehensible to the reader.

And here is where a little magic can come in handy: for instance, some flash may occur to a historian in the middle of the night, and all of a sudden a segment of the past is illuminated and all the problems the author has been pondering and worrying about are solved, at least to the writer’s satisfaction. Reviewers and other critics, of course, may have different views, as well they should.

Going back to what I said at the outset, it is the drawing together of things that counts so much—the figuring out of relationships. In addition, you have to beware of the bogus, and leave doctrine and bias aside. At the same time, judgments are required, and one hopes that these, when made, are sober judgments, ones that will stand the test of time. Any book has a complex structure because of shifts of time and place, and it is always grand when personalities and characters make their appearance and brighten the story or illuminate the past by their actions, opinions and pronouncements. This is when history truly comes to life. In cross-cultural matters, and in this case a field of history known as ethnohistory (the study of race relations or interrelations), the historian is often bereft of details about those who form part of the history but who had no written records. Then the great challenge presents itself concerning the other side of the frontier, so to speak. As any historian knows, they must do the best they can with what they have found or are presented with. The writing of British Columbia and Pacific Northwest history (or indeed any other kind of history where people of oral cultures come in contact and conflict with people of literary culture) therefore poses special problems. Of all the challenges the historian faces, this is the most formidable. And so it is with this book.

Insofar as this book may be a contribution to the history of history (or “historiography” as we call it in my trade), I make no claim as to how it fits into the larger corpus except to say that the subject has never been tackled before. Certainly, it does not fit easily into the settler-colonialist category, for there were no permanent settlers on Meares Island until a residential school was established in 1900. “Settler anxiety” holds no water here, though it might have been felt elsewhere, especially in Victoria. Clayoquot Sound was, in its first phase, an open, maritime place of exchange or makúk (that is, to buy or to sell—or “let’s make a deal”). In its second phase, in the mid-twentieth century, it moved directly into what might be called the industrial age of clear-cut logging. There was no gold rush at Clayoquot Sound, such as occurred in the Fraser River watershed. There was no mass gathering of Indigenous peoples, upsetting the local authorities who called for forced removal, as occurred in Victoria. It is hard to gauge the impact of infectious diseases: smallpox, syphilis, diphtheria and others would have taken their terrible toil. However, the 1862 smallpox epidemic, perhaps the most severe calamity to befall the Indigenous population of British Columbia, certainly would have affected the peoples of Clayoquot Sound, though not to the degree it did the Haida, Tsimshian and people in Fort Rupert and Bella Bella, for Clayoquot Sound lay off the main arterial of coastal travel, the Inside Passage separating Vancouver Island from the mainland. My point—and the striking thing revealed here—is that Clayoquot Sound stood as a world apart, free from many external pressures, and its residents were less influenced than other peoples in other locales.

Persons familiar with British Columbia history, and that of the Northwest Coast of North America more generally, will appreciate the fact that all too often generalizations are made about our history that do not apply in certain locations and at certain times. I also think historians have been far too careless in the generalizations that they have made. British Columbia is a complicated piece of geography; its Indigenous peoples showed some uniform cultural changes over time, but these peoples, or individual nations, retained their uniqueness in language, places of occupation and responses to outside authority. I have tried diligently to focus on Clayoquot Sound and Meares Island and not to distract the reader with what was occurring in such places as Nootka Sound, Barkley Sound, Victoria, Nanaimo and Fort Rupert. I have fought against the tendency to wander, always the historian’s nightmare.

The modern history of Clayoquot Sound, including Tofino with side glances at Meares Island, has been successfully told by Margaret Horsfield in her wonderful contemporary history Voices from the Sound (2008). In Tofino and Clayoquot Sound: A History (2014), Horsfield and Ian Kennedy brought the account up to date, enriched and broadened. And what a lovely account it is. This, my book, is of a different order—an analysis of how Meares Island came out of the mists of time, how the sea otter was hunted to the brink of extinction, how the last internecine war of 1855 changed that world, how colonial and Canadian law and regulation spread enveloping arms over Clayoquot Sound, subverting or destroying local mores, and how, at the climax of the modern age, the chainsaw and clear-cut logging threatened Meares Island. This led to the fights for the woods, the alliances of convenience and the rise of the Nuu-Chah-Nulth Tribal Council and its constituent First Nations, which sought to either possess Meares Island or keep it out of the clutches of industrial logging. At the end of the day, this historian has come to possess the island even more than he did in 1991, when his report demonstrated decisively to the court the active use of the forests by persons who had always occupied that place, had never been conquered or swept aside, and who—a true and living presence of Native bands—continued to guard and exploit the resources of mountainous Meares Island.

Here is an epic of survival and resistance, the story of continuous occupation and possession, and of the triumph of the guardians going back to Wickaninnish. The weight of this Meares Island story has slowly increased over time, its importance strengthened. Events, in the retelling, take on heroic status. Years hence we will look back on the Meares Island crisis of 1984 and all that followed over the next few decades, and realize this was drawing a line in the sand and saying, “None shall pass.”

Now, a word about how this book is ordered. The issues it explores are best raised in the form of questions. How does history come to possess a certain place, and how did Meares Island in particular come to be possessed by the historical record? This is the focus of Part I, “Empire of Fortune.” Commercial activities run throughout its chapters. Chapter 1, “Out of the Mists,” sets the locale, while Chapter 2, “First Encounters,” takes us down a different trail. When we think of Meares Island in recent history we immediately think of trees and how they were saved from the chainsaw. Two centuries before this the waters of Meares Island were filled with, and then stripped of, Enhydra lutris, the sea otter. The history contained in this chapter thus belongs to the age of sea otter exploitation. Chapter 3, “Sea Otter Hunters,” is a chapter about cargoes. As such, it reverts to a time—the late eighteenth century—when British and American fur traders, and, almost as an afterthought, Spanish explorers on imperial purpose, came in their sailing vessels to Meares Island and its water approaches, inlets and passages. They arrived for various purposes: to trade, to seek shelter, to take on wood and water, to winter, to engage in shipbuilding and repair. This chapter adds to discussions by historians of Indigenous control of the sea otter trade and the ability to engage in price fixing. This was a more wide-open commercial frontier than has been imagined. It also calls into question the safeguarding of marine resources on a basis of sustained yield. Sea otter were hunted to near extinction.

Chapter 4, “Buying and Selling Clayoquot,” flows from its predecessor, disclosing phases of the encounters that came one after the other. When traders arrived for their various purposes, they came vigorously and unavoidably into contact and, in some cases now notorious, conflict with the Aboriginal peoples of Meares Island and Clayoquot Sound. There were many unrecorded peaceful encounters but, understandably, these seldom warrant a mention in any historical narrative. Once again, crisis drives history. There were bloody and violent times that we cannot wish away from our past. British, Americans and Spanish were all involved in violent encounters at Clayoquot Sound. I have brought the Native side of the story to the fore as much as space, and particularly documentation, will allow. Historians have engaged in lively discussion about the intensity and meaning of these cross-cultural encounters, and these also are worth noting here.

Chapter 5 deals specifically with the destruction of the village of Opitsat on Meares Island, as ordered by the American fur trade captain Robert Gray. There is much more to this than meets the eye, and I present new evidence plus in-depth discussion of the matter as it came before the courts in 1993. The trade in muskets and ammunition intensified cross-cultural exchanges and made that world all the more dangerous. This is not—indeed, it cannot be—a benign story. We always want finality in our judgments, but sober ones are harder to make.

Chapter 6 tells the story of the ill-starred ship Tonquin. Many a historian has tried to bring closure to the issue of the location of this episode; I review the various possibilities and add some new explanatory detail on the Native side.

Chapter 7, “The In-between Time,” is the closing segment of Part I. The subjects covered are perhaps the most elusive imaginable. I have not strained for grand overarching themes: there are none to be found. There is no Native testimony, only observations from transient visitors. And yet this was a central time, for new influences were replacing old. The old “empire of fortune” of the sea otter trade had given way to a “dominion of influence.” Indigenous peoples had controlled the trade by controlling the supply of pelts. With the establishment of the colonial jurisdiction at Victoria, the Hudson’s Bay Company held the commercial and political monopoly, which, though benign on the west coast of Vancouver Island, nonetheless changed the commercial activity there: it kept foreign shipping out. Clayoquot Sound became a backwater, and only the occasional trader or yachtsman called there. The Indigenous population declined, owing to disease and spirituous liquors, some poisonous, as well as individuals travelling to other places for work. Internecine warfare continued but was in its last phase. The old vitality of commercial rivalry and wealth gathering had given way to something more warlike and certainly less commercial.

Part II, “War for the Woods,” is the modern history of Meares Island, running from the latter part of the nineteenth century to the present. It answers a related web of questions: What circumstances led to the island’s transfer, in historical memory, from Native occupancy and maritime fur-trading realm to Indian Reserves 1 and 2 and, later, Tree Farm Licence 22? Who has rights of possession to the island and its waters? Must possession be on the spot, or can it be from some faraway place or places—or can it even be an imagining of the mind? How did the legal case brought forward by the NTC bring all these issues together? And how did it leave as legacy a quite different and indeed startlingly new perception of Meares Island—as a place saved from forest exploitation by the alliance of Native voices and environmental groups? Chapter 8, “Possessions and Dispossessions,” is all about chainsaws, protests and commercial disputes. It focuses on the historical issues of the legal file. Generally speaking, I have left the legal pleadings, arguments and counterarguments to others. These can be traced in court records. My intent here has been to restage the deep-seated grievances brought forth so long ago and yet still persistent.

There is much about real estate in this chapter, mainly regarding the size and contracted limits of Indian reserves. There are appeals to the Crown and its agents for justice and for due recognition of Native rights. Native peoples claiming a hereditary interest in Meares Island called for righteous action on the part of the Crown. Their voices, cutting through legalese and administrative obfuscation, are striking testimony that all they really wanted was fair treatment under the law. Native resentments were disclosed in many of the documents I examined; these same resentments are with us today.

Chapter 9 looks at the forest and the trees, examining how MacBlo came to have the right to log Meares Island, but also tracing the development of industrial logging on the BC coast generally, and its slow but steady march to Clayoquot Sound and Meares Island. Chapter 10 gives a taste of the courtroom drama and the judgment of the Appeal Court justices, and then turns to other cases that built on the Meares Island decision, as well as to the Clayoquot Sound protest that drew worldwide attention a decade after the Meares Island protest.

A final chapter offers some observations about the continuing assault on the forest and the downward slide of old-growth timber stands. It is not a happy story, but a tragic conclusion and sad commentary on the rapaciousness of humankind.

Meares Island is now symbolic. The inescapable conclusion we are bound to draw is that it is crisis that gives uniqueness to the history of otherwise unknown locales such as, in our case, Meares Island. As so often in history, crisis drives the agenda.

Barry Gough

Victoria, British Columbia, Canada