Proposal for Essay:

Relinquishment of the Songhees Lands: Factors in the Lkwungen peoples’ Decision to Relocate
Their Community

Barbara Clerihue
V001892452
HIST 329B
28 January 2019
 The long-pending question of the Songhees reserve was settled yesterday
when the British Columbia government closed arrangements with the Hudson’s
Bay Company for the purchase of the new reserve selected by Chief Cooper and
the heads of the Songhees band…The new reserve was chosen on October 28th,
when after many futile efforts covering almost have [sic] a century, Chief Cooper
and the head tribesmen acceded to the scheme proposed….1

Victoria British Columbia experienced rapid growth in the latter half of the 19th century,

from a recorded settler population in 1858 of about 700 to over 31,660 in 1911 at the time of the

Songhees land sale. More growth was anticipated and as a result, more land for development was

being sought. One prime area coveted for city expansion and industrial development lay directly

across the harbour from the new neo-Baroque British Columbia Legislative buildings. There was

just one problem, the lands were inhabited by the descendants of the indigenous Lkwungen

peoples.

The site of this reserve had long been controversial. In 1850 the Colonial Governor,

James Douglas, tasked by the Crown with the colonization of lands surrounding Fort Victoria,

met with Lkwungen families to formalize the occupation of their land and assign them land

reserves for their use, thereby containing Indigenous presence in Victoria.2 Later that year, the

first Lkwungen reserve, measuring 10 acres, was established at the site of present Legislative

buildings and a second Lkwungen reserve of 47 acres was established at Esquimalt Harbor.3 As

part of these arrangements, Douglas pledged that Lkwungen residents would “not be disturbed.”4

1
-, “New Reserve Purchased,” Daily Colonist, January 1, 1911, 1.
2
John Sutton Lutz,“Relating to the Country:' The Lekwammen and the Extension of European Settlement, 1843-
1911,” in Beyond the City Limits : Rural History in British Colunbia, ed. R.W. Sandwell, R. W. (Vancouver: UBC
Press, 1998), 11.
3
Penelope Edmonds, "Unpacking Settler Colonialism's Urban Strategies: Indigenous Peoples in Victoria, British
Columbia, and the Transition to a Settler-Colonial City,” Urban History Review 38, no. 2 (Spring, 2010): 9.
4
Patricia E. Roy, “McBride of McKenna-McBride: Premier Richard McBride and the Indian Question in British
Columbia,” BC Studies No 17,: (Winter 2011/12): 43.

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 By 1857 the ten-acre reserve was converted to colonial property and a replacement

reserve between 90 and 112 acres was allocated on property to become known as “the

Songhees.” These lands were laid out on the northern side of Victoria harbour, away from

commercial and European residential neighbourhoods.5

In 1858 the gold rush increased land pressure on the town, however to the north and west

limits on growth were present: indigenous lands occupied by “savages.” European property

owners and speculators were concerned about the value of their property in the townscape and its

devaluation if their land came to be considered “savage” by association. In short, Lkwungen

land were conceived as an impediment to progress and a threat to property values.6

After Confederation, the Songhees (as they had become known) resisted all attempts by

the Department of Indian Affairs to relocate them despite the public and incessant push for their

displacement.7 The matter became more pressing as the city boomed early in the twentieth

century and contemporary newspapers filled with calls for the relocation of the band to make

reserve lands available for development and settlement by the non-Indigenous population.8 After

the receipt of two (unpublished) letters from members of the Songhees, the Daily Colonist noted,

“we are afraid our Songhees neighbors will have to acknowledge, however unwillingly, that the

existence of an Indian Reserve in the heart of a city is neither good for the city nor the Indians.”9

5
Patrick A. Dunae, et al., “Race and Space in Victoria’s Chinatown 1891,” in Home Truths: Highlights from BC
History ed. Richard Mackie and Graeme Wynn (Madeira Park, BC: Harbour Publishing, 2012), 209.
6
Penelope Edmonds, "Unpacking Settler Colonialism's Urban Strategies: Indigenous Peoples in Victoria, British
Columbia, and the Transition to a Settler-Colonial City,” 9.
7
Patricia E. Roy, “McBride of McKenna-McBride: Premier Richard McBride and the Indian Question in British
Columbia,” 43.
8
Ibid.
9
Untitled Editorial, Daily Colonist, 17 April 1905, 4.

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 The complicating factor in any relocation was that the Songhees land appeared “to be the

private property of the tribe” because of the Douglas agreement whereby, in return for gifts, the

Songhees sold their territory (apart from village sites and enclosed fields) to the colony.10 This

gave the Lkwungen people considerable power when it came to the disposition of their lands.

Yet despite years of resistance, in 1911 the Lkwungen peoples “acceded to the scheme

proposed”, accepted a cash settlement and moved to a new site in Esquimalt.

This paper will focus on the events leading up to the transfer of the Songhees lands,

review the controversies and objections associated with the sale of property, and detail the

rationale for agreeing to the sale after years of resistance.

Through the writing of the paper, I hope to develop a more nuanced understanding of the

events leading up to the sale of the Songhees lands and understand what pressures finally

influenced the Lkwungen decision to relocate.

Patricia E. Roy, “McBride of McKenna-McBride: Premier Richard McBride and the Indian Question in British
10

Columbia,” 43.

3
 Bibliography

Penelope Edmonds, "Unpacking Settler Colonialism's Urban Strategies: Indigenous

Peoples in Victoria, British Columbia, and the Transition to a Settler-Colonial City,” Urban

History Review 38, no. 2 (Spring, 2010): 4-20.

This paper is a case study of Victoria, British Columbia, and highlights how settler

colonialism constructed indigenous people and their occupation of urban land as inconvenient

and vagrant. This perception stood in contrast to the white Eurocentric view that cities were at

the pinnacle of social and cultural evolution and that progress was bound up with the human

relationship to land. The paper tracks the shift from a mixed and fluid mercantilist society to an

increasingly racialized and segregated settler-colonial cityscape.

Harris, Cole. Making Native Space: Colonialism, Resistance, and Reserves in British Columbia.

Vancouver: UBC Press, 2011.

This book describes how settlers displaced Indigenous people from their land in British

Columbia, provides a geographical history of the Indian reserve in British Columbia and

analyzes the impact of reserves on Indigenous lives and livelihoods. The account begins in the

early nineteenth-century British Empire and then follows Indigenous land policy, and resistance

to it, in British Columbia from the Douglas treaties in the early 1850s to the formal transfer of

reserves to the Dominion in 1938.

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Keddie, Grant. Songhees Pictorial: A History of the Songhees People as Seen by Outsiders,

1790-1912. Grant Keddie. Victoria, BC: Royal BC Museum, 2003.

This book is a chronological account of the lives of the Lkwungen peoples, focusing on

the period between the 1843 establishment of Fort Victoria and the 1910-11 sale of the Songhees

reserve and the people’s relocation to a new reserve in the (then) suburbs of Esquimalt. Songhees

Pictorial is an outsider’s view, as suggested by the title, and focuses on photographic history

without critical commentary (e.g. the secret $16,000 payment to Chief Cooper to “facilitate” the

sale of the reserve and subsequent resignation in 1917). However, it is one of the most complete

chronologies of these peoples and useful as a starting point for research on the sale.

Lutz, John. “Relating to the Country: The Lekwammen and the Extension of European

Settlement, 1843-1911.” In Beyond the City Limits: Rural History in British Colunbia,

edited by R.W. Sandwell, 17-32. Vancouver: UBC Press, 1998.

This chapter provides an overview of Aboriginal-White settler relations on Vancouver

Island and specifically the changing relationship between settlers and the indigenous people

living within the city on Songhees lands.

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Lutz, John Sutton. Makúk: A New History of Aboriginal-White Relations. Vancouver: UBC

Press, 2009.

This work traces Indigenous people’s involvement in the settler economy, and their

displacement from it, from the arrival of the first Europeans to the 1970s. Lutz outlines how

Indigenous peoples were displaced from their land and resources in the province while, at the

same time, provided the labour to build it before it was marginalized and denigrated, and their

communities impoverished and many vanished.

Roy, Patricia E. “McBride of McKenna-McBride: Premier Richard McBride and the Indian

Question in British Columbia.” BC Studies No 17 (Winter 2011/12): 35-76.

This article discusses the premier of British Columbia Richard McBride's relationship

with the debate over Indian land tenure in the early 1900s. An overview of McBride's

relationship with the indigenous peoples of Canada, including his perspective on their land

claims in BC and on the status of Indian reserves, is provided and in particular discusses the

considerations of the Province when negotiating the sale of the Songhees lands to the Province.

Storey, Kenton. Settler Anxiety at the Outposts of Empire: Colonial Relations, Humanitarian

Discourses, and the Imperial Press. Vancouver: UBC Press, 2016.

Book demonstrates how government officials and newspaper editors appropriated

humanitarian rhetoric as a flexible political language and how it became a popular means to

justify the expansion of settlers’ access to land and to promote racial segregation, while the

“protection” of Indigenous peoples was promoted.

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