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Aboriginal Affiliation of the James Bay Reserve 1

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Aboriginal Affiliation of the James Bay Reserve 1 ABORIGINAL AFFILIATION OF THE JAMES BAY RESERVE PRIVILEGED AND CONFIDENTIAL Final Report Prepared for: Greg McDade, Q.C., Ratcliff & Co. North Vancouver, BC Counsel for the Esquimalt and Songhees First Nations Prepared by: Dorothy Kennedy, M.A., D.Phil. Bouchard & Kennedy Research Consultants Victoria, BC April 17th, 2006 Aboriginal Affiliation of the James Bay Reserve 1 1.0 INTRODUCTION In June 2004 Greg McDade, Q.C., of Ratcliff and Company, legal counsel for the Esquimalt and Songhees First Nations, requested me to provide an expert opinion on specific issues being raised in Thomas et al. and Albany et al. v. The Attorney General of British Columbia and The Attorney General of Canada. In order to provide this opinion, I have drawn on my experience as a socio-cultural anthropologist who has specialized in the aboriginal cultures of western North America for more than 30 years. More particularly, I have relied on my research concerning Coast Salish land and resource use, and on Coast Salish social organization. My expertise requires a familiarity with anthropological, ethnohistorical and linguistic data, and with this familiarity, I have knowledge of issues that have been raised by this litigation and addressed in this report. I have analyzed specific aspects of Coast Salish societies, including the Songhees and Esquimalt First Nations, for the Masters thesis I completed at the University of Victoria, and for the Doctoral thesis I completed at the University of Oxford, in England. Materials presented in both of these theses are included in this present opinion report. 1.1 Scope and Objectives The purpose of this report is to provide an opinion on the relationship between the Plaintiff First Nations, the Songhees and Esquimalt Indian Bands or First Nations, and the aboriginal groups recognized in the spring of 1850 by James Douglas, Chief Factor of the Hudson=s Bay Company=s Fort Victoria, as comprising the ASangees@ [his transcription for the term anglicized as ASonghees@]. Douglas in 1850 concluded a series of agreements C now commonly known as the Fort Victoria Treaties C with six local groups known collectively as the ASangees,@ as well as an aboriginal group known as the ASoke@ (Sooke or T=Sou-ke), and also other groups now recognized as Becher Bay Clallam (also spelled “Klallam”). This report discusses depopulation of aboriginal villages on southern Vancouver Island and the eventual consolidation of remnant populations of ASangees@ local groups, which led to transformation in their identity and residence. More specifically, this report looks at the identity of the residents of the James Bay Reserve (later the site of the BC Legislative Buildings), which was established pursuant to the 1850 treaties, and the relationship between those people and the current Songhees and Esquimalt First Nations, the successors to the six local groups identified by James Douglas as the “Sangees Tribe.” Aboriginal Affiliation of the James Bay Reserve 2 1.2 Report Organization This report is divided into nine sections. Section 1.0 outlines the scope and objectives of the study and sets out the study area; Section 2.0 provides a brief discussion of the agreements now known as the Fort Victoria Treaties that James Douglas made in April 1850 with the local aboriginal peoples. Section 3.0 provides a review of Central Coast Salish social organization, with a focus on the relationship between local groups, villages and tribes. Section 4.0 examines the identity of the six groups with whom Douglas made treaties, the known locations of their village site(s), and the territory Douglas associated with each group. This section also addresses the question of whether Douglas made agreements with all pertinent groups, and consequently looks at the relationship of these groups to neighbouring social units. Section 5.0 describes the epidemic diseases that affected changes occurring in the social composition of the Lekwungen tribe, while Section 6.0 provides a brief look at the effects of these diseases, along with inter- group hostility, on the ancestors of the Plaintiff First Nations, and discusses the process of the consolidation of the surviving Lekwungen communities. Section 7.0 discusses recognition of the James Bay Reserve and the identity of the residents who lived there at the time of the treaty. Section 8.0 presents the Conclusions to this report, including the response to the five central questions raised in Counsel’s June 2004 letter of instruction; and Section 9.0 lists the References cited herein. Additionally, this report contains four Appendices: Appendix A provides a discussion of the main documentary sources used in the compilation of the report; Appendix B provides more detailed information on the terminology relating to the “Lekwungen” people, including anthropologists’ classification of them; and Appendix C provides a discussion of a possible Clallam village at the site of the James Bay Reserve. Appendix D provides a comparison of names given in the 1850 treaties with names compiled in 1876 and 1877. A Glossary of terms follows the Appendices. 1.3 The Study Area The present report examines the identity of the aboriginal people who at the time of the treaties signed with James Douglas in 1850 lived on southeastern Vancouver Island from approximately Albert Head to Cowichan Head [Cordova Bay] and on the western side of San Juan Island in what is now Washington State. The geographical focus of the report, however, is Victoria Harbour, particularly the site and immediate environs of the present British Columbia Legislative Buildings located on the south side of James Bay where, pursuant to the 1850 treaties, a ten-acre parcel of land here became known in the documentary record as Athe Indian Reserve@ or the AJames Bay Reserve.@ Aboriginal Affiliation of the James Bay Reserve 3 1.3.1 Terminology: the Songhees or Lekwungen This report focuses on the aboriginal people known by the anglicized terms ASonghees@ and ALekwungen.@ Among non-specialists, the former term is the more commonly known. Since the early nineteenth century, observers of these indigenous people have used variants of the term ASonghees,@ anglicized from the indigenous ethnonym sc̉áηcs,1 originally applied specifically to the people who occupied southern Vancouver Island from the approximate area of Albert Head to Esquimalt Lagoon2 (see Figure 1). ASangees,@ a variant transcription of sc̉áηcs was used by James Douglas at the time of the 1850 Fort Victoria Treaties. Another term applied to these same people is lck=wc!ηcn, anglicized here as ALekwungen.@3 The term likely applied to all of the Songhees local groups and, as the late Wayne Suttles pointed out based on his field work among these people more than 50 years ago, lck=wc!ηcn was the name that Amost Songhees call themselves.@4 Today, as in the past, the term lck=wc!ηcn embraces the ASonghees First Nation@ (also known as the “Songhees Indian Band”) and the AEsquimalt First Nation@ (also known as the “Esquimalt Indian Band” or “Esquimalt Nation”) together. Although the anglicized term ASonghees@ or variants of this term were used commonly in both the historical and ethnographic literature to refer collectively to the groups that formed the lck=wc!ηcn, I propose using in this report the preferable term lck=wc!ηcn in its current anglicized form, ALekwungen.@ This is to avoid confusion between the aboriginal groups at the time of the treaties and the contemporary Songhees and Esquimalt First Nations. The term lck=wc!ηcn is encapsulated in their term for their language, lck=wcηíncη (also written as lck&wcηínc̉ η). All of those who shared a unique 1 Indigenous terms are transcribed here phonemically using the International Phonetic Alphabet as it has been adapted for Northwest Coast languages (see pp. x-xi of the Handbook of North American Indians, Vol. 7, Northwest Coast, published in 1990 by the Smithsonian Institution, Washington DC). However, glottalization is marked for some phonemes in the present report with a raised apostrophe to the right of the symbol, rather than directly above it, due to font limitations in MS WORD. Terms taken from the literature where they appear in another writing system are identified here with double quotation marks. 2 Franz Boas 1891b. The Lku!ñgEn. Second General Report on the Indians of British Columbia. 60th Report of the British Association for the Advancement of Science for 1890, pp. 563-582 [also printed separately as pp. 10-30 of this same report]. London, p. 563; Wilson Duff 1969. Fort Victoria Treaties. BC Studies, No. 3, Fall 1969, pp. 4-5; Wayne Suttles 1990. Central Coast Salish. Handbook of North American Indians, Vol. 7, Northwest Coast. Washington DC: Smithsonian Institution, p. 474. 3 This same term is also anglicization as ALukungun@; see Randy Bouchard and Dorothy Kennedy (editors and annotators) 2002. Indian Myths and Legends from the North Pacific Coast of America: A Translation of Franz Boas= 1895 edition of Indianische Sagen von der Nord-Pacifischen Küste Amerikas. Translated by Dietrich Bertz for the British Columbia Indian Language Project, with a Foreword by Claude Lévi-Strauss. Vancouver, BC: Talonbooks (reprinted in 2003), p. 169. 4 Suttles 1990, p. 474. Aboriginal Affiliation of the James Bay Reserve 4 dialect of this language and occupied the area between Albert Head and Cowichan Head are known collectively as “Lekwungen.” A more detailed discussion of terminology and synonymy can be found in Appendix B. Aboriginal Affiliation of the James Bay Reserve 5 2.0 THE 1850 FORT VICTORIA TREATIES The 1846 Oregon Treaty between Britain and the United States divided the northwest coast and assigned to Britain the area of Vancouver Island and the mainland north of the 49th parallel and south of Russian America. Three years later, in January 1849, Britain granted the Island to the Hudson’s Bay Company for a period of years, along with specified conditions.
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