Among the innumerable true stories that defy the dreary and depressing version of Canada’s history that Ottawa prefers nowadays — the version that requires interminable apologies, “decolonization” and acts of contrition, restitution and reparations — just one striking story involves the Victoria Pioneer Rifle Corps, otherwise known as the African Rifles.
It’s a story that’s especially worth remembering on the first Monday in August, the public holiday west of the Rockies that has been known as British Columbia Day since 1974.
While most provinces had established an August long weekend holiday by the 1970s, B.C. didn’t have one, which was odd, since the Crown Colony of British Columbia was established on Monday, Aug. 2, 1858. But you have to dig deeper to know the origin of the B.C’s August holiday. By the 1970s, it had lapsed for more than a century.
The story of the African Rifles figures into it from the time before the B.C. colony was united with the Crown Colony of Vancouver Island, in 1866.
At the height of the American Civil War, trigger-happy American gold miners were pouring into Victoria on their way to the Fraser River, and it was very much an open question whether the American doctrine of manifest destiny would swallow up everything that was left of the Hudson Bay Company’s old Columbia territory.
In Victoria, the colonial governor was James Douglas, a senior HBC official who had been forced north with hundreds of mostly mixed-race loyalists after the Oregon Treaty of 1846 fixed the mainland border at the 49th parallel. Douglas was determined that the Americans had taken quite enough.
A devout abolitionist, Douglas saw to it that the first sign of Crown authority the Americans encountered upon disembarking in Victoria Harbour was a militia of Black men, in uniform, with guns.
In 2008, Ontario designated Aug. 1 Emancipation Day, to observe the outlawing of slavery in the British Empire in 1843. While it took the House of Commons until March 24, 2021, to officially designate the federal Aug. 1 civic holiday as Emancipation Day, Gov. Douglas was hosting an Emancipation Day fancy-dress ball for the crews and officers of British naval vessels in nearby Esquimalt as early as 1855.
How the African Rifles figure into the story is that they were formed up from a contingent of several hundred members of San Francisco’s First African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church who settled on Vancouver Island at Douglas’s invitation. Unlike their predicament in California, in Victoria they were entitled to vote, own land and otherwise enjoy equality before the law.
Similarly racist strictures targeted Chinese immigrants in California, so Douglas invited San Francisco’s Chinese merchants and labourers to come north to settle under the British flag, too. It’s why Victoria can still claim the second-oldest Chinatown in North America.
That’s just part of what distinguishes British Columbia’s colonial period from the Trudeau era’s miserable conception of Canadian history as a relentless saga of white racism, Indigenous dispossession and structural, “systemic” racism.
Historian Daniel Marshall finds it all quite distressing.
“Why do we need to have this American narrative overlaid on us? It’s like everybody’s up in arms all the time, as if we’re part of the story of racism from south of the border,” Marshall told me the other day.
An award-winning author and adjunct history professor at the University of Victoria, Marshall worries that his fellow academics have helped turn Canadians away from the cultivation of a genuine curiosity about the country’s history. Theory-obsessed disquisitions will make anyone’s eyes glaze over eventually, and toppling statues on the pretext of anger about residential schools is wholly counterproductive to both truth and reconciliation.
A fifth-generation British Columbian, Marshall’s latest book, Untold Tales of Old British Columbia, is currently in its 14th week on B.C.’s bestseller list. Its success can be attributed to its absence of hectoring, moralizing and theory-expounding. Marshall has his own arguments to make, but the book’s mainly just a lively telling of fascinating stories that most people would not know.
“There seems to be a real thirst out there for history like this,” Marshall said. For most people, it’s probably surprising that B.C.’s history just doesn’t fit with the patterns that people have come to expect. It’s not just that faddish American ideas that have been lately insinuated into Canadian history simply don’t hold up. “The Canadian narratives don’t fit, either.”
British Columbia’s origins owe little to even the most conventional narrative lines that have explained Canadian history.
While the HBC was a pivotal player in B.C.’s early years, it was never much about beaver pelts and furs. The HBC trade was concentrated in tierces and hogsheads of salted salmon. While the Métis were key players in the HBC brigade trails, a third of the HBC workforce west of the Rockies were Hawaiians.
The westward expansion of the Dominion of Canada involved the establishment of provinces by federal law, but that pattern stopped at the Rockies. B.C.’s story runs mostly north-south, and like Newfoundland, B.C. was a self-governing Crown colony that joined Confederation, for good or ill, on its own.
The story of B.C’s colonial survival against the backdrop of overwhelming American military and population pressure is a story written almost entirely by Douglas’s sheer will and force of personality. Douglas was himself a “coloured” person, the son of Martha Ann Ritchie, a free Creole from Barbados, and John Douglas, a Scottish merchant and planter from Glasgow. James’s wife, Lady Amelia Douglas, was the daughter of a Swampy Cree woman and an Irishman from Lachine, Que.
In 1858, when a war broke out between the Nlaka’pamux people and American miners in the Fraser Canyon, Douglas unilaterally annexed the mainland as a British colony in advance of London’s formal declaration. That’s one of history’s ironies. Far from being about stealing Indigenous land, B.C. was established in order to protect Indigenous people from heavily-armed American marauders and to secure to the Indigenous people of the Fraser River all the rights of British subjects.
In 1859, when an American military regiment occupied one of the Southern Gulf Islands in a clear violation of the boundary provisions in the Oregon Treaty, Douglas told the HBC’s Angus McDonald that if the Americans didn’t stay put, he would mobilize “fifty thousand Indian riflemen at Victoria.”
After the American Civil War broke out in April 1861, Douglas suggested to the colonial office in London that he would be glad to lead an expeditionary force to take back the Columbia territory that had fallen to the Americans 20 years earlier, and to keep on going, all the way to San Francisco Bay.
A great part of the success of British Columbia’s early settlement was owing to Douglas’s largely cordial relations with the Indigenous peoples within the colonial ambit. For one thing, Douglas and the Royal Navy were formidable allies to the Coast Salish people against the slave-raiding tribes from further up the coast. For another thing, the Indigenous leadership was fully aware of what had happened once the Americans moved into what would become Oregon, Washington and Idaho.
There was the Cayuse War, the Klamath War, the Salmon River War, the Yakima War, and the Nisqually War.
In Douglas’s vision of a successful colony, the tribes would be not be disturbed in their customary laws, their villages and enclosed fields would be protected along with their rights to hunt and fish “as formerly,” and there would be no removals to reservations. Indigenous people were to have the same rights as any settler and would be full participants in the emerging economy.
It was only because of the insistence of the Colonial Office in London that funds for treaty-making had to be raised locally that Douglas managed to secure only 14 treaties with First Nations on Southern Vancouver Island. It wasn’t until the 1990s that Victoria and Ottawa secured another treaty — with the Nisga’a people of the Nass Valley. Most of B.C. remains without benefit of treaty even now.
Despite the perilous challenges Douglas faced in his day, for the most part, peace prevailed.
In his articulation of how a proper colony should be managed, Douglas made clear that medical care would be denied no one on the basis of race or status, child labour would not be tolerated, common-law marriages should be recognized and public charity should be encouraged. Importantly, slavery, which was a commonplace Indigenous practice, would not be tolerated.
And so, for a time, a peaceable kingdom prevailed on what was to become Canada’s West Coast. Its multiculturalism emerged organically more than a century before it was conjured in the Canadian imagination as the invention of Pierre Elliott Trudeau, later mutating into the “diversity, equity and inclusion” regime strictly enforced by his son, Justin.
It’s why James and Amelia’s children were baptized in several Christian traditions — Catholic, Anglican and Methodist. It’s why the Congregation Emanu-El on Victoria’s Blanshard Street is the oldest continuously-occupied synagogue in Canada. Its cornerstone was laid in 1863. Many if not most of the synagogue’s original fundraising subscribers were gentiles.
When Lumley Franklin was elected mayor of Victoria in 1865, he became the first Jewish mayor in North America. In 1871, the year B.C. joined Confederation, Victoria voters sent Wharf Street merchant Henry Nathan to Ottawa. He was Canada’s first Jewish member of Parliament.
This is not a history that requires atonement, penitential reflection or some “long overdue reckoning.”
It’s certainly not entirely a happy story. But it’s nothing to be ashamed of, either.
National Post