Writing British Columbia History, 1784–1958 (review)

Chad Reimer starts from the premise that, at its worst, history is about the present and the future as much as it is about the past. The writing of history in British Columbia from James Cook to Margaret Ormsby, he argues, 'was an essential tool in the construction of a neo-European society – and, more particularly, an Anglo- or British-derived society – on the Northwest Coast of North America' (6). Of course, Cook was not a historian, even by the eighteenth-century definition of the word. But his exploration narrative erased Aboriginal peoples, their history, and their prior claim to the land and its resources. They were, in effect, a people without a history. The erasure of Aboriginal peoples in historical writing continued for the next two centuries. In this sense, history was part of the imperial project and an important site for the reproduction of racism. There would be, of course, other elisions, erasures, and omissions. There would be other uses and abuses. But the goal of historical writing remained the same: to legitimate a brutal dispossession on the one hand and to construct a usable – meaning British – identity on the other.

In the 1840s, for example, history was used to legitimate Britain's claims to what was then called the Oregon Country. The Hudson's Bay Company, according to these early interpretations, was something of a founding father; it was a benevolent parent to the child-like Aboriginal peoples; and it sowed the seeds of British civilization and Christianity. A few years later, historical writing would become promotional literature in William Hazlitt's British Columbia and Vancouver Island: A Historical Sketch of the British Settlements in the North-West Coast of America (1858). Hazlitt painted a flattering picture of Britain's 'New Eldorado' in an effort to attract British emigrants. In this case, history served a British future.

In the late-nineteenth century a new theme was introduced to historical writing in British Columbia: the omission of Chinese residents from bc's past and therefore present and future. According to the 1891 census, a full 97 per cent of all Chinese in Canada lived in British Columbia and, as is well known, they contributed enormously to the building of the cpr. But writing in the 1890s, historians John Kerr, Oliver Cogswell, and Alexander Begg 'responded with a reflexive denial' (46). When, for example, Kerr did discuss bc's Chinese residents it was 'to argue strenuously for their exclusion from the province' (46).

Old habits die hard: the erasure of Aboriginal peoples, the omission of Chinese residents, and the emphasis on a usable British past continued into the Edwardian period and through the professionalization project. Judge Frederic Howay is an interesting figure. He was an optimistic Edwardian booster of bc's history and, although located outside the university, he was a key figure in history's transformation into a more recognizably scholarly activity. History, Howay believed, was a pageant of heroes overcoming adversity, or more to the point, British heroes overcoming bc's rugged terrain, defending it against a violent American frontier, and preserving it for the empire. However, his 1920s and 1930s work on the maritime fur trade revealed an understanding of, and sympathy for, Aboriginal peoples. Although Howay often depicted Aboriginal peoples playing a passive or reactive role in the maritime fur trade, he at least reminded his readers that British Columbia was not an empty land prior to European contact, trade, and settlement.

The professionalization of history in British Columbia did not offer a more enlightened or a more generous historiography: the same elisions and omissions migrated to the University of British Columbia via the Toronto-trained, Oxford-polished Walter Sage. Confirming the expression that historians dig where they stand, he turned to bc history and, for many years, led an important seminar course in bc history that would train a new generation of historians. But as Reimer notes, the professional Sage was as blind as his amateur predecessors to British Columbia's Chinese and Japanese residents...