Make-Believing White Civility: Historical Re-enactments at Fort Langley, British Columbia

In 1858 Governor James Douglas proclaimed British Columbia a colony at Fort Langley before an audience of Hudson’s Bay Company officials, workers, and Indigenous leaders. The Proclamation dissolved the Hudson’s Bay Company trading monopoly and, while claiming to protect Indigenous lands, actually asserted British ownership of their territory. In the present, Fort Langley National Historic Site holds regular re-enactments of the Proclamation through their educational programs targeting local schools. The script for these re-enactments, authored by Parks Canada staff, allows schoolchildren to role-play a scenario in which James Douglas proclaims British Columbia a colony to protect Indigenous lands, without explicitly staging the negative consequences for Indigenous peoples that the claiming of those lands caused.

I link these two events, the 1858 Proclamation and the present-day re-enactments, by comparing the script’s content to its historical and contemporary context. I conclude that the Proclamation re-enactments become performances of recolonization when Parks Canada deceptively presents its own wry civility (Daniel Coleman). The 1858 Proclamation’s embedded civility, and its repetition and reformation in the contemporary script, the production process, and the surrounding social structure, allows colonial ideology to be physicalized, invested, and passed on to and through children at the Fort Langley National Historic Site.