and speaking in English. (My own relatives would have been speaking Central European languages!) It became clear to me that each of these accounts was a window into the history of this province that no one else had ever heard in its entirety.
The more I listened, the more I felt that I had to help get this material out so the general public could have access to this rich resource. As a result, the Orchard Collection became the focus of my master’s degree in history at the University of Victoria. Contained in this book, several years later, are the “greatest hits” from the collection, a broad survey featuring fun, poignant stories from a variety of regions and covering an array of vocations and experiences that paint a picture of life in pre-war B.C.
Since the contents of this book are a sample of the entire collection, there are many omissions. For example, I have not selected any of the stories from northern Vancouver Island or from the Arrow Lakes district. And the collection itself contains many interviews from the Skeena River but very few from the Stikine River. These omissions are not meant to take away from the rich histories in each of these areas, but I could not represent everything in this one volume.
It is also worth noting an obvious oversight in Orchard’s collection: Asians—particularly Japanese and Chinese people—are discussed in many interviews, yet among all the recordings in the collection there is only one interview with a Chinese person. Perhaps Orchard did not deem the level of their English or the quality of Asian immigrants’ voices to be “broadcast worthy.” Perhaps they refused his requests to be interviewed or perhaps he didn’t think to ask them. Regardless, much information can be gathered from Orchard’s collection about how the Chinese and Japanese people of British Columbia were perceived by non-Asians in the pre-war period. Workers of Chinese origin were segregated in British Columbia’s labour markets: mostly they competed with Euro-Canadians for low-wage manual-labour jobs, though some Chinese and Japanese people were also independent proprietors—mainly farmers and fishermen. Orchard’s informants, some of whom worked alongside Asian labourers, were acutely aware of the Asian presence in the workforce and their attitudes toward Asians were both positive and negative, reflecting many racial assumptions and some tension in society at large.
Similarly, Orchard had tremendous respect for Aboriginal oral tradition and believed the cultural stories passed down from generation to generation were the property of the nations from which they came. As a result, he did not focus on these stories. Most of Orchard’s interviews with Native peoples fall within the realm of oral history, which is to say their personal recollections about what everyday life was actually like as British Columbia went from a settlement with a hundred or so non-Native people in January 1858, before two gold rushes and Confederation, to almost 400,000 by 1911. As conveyed in the Orchard Collection and in this book, the province’s past is the story of newcomers settling the frontier in western Canada; it is a story of people accommodating to and building infrastructure in B.C.’s vast landscape in the nineteenth and first part of the twentieth century.
An audiotape copying setup used by the B.C. Archives’ aural history program, 1975. Photo: I-67663/Janet Cauthers
Voices of British Columbia, the book and the accompanying audio recordings, are intended to immerse you in the history of British Columbia: read the introduction to each story, listen to the speakers narrate their own experiences while you follow along in the text and look at the various photos and map. Discover a sense of place and meet the personalities who shaped the province, including Orchard himself who speaks with and prompts his interviewees. Through these audio recordings, Orchard has provided a window into the remembered past, allowing British Columbia’s pioneers to speak for themselves. As he said to Derek Reimer in 1978: “My contribution was to get people to see that… the sound of a person’s voice is an historical thing in itself. And the feeling that’s in that voice, as voice, not what comes on the page afterwards, is historically important.” I am hopeful that these samples from the collection, both audio and visual, will encourage you to look for details about B.C. history in general or even about your own specific family histories amid the material at the B.C. Archives or your local archives.
Aboriginal people near Lytton, ca. 1870. Photo: HP000676/Frederick Dally
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Original
Voices
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BRITISH COLUMBIA’S First Nations are steeped in a rich oral tradition that communicates much about their diverse cultures and about the history they created before Europeans came to this land. Although these stories—the legends and traditional narratives—are the property of the individual nations from which they come, they are a fascinating and invaluable part of the province’s historical record. However, to respect the sacred nature of these stories when talking to Aboriginals, Imbert Orchard focussed on people’s individual memories rather than on their broader cultural reminiscences.
In the following two stories, Native speakers discuss the interaction between Native and non-Native people at and before the first gold rush of 1858, which brought the largest wave of immigration to British Columbia.
When this photo was taken in 1896, Bob, a Yu-Ka-guse medicine man, was 104 years old. He was one of the few elders who remembered seeing Simon Fraser in 1808. Photo: HP016181/W.H. Barraclough
Put Your Knife Down
LIZETTE HALL
on the Meeting of James Douglas and Chief Kwah
(RECORDED SEPTEMBER 19, 1966)
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LIZETTE THERESE HALL was a member of the Dakelh (Carrier) First Nation, an indigenous people who are part of the Athapaskan language group that occupies a huge area from the upper Fraser River up to Anahim Lake in the Chilcoten region and that also has a strong presence in the Nechako River area. Hall’s father was Chief Louis Billy Prince, born in 1864. Hall’s great-grandfather was Chief Kwah, born in 1755, who was chief of what is now the Nak’azdli Indian Band.
Hall’s story begins with a discussion of first contact between the first Europeans and the Native people in her area, in 1806. Chief Kwah lived near Fort St. James and was instrumental in preventing Simon Fraser’s men from starving when they were camped at Stuart Lake. A natural leader, Chief Kwah saw to it that the thirty to forty thousand salmon needed to feed Fraser’s men annually were secured. As one of the traders commented in Jean Barman’s book The West beyond the West, Kwah “is the only Indian who can and will give fish, and on whom we must depend in great measure. It behooves us to endeavour to keep friends with him.” Chief Kwah was greatly respected by both the Native and non-Native communities at the time of the following anecdote about
Sir James Douglas in 1828.
Often credited as “The Father of British Columbia,” Sir James Douglas (1803–1877) was a British colonial governor at the time and was of central importance during this phase of the province’s history. Schooled in Britain, he had come to Canada at the age of sixteen to enter the fur trade for the North West Company, an outfit that eventually merged with the Hudson’s Bay Company (HBC). In 1828 he married Amelia Connelly, daughter of William Connelly, the Chief Factor of the fur-trading district of New Caledonia, and a Cree woman (Hall mentions
