Common Ground in a Liquid City. Matt Hern

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      Stanley Park is almost always one of the very first things visitors and residents alike speak of when they catalog what’s good about Vancouver. It was established in 1888, right at the city’s inception, and is one thousand acres of forest, gardens, trails, beaches, seawall, playgrounds, restaurants, and an aquarium in the heart of Vancouver, making it the third largest urban core park in North America. The park hosts more than eight million visitors annually, and occupies a central role in marketing the city.

      Vancouver focuses much of its identity, branding, and advertising around its natural beauty, its proximity to the ocean and mountains, and its overall wholesome healthfulness. Stanley Park is a vital player in that effort, and reifying its “naturalness” and “untouched” splendor is critical both for Vancouverites and tourists in constructing an ideological space for the park. As an early city paper wrote in 1939:

      A city that has been carved out of the forest should maintain somewhere within its boundaries evidence of what it once was, and so long as Stanley Park remains unspoiled that testimony to the giant trees which occupied the site of Vancouver in former days will remain.⁹

      It is clear that from the very earliest days of both the park and the city that maintaining this “unspoiled” character has been a critical (if absurd) project, which begins to explain the outpouring of very public hand-wringing and emotional sentiment about the trees. Notably, however, that interest has hardly extended to the Native people who occupied the park for millennia and were almost literally paved over in Stanley Park’s creation. The city’s 1985 Stanley Park Master Plan acknowledged that “[b]efore 1840, the peninsula was used by several thousand coast Indians” but failed to mention that Natives continued to inhabit the area for many more decades.¹⁰

      In the 1880s, as Stanley Park was being established, Natives used sites all over the peninsula for a variety of uses and there were at least seven Native settlements in the park area, the biggest being Xwayxway (Whai-Whai)—near Lumberman’s Arch where eleven families lived:

      You know the Lumberman’s Arch (Whoi-Whoi) in Stanley Park. Well, the big house was about 200 feet long, and 60 feet wide…. That was the “real” pow-wow house. The name of it was “Stah-hay”; no meaning, just name, and six families lived in it.

      Then to the west of it, was a smaller house, about 24 by 16 feet deep; one family lived in that, and on the extreme west was another pow-wow house—it was measured once—and I think the measurement was 94 feet front by about 40 feet deep; the front was about 20 feet high; the back was about 12 feet. Here two families lived. All these houses stood in a row above the beach, facing the water; all were cedar slabs and big posts; all built by the Indians long ago.¹¹

      The settlement was razed for Park Road. The eagerness to create the park meant that communities and homes were just in the way. Road workers chopped away part of an occupied Native house that was impeding the surveyors at the village of Chaythoos near Prospect Point. City of Vancouver historian J.S. Matthews interviewed August Jack Khatsahlano, who was a child in the house at the time.

      “We was inside this house when the surveyors come along and they chop the corner of our house when we was eating inside,” Khatsahlano said in that 1934 conversation at city hall.

      “We all get up and go outside see what was the matter. My sister Louise, she was only one talk a little English; she goes out ask whiteman what’s he doing that for. The man say, ‘We’re surveying the road.’

      “My sister ask him, ‘Whose road? Is it whiteman’s?’

      “Whiteman says, ‘Someday you’ll find good road around, it’s going around.’ Of course whiteman did not say park; they did not call it park then.” ¹²

      Most of the Native inhabitants at Chaythoos left and went to live on the reserve at Kitsilano Point, which was later transferred by the province into the posession of the federal government and eventually sold.¹³

      It’s not entirely true to say that Vancouver’s colonialist effort has attempted to erase Native peoples from this territory, but we want only very specific, very limited renditions of Native life to remain. There is now, for example, a tasteful little brass plaque at the site where the Chaytoos settlement once stood.

      Some of the most iconic symbols of Stanley Park are the totem poles, which are prominently profiled in endless tourist publications and grace the cover of books and thousands of postcards. The Brockton Point totems are now the “most visited tourist attraction in all of British Columbia”¹⁴ and are intended to symbolize and “honor” the area’s indigenous population. But the Coast Salish did not traditionally carve totems and the poles that now inhabit the park were imported from all over the Northwest Coast, brought in from Alert Bay, Haida Gwai’i, Skeena River, and elsewhere.

      The poles are a replacement for what was originally planned as a full-scale “Indian Village” tourist attraction, which was proposed to be built by the Vancouver Arts, Historical and Scientific Society who presented a plan to the Park Board.

      They proposed a “model Indian village” that would “suitably house and preserve historic relics and curios relating to the Indians.” The idea was to purchase “some old, deserted village,” transplant it to the proposed site, and reassemble it there. The Board gave vigorous assent to the proposal.¹⁵

      The plan was also to transplant some Native folks who would “make permanent quarters there, carrying on their Native life.”¹⁶ The Society then began purchasing totem poles from various parts of British Columbia and erecting them in the park. In 1925, the Squamish Indian Council objected to the whole plan because neither the planned “village” nor the poles had much to do with local Native culture or peoples. The Society, concerned about controversy, quickly turned the whole project over to the Park Board who reluctantly abandoned the village project, but the totems stayed.

      The Park Board has just now been taking some first steps to ameliorate this weird situation. In June of 2008, Susan Point, an excellent and renowned Musqueum artist, installed three traditional House Posts—often called portals or gateways—titled People Amongst the People, that now sit alongside the existing totems and are the Coast Salish people’s welcome to visitors of Stanley Park. At the opening ceremony, Larry Grant welcomed people to the unceded land of the Halkomelem-speaking people. “We are finally being acknowledged as the Salish people of this territory. The rain you see coming down is very much like the tears of our ancestors who inhabited this land many years ago prior to СКАЧАТЬ