NiCHE News Scholars Committee member, Hope Latta, speaks with Historian Kelly Black about The Great Vancouver Island Land Grab project and travelling exhibit.
Hope Latta: For readers who may be unfamiliar with the E&N land grants, how would you describe what happened and why it remains significant today?
Kelly Black: British Columbia (BC) joined Confederation in 1871 and became the sixth province in the young Dominion of Canada. Part of the Terms of Union between BC and Canada called for the completion of a transcontinental railway to tidewater. When it was decided that the new railway would terminate on BC’s mainland rather than Vancouver Island, local politicians and business leaders called for Canada to also fund construction of an island railway. Historians Patricia Roy and John Herd Thompson refer to this as Vancouver Island’s “consolation prize.” As with construction of the Canadian Pacific Railway (CPR), a massive land giveaway was the primary inducement to the railway company. In 1886, the Esquimalt and Nanaimo (E&N) Railway Company completed seventy miles / 113 kilometres of track between Esquimalt (near BC’s capital, Victoria) and Nanaimo. In exchange, the company received $750,000.00, about two million acres / 800,000 hectares of land and, with the exception of gold and silver, the rights to “all coal, oil, ores, stones, clay, marble, slate, mines, minerals and substances whatsoever thereupon, therein, and thereunder.”
The land grant remains significant for a number of reasons, but especially because as private property they are off the table in the modern BC Treaty process. The designation as private property also allows for the logging practices that take place on these lands to be exempted from many regulations that otherwise apply to Crown lands elsewhere on the island and in BC.
Latta: What first drew you to researching the E&N land grant and its history?
Black: During my undergraduate studies at Vancouver Island University, I first learned about BC’s entry into Confederation and construction of the island railway, including the land grant. As I noted in my 2021 Rhizomes interview with NiCHE, it was during my graduate studies at Carleton University where I started learning about settler colonialism. Through my MA and PhD theses, I tried to work out some of the contradictions and complexities of being a settler and feeling at home on lands where First Nations peoples were/are dispossessed. On Vancouver Island, this means engaging with the history and legacy of the land grant, an event that turned nearly two million acres of First Nations territories into private property at the stroke of a pen. A key finding from my PhD work was the need for non-Indigenous people to work at “explaining settlers to ourselves” –to make visible the disruptive processes of colonization (historically and in the present) that seek to replace Indigenous peoples with a settler society [Footnote: Alissa Macoun and Elizabeth Strakosch. “The ethical demands of settler colonial theory,” Settler Colonial Studies, 3:3-4 (2013), pp. 426-443, doi: 10.1080/2201473X.2013.810695]. I have tried to carry this concept forward in my life and work, primarily through public history and, most recently, with the launch of the travelling exhibit The Great Vancouver Island Land Grab.
Latta: The project uses the term “The Great Land Grab.” Why did you choose that framing, and what do you think it helps people understand about the E&N land grants?
Black: “The Great Land Grab” comes from a 2007 Hul’qumi’num Treaty Group publication titled The Great Land Grab in Hul’qumi’num Territory. Nearly 85% of these nations’ traditional lands were made private by the land grant. The term “land grab” may be provocative, but I think it is an accurate reflection of what happened. Simply put, the land was grabbed away from the legal and jurisdictional processes that should have reserved it as Crown land for First Nations (e.g.: The Royal Proclamation of 1763, the modern BC Treaty Process). The land grab converted one fifth of Vancouver Island from Crown land to private property. The real money was in the land, not the track and trains. The railway itself was barely profitable, as Geographer Michael Ekers has shown.1
Latta: How did the transfer of these lands into private ownership affect Indigenous communities, and how are those effects still felt today?
Black: The immediate impact on First Nations communities happened through the expropriation of a number of reserve lands for the railway right of way. In the 1880s, most of the land grant area was heavily timbered and inaccessible. However, by the mid-twentieth century this changed with the advent of high-lead logging and truck logging, new technology that sped up extraction and opened up more mountainous areas. For First Nations, this meant a loss of access to cultural sites for ceremony and for the gathering of traditional foods and medicines.
Industrial logging also meant the loss of monumental timber for the construction of canoes, totems, and buildings. Today, this loss of access is best exemplified by the orange or red steel forestry gate, a symbol of the land grant’s standing as private property and a barrier which is kept locked by the forest management company. The Hul’qumi’num Mustimuhw – those people who speak the Hul’qumi’num language – explain that their oral history and laws, or snuw’uy’ulh, inform a connection to the land that is not only their right, but their responsibility. The imposition of private property and related legal systems severed access to the lands that make these cultural practices possible. Coast Salish legal scholar Sarah Morales (Su-taxwiye) explains:
“As these private lands became ‘developed,’ fences and locked gates went up to block our entry to places where we’d always hunted, harvested plant food and gathered other resources to meet our material needs…For over a century we’ve seen the natural wealth leave our territory, making others wealthy at our expense…The loss of these lands also affects our cultural life. We are prevented from using areas of great cultural importance, including bathing sites, burial grounds and other special places. Many of these sites have been destroyed by development and are now lost to us forever.”2
Latta: More than a century later, where can people still see the legacy of the E&N land grant on Vancouver Island?
Black: Today, the E&N land grant area is the largest contiguous piece of privately held land in BC. Two forestry companies own the land, and these companies are in turn owned by provincial and federal pension plans. The pensions plans created Mosaic Forest Management to manage forestry and real estate operations across their hundreds of thousands of acres. If you work for the BC government, for example, you can see the legacy of the land grant in your pension plan returns. In a more tangible way, the legacy of the great land grab can be seen on the landscape—in logging cut blocks across the sides of mountains; at every red forestry gate; and in the harbours of central Vancouver Island where raw logs extracted from the land grant area wait to be loaded onto ships for export. In the travelling exhibit, one panel asks readers to “Follow the Money.” Very little of the wealth extracted has flowed back to First Nations communities and the exhibit puts forward a provocation for visitors: “Do you see yourself in the flow?”
Latta: Is there a particular place, document, event, or individual story that you think makes the scale and impact of the land grant especially tangible?
Black: How to best demonstrate the scale of the great land grab is something we talked a lot about during development of the exhibit. There are two ways we tried to do this: using satellite imagery and using an archival map. In the short film for the exhibit, we show a forty-year timelapse of composite Google Earth imagery of logging activity on lands within the land grant. Seeing the pace and scale of extraction from space is particularly powerful. For the archival map, we reproduced a Canadian Pacific Railway (CPR) map of the land grant area from 1910 (the CPR purchased the E&N Railway and lands in 1905). The original map, found at Library and Archives Canada, is over seven feet long. We reproduced the map at about five feet in length and placed it at the centre of the exhibit where it provides a top-down view of the size and scope of the historic grant. The map helps with scale, but we also asked artist Gord Hill of the Kwakwaka’wakw Nation to illustrate a series of vignettes onto the map. These illustrations accompanied by interpretive text help visitors to the exhibit spend more time with the map and spark engagement with several past and present events connected to the great land grab.
Latta: What do you think people most commonly misunderstand, or simply don’t know, about the history of land ownership on Vancouver Island?
Black: The most commonly misunderstood idea about the history of land ownership on Vancouver Island is one that characterizes all settler colonial projects: the idea that private property in the form of fee-simple title is a self-evident and natural thing. Property has to be worked at through a set of shared beliefs, and for “private property” to be created First Nations had to be—and continue to be—dispossessed. The Colony of Vancouver Island (and later, BC and Canada), deployed surveys, maps, reconnaissance, and violence to establish systems of law and property. The Western/European worldview that Indigenous lands were terra nullius or terra incognita portrayed a blank slate upon which these foreign systems could be placed. Legal scholar Estair Van Wagner shows that despite the long-standing and ongoing presence of Indigenous property relations emerging from the land, human relations, and non-human relations, Indigenous peoples “…are transformed by state law from owners and descendants to trespassers in their own territory.”3 Using interactive elements that highlight First Nations place names and cultural practices, the exhibit encourages visitors to consider other ways of thinking about property and land, ones that are not rooted in the supremacy of fee-simple title.
“We have not yet had a public conversation about the ongoing consequences of the great land grab, but now is a good time to start.”
Latta: What do you hope readers take away from The Great Land Grab?
Black: There’s a lot to take away from The Great Vancouver Island Land Grab travelling exhibit (in person and online at TheGreatLandGrab.ca). The exhibit is geared for a general audience but we have also developed a learning guide for use by educators in BC classrooms from Grades 9 to 12. The key takeaway is awareness about the land grab as an historic event that continues to impact life on Vancouver Island. That may seem rather simple, but it is an achievable goal for a small exhibit designed for a general audience. However, we will know if the key message is successful if people start taking a deeper dive into the issues and start conversations with their friends, family, pension plan managers, and elected officials. We have not yet had a public conversation about the ongoing consequences of the great land grab, but now is a good time to start.
Kelly Black, PhD, is the President of the Vancouver Island Local History Society and an Adjunct Professor in the Department of History at Vancouver Island University. He works as a curator at a National Historic Site and lives in Victoria, BC. Kelly writes about public history in his newsletter, Left Coast Dispatch.
Feature Image: “Booming Grounds At Caycuse.” BC Archives. Item I-07482.
Notes
- “Land grabbing on the edge of empire: the longue durée of fee-simple forest lands and indigenous resistance in British Columbia”, The Journal of Peasant Studies, 50:7, 2799-2828, DOI: 10.1080/03066150.2022.2144729 ↩︎
- Sarah Morales, “Snuw’uyulh: Fostering an Understanding of the Hul’qumi’num Legal Tradition” (2014). Pp. 190-192. University of Victoria, PhD Dissertation. The exhibit asks readers to consider these impacts through a contemplative art piece created by Eliot White-Hill, Kwulasultun, of the Snuneymuxw First Nation. ↩︎
- Estair Van Wagner (2021) The legal relations of “private” forests: making and unmaking private forest lands on Vancouver Island, The Journal of Legal Pluralism and Unofficial Law, 53:1, 103-126, DOI: 10.1080/07329113.2021.1882803 ↩︎
Hope Latta