Aboriginal History
by Andrew Scott
The paddlers who greeted José Maria Narvaez as he and his crew sailed cautiously into English Bay had a profound knowledge of the place we call Vancouver. They and their ancestors had lived in the area—either year-round or just during the summer months—for hundreds of generations. The mild climate and an abundance of food had allowed them to develop a creative, self-sufficient culture. Their villages and camps dotted the evergreen shorelines. But even by June 1791, when the Spanish strangers first visited them, the rich, complex way of life of the Coast Salish was beginning to change.
No one knows how many human beings occupied the region at the time of the first European contact. Habitation patterns varied dramatically with the season, and two smallpox epidemics (in the 1770s and about 1800, believed to have been spread from tribe to tribe ahead of the Europeans) had reduced the population. An estimate of 3,000 to 5,000 made by Chief August Jack Khahtsahlanough in the 1930s cannot be verified. Bruce Macdonald's fascinating historical atlas, Vancouver: A Visual History, identifies numerous seasonal camps and at least five villages established within Vancouver city boundaries over the past 3,000 years. Sixty per cent of them, he noted in 1992, have been obliterated by urban development.
The Musqueam people lived round the mouth of the Fraser River and along the shores of Burrard Inlet and English Bay. The Squamish, whose main villages were beside the Squamish and Cheakamus rivers above the head of Howe Sound, also inhabited Burrard Inlet and English Bay. Most Squamish camps were used only in summer, but some were substantial and may have been populated year-round. The Musqueam spoke Halkomelem, a language used throughout the Fraser Valley, while the Squamish spoke a separate tongue. Still, there was much interaction and marriage between the two nations.
The Kwantlen, whose villages were near New Westminster, controlled territory farther east, and the Tsawwassen lived to the south, in Delta and Richmond. North Vancouver's Burrard band claims descent from a separate Halkomelem-speaking nation, the Tsleil'waututh. Other Coast Salish tribal groups—Cowichan, Saanich, Nanaimo—occupied large seasonal camps while the Fraser River salmon were running.
In 1791 the Squamish nation had three principal habitation sites in what is now Vancouver: Sun'ahk ("inside, at the head"), on the east side of Kitsilano point; Khwaykhway ("masks"), where Lumberman's Arch now stands in Stanley Park; and Be'yullmough ("good spring water"), at Jericho Beach. Archaeological evidence suggests that Locarno Beach, just west of Jericho, was also an important native site 2,500 to 3,500 years ago. Other Squamish villages were located on the shores of North and West Vancouver.
Mahli and Stsulawh, the two main villages of the Musqueam (Wh'rnuthkweyum—"people of the grass"), were located at the mouth of the North Arm of the Fraser River, on the site of the current Musqueam Band reserve. The Musqueam have lived there for over 3,000 years, and Mahli and Stsulawh may have had a combined population of over 2,000 in the 18th century. The villagers charmed Dionisio Galiano, commander of one of two tiny Spanish schooners that explored the Vancouver area in the summer of 1792 (and met George Vancouver doing the same thing). "Their liveliness, grace and talent engaged all our attention," he wrote. "They displayed an unequalled affability together with a warlike disposition."
Slightly upriver, along the Marpole foreshore, a five-metre-deep deposit of shell and bone known as the Great Fraser Midden tells a story of human occupation over 3,000 years ago, when this spot was right at the mouth of the river. The residents of Marpole were skilled artists; exquisite stone and bone carvings have been found there. Farther upstream, even older habitations have been identified. On the south shore of the river, east of the Alex Fraser Bridge in Delta municipality, the St. Mungo and Glenrose sites also marked the mouth of the steadily advancing Fraser delta at one time. They are believed to date back over 9,000 years, to the period after the glaciers of the last ice age had retreated from this part of the world.
First Nation oral traditions, combined with the reports of early explorers, provide a fair amount of detail about Vancouver's first inhabitants and their society. Long-standing kinship patterns, which evolved between related communities, determined the social status of individuals, as well as the fishing, hunting and gathering rights of families. At the bottom of the pecking order were slaves, captured in intertribal warfare, who became the property of high-ranking chiefs and performed menial tasks. Formality attended every stage of life. Infant's heads were bound with cedar pads to make the growing skull wedge-shaped as a wide, flat forehead was considered beautiful. The dead, wrapped in blankets or mats, were placed in boxes and lodged on elevated platforms. Decorative and ceremonial items—like dentalia shells, mother-of-pearl, copper, iron and jade—were eagerly traded with neighboring tribes, as were a wide range of foodstuffs, textiles and domestic materials of all kinds. Simon Fraser, who reached the mouth of the Fraser in 1808 but was chased back upstream by hostile Musqueam warriors, recalled their village as a "fort 1,500 feet [457.2 metres] in length and 90 feet [27.4 metres] in breadth." What he more likely saw was a row of joined cedar plankhouses, the interiors divided by hanging mats to form spacious rooms for family groups. Small smoke- and sweathouses were built separately. Farther up the river valley, Fraser described a six-metre-high structure. "The posts or pillars are nearly 3 feet in diameter at the base," he wrote, "In one of these posts is an oval opening answering the purpose of a door . . . Above, on the outside, are carved a human figure large as life, and there are other figures in imitation of beasts and birds. The fires are in the centre and the smoke goes out an opening at top."
Fraser wrote about the patterned robes that the Fraser Valley people wove, and mentions the little white dogs that were bred and greatly valued for their woolly fur. The cedar canoes, hollowed by adze and fire, then stretched to shape, impressed him; fashioned from single logs, some were 10 metres long. Cedar bark, roots, reeds and animal skins and furs were used to make containers, clothing and other domestic articles. In his journal, Fraser recalls being offered fish oil, sturgeon, dried oysters and raspberries to eat, as well as salmon cooked with hot stones in wooden receptacles.
While the region's early residents subsisted mainly on salmon—catching the life-giving fish with specialized equipment like trawl and dip nets and weirs, then smoking it for winter use—their other food sources were numerous. Deer, elk, bear and goat were hunted with bow and arrow, as were many types of birds, which might also be netted or snared. Seal, porpoise and sturgeon were taken with cleverly designed harpoons, the heads of which were tied to lines and separated from the shafts on contact. Shellfish were gathered, also fruit and berries, edible roots and the wapato or Indian potato, which grew beside the Fraser.
Preserving and storing food in summer enabled people to live comfortably through the wet, cool winters and gave them time to develop distinctive ceremonies and customs. Ritual dances were performed, accompanied by singing and drumming; feasts were held, stories told and games played. Sacred and utilitarian objects were carved from wood, stone and bone. The intertribal, gift-giving tradition of the potlatch, which conferred status and power on the host, was prevalent.
Important ceremonies in the Greater Vancouver area sometimes involved a dancer wearing a feathered costume and a plumed, bug-eyed skhwaykhwey mask. Although skhwaykhwey masks and rattles were found throughout the region, their use, according to old stories, may have originated in Stanley Park, where the mask gave its name to Khwaykhway village. Other tales explained the origins of the land and those who inhabited it, including supernatural beings and animals, and provided everyday events with a dense foundation of myth.
The entire landscape, in fact, was alive with meaning for Vancouver's original inhabitants. That meaning, which lingers on in ancient placenames and in legends of rock and lake and cliff and cove, is still sacred to their descendants. Although their numbers were decimated by European disease and their way of life altered forever by a voracious occupation, Vancouver's First Nations continue to play an essential role in the city's cultural mosaic. The landscape we see today is the same one seen by aboriginal people hundreds, even thousands, of years ago. Their memories, passed down and kept alive by countless generations, connect those who live here now with an older, deeper spirit of the place we call home.
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