Before Narvaez
by Norman Newton
The history of Vancouver begins, as it should, in myth. A legend states, “In earlier times this Fraser River resembled an enormous dish that stored up food for all mankind . . .” In the beginning, there were no deciduous trees, only evergreens; there were only clams and mussels in the sea, since the more highly developed fish had not yet appeared; and there were no mammals at all. Then God created groups of people in various places, and one of these he settled at Musqueam (now on the outskirts of Vancouver, just off Southwest Marine Drive).
After man degenerated from his first state and became wicked, a hero appeared out of the western sea. He went through the disordered land, reestablishing civil society and turning various persons or creatures, most of them illdisposed, to stone. These stone images may still be unearthed, the story continues, though it is dangerous to find them.
The legend may refer to the stone images of the Marpole culture. This culture, named after the Vancouver suburb in which its relies were first found, seems to have been the true ancestor of that village civilization encountered by such explorers as Narvaez and Fraser. According to the archaeologists, it was preceded by a much simpler culture. It began to flower around 200 B.C., coming to its end, or perhaps just changing into the culture the explorers found, about 500 A.D.
The class structure was a kind of democratic aristocracy. The gentlefolk were expected to have better table manners than the vulgar, to be generous in their attitude towards the commoners who depended on them, to be modest except on those ceremonial occasions when a recital of ancient rights was required, and to be virtuous in their sexual lives. Had they shown in daily life the formal hauteur expected of Haida and Tsimshian chiefs, they would have been thought overbearing and pretentious.
The evidence indicates that the Marpole people lived in large plank houses and used dugout canoes. Their wooden artifacts have perished and what we have are some of their tools, copper ornaments and fine stone carvings which display, says art historian Paul S. Wingert, “a mastery that is not surpassed or often duplicated in the Indian arts north of Mexico.” Similar stone carvings have been found on Vancouver Island and the Gulf Islands, up the Fraser Valley, along the valley of the Columbia, and as far north as Alaska. We have some knowledge of the art styles and material culture of the Marpole people, but only a sketchy idea of their beliefs. From the evidence of one burial, copper was a metal of great symbolic importance. In that burial, two women had been killed and buried with a young chief, presumably to accompany him into the other world.
At the time of the first European explorers the area of greatest settlement was on the southern shore of Point Grey, near Sea Island, where there were three villages, arranged in a semicircle around a little bay. The largest of these contained 76 shedroofed houses, set end to end, and constructed of roughhewn planks. They were a kind of row housing, made up of a number of units, each with some 6 metres of frontage and 18 metres of depth. There were no connecting doors between them. In some cases the entire complex was surrounded by a stockade of halflogs. Here and there, close to the houses, were wooden statues or totem poles. However, the class structure was less rigid than the heraldic structures of the Haida and Tsimshian, who were at the centre of “totem pole” culture.
Most of the prominent natural features in the Vancouver area have legends attached to them. In this respect we live in a mythical landscape whose features are as well delineated as those of ancient Greece, Egypt or Mesoamerica. It is enriching, when one sees Siwash Rock, to be reminded that it is the petrified form of T’elch, the devoted husband and father, or to speculate about the hero who landed long ago at Point Grey and the murderous warrior who was turned into a great rock near New Westminster when he attempted to thwart the hero’s civilizing mission. (The rock is said to have been buried by engineers when they constructed the approaches to Pattullo Bridge.) Even the stars over Vancouver have a local origin, since this hero created them, too. But the mythology of these peoples, it should be remembered, hid a profound traditional wisdom beneath its charming surface naivet.
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