Long ago, the land that has become known as James Bay was part of the territory of the Songhees people. Before the arrivial of European settlers the Songhees were not a concrete political entity, the name refers to a group of autonomous but interconnected family groups who spoke the same dialect of the Salish language family, known as Lekwungen, and who had hereditary ties to the land that has since become the municipalities of Langford, Colwood, Esquimalt, Oak Bay, and Victoria, as well as a good part of the San Juan Islands.

To see evidence of the Songhees’s ancient occupation of this land simply go for a walk on the South East side of Beacon Hill. You will be sure to notice several great piles of boulders sitting amongst the dense grasses and underbrush. These are the remains of a whole slew of native burial cairns that once covered most of the seaward side of Beacon Hill.

Aboriginal burial cairns on Beacon Hill.
© 2005 Gordon Friesen. See more here.

Very little is known about the origins of these burial cairns. One theory suggests that they were built in the late eighteenth century to bury victims of the smallpox epidemic. Another suggests they were built over a long period started up to 1,500 years ago and continuing, perhaps right up until the arrival of European settlers in the 1840s.

Because of the great effort involved in building the cairns it is likely that those buried in the cairns were of high status in their community. Each body was placed in a shallow grave, covered in dirt and small stones, and then boulders were piled up around and on top of the body. The graves stretched from one to ten metres on a side and were up to 2 metres tall. Some of the boulders weighed over a ton and had to be transported from another location.

The European settlers in Victoria did not understand or respect the significance of the graves and the cairns became victims of curiosity and vandalism. When Douglas arrived to set up a Hudson Bay Company trading post in 1843 there were at least 23 burial cairns on the hill. In 1858 the largest of the graves at the top of the hill was excavated and the body, covered in a cedar bark mat, was removed. Many of the boulders from the other cairns were moved, or taken from the hillside before the beginning of the twentieth century.

Boulders from native burial cairns on Beacon Hill,
Photo by Joel Legassie.

In 1986 a Parks crew, unaware of their significance, moved some of the boulders so they could mow the grass. Though the boulders were eventually replaced under the supervision of Royal BC Museum Anthropolgist Grant Keddie, their current position is only an approximation of their original placement. These are the cairns that you can easily find just a short distance from the flagpole on top of Beacon Hill. But if you are adventurous there are others lying hidden in the thick undergrowth of the hillside.

These cairns are not unique to the Beacon Hill Park area. There are actually thousands of sites that had, or still have, burial cairns, all across the Capital Region. In fact the Beacon Hill site is typical in that the cairns are built on a hillside overlooking the water and a defensive village site. In this case the site of the defensive village was Finlayson Point, where archeologists have found a shell midden dating back about 1,000 years, as well as evidence of a defensive trench and houses built on the point.

Aboriginal village and defensive site on Finlayson Point
(904 A.D. to 1689 A.D)
© 2005 Gordon Friesen. See more here.

The burial cairns and archeological evidence show that compared with the mere 165 years the descendants of European immigrants have called this land home, the Songhees’ association with this area is much longer and deeper. In my next post I’m going to explore one of the ways that the Songhees used the land, while leaving a legacy that lives with us even today.

Further Reading:
This post draws heavily on the work of Janis Ringuette in her extensively researched History of Beacon Hill Park. For more detailed information on this subject visit: www.islandnet.com/beaconhillpark/articles/119_cairns.htm

Also see:
Camas Historical Group, Camas Chronicles of James Bay. Victoria, BC, 1978.

Grant Keddie. Songhees Pictorial: A History of the Songhees People as Seen by Outsiders (1790-1912). Vancouver: UBC Press, 2003.

Want to add something? Did I make a mistake? Join the discussion of this topic in the JamesBay.org Forum

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Community building and sustainable living are two ideas that few people can quarrel with, but when it comes down to it most of us just don't have a clue where to start. Well now there is a new group in James Bay that is working to bring these concepts down to Earth by bringing people together, online and off, to share simple and practical techniques for making a more sustainable and livable James Bay.

In early June the James Bay Sustainability Commons (JBSC) launched their website and blog at a well-attended public meeting held at Moka House, Shoal Point Fisherman's Wharf. Hosted by members Colleen Woods, Linda Chan, Bill Wilson, Stan Horner, Joyce Jason, and Fred and Heather Gonneville, they described in detail the mandate, mission statement of the JBSC and gave a preview of their website, while guest speaker Kris Obrigewitsch, of R~Earth, introduced us to composting as a landfill diversion strategy.

Last week (July 10), the JBSC held their second meeting at James Bay New Horizons, 234 Menzies Street. Guest speaker Paula Sobie of City Harvest spoke to a full house about converting urban lawns into food producing gardens.

Inspired by a discussion course on Choices for Sustainable Living offered by The Canadian Earth Institute, an affiliate of the Northwest Earth Institute in Portland, the mandate of the JBSC is to promote environmentally sustainable choices in James Bay. While a sense of community is at the core of all efforts to strengthen and build community, a sustainable community must constantly adjust to meet the current economic and social needs of its residents while ensuring that adequate resources remain for future generations.

Media headlines and an abundance of scientific research papers published in peer-reviewed journals attest to our changing climate: the 4,500 year-old Ward Hunt Ice Shelf is disintegrating; the permafrost is melting; retired entomologist Bob Duncan is growing lemons in North Saanich — they are flourishing; our polar bears’ world is disappearing; BC’s forests are now a net source of carbon, not a sink.

In 2005, 1,300 experts from 95 countries released the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment warning, “a majority of the life-supporting ecosystems on our planet are under severe stress.” To further elevate this sense of urgency, Dr. Andrew Weaver recently expressed in the Times Colonist that, “We know the climate has continued to warm…it takes time for people to wake up and smell the roses.” The University of Victoria climatologist and recipient of the shared 2007 Nobel Peace Prize awarded to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), also warned in a March 2007 Winnipeg lecture that “massive climate change can only be averted if we reduce our CO₂ emissions by 60 – 90% by 2050.”

The magnitude and accelerating pace of these large-scale climate changes can understandably fuel environmental fatigue: but community-based proactive initiatives can significantly offset this fatigue by focusing on local results-based projects that reduce our carbon footprint, and by promoting neighbourhood climate change adaptation and mitigation strategies.

Guided by the principles of Reduce, Recycle, Repair and Re-Use, the JBSC will engage the community and raise awareness of the importance of practicing and learning about sustainability by developing an online resource, highlighting local sustainability projects and initiatives, and supporting sustainability by collaborating with individuals and other local or external organizations with compatible goals.

The JBSC website will provide a forum where local citizens can find or make suggestions for relevant resources related to the practice of sustainability in the James Bay area and post their own sustainability projects. In addition JamesBay.org is proud to host the official JBSC discussion forum. This online resource will allow the community to participate in discussions related to sustainability, find out about future speakers or tours, and provide other opportunities to network.

Included among the JBSC local sustainability initiatives are: growing and buying food locally, conserving water, buying or consigning second hand goods, selecting goods with less packaging that are produced with a minimum of energy consumption, biking, car-sharing, saving seeds for future crops, removing lawns to grow food, composting kitchen waste, and repairing items for re-use or trade.

For more information about the James Bay Sustainability Commons, or to find out about our future meetings please contact jamesbaysustainability@gmail.com or visit their website at: http://jbsc.seedwiki.com/.

Please note that all are welcome to attend the next JBSC presentation August 14, 7:30 – 8:15 p.m. at James Bay New Horizons, 234 Menzies Street: Guest Speaker Geoff Johnson who will be presenting about growing food in containers on apartment balconies. For more information please contact jamesbaysustainability@gmail.com or Linda at 380-6383.

Level Ground Trading will provide Fair trade coffee.

Resources
R~Earth: http://www.r-earth.com/
International Composting Corporation: http://www.internationalcomposting.com/
Composting for Apartment Dwellers: http://www.perc.ca/PEN/1994-07-08/king.html/
Canadian Earth Institute: http://www.canadianearthinstitute.org/
Centre for Sustainable Community Development: http://www.sfu.ca/cscd/
City Harvest: http://www.cityharvest.ca/

Except where otherwise noted, this content is licensed under a Creative Commons License.

Wherever I’ve lived I’ve always found myself wondering how people lived in that place before I got there. It is hard to imagine what James Bay was like without all the asphalt, buildings, and tourists, but I have spent some time recently looking into the pre-history of this area. The further back you go the dimmer and less certain things become, but there are a few things we can say about the arrival of the first people in this part of the world.

J.V. Wright in A History of the Native People of Canada, says that archeologists believe the first people to settle in this part of the world were part of what is called the Southwestern Coastal Culture. They have found stone tools, dolphin and seal bones, and other artifacts left behind by this culture as long as 10,000 years ago at the Glenrose Cannery on the Fraser River Delta, at Milliken in the Fraser River Canyon, and in Bear Cove on the Northeast coast of Vancouver Island.

The presence of large sea mammal bones at the coastal sites suggests that these people possessed considerable technology and skill in sea faring and probably used tools, such as boats, nets and snares, which have not survived to be discovered by archeologists.

While these archeological sites show that there were people in Southern British Columbia as long ago as 10,000 years ago, there is some controversy about their origins. One hypothesis is that they migrated from Alaska and the Yukon into the rest of North America through a narrow ice-free corridor that existed to the East of the Rocky Mountains between 45,000 and 15,000 years ago. From there they spread throughout North and South America eventually reaching the Southwestern Coast of what is now British Columbia from the Southern interior. Another theory suggests that some groups of people may have developed sea-faring technology and spread South down the Pacific Coast at about the same time, or even earlier, and from there penetrated into the interior of the continent.

While both hypotheses are certainly possible, there is not enough archeological evidence to make a sound judgment either way. Much of the coastline of 10,000 years ago is now underwater effectively hiding the secrets that may be held in ancient settlement sites. During this time period the interior route alongside the Rocky Mountains would have had few resources to entice nomadic hunters to stay in one place for long. Archeologists believe that if they took this route they would have been moving constantly in small groups, so any evidence of their migration would have been spread thinly over a wide area, and is unlikely to have lasted so long.

Regardless of how they got here, the groups that made up the Southwestern Coastal Culture settled in and began to develop the advanced cultural forms that European traders and explorers encountered when they arrived on the Pacific coast in the 18th Century. Archeologists believe that this culture developed across a number of different language groups and interrelated, but independent, family bands with considerable local variation over a period of several thousand years.

As the glaciers continued to recede the coastline began to look more and more like it does today, and the great Red Cedar forests took root, First Nations people adopted a pattern of seasonal migrations to take advantage of the resources available in different places at different times of the year.

In the winter they concentrated in coastal villages where they lived off shellfish, and hunted sea mammals. In the summer they followed the rivers upstream in smaller groups to catch salmon in the rivers and gather roots and berries on the mountainsides. They developed ways to preserve and store these abundant food sources, creating a surplus to carry them through the winter, and leaving a lot of energy free to develop complex rituals, social hierarchies, and highly developed art forms.

Because the First Nations’ use and conception of the land is so different from 21st century concepts, it is difficult to talk about the prehistory of what has become James Bay in isolation from the surrounding regions. However, the area in and around what we call James Bay today is very significant to the Songhees people, who occupied the area when it was settled by the Hudson Bay Company in the 1840s, and whose ancestors still live nearby, at the Songhees Reserve in Esquimalt. In the coming weeks I want to learn as much as I can about what this place meant to its original inhabitants, and how they lived here. I will be sharing what I learn in this blog, and I hope that others might take an interest and share what they know as well.

Further Reading:

Carlson, Keith Thor, ed. A Stó:lô Coast Salish Historical Atlas. Chilliwack: Stó:lô Heritage Trust, 2001.

Wilson Duff. The Indian History of British Columbia: The Impact of the White Man. Victoria: Royal British Columbia Museum, 1997.

Woodcock, George. Peoples of the Coast: The Indians of the Pacific Northwest. Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Press, 1977.

Wright, J.V. A History of the Native People of Canada: Volume I (10,000 – 1,000 B.C.). Hull, QC: Canadian Museum of Civilization, 1995.

James Bay, the place we call home, began as a deep oceanic lava plain formed during the Devonian period 370 million years before present (BP). Subsequent episodes of volcanism, erosion, sediment accumulation and crustal movement during the following 200 million years gave rise to the exotic terrane of Wrangellia that docked with North America 170 – 100 million years BP. The Pacific Rim and Crescent terranes followed, forming much of what is now southwestern Vancouver Island. Much more recently, at the peak of the Vashon stade of the Fraser glaciation 15,000 BP, James Bay was entombed by at least 1500 metres of ice; and a "mere" 1,000 years later, it was submerged by an advance of the sea: a marine transgression. After differential glacio-isostatic rebound and eustatic changes (changes in sea-level, not due to isostatic rebound, that occur worldwide), modern sea level was reached approximately 5,000 BP.

Surveying the shoreline just west of Finlayson Point, evidence of an ice-dominated environment evokes awe not only of the scale, but also of the endless variety of features. Referring to my well-worn and indispensable copy of The Geology of Southern Vancouver Island, by Yorath and Nasmith, I found numerous examples of metamorphic Wark gneiss bedrock exposures — a coarse-grained, banded rock resulting from high-grade metamorphism — that had been dramatically shaped into the asymmetrical roche moutonnée, a profusion of north-to-south-trending grooves and striations, and multiple crag-and-tail features that attest to the immense power of ice and entrained debris. Looking to the north, the sea cliffs in Beacon Hill Park along Dallas Road expose ice-contact gravels and Vashon till which accumulated adjacent to ice that had grounded in Juan de Fuca Strait about 12,000 BP.

My favourite feature is roche moutonnée, a reference to either the back end of a sheep or a barrister's wig. An example of stoss-and-lee terrain, it is rounded, smoothed, grooved, striated and polished by abrasion on the stoss, or upstream side, and steep, jagged and irregular on the opposing lee flank. According to Summerfield, increased ice thickness and higher pressures on the stoss (north exposure in this instance) side of obstacles decreases the melting point of ice (there is a decrease in the melting point of ice with increasing ice thickness of about 1°C per 1000 metres), creating a flux of basal meltwater which migrates to the zone of lower pressure on the lee side where it refreezes due to lower pressure, releasing latent heat of fusion. Depending upon the depth of joints in the bedrock, and facilitated by freeze-thaw cycles, blocks are mechanically pulled — or plucked — from the lowest to highest point in the rock floor when the basal ice freezes to them.

At the peak of the Fraser glaciation, which began 29,000 BP, the land was depressed by approximately 250 metres, and sea level was 100 - 150 metres lower than it is today. When the ice retreated about 14,000 BP, the ocean invaded all but the highest points of the Saanich Peninsula. This marine transgression completely covered James Bay, allowing for the formation of the Victoria Clay.

Glaciomarine Victoria Clay and Wark gneiss outcrops dominate the surficial geology of James Bay, while the Vashon till, which accumulated beneath the base of the ice sheet, overlies most of the bedrock. One can also find an isolated example of Holocene peat overlying Victoria clay on Niagara Street, between Rendall and Oswego. The clay, deposited at the close of the Fraser glaciation when the sea level was higher, is predominantly thick, soft, grey clay of more than 3 metres in depth. Of Jurassic age, the Wark gneiss outcrops have been potassium-argon dated from 131 - 182 million years of age. Comprised of massive and gneissic metadiorite—“meta” being the prefix used to denote metamorphism, while diorite is a coarse-grained plutonic igneous rock consisting of plagioclase and one or more of the ferromagnesian minerals—metagabbro and amphibolite, the Wark gneiss may have originally been composed of rocks of the Sicker Group and Karmutsen and Quatsino formations (Vancouver Group). James Bay Square and the Royal British Columbia Museum, for example, are constructed upon Wark gneiss, while most of the area bounded by Menzies, Belleville, Government and Dallas Road is underlain by Victoria clay.

For more information, please refer to these fine references:

Cannings, Sydney and Richard Cannings. Geology of British Columbia: A Journey Through Time. Vancouver: Greystone Books, 1999.
Fettes College. 2008. http://www.fettes.com/cairngorms [17 June 2008].
Ministry of Energy Mines and Petroleum Resouces. 2007. http://minfile.gov.bc.ca [14 June 2008].
Natural Resources Canada (NRC). Geoscape. 2008. http://www.geoscape.nrcan.gc.ca/victoria/index_e.php [20 June 2008].
Quaternary Geological Map of Greater Victoria. Map 2000-2. Victoria, BC: Ministry of Energy and Mines, 2000.
http://www.empr.gov.bc.ca/Mining/GeolSurv/Surficial/hazards/default.htm
Summerfield, Michael A. Global Geomorpholgy. New York: Longman Scientific & Technical, 1991.
Whittow, John. Dictionary of Physical Geography. London: Penguin Books, 1984.
Yorath, C.J. and H.W. Nasmith. The Geology of Southern Vancouver Island: A Field Guide. Victoria: Orca Book Publishers, 1995.

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A creative twist on the neighbourhood bulletin board, this telephone pole has been reappropriated by the residents of Lewis Street for public poetic expression.

The lyrical offerings range from free verse stylings to elegant and simple haikus.

If you’re walking on Dallas Street it’s not too much of a side-trip to visit the poetry pole. It's sure to garner a smile, perhaps even a chuckle, and who knows, you might be inspired to compose your own contribution in verse.

This is part of an irregular series of posts about the things that make James Bay unique. If you know of a place, a person, or an event that makes James Bay different from everywhere else, then we’d like to hear about it: joel[at]jamesbay.org.